Lean Upstream

To those readers who insist that blogs are essentially channels for self-promotion, what follows will be any amount of meat and drink. I know it's yucky but sometimes that's just the way it is. So, head down and off we go.

Next month, I'm going to do this:

It's a sort of mini-season, supported by Artsadmin and CPT, and stitched together mostly out of the things to which I was already committed at the point that the Arts Council declined to fund our proposed maxi-season. Notwithstanding the downscaling, it's quite a busy programme and it's already a bit frantic trying to pull stuff together.

The programme is an agreeable (for me at least) mix of old and new work. The old: two one-night stands with solos from the archive: Hippo World Guest Book for the opening night, and Yeah Boom!: A Christopher Knowles Reader the next night; and having another crack at the Ursonate of Kurt Schwitters on the Saturday of the first week must I suppose fall within the 'old' category: though Lord knows it seems to get newer every time I approach it. 

The major really-new item on the agenda ("really-new" = "we haven't even started making it yet") is a staged version (we're snootily calling it a 'performance lecture' but I suspect it will be a lot more ragged than that might imply) of my essay The Forest and the Field. New too, a reading of a Christopher Knowles text I've never attempted before -- The Network of Howard Betel -- which promises to be pretty hallucinogenic (in a good way). Also Jonny Liron will be performing a scratchy version of O Vienna, which has never been done before (as far as I know), as part of a mixed bill alongside readings by Caroline Bergvall and Marianne Morris, and sets by two brilliant solo musicians, Dominic Lash (with whom I did Four6 at Openned a few weeks back) and Tom James Scott, whose School & Rivers is beyond any shadow of a doubt my record of the year. Other guests in the season include Keston Sutherland and Lawrence Upton, who'll be joining Jonny and me for what promises to be a genuinely horrifying rendition of the Michael Basinski text that I posed video footage of here a few weeks ago; and Matt Trueman and Jen Mitas (of QMUL), with whom I'll be having post-show conversations after performances of Hippo World Guest Book and The Forest and the Field respectively. Conversations with which, obviously, you are invited to join in.

And then in the middle of all this, I'm going to be launching a book:

which I'm really excited about, though I'm beginning to doubt that it's ever going to actually physically emerge from the print-on-demand facility I'm using... -- so we face the somewhat jarring prospect of a book launch event (at Stoke Newington International Airport, on Bonfire Night) without books. (UPDATE: no, we don't face that jarring prospect, not any more: the launch event has been rescheduled for Wednesday 25th November, still at STK.)

Anyway, I'm not going to elaborate too much on any of this now, except to say that there is a season web site, with all the performance details & lots of further info, and via which you can buy season tickets (a v good idea -- £35 for the whole shebang), donate money (also a v good idea), and take advantage of a reduced price for pre-ordering the book (an excellent idea, if I may say so -- and comes with a binding promise that there will actually be a real, tangible book, sooner or later). Also there's a mixtape on the site where you can hear stuff by me and others. 

So! This season, eh? Please come to as much as you can -- it won't be any fun without you -- and bring friends -- spread the news -- come and be a part of it all. I think I can safely, if immodestly, say this of pretty much all the work in the season: nobody else does this stuff. That's why I do it. So if you don't come and see me do it, you don't get to see it being done: and that, honestly, would never do, because it's work that likes you.

End of infomercial. Hopefully, next time we meet in these pages, we'll be talking to each other about, y'know, the rest of the world. Lots to catch up on, and none of it involves you sitting in a room staring at my stupid loudly-talking face.

All this, and love too xx

(Oh, p.s., the blog list in the sidebar has had another long-due update. Still needs weeding for the dead and the dormant, but there are some highly worthwhile new bits and pieces in there. I'm particularly excited right now about Steve Roden's blog, the new Zanzibar Beer blog, and something called Fafblog to which the heroic Malcolm Phillips alerted me only today. Enjoy!)