Driven

Have a look at my entry for this year's Observer/Comica graphic novel competition.

worksop

Worksop, where coal was once king, is now home to the world's biggest sandwich factory. It's also got all the other problems familiar to post-industrial Britain:  from unemployment and drug abuse to a vague sense of meaninglessness and blankness when you walk around the town centre. It's a town that's neither northern nor of the midlands, but somewhere in between, and with an eye on East Anglia. My idea is an absurd one: to investigate, through looking at this town, whether sandwiches and snacks have had more of a makeover in the past twenty years than the people who make them. Do governments and corporations think about marketing more than about communities?  

I'd like to point something out....

I'd like to point something out to Manchester City Council. This building, currently undergoing refurbishment, is a library. NOT a plinth for a car advert. Apart from the fact that the car looks fucking stupid, the whole context of this piece of propaganda is offensive. Wouldn't the Council be better off using the Library space to encourage people to use public transport - like the Metro, which is RIGHT OUTSIDE?

konjic

Pravdoliub Ivanov: Behold

Basim Madgy: Our Prehistoric Fate

service tunnel leading to main bunker

Iaona Nemes: Monthly Evaluations (06.09.2006) detail, in Tito's bedroom, containing the bunker's only double bed.

Mladen Miljanovic: Today I Became A Real Artist

Excavated between the 1950s and the late 70s, the nuclear bunker near Konjic in Bosnia is the setting for a new contemporary art biennial, called Time Machine. The name is appropriate. The bunker was designed for President Tito and 350 of his military and political elite to survive for six months in the event of a nuclear attack from the USSR and other Eastern Bloc countries, after Yugoslavia was expelled the Cominform in 1948. The bunker, known as ARK (Atomska Ratna Komanda, or Atomic War Command) contains hundred of rooms, in which fixtures and fittings are perfectly preserved. Attending the opening of the Biennial on May 27, amid the politicians, the media and of course the artists, were also the few coachloads of local people , who up till recently will not have had the chance to visit the bunker, because it's still in the hands of the Bosnian army. I'm working on a radio documentary about the event, to be broadcast on July 14, 2011, on BBC Radio 4.

Schwitters again

In Bury on May 1 to visit Warth Mill, where Kurt Schwitters was incarcerated in 1940, as an "enemy alien"... performances of Ursonate took place as part of Bury Text Festival.. when I get a minute I'll add a full namecheck of artists. Very spooky atmosphere down there in the basement, where the prisoners really did have to live. A big contrast to the blazing sun and white plasterwork reflecting it outside.

BARROW again

The programme I've worked on now for over a year, simply entitled Barrow, is transmitted on Monday April 18 on Radio 4 at 11.00am....I'm slightly on the defensive because I realise people in Barrow will listen, my family in Barrow will listen, and Radio 4 documentary makers MIGHT listen (the latter recently expressing an interest in how to make a "radio audit" of British towns, post-recession, whatever an "audit" impies). And I can't keep them all happy. But once they've finished mending the railway viaducts, I'm sure I'll be back in Barrow...

Barrow again

dominating the skyline, BAE systems submarine dockyards. Seen from Walney.

lovingly restored industrial heritage merges into high security fencing.

Barrow's wide choice of charity shops are cosy and welcoming.

Walney warms up in early spring sunshine. Should I consider living here? (not on the beach, obviously)

poison pub

wet street cold front exile
footsore unsteady days unspent
helena her mask repositioned
breaks open the joke the punchline
every conversation is unwieldy
streaming from another country
the further apart the better.
but now is not the time to be belligerent
and asking amazes the crazed
the effort just sets off events;
upended, unpleasant, the poised
poison every party
marvellously hijacking strident mingling.
The stare she emits across the bar
to single men in suits
propped up behind lagers
is blankness and dark awayness
an all or nothing headstrong amendment
guaranteed to eradicate the memory
adjusting lust drop by glittering drop.
flattering the batting eyelids
they're lowering their sights again.
it's calm inside her as she
circumscribes the Sevenoaks
of the moment she cannot describe
of the song that she cannot reference
the location is spiked with effrontary
wordless insatiable walls of dull wounding
and home is the station, the running away.

Merz

Seen here at the launch of the exhibition Born After 1924 at Castlefield Gallery Manchester, singer, speech performer and practitioner in psychiatric medicene, Florian Kaplick, delivers in forthright fashion the third section of Kurt Schwitters' sound poem Ursonate (or Sonata in Primordial Sounds). Castlefield's show, organised by Ingo Gerken, features work by Madeleine Boschan, Matti Isan Blind, Rainer Ganahl, Atonia Low, Tim Noble & Sue Webster, Reto Pulfer and Gregor Schneider. An updated version/adaptation of Schwitters' collaborative magazine, Nasci, is also on sale. Florian had started the poem earlier at Cube Gallery where the Manchester-wide Merzman project features a developing and evolving series of installations by Office For Subversive Architecture. There's further Schwitters action coming soon at Madlab.

morning

one more walk before movement
one more bridge to veer one way or
one more finding noted bystander
bypasser bicycle sloping triangle
no more one more before storm
or separation no extension
so delivers you were not yet for
moments ago no time for change
brickworks curing off into lost district
cut off history unapproachable
don't end possible and have reliance
on thought packages convenient
only there's this step
the next one and the one after
take as long as you want
to enter the city
with the detachment of the ill
the strength in season of lions apes birds
all the menagerie see it in the shields
coats arms makers could've been
shipwrights nothing steady
the work about a holding and the hooks released
the sound of clothes muffling a struggle

barrow

If you wanted to, you could travel to Barrow-in-Furness by ship.
But most people go by road or rail, along the southern edge of the long peninsular north of Morecambe Bay.

It feels out of the way, isolated. You're greeted by a horizon lacking high-rise or multistorey buildings.
What stands out are the Victorian Town Hall Tower and a great big pale grey shed - the Devonshire Dock, where BAE Systems, formerly Vickers, build submarines for the Navy.

The town centre's got boarded up shops - not surprising for any town in Britain nowadays, but weirdly they've plastered pictures over the front windows, of what that shop would ideally look like if it was actually trading as a shop. Mustang Sally's once was an "American Diner". Now it's a poster of an "American Diner".

Even more bizarrely, some of these postered shopfronts have also been infilatrated by celebrities. Even in dereliction, it seems we can't do without them. Standing inside the former Rapid Snaps photoshop, for instance, you suddenly come face to face with Gok Wan. But you realise he's not real, because he hasn't got any legs behind that piece of shop furniture. 

Barrow Island, reached by a roadbridge, contains the dockyards. And block after block of red sandstone tenements, made for shipyard workers in the nineteenth century. It resembles Glasgow, of old.

daybreak

Winter interrogates the limit of the downturned wall brick
a platform raised up and examined by her narrowed eyes.
In the kitchen, how nice to crack the isolation of the window
and the possibility of a key's shadow on the smooth polished floor.
A beautiful Godzilla hits Trafford Park, footprints Chester Road,
knowing nothing of the sinew in the eye, the bead in the glimmer,
the statue in the park, the stare in the spearing,
the crux of the posture, the pining of the overthrown victims,
rigid as concrete, straight as Deansgate

Glass

I'm trying to find you again in a ball of glass, or the corner of a mirror, or the bottom of a bottle.
You keep disappearing.
I think I catch sight of you, then you run away.
I'm saying this because at one time you made me do cruel things,
mean deeds in the name of reality and practicality and agendas of your choosing, not mine,
and oh, wasn't it so perfect and well thought-of, your little set-up.
People see me staring and it looks like they'll ask me to move on.
Cafes once so timeless are now short-circuited by pragmatists and laptops and blockers
of light in the glass.

Statue

How on earth we carry on without you, I don't know.
It amazes me the need to worship and pay homage to beings we do not ever really know.
Repesentative of the gods, some say - well, they take sacrifices that is for sure.
Victoria in Piccadilly trapped a teenager once, who crawled into the space
between the plinth and a wall.  Stiflling he cried out, but by her behind
was royally asphyxiated.

There Is A Code

There is a code, his mother always said -
Rules to rule out the headbanger in all of us.
He could be accused of not caring, though,
Over the years, getting away with all sorts of excess.
Plenty of people he knows would call him decadent
if only they knew. Keeping a low profile,
slack-trousered and lean around the jowels
(often badly shaved), he moves amongst the

karaioke crowds like liquid through gold-dust.

Broke

Broke. Can't even afford a haircut. Last got paid in November. No prospect of further income till April. Try not to spend money. Make every fifty pence last as long as possible. Walking to the train station in the rain. Oxford Street, the pavement's like a mirror. Main source of employment takes so long to sift through offers I don't know when I'll get a straight answer out of them about anything. You work on ideas but they don't pay you for what you've written. For the "development". Then you have to wait, and wait. Months go by. Political changes happen in the organisation. Career breaks for those at the top. Holidays for staff. Decisions delayed on the ideas you depend on. And then when the day comes, they reject most of it. Or shortlist your precious idea "pending further discussion". Furthering the putting-off. Feeling hopeless about prospects.