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.