ANOTHER SOFTWARE UPDATE?:
This one stops my iTunes talking to my phone – useful
(K)
Thursday 10th January
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Author Archives: karlhyde
Wednesday 9th January
I’M MELTING:
Lively Up Yourself, Babylon By Bus, hungry to go live.
Locked in a small room for weeks learning how to do things
that came natural to a 14 year old looping the same parts,
going groove blind & trying to sing at the same time.
The trick is to train the fingers to think for themselves
then you can nurse that self centred voice. The comfort of
familiar safety nets is slipped out from underneath, the
evolution of beautiful things, the journey set to music
& words – don’t get caught in a roadblock.
(K)
Tuesday 8th January
ONE FOR DAVID:
On principle I’m buying David Bowie’s new track.
Space Oddity was up there with Lux Aeterna, Acid
House & pirate radio when I was a kid – life changing.
(K)
Monday 7th January
THE ROAD LESS GRAVELLED:
The coffee hit the back of his throat, setting sparks
behind the eyes. The he felt a growing guilt, it seemed
wrong to be enjoying this pleasure alone & it made him
nervous. He watched the door, waiting for her to storm in,
make a scene, wondering where she was & if she was still
angry. It was a daily occurrence – had she even noticed?
Love, that most over used of words had been reduced
to a comma punctuating vitriol, a pause for breath.
On the rare occasions she looked at him here eyes were
distant, her face obscured by clouds – what was she thinking?
(K)
Sunday 6th January
WE ARE BRIGADOONED:
As we wake in gentle blue light the moon grins at us on it’s side
before a fog envelopes us, low hiss of traffic in the distance,
invisible. A mantle between us & the sun, once again the smell of
mud. Spring is keen, new life already on the move. I’ve been
trawling the web through the night for images from the rim of
the city, punishing myself with coffee to inspire a title, focus
the story that’s dancing in my head. The story, like it’s title,
is lying somewhere out there between the cracks where all my
favourite poetry waits – If it was easy they’d all be doing it.
Efterklang’s new film is released today – sadly missed the preview
because the mud & all it’s succulent friends.
(K)
Saturday 5th January
THAT RAW FEELING:
I’m, trying to write about a journey along the banks of a river,
people we meet, their stories, animals, names, idiosyncratic car
livery. The things people make with their own hands. Art Brut,
Outsider Architecture, recollections of living in the edgelands.
Hand painted signs, local business, domestic garage evolution.
Spray shops, office sheds, larchlap fences patched with prams &
for sale signs as weeds devour concrete that cut across fields
disappearing into bushes. I’m trying to write a story,
but the violence is too near for me to take my eye off reality &
slip into art. Imagination on hold, back in it’s box for protection,
waits for a cessation in hostilities to come back out to play.
(K)
Friday 4th January
IN PASSING:
Found another shrine by the side of the road, two small bunches of flowers.
What’s the story? All these lives, all these memories, journeys touching other
lives. Joy, Laughter, aguish, pain, extraordinary fragments gathered by one
individual, assembling a vision, a point of view – Experience, information &
advice, replaced by silence. The journey of one life lived, remembered in the
rain beneath a dry stone wall hung with ivy. Woke up this morning & found
your mail, the sadness & relief – sail on brother.
(K)
Thursday 3rd January
THE YEAR OF THE DANCING STICKMAN:
Through the gate & down the ash track into the forest. Past an old orchard where we blew that twelve bore hole through a cherrywood stump, we saw four men in black parked where no one should be. Two smoking in the tailgate of a Ford, hangdog & hooded, I nodded…no response. Suspicious eyes lowered, lips take a last drag & nicotine fingers flick butts into the mud, sizzle. A large slobbering dog, the colour of velvet mould, trots towards us, past us, sniffing the air, searching for some one smaller, the instinct to separate the weakest from the pack. Drool dangling from a grey lip as it locates it’s prey & grins.
The rare sight of a motorcycle/sidecar, dirty black & silver, parked in bracken, where barbed wire protects the new growth from deer. “Yeah, we ride out as far as Nuremberg, been around all that part of the country” pulling on a black balaclava, eyeing us with suspicion. His lips move as I nod, but not to me. A German accent, grinning, calls the dogs away, turns up the ash track, waves without looking back. A clandestine meeting? Our luck run out? A fifth man wraps something, slipping it onto the passenger seat of the Ford, watching us, grinning.
We turn off the track, through a gate in the fence, putting distance between us, the silence of the men & their grins.. Into the familiar surroundings of an old oak forest dotted with Ewes, images of cemetery crows, Victorian vicarages, dog collars, headstones covered in ivy. I always think I’ll find something new out here, a sculpture, a gingerbread house, an entrance to another world, but today it’s just this path of mud & leaf rot & then … another of your beautiful marks that you left for me to find.
(K)
Wednesday 2nd January
EXITING THE DREAM HOLE:
Shellshocked expressions imerge from bleary dream holes.
The mocking light of a damp day offers chill hugs that cling
to the bone. The comforting cheer of festooned trees has passed,
reality grins, sharpening pencils on curb stones.
The early explorers of 2013 wrapped themselves in washed out
blacks, moth-balled browns, chalk complexions. Bumped around town
clutching limp bags, reluctant to return to full blown shopping –
milk & bread & instant coffee. It may not be your tipple, but
I need rhythm when the wick is low.
(K)
Tuesday 1st January
BEGINS WITH A SMILE:
A four mile walk to the rhythm of rain, accompanied by naked dancing
hedge rows. Heroic trees raise up on hind legs, proud Lipizzaners,
caught in cracks of winter light, Weegee crime scenes at the forest edge.
Sweet smell of leaf mould, startling colours of vibrant cans, cartons
consumed by mud & succulent Autumn Browns. Foreign materials ejected
though windows of passing cars whose tyres hiss like beat poems, emerge
hungry from blind corners , no pavements. Legends cast into grills of iron
drains, throaty waters gargle deep with the sodden earth. Violent greens,
mosses cling to dripping dry stone walls & bracken rusts beneath barbed wire
where sheep graze ambivalent to the rhythm of footfall. With so much
still to eat, who’d waste time pondering just another boy with a camera.
Up in the hills, out on the Edge of the World, watching sparks arc off the
backs of celebrating beasts, I play John Grant, grin & map new journeys –
Time to travel, once again it seems.
(K)
Karl Hyde 