excerpt from a forthcoming book on idling, my chapter dealing with idle creativity
Posted 20th September 2008 at 12:21 PM by Harpo
Creativity may take many forms, affecting and affected by all ten senses – the sense of humour, the sense of the ridiculous, the sense that someone is watching you, the sense of occasion, and the non-sense. These may include such obvious forms as music, dancing, painting, and cooking, as well as lesser/greater forms like kitsch-appreciation, getting away with it, juxtaposition, and the post Kool-Kat delirium.
“Let’s do a magazine” I said.
“Let’s call it GOAT” he said.
It was that simple, pretty much. We made random collages of pictures, writings, and pages from the Reader’s Digest; added a few cartoons drawn by a friend, and got 50 copies printed up. We sold one copy, and left the rest on tables and chairs in cafes, trains, and so forth.
Issue 2 was going to be all the post we received during the month of April 1987, and plans for further issues included our experimental poetry, pictures of goats, the contents of a rubbish bin, writings by and photos of a friend of ours. But we only ever actually produced that first issue.
“A Beginner’s Guide To Failure”
Let me guess - you’re a real success
Please allow me to regale ya
With a few ideas for facing your fears
A beginner’s guide to failure.
Failure’s a must for life-long lust
It’s important for your happiness
Ignore the rules they teach in schools
Indulge yourself in crappiness.
Pay no attention when I mention
People from Australia
You’re a big success, you need to mess
Around with being a failure.
Don’t see things through, I’d rather you
Be wrong at every juncture
Be off, go home, get on yer bike
I hope you get a puncture.
Every morning stay in bed
But don’t do any reading
Avoid all contact with your peers
Unless your brain is bleeding.
Burn all proof of everything you
Feel makes you a winner
Make bad choices, heed your voices
Throw up all over your dinner.
Keep your socks at half-mast, & your work half-arsed
Do nothing that is stressful
I hope this song makes your life go wrong
I hope this song’s successful.
Late last year I decided that this year (2008, pronounced ‘twenty-oh-eight’) will be the best year of my life. Then, because I wanted it to be longer than usual, I made it start earlier by adding an extra month (December, obviously) at the beginning, and then I realised this made a year of almost 400 days, so I added a few extra days at the end of November and made the entire year into an art project called “400 Days”. I didn’t make any sort of announcement in the Media, nor did I apply for an Arts Council grant, I just decided that it’s an art project. That’s all it takes. Art is anything an artist says it is, and an artist is anyone who does something and decides it is art. John Cage once said “Anything you can get away with is art”.
Cage was the first artist to base his work on chance. However, he was far from being the first to employ it; several artists had used chance at some stage in the compositional process. Mozart wrote Dice Waltzes, in which the order of musical material was selected by chance – later, in HPSCHD, Cage was to employ them – and Bach wrote a random piece. In the twentieth century Tristan Tzara put together poetry from words cut out of newspapers and drawn from a hat; Duchamp made both musical and visual works by means of chance selections.
David Revill, “The Roaring Silence”
I first heard of “The Diceman” by Luke Rhinehart in 1986 – I was advised to skip the first 100 pages and then it’s fun all the way. Since then I’ve used dice to make decisions occasionally over the years, in a variety of ways – including the way I wrote this thingummy you are reading. I’ve often used random words for singing at gigs, such as things I might find in the street (it’s easier than thinking up my own things, and it make more sense to somebody)
Founded just before punk, in 1975, the London Musicians Collective was conceived as an open-ended alternative to the existing Musicians’ Co-op (more of an invitation-only guild). British improvisational music culture had definite affinities with punk. Being such a small scene, it pioneered a do-it-yourself approach from the early seventies onwards: independent labels like Incus; samizdat publications like the ‘squabblezine’ Musics. “There were anarchist ideas floating around,” says David Toop, another LMC co-founder. Proto-punk ideas of incompetence as liberating and musical training as a shackle on creativity also circulated, filtering down from Fluxus and John Cage to inform outfits like the Portsmouth Sinfonia – an orchestra in which everybody played an instrument at which they weren’t fully proficient. Sinfonia participants included Steve Beresford, Brian Eno, and David Cunningham, who later formed the LMC-affiliated pop group The Flying Lizards.
Simon Reynolds, “Rip It Up And Start Again.”
“Let’s do a magazine” I said.
“Let’s call it GOAT” he said.
It was that simple, pretty much. We made random collages of pictures, writings, and pages from the Reader’s Digest; added a few cartoons drawn by a friend, and got 50 copies printed up. We sold one copy, and left the rest on tables and chairs in cafes, trains, and so forth.
Issue 2 was going to be all the post we received during the month of April 1987, and plans for further issues included our experimental poetry, pictures of goats, the contents of a rubbish bin, writings by and photos of a friend of ours. But we only ever actually produced that first issue.
- Creativity is often experimental in nature – Inherent within experimenting is the ‘permission to fail’. Creativity is not the same thing as success. In 2003 I had to write a handful of new songs in a hurry, one of them was called
“A Beginner’s Guide To Failure”
Let me guess - you’re a real success
Please allow me to regale ya
With a few ideas for facing your fears
A beginner’s guide to failure.
Failure’s a must for life-long lust
It’s important for your happiness
Ignore the rules they teach in schools
Indulge yourself in crappiness.
Pay no attention when I mention
People from Australia
You’re a big success, you need to mess
Around with being a failure.
Don’t see things through, I’d rather you
Be wrong at every juncture
Be off, go home, get on yer bike
I hope you get a puncture.
Every morning stay in bed
But don’t do any reading
Avoid all contact with your peers
Unless your brain is bleeding.
Burn all proof of everything you
Feel makes you a winner
Make bad choices, heed your voices
Throw up all over your dinner.
Keep your socks at half-mast, & your work half-arsed
Do nothing that is stressful
I hope this song makes your life go wrong
I hope this song’s successful.
Late last year I decided that this year (2008, pronounced ‘twenty-oh-eight’) will be the best year of my life. Then, because I wanted it to be longer than usual, I made it start earlier by adding an extra month (December, obviously) at the beginning, and then I realised this made a year of almost 400 days, so I added a few extra days at the end of November and made the entire year into an art project called “400 Days”. I didn’t make any sort of announcement in the Media, nor did I apply for an Arts Council grant, I just decided that it’s an art project. That’s all it takes. Art is anything an artist says it is, and an artist is anyone who does something and decides it is art. John Cage once said “Anything you can get away with is art”.
Cage was the first artist to base his work on chance. However, he was far from being the first to employ it; several artists had used chance at some stage in the compositional process. Mozart wrote Dice Waltzes, in which the order of musical material was selected by chance – later, in HPSCHD, Cage was to employ them – and Bach wrote a random piece. In the twentieth century Tristan Tzara put together poetry from words cut out of newspapers and drawn from a hat; Duchamp made both musical and visual works by means of chance selections.
David Revill, “The Roaring Silence”
I first heard of “The Diceman” by Luke Rhinehart in 1986 – I was advised to skip the first 100 pages and then it’s fun all the way. Since then I’ve used dice to make decisions occasionally over the years, in a variety of ways – including the way I wrote this thingummy you are reading. I’ve often used random words for singing at gigs, such as things I might find in the street (it’s easier than thinking up my own things, and it make more sense to somebody)
Founded just before punk, in 1975, the London Musicians Collective was conceived as an open-ended alternative to the existing Musicians’ Co-op (more of an invitation-only guild). British improvisational music culture had definite affinities with punk. Being such a small scene, it pioneered a do-it-yourself approach from the early seventies onwards: independent labels like Incus; samizdat publications like the ‘squabblezine’ Musics. “There were anarchist ideas floating around,” says David Toop, another LMC co-founder. Proto-punk ideas of incompetence as liberating and musical training as a shackle on creativity also circulated, filtering down from Fluxus and John Cage to inform outfits like the Portsmouth Sinfonia – an orchestra in which everybody played an instrument at which they weren’t fully proficient. Sinfonia participants included Steve Beresford, Brian Eno, and David Cunningham, who later formed the LMC-affiliated pop group The Flying Lizards.
Simon Reynolds, “Rip It Up And Start Again.”
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Comments
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How to form a band the idle way.
There was a guy called Vince Earimal who had a gig and needed some people to play with him, so he recruited Jim Plaistow, and Jim recruited Neil Campbell. The three of them improvised about twenty minutes of music. Neil was writing a song a day at the time, so he sang a couple of them, and named the band after one – “Arachnid”.
A few days later Richard Youngs had a gig, he got Jim & Neil to join him, along with Stream Angel who played a number of backing tapes. Richard’s first album “Advent” was new then, and for a joke he announced “We’re called ‘Advent’, we have an LP called ‘Richard Youngs’, so snap it up”. Richard read out the departure & arrival details of 171 used train tickets (the recording of which has since been pressed onto 10” vinyl) and afterwards the band improvised a song called “Souls In Wheelchairs.”
I was away in Normandy at the time, and missed both these gigs. The following month I was back in Nottingham , and there was another gig. Jim, Neil & I set off driving to Newark (no, the one in Nottinghamshire) and trying to think of a name for the gig. We decided retrospectively that “Arachnid” & “Advent” had been two versions of the same band, but had changed the line-up and the name, and that this Newark gig would be the same band again, only with another name starting with the letter A. Neil grinned and held up the anglegrinder that was in the back of Jim’s van, and the name was chosen. We played for maybe 30 minutes, I wandered through the audience, handing out surgical gloves and mouldy strawberries, while the regular team of Jim & Neil played (Jim on percussion frame, Neil on bass and sampler, myself on vocals). From then on it became a band with a different name (starting with A) every time, and always at least one new band member every time we played. We never rehearsed, we never played anything twice, the music was entirely improvised using whatever instruments people brought along, and often the bandmembers included non-musicians (given the definition that a person making sounds with a musical instrument is not necessarily a musician) including me. Within 9 months of that first gig we’d recorded our first single, and played two gigs which made up our first album; and within a further 6 months we’d recorded all the music that’s on our second and third albums. The policy of having new bandmembers for every gig meant that for “A Lot” we had 15 people in the band, and for “Apron” we had 19. The latter was possibly my favourite – we were in a marquee tent during a 2-day music festival, and 100s of people crowded in to see us. The music started with just violins and those plastic tubes you whirl around overhead, and apart from sounds we also had Stream Angel frying onions and perfume, Sticky Foster fire-breathing, various people re-spraying everything and anything different colours, Sharen Woodward made a sculpture by draping muslin soaked in Plaster-of-Paris over herself and holding a pose for 20 minutes, several people playing a game of cricket onstage throughout (using fruit & veg for the balls), and I passed a tin of durian-flavoured wafer biscuits through the audience, along with a small drum. For an encore we sawed up a sofa onstage.
Over a 4-year period we played maybe 45 gigs, with about 40 band members appearing at least twice, although nobody played more than 40 times. During that time most of the regular band members moved away from Nottingham but would still visit for a gig. Time moved on, both Richard and Neil became underground cult heroes, and the A Band (well, is there an easier way to refer to a band that changes its name every time it plays?) became “seminal” and “famous” on the UK underground scene. Last Saturday I met a guy in Brighton and he said “You’re famous!”
In 2007, after a break of some 12 or 13 years, we had a reunion gig, and decided to start playing again. Our youngest member is (at the time of writing) 14 years old, but she first recorded with us in 1994 at the age of 8 months, when she did a 16-minute keyboard solo.
All their life was spent not in laws, statutes, or rules, but according to their own free will and pleasure. They rose out of their beds when they thought good: they did eat, drink, labour, sleep, when they had a mind to it, and were disposed for it. None did awake them, none did offer to constrain them to eat, drink, nor to do any other thing; for so had Gargantua established it. In all their rule, and strictest tie of their order, there was but this one clause to be observed,
Francois Rabelais, “Gargantua and Pantagruel.” Book 1, Chapter 57DO WHAT THOU WILT.
(Excerpt from my diary. September 1988)
In the evening we went to a studio-art-party thing at Jez’s studio. Very arty people standing about, mostly ignoring the art things. I spent 10 minutes or so looking at the ceiling (it was very interesting) & singing. I asked some girl what she thought of the ceiling & she suggested I look at the paintings, so I looked at the ones she’d been looking at. They were sort of surreal bones pictures, by ‘Stephen Butler’ (The only actual artworks in there that I really liked). She’s from Oregon , USA , and we swapped addresses (because I want to go to West Coast Amerika sometime) but at first, when I wrote my address down, I folded it up & put it in my own pocket. The paper was from the studio’s visitors book, in which I’d signed “Albert Weeblestonker”. I asked a few other people what they thought of the ceiling and got various answers. Then I started using discarded cardboard as artworks, & put 5 on display around the studio. Then wandered around with a big cardboard box, then into a separate room which only contained one big thing, by Jez. I did a tapping-the-box performance in there for about 10 minutes, which about 3 people witnessed, after that I went & asked Jez for permission to do it & he said yes, & I said “Good, because I’ve just done it.” Then, with his permission, I added the box to his piece of art. Then found nameplates for 4 pictures, all by ‘Stephen Butler’ discarded on the refreshments table, so I gave my cardboard things names, officialdom, & expensive pricetag. Meanwhile Neil & Richard were writing other names in the visitors book. Neil threw a clay ball out of the window & the artist went mad & angry, apparently. The bad music had stopped, so I put the tape on again, but performed a live rewindism performance, which lots of people apparently liked, & lots of people apparently didn’t. Then switched to shortwave radio for a live gig by “Sonik Death Hypnosis”. A pity it wasn’t recorded, but never mind. Later someone put the tape on sensibly, but Neil put SDH back on. Me & Mike went round turning out all the lights, & for a brief few moments the art studio was full of ‘trendy’ ‘art’ ‘people’ standing in total darkness & listening to “Urinectomy”. Then someone put one light back on. The others didn’t go back on for quite a while. Mike played around with the radio noises a bit, & some bloke put the tape on again. Meanwhile I opened some windows, but this same bloke wanted them closed “because we’d get pigeons in here in the morning”. I only wanted the place to get very cold. Richard filled 4 pages of the visitors book with big scribbles, I turned the sink tap on full, & we left, turning the lights outon the way down from the third floor. Just before I left, I ran up & down the length of the studio a few times, & the girl from Oregon told me the best thing she’d seen was somebody accidentally bump into a ‘sculpture’ consisting mainly of a slab of concrete & metal, & ‘steadying’ it very delicately, even though it was quite solid & undelicate.
He who stands on tiptoe
doesn’t stand firm.
He who rushes ahead
doesn’t go far.
He who tries to shine
dims his own light.
He who defines himself
can’t know who he really is.
He who has power over others
can’t empower himself.
He who clings to his work
will create nothing that endures.
Lao-Tzu, “Tao Te Ching.”
A few years ago I had an idea (ok, I stole it from Dylan) to make traffic lights into art, by framing and signing the central amber light on each traffic light. How many man-hours are spent sitting and waiting and staring at the lights, waiting for the amber one to light up? A fair few. So yes, I’d knock up a few thousand little frames, go out and about with superglue and a marker pen, frame each amber light and write “Tom” across it (Tom being the name I was using at the time). That was the idea, but I never actually did it, and I only mentioned it to a handful of friends.
I’ve just found a bit of paper dated Sept’04 on which I wrote “now home and trying to record new kinds of music: Psychedelic bluegrass country and dub trad-jazz skiffle-march crossed with barbershop speed-gospel” I don’t remember hearing any such recordings after that time, but I do know it was a great idea – a new style of music with a very long name.
There is a room which resembles a daydream, a truly spiritual room, whose still, stale air is tinted with pink and blue.
Here the soul bathes in idleness, amid the aromas of regret and desire. There is something of the twilight here, in its blueness and its rosiness; it is as though one dreams sensuously during an eclipse.
The Furniture extends itself, languidly prostrate. The furniture too seems to be dreaming, as if it existed in a state of permanent sleep, as all things vegetable and mineral do. The fabrics speak a language of silence, as flowers and skylights do, and sunsets.
Charles Baudelaire, “The Double Room.”
Remember:
The possibilities are endless.
Give up art, be creative instead.Posted 20th September 2008 at 12:22 PM by Harpo
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Ideas
[QUOTE]book on idling by Harpo
‘goats, contents of a rubbish bin’, “A Beginner’s Guide To Failure”, poetry from words cut out of newspapers and drawn from a hat’.
How to form a band the idle way.
‘171 used train tickets, 10” vinyl, band starting with the letter A.
‘angle grinder, surgical gloves, mouldy strawberries’. ‘frying onions and perfume , game of cricket onstage throughout (using fruit & veg for the balls)’. ‘A few years ago I had an idea (ok, I stole it from Dylan)’ Sacrilege – how dare you?
Psychedelic bluegrass country and dub trad-jazz skiffle-march crossed with barbershop speed-gospel.’[QUOTE]
Harpo – you are one of my heros! Not only did you put a hazard light on top of the coffee bean stalk a while back but you have created these two blogs which are great, and every time I read them, I can’t help but smile. Thank you for that.
You have shown a great sense of humour, or was it meant to be serious?
'Hugs' from RosiePosted 6th October 2008 at 04:47 PM by Rosemary
