BIFOCALS / RITUAL EXCHANGES

  "A History of The World in Personalised Record Sleeves"...  The painted, collaged, defaced and homemade sleeves found in charity shops and donated throughout REx has been worked up in to a performance lecture...we had two shows lined up but.... So instead James Alexander and me we made these short docs, using James' clay Avatar  in full-on Melvyn Bragg mode, airing my pontification about the home made sleeves ..and you get to watch/listen to the Jackson Five and Kathy Kirby too...   https://drive.google.com/file/d/11I3KmbCNttjqy6L5iXf6kmmArFFnQzVC/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NHxinP4guwm18SDu3go7pGmFyeN1go_k/view?usp=sharing The lovely close-up images in the videos are  by  Bill Bartlett. Other sleeves include a fully painted-over F aust  T apes sleeve, a collision between the  Monkees and the Planet Of the Apes, the Clash in Spray paint and the M Barr collection of collages from the early 60's...a trip to Scarborough when...

https://soundcloud.com/bifocals-2013/double-double-kate-davies-on-playground- Poet Kate Davies sent me this recording of herself reading her work for Flypaper 2 on the transmission of playground games. You can also hear the children from South Walney infants playing their games for us.. Here's Kate's text as it was printed, along with my bit on Folk Process as Virus and my transcriptions of the movements that accompanied the children's chant. These are set out using the conventions of EFDS Dance Transcription and using imagery drawing on the early Government recommendations for handwashing during the early days of the pandemic. There's a downloadable PDF at the foot of the page. Our thanks to the children for sharing their games with us. games   https://drive.google.com/file/d/1fa9e9k3OK5Oh-wp214vRQDVZhNfjz8Ik/view?usp=sharing

  The obby oss is an intruder on the social  calendar,  unsanctioned and irregular he turns up with the best of intentions but with no-one's agenda in mind. This year though his wranglers are careful not to let him distract from the one occupying truth of the time. An audience- bigger than last year - are reminded of the need to look out for each other, to give each other space, to enjoy the oss and his flapping clacking jaw while masking their own. The proceedings are recorded and sent instantly to an online party, the annual Furness Tradition Christmas do is being zoomed around the town. While the oss sends a flavour of the wintry night and the wet cobbles; the Human Organs pipe band and the ostler flit around, with their red jawa  eyes and balefull oompah. An electronic drone and the hums from the crowd combine in a performance of the Love Chorus music from fictitious composer Horse Badorties*.  Intoxicated by the fizzing signal from the amplified battery fan...

 A  safe outdoor screening of three collaborations, by means of a fourth. Dan Fox of Sound Intervention  https://www.danfox.net/ has an off-grid on-wheels projection unit with fantastically good sound and  projected the video work from Ritual Exchanges onto  house walls in Ulverston.  We had a nice audience from around the Gill, we behaved,  caught up with each other. plans were made. It was lovely to see them. We'll do this again.   This project has nudged me towards further collaborations.   There are two pieces here that involve  friends who should know each other.  Talking to Dan and Ulverston Animator James Alexander just now about where we are with our work at this time underlines how important local connections are, and how it should be possible to make work that is rooted in locality and community..and that can find an audience beyond it. My Leeds Poly friend Andrew Beresford aka Barney is a prime mover behind the Unit...

  A December afternoon on the North Yorks coast. An open ended project about cycles of behaviour and celebration, about continuity, is in need of a jumping off point from a  world very different to one it began in.  Currently, distance and safety form a tight weave. (We share a tier, and I am careful). The Horngarth when it returns it will be behind new flood defences. On land, old elemental uncertainties have returned; Undercurrents and eddys pull us away from each other and weave us into bundles of 6.  The Elsinore , one of the centres of the towns folk scene, is set to re-open, hidebound and under  management that took over just 8 weeks before lockdown....others shut as night draws in, others light their windows to help us keep them in  mind....Neon reindeer cascade down the slope behind the Star..  In Scarborough I record a chat about the project with Chris Curtis for Coast and County radio. Next-door-but- one is the Koda coffeshop, easing into its...

 The oss is getting its winter plumage. Last years rotted and apparently ended up plastered to the inside of a spindryer, so thanks to  Sue Fletcher and Rob Cooney it is getting a covid-appropriate elasticated waistband and a new snood. Watch this space for this years socially distanced Short Rising. And sort out some bells or something percussive.

  https://anchor.fm/28daleslater/episodes/Ep-15-Three-Tides-Yorkshire-Coast-en45h6    This is another angle on the Horngarth, featured on  the podcast 28 Dales Later, which looks at events and features in the northern landscape. I did  a voice over on this one, drawing on what I wrote for the Flypaper Holiday Special, and some music which sees the piece out. "This piece is a part of a small body of work from John Hall on the Whitby Horngarth ,or Penny Hedge service, which takes place on Ascension Eve and dates back to the 12th  century and probably further back than that. Right... ,  Hornblower Tim Osborne with   Lol Hodgsons predecessor as Court Leet Bailiff Harry Green, and below, Harry's predecessor  Harold Hartland. It is tempting to explain , and so in an attempt to resist a single p.o.v, the work circles around the Service. "The Tide Will Turn" - which featured in the Broadcast Arts Festival Radiophrenia - draws on interviews an...

https://vimeo.com/461636449 Me and my pal JD in Sheffield have played music of one sort and another for most of our lives, at least until this part of them when we havn't at all. Having put a song together using toy keyboards and drum machines it struck me as good idea to send it to him for a bit of  distanced collaboration. What came back was great, he surrounded my track with some things that provided good  options and others that once you heard them were instantly right and part of the thing. Jim Alexander is a pal from Ulverston, we seem to have done a fair bit of work together without really meaning to,,,either for his Fine Art degree or on community drama projects for Dalton Litfest and  Kate Davis. Jim told me of his new animation figures and showed me some exercises and lighting tests he'd done with them.  I was struck by how closely they seemed to follow the narrative of the song, and so I cut the files to fit the first couple of verses, using the same few f...

  The full Radiophrenia Broadcast of  "The Tide Will Turn":  https://soundcloud.com/bifocals-2013 About a year ago I was heading over the North York moors to talk to Margaret Noble, nee Hutton, whose family planted the Whitby Horngarth for the best part of a century in the muck of the North Harbour.   Margaret lives in Fylingthorpe, where I'd just spoken to Lol Hodgson, Court Leet Bailiff and the current custodian of the service since the turn of the century, the Court Leet having taken it on in the 80's. Lol talked me through the routine I'd seen him undertake earlier in the  year ; the finding and cutting of the hazel, the meeting with Hornblower Tim Osbourne on the harbour wall, and the planting and the hornblast and  the chanting. He talked around the service; you saw him as a kid bemused by it, and felt it arrive in his life through his office and grow into him, he carries his  care for it and his commitment to it like muck on his boots that never...

 There is something to be said for pulling an  event before someone else tells you have to.   The Hallowe'en Candlelit Walk looked do-able for a while..the will was there...a fewer tickets, groups of 6 and under, more space . ..all options were explored  but it became hard to imagine the bustle of a mustering crowd without also seeing the possible cost. But the will was still there, and The Walk became a welcoming and responsible shuffle around the Gill, with throbbing LED mushrooms, music and projections , fire dancers,  displays like bright shrines in front of houses near the Mill, and  waxy sentinels watching from the trees.    I took the big witch for a cackling walk around town, provoking screams  from Chippy Bank Customers huddling in front of the carpet shop and an attempted good-natured piggyback launched from the alley at the side of Tesco. There were people around; I danced in Market Street with kids and parents and, at ...

  When you get above a certain level football sees supporters as an inconvenience, there to be patronised, fleeced, sold crap, and whipped up until they burst into tears on Five Live as evidence of their 'passion'. The passion expended on safely securing broadcasting income is the one expenditure that no club minds incurring. Which is why players are currently playing to empty stadiums under testing regimes  unavailable to the rest of the population. The broadcasting money musn't be given back. Get 'em out on that pitch.,                                                            Even when Newcastle stank the place out with their mooted  takeover by the journalist-murdering Bin Salman gang, it was only when he was seen to be profiting from bootleg sports broadcasting that anyone in football got worked up about it. Left to bu...

Ulverston's gentleman anarchist Martin Gilbert was a student in the USA during the late 60's and early 70's. During this time he did a bit of what you might expect and a bit of what you might not. To supplement his studies Martin sold the alternative press on the streets of  Atlanta and San Franscisco. Haight-Ashbury.  Short, sweet, illustrated  and in no way the whole story, Flypaper 4 looks at the times through the papers, flyers and community newsletters  he brought back with him, excerpts from a chat with Martin and from email exchanges with Stephanie Coffin, co-founder of The Great Speckled Bird.  Available here..along with gratifyingly small numbers of issues 1, 2 and 3 . https://www.johnhallartist.com/product-page/flypaper-4

  Despite lockdown, HORNGARTH has been seen at Furness Tradition Festival, Whitby at Home and is currently on offer to members of the Folklore Society via a link on their blog.   https://drive.google.com/file/d/1o3Wxv-eB3ivi4b5KM3sKNrkZ2HSP_Wlx/view?usp=sharing An audio piece " The Tide Will Turn' will offer another angle on the service hacking down and weaving interviews, field recording , archive material and cassette recordings made by participants to evoke the mixture of superstition, social obligation and inconvenience that has followed the Whitby Horngarth Service from its roots in rituals of rogation to the present day, through 900 years of recorded observance. It includes the voices of hear several generations of the family that delivered the service on pein of losing their land, the current Court Leet Bailiff of Fyling, various explainers and commentators, and of the service itself.

In 1971 logos were usually the preserve of  the prog bands.  Angular, heraldic or biomorphic, they spoke to male fixations of sex, power,  superiority and complexity.  Using graphic styles inherited from the 60's  underground and then diluted to be at least readable, they lent themselves to careful analysis and faithful reproduction. Rendered halfway accurately,  they could signal across a crowded comprehensive school playing field  from the back of an army store rucksack. In the world of pop,  logos were rare. The Jackson Five's wasn't always used even by their record company, but the fans picked up on it and drew it into their own vocabulary of intimacy and  emotional investment in the groups joyuous, consoling music. You saw it on smaller, personal items; Pencil Cases, Diaries and School Jotters where it jostled with coded messages and names of friends picked out in a soft-block lettering. This was appropriated from the bubblefonts...

https://vimeo.com/40776116 Spaces between us Keep getting deeper   ("Spaces" / One Direction) Negative space , in  art , is the space around and between the subject(s) of an image. Negative space may be most evident when the space around a subject, not the subject itself, forms an interesting or  relevant shape, and such space occasionally is used to artistic effect as the "real" subject of an image .   ( Wikipedia, but you knew that) "Why so negative?"   ( attrib  President Trump, endlessly) What will we make after Covid 19?  The response of the Government will be picked over and  condemned or excused; it'll  be dramatized I imagine, maybe like  David Hare's Stuff Happens which reconstructed the making of a bogus case - of - convenience that led to the Iraq war. Surely the Health Service  and Care Sector will be celebrated in song.   Pop's response to political events is usually to personalize, to...

These playground chants and the choreography of  clapping and skipping that goes with them are from Walney, off the coast of Barrow. No-one composes them as such. They seem to wait in the playground to be discovered, dusted down and tried on for size.  Obsolete features are removed, others survive and others are added. Populated now by UFOs rather than (as I recall)  Elsie Tanner, their rhythms, calls and responses and fizzy backchat deal with pecking orders, identity and territory.   https://soundcloud.com/bifocals-2013/walney-childrens-games The Opie's " Lore And Language Of Schoolchildren" is probably still the set text on this.. They came up here in rhe 50's and found this nursery rhyme in Ulverston.. Wrangel a wrangel a Pig-a-machine, All his mighty men: Fly,cock, goose or hen.   Poet Kate Davis -who lives within earshot of the school playground when the wind drops  reports  "..a pparently the reader  would hold onto a lock of...