Yay! It’s Will Bishop Stephens and Wrongboy Associate Productions Offical Website.
Good Afternoon readers.
I am in the departures lounge of Oslo Torp airport, on my way back from doing puppets and scenery for a pilot TV show, called Band Camp.
It’s the closest to doing the Muppet Show I’m ever likely to get and is hung around brilliant live music performances.
It’s been 2weeks of working 19hour days so I’m a bit wonky. Some of my mechanisms have gone.
Here is a picture of the valley Bandcamp is in. It’s a secret valley on a mystery island and it’s very pretty indeed.
My studio is going to be open this weekend and the following two weekends. It was open last weekend too, but I forgot to say. It’s The Old Fire Station, Queen Street, Godalming. Mine is the studio with shelves full of old broken science equipment, jars of nails etc.
And a submarine.
And a plasticine head.
I got on a train that did not stop at my small town, accidently in the quiet zone, and I sat next to two business men, who would not shut up because they are colleagues and not friends and so can’t allow a moments quiet in case they end up with an awkward silence that lasts for the rest of their working lives.
Mostly I could block them out and continue reading Moon Palace, but occassionally a word would break through “google” “modest income” “elite” and I couldn’t read any more.
” I could feel my eyes making contact with the words on the page, but no meanings rose up to me anymore…The black marks seemed wholly bewildering…”
Paul Auster, Moon Palace
was one of the things I was having trouble reading.
How literary.
The locals picked through the wreckage of the alien craft, giggling like the children they ressembled, though they were a lot older than they looked. Millions of years older.
The crust had already started forming on the wreckage in greens and greys and deep purples, even as it sunk into the soft silt that forms the entirety of this small planets surface. It spooled out in little patterns, decorating the edges of the framework, or hanging down towards the planets surface in stalagtites, as it does on anything that sits still for long enough.
The crust squeaked and foamed slightly as it was drawn down and smothered in the horizontal sludge that is, itself, made up of the ground skeletons of the tiny creatures that make up the crust. The ship was sinking.
Bits of space suit and sail cloth hung limply in jolly colours from bits of the frame and the giggling creatures pulled bits off and whacked each other over the head with them, without much thought to what they meant and what they had once been.
That was unlikely to endear them to the riders of the massive platform, a framework mothership, that had, a few hours before, broken through into the large watery atmosphere from the chill of outer space, and which now loomed over the wreckage, hoovering, massive. They were watching with some distain as the child like inhabitants of the small beachy world slapped each other in the face with the soggy remains of their collegues, ducking and weaving and giggling, like the children they weren’t.
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Photos from WordPress’ss iPhone app freezes everything up or just takes for ever.
Anyone else have that problem?
Still on my way back from ATP music festival. There are more notes on that and other things to come (probably), dear reader, or readers(possibly)
Firstly though, A prohibition-
The phrase:
‘There are two kinds of people, those who know/love (fill in band name/director/film book) and those who don’t.’
is completely meaningless and should not be used by good people. Let’s over analyse it now.
First off it’s intended meaning is to join speaker and listener in a special club of elite scholars against the sea of insufferable ordinary folk, which isn’t very healthy
Secondly (bear with me), I once found a steel plate that was rusty but polished by regular use-perhaps where cows or sheep had rubbed up against it when it was part of a gate, each day coating the nights rust in the greasy lanolin that’s in their hide and gradually rounding it’s square edges. It had a nice hole in that you could comfortably fit your thumb in.
I carried that bit of metal around in my pocket as a comforting object, and would say, if asked, that it was a tool for sorting every object in the universe into two groups, those that could pass through the hole and those that could not, without being liquidised or granualated.
Which is at least as useful a means of splitting things into two groups as wether they know, or like, something lots of people don’t.
On the other hand… people who only like what everyone else likes are craven milksops whose fear of being reviled can easily drive them to acts of cruelty and mooing in dangerous herds.
so it’s swings and roundabouts, really.
This weekend was spent reliving my youth at All Tomorrows Parties curated by the Breeders. It was fun.
Highlights in order of when they were on- Dj Alphabeast& Matt Goldman, Declan Allen, th’ Faith Healers, The Breeders soundcheck and when they actually played, The Frogs, Dianogah, Melt Banana, Kimya Dawson, Shellac, Kim and Kelley Deal playing with Foals, the man from X’s little cheesey smile (sometimes to force an audience person to smile, sometimes just blinking into the pretty lights) tUnE-YaRdS. Lovely lovely tUnE-YaRdS.
And here’s some photos.
more to follow. this application is playing up…
here we go.
that’s a goose on the roof
Dominic being dynamic, at 5am on the beach.
and later that same day…
three Butlin’s residents.
Here is an image from my lunchbreak. I was teaching Animation at Farnham again today, as I do quite often.
Today I went into a field to eat my sandwich and found a burnt out car, looking disingenuous amongst the dandelion clocks, trying to look like it belonged there, or like it didn’t care if you thought it didn’t.
Tum-te-Tumming to itself.
In a circle of burnt grass.
I’m back in bristol. I’m on a mattress on a friends floor, it is sunny in the garden outside the window. Noone is up yet.
I’m going back to my old studio, to the Open Studios at Spike Island.
I’m nervous and excited to see a lot of people at once who I used to see every day and haven’t seen now for at least a couple of years. There may be some of that ‘you never call you never write’ nonsense, but that isn’t why I’m nervous. Will I have been missed? Or not missed? Will I react in the right way to either terrifying sceneario?- sometimes my reactions go a bit wonky and I only realise days afterwards.
I expect I will explosively hug someone I hardly knew and nod casually at my best friends. Yes. That’s what I’ll do.
Excellent.
It’s hard to take a photo of yourself in front of broadcasting house like a newscaster/newt caster.
There are proper people milling about being busy.
The author of ‘String for Pleasure and Profit’, ‘String’s the Thing’ and ‘Let’s Let String into Our Lives’ has released an excellent primer into the facinating world of string. Let’s read it.
