English C***ry Tune



Fifty-five seconds PART TWO "Midsummer Morn" from Michael Finnissy's English Country-Tunes (1977) for solo piano.

pâte à physique

improving the image of construction

PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY OF LONDON UNDER CONSTRUCTION


End 2008 experimented making up two e-books, Screen Reading no's 1 and 2, using free-to-use myEBook platform.





Screen Reading 2 (Screening Along In South London) featured two minimovies 'psychogeography of rubble' and 'Cambridge Grove' published 'Factory Girl' post here.

Demolished window-less bicycle factory that so pissed off Pete Butler, and milk depot it was converted into for final days, has been replaced by another window-less structure in postmodern blue and yellow hardboard. Referenced here also, made minimovie and videographs to compare deep topographies then and now. You can hear moving-image maker fall arse over tit as camera is desperately saved from breaking whilst documenting bowed road sign 'Cambridge Grove'.

MADONNA in Verdana = MODANNA

now here's a tale for tonight

London bookartbookshop's second night of good reads from an exhibition 19:30.

Real Mike Weller stand up sit down, stand up sit down, stand up sit down ... launch 'The Making of Slow Fiction' with '... Character & Scene Guide' and twenty-three tales in a box.

freering tonight

London launch of Cleaves international poetry journal 19:30 - 21:00 at bookartbookshop with readings by Alex Davies (for Knives, Forks & Spoons Press), Ulli Freer, Tessa Whitehouse and Stephen Willey.


For next couple weeks London's very own bookart boutique window will appear similar to ...

caution - slow fiction in progress



Planning e-book versions of Slow Fiction blogging EGNEP has made guide to characters and scenes. Scenes are both real and imagined places. All characters taking part are imagined. Some, the writer likes to think, have that contemporary English novelist's sense of feeling, depth and paperback believability. Others are slightly whimsical, some downright cardboardy and comic book.

One conceit in Slow Fiction is the Earth Corporation (EarthCo) , new metaphysical fabulation with entertainment division. So what happens when character Mike Weller walks onto set of live action reality tv? In the fiction EarthCo are making movie at EGNEP location Penge. Will Mick be simpsonized Earth Corporation Entertainment III? Well ... er ... no.

APRIL FOOL



1972. Mike Weller has published character used for Blighty 'underground' comics work - English comix artist character 'Captain' or 'Cap' Stelling.

Internationally, comics were slowly recognized as part of late sixties popular media alongside film, science fiction and rock music. Finding popular North American form through classic newspaper 'Sunday Funnies' and US comic books, it took further twenty years before comics finally found entry in marketing bracket as 'graphic novel'.

In early seventies publishers like Rolling Stone magazine involved with new popular arts media - still index-linked in mind to '60s prosperity - were planning hugely ambitious visual media books. I've blogged here and here on stalled '70s graphic arts projects involving then London-resident and literary Beat guru William S. Burroughs.

Another graphics project that seemingly was never to see light of day made appearance again last year on Maclean's Canada current affairs website after forty-year sleep. Looking for material to feed google-blog and compose hard-copy Beat Generation Ballads text, found telegram from 1973 inviting Mike Weller to view a history of the sixties project entitled 'The Someday Funnies'.



Weller was living in depths of south London without telephone connection. Awoken by telegram boy on motorized bicycle to world outside Penge, Cap Stelling took number 12 bus to counterculture literary agent Ed Victor's London home where author Michel Choquette was commissioning work from UK artists.

Invited to contribute, Stelling discovered almost entire swinging sixties art, fashion, science, media and culture had already been interpreted in graphics and cartoon by celebrities of the day - which included North American comic artists who'd earned celebrity status through attention by pop artists Öyvind Fahlström, Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol.

Only topic left in programme of 1960s untouched for comic book interpretation, apart from Six-Day 1967 Arab-Israeli war (early 1970s found Egypt stockpiling Soviet weapons with Syria on board) was 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.


from beat generation ballads sequence