Pictures Of The Possible: LIVE AT BUSH HALL (2023)

Lots of Work:

- A project by the band Black Country, New Road that has mainly been treated as a music album, though that is just one part of a strikingly dense series of works in different media, including the original live performances (which use 3 different set designs and sets of costumes), a series of related printed books/theatre programmes, and a concert film that was released for free online. 

Lots of Song:

- This density also marks the suite of songs that rest at the bottom of this collection of works, which combine all sorts of musical styles into complex structures, as well as featuring words that shoot off in all sorts of directions.

= Pictures of Making Things (Together):

- In this way each work and each song explore different themes and ideas, but when all of these parts are joined together, they produce a picture of making, which is a picture of a way of making, which is a picture of joy in a way of making, and all of these pictures helpfully encourage making things. Or, a picture of people making things together, a picture of joy in that process, that in turn might encourage others to make things together.

A Picture of Making (A Picture of the Possible):

The way of making demonstrated here is double; a democratic organisation of works, in which different parts of the structure (the songs or set designs or books) can do as they please while also working towards a (an unknown?) common goal; and a collaborative process which does the same (a group of musicians with multiple composers and concerns, who sometimes switch roles). The concert becomes a central train station where a network of intersecting stories can meet and be performed.

1. The Violin Maker's Workshop

Turning into a door at random, a bell rings, revealing a place as quiet as the ceramic bowl on the ledge, a little chapel to a different time and structure of time. Shade is illuminated by tall white columns cast by small windows, casting light on a spiral staircase, brown paintings, engravings of masked clowns, Pulcinellas and Harlequins. Each worn plaster wall is pockmarked and scratched with telephone numbers and notes. Each workshop contains a little cosmos of dust in sunlight, falling in the slow time of a long window. 

Hanging up are horse tails and bows in different stages of finish, some notched, some turned, some set with pearl. There are unfinished violins too, on wide, plain worktables set with heavy, faded blue clamps. A cabinet holding many glass-fronted drawers holds unknown treasures, little glass phials and jars squat and filled with colourful powders. 

The violin maker lumbers slowly and carefully, speaking slowly and carefully in a Colorado accent. He explains his idea of making things, which is to understand a problem. His problem is to make something sound. You can use the old designs, but you won't have three hundred year old wood clear of all moisture. 

I put my hand out the window of the car. How would you make a poem turned finely as the wood in the violin-maker's workshop, turned to the problem of a fine sound?

- The picture of making in LIVE AT BUSH HALL is introduced straight away in the first minute or so of the film, a fast-cutting montage dense with images and sounds: voices introduce the three books, there are images of the stage being built, and there are fragments of video taken with small cameras that appear to have been shot by members of the band as well as concert attendees. There are also images of a camera taking pictures of people in the crowd, followed by the actual photographs integrated into the montage. 

- This cacophony leads straight into the beginning of the concert film-proper and the performance of the first song "Up Song" (which begins with more pictures of production, of clapper boards clacking). The lyrics of this song straightforwardly celebrate the act of making things together, while the arrangement builds spaces in which each instrument is given a moment in the spotlight. This song is performed in the first set design, which looks like an American high school prom or reunion.

SOMETHING WILD (1986)

While the concert film setting might suggest a lineage with STOP MAKING SENSE (1984), a more useful comparison might be with Jonathan Demme's subsequent film SOMETHING WILD. The disjointed feeling of the USA high school stage in LIVE AT BUSH HALL brought back the memory of the school reunion sequence in small town Pennsylvania where The Feelies play the function band. 

Both films also feature a publication, in the case of SOMETHING WILD a yearbook, while LIVE AT BUSH HALL has something of the crazy carefree energy of Jeff Daniels' freaky dancing.

Or, a playful attitude to identity which delights in costumes and disguises, the different costumes in the concert film, or the scene at the second-hand shop.

Or, a shared democratic attitude to music. In SOMETHING WILD the soundtrack, and the characters in the film, are in the moment of the mixtape and the beginning of individual curation of music as well as the growing availability of international music. The narrative of the film becomes a space to be interrupted by musical performances by Sister Carol or a Bach recital on the harpsichord (delight in cutting together styles). Whereas the musical performance in LIVE AT BUSH HALL becomes a space for different narratives.

Or, a playfulness which sometimes boils over into surprisingly violent imagery, as in the song "Turbines/Pigs", or the scary third act of SOMETHING WILD.

- The second song "The Boy" builds a frame for a story about woodland animals in which an injured robin attempts to fix its broken wings, encountering different characters on the way. There's room for small details, like flowers seen from below when the robin fails to leave the ground. The story is split into 3 chapters, and each of these chapters is announced by the singer.

These announced headings are another sort of picture of making. The story is the kind you would expect to find written down, maybe in a small book with pictures - if not, in any case, this kind of story makes pictures in your head, using only words like the names of animals, a way to go into a different world, an illusion. Here the story is performed aloud with the written-down features intact. You can see the story being written and performed - but this doesn't seem to lessen the pictures the story creates in your head (of the animals!). 

Illusion Without Illusion (A Picture Making (A Picture of the Possible)):

- Even more than in SOMETHING WILD there is a flurry of activity and a flux of identities and characters. This comes from the stage designs, which are visibly stage designs, and the costumes, which are visibly costumes. They register as costumes rather than as illusions of another identity, like masks, they register as the process of making identities rather than something permanent (a liberating feeling).

Maybe LIVE AT BUSH HALL is doing something positive in that this doesn't degenerate into a random play of signs or into nothingness. There is still a story, the story of the robin, without a trickery or an overwhelming of the viewer - a more co-operative experience? The story is something transparent overlaid on the visible process that creates it - it becomes pliant rather than demanding control of its own interpretation. This open quality allows others to see how a story functions, they might agree or disagree or use this knowledge to create their own. Maybe the effect of this is something is made possible - a different world can be created that is accessible and possible. 

Picture of making: a framework that remains visible (performers and instruments on a stage) whilst also displaying different places making might lead into - dreams, stories, abstractions, or ideas for a different way of life. A space of fiction can be reflected back into real space as ideas, routes, gestures, transparent and subject to change. An escape from reality into reality.

DUELLE (1976) also known as TWHYLIGHT

A similar effect takes place in this film, which is the second in the unfinished series of films this site takes its name from. DUELLE is a narrative film with all the usual component parts, but takes an experimental approach to each one. The film has a soundtrack, but the musicians performing that soundtrack are visible in each scene, and the music used is the music they improvise in each of these scenes - you can see it being written live. The settings in the film are grand and very set-like, as well as dream-like, but are actually all real locations, fragments of an earlier, grander Paris that had managed to survive, run-down, into the 1970s.

Similarly, the story and dialogue of the film are collaged together out of fragments from other films, including musicals and detective films, as well as folk tales and mythology. The resulting narrative, which features supernatural characters interacting with everyday Parisians, is mysterious and open to interpretation. The performances of the actors are similarly experimental and again produce an effect where you can see performance itself taking place, you can see it being worked out in real time, as the actors attempt to produce a new form of performance that becomes extremely dance-like.

2. Two Cities

First City:

In the city in a dream there is a busy square. At the centre a collapsing fountain sits on the old cobblestones. Water still runs into the reservation of the fountain, but the statues are missing hands or noses. The square is busy with people, some sitting and listening to the sound of the clear water running through the red stones of the fountain. Around the square there are dilapidated hotels with slumping facades, faded bars leaking yellow lamp-light, and two grand archways leading into other squares. A railway crosses the southern archway, shaking dust from the masonry, and the steam from the train rises into a night sky marked with millions of stars.

Second City (The Swimming Pool City):

In another city people swim through the sound and light of a long street on a summer evening, the wash of sound from swaying branches and passing cars, the poses of men sitting outside cafes, the white light of a petrol station. Softly, amongst all this noise, they say

Chorus of the Swimmers:

"We have gone away. Where we are and how we came here, we have forgotten. Everything is imaginary, is a series of pictures."

- The song "Across the Pond Friend" is performed in a countryside setting of cut-out rolling hills and wind turbines, with farmyard costumes and hats from Van Gogh paintings. The words of the song seem to be a description of a transatlantic trip wherein the narrator meets a helpful accomplice (it sounds a little bit like the plot of SOMETHING WILD (SOMETHING WILD's picture of the possible is how quickly the two characters escape Manhattan into the hugeness of the USA. The rest of the world, a place worth visiting, is just a tunnel away)). 

Distance Without Snobbery (Illusion Without Illusion (A Picture of Making (A Picture of the Possible))):

The music of this song is rooted in pop (whatever that is), but is at a distance from pop music. It lacks the sheen of production that pop music has, because it is a recording of a live performance by a group of musicians playing together (rather than overdubbing), mainly using traditional, acoustic instruments (violin and piano (not to imply this is something better or worse)) - yet the music itself has the quality of pop, and not the pop of 50 years ago. This distance is audible, but is different from other kinds of distancing. The intention here does not seem to be to call attention to the way popular music functions in a critical way, or to condescendingly attempt to "free the spectator", nor to attempt to use the form to transmit a message thought to be in contrast with that form. 

There is none of the snobbery that these approaches can fall victim to. The distance that is not snobbery is a love of something and an encouragement for everyone else, a revealing of the working parts of a form like popular music which draws attention to their reproducibility - by anyone. Rather than a calling to attention of the negative aspects of a mass form of culture (if anything can still really be called that), the distance here reveals the positive and subversive possibilities of these forms. This idea aligns with the decision to stream the film for free online. 

There are some parallels with the Tropicália artists working Brazil in the 1960s, who delighted in finding all kinds of great ideas in musical forms that were not only radically different, but often militantly opposed to one another. They used televised song contests to disseminate their work, later even producing their own television series DIVINHO, MARAVILHOSO (1968), which featured beautiful costumes and sets designed in collaboration with contemporary artists.

3. Night-Time Park

The long avenues of the night-time park are scattered with international pilgrims, dancing slowly or speaking quietly under the dark leaves, watching scenes framed by the trunks of the night-time trees.

- shhh -

A dog looks back at a matchbox containing a blue bay. As the printed picture of the red bridge grows, the dog imagines itself swimming, head bobbing up and down as it paddles through the dotty, printed blue bay waters. The dog shrinks as the frame tracks outwards, a small dog in the bay of the city.

In the night-time bandstand the group of musicians play their soft music. One turns the hand of a painted wooden box, producing a long, humming sound with woolly edges. Another carefully presses the pearl keys of an accordion, the soft clicks of the keys are a rhythm that accompanies the long, slow melodies of the night-time accordion.

- shhh -

The violin-maker stops and looks into the distance, through the light that falls slowly in a golden ramp through the glass of the workshop. Crossing the red bridge, the little car putters slowly through woodland to small, rocky towns, to the wide expanses of the desert. One of the pilgrims opens a door and steps into the warm evening of the desert that joins all things together. The sky has turned a deep blue, and so has the flat sand of the desert that stretches endlessly to the horizon.

A slow crowd sit in the night-time meadow at the centre of the park. Night-time breezes wash through the dim trees, fanning out waves of sound. The crowd lie on the cool grass, dizzied by the landscape spilled across the night sky. The biggest map, the biggest Euston Road. The view is endless, in the endlessness people can decide what they want to see.

- shhh -

Endless managers throw their hands up in sheer exasperation, clutch at the cheap carpets, throw telephones at cheerfully unresponsive walls. The workers are going on strike and nothing can stop them now, the machines are quiet and every wheel is completely still.

I sit down on the bench in the night-time park. I have been here before. The expanding leaves are full of sound that runs through my hands that move as the leaves do, new leaves in the new season, new hands.

Shhh...

- Other pictures of making: an interlude showing the sets being built and painted; "I Won't Always Love You", which also functions as a lesson on how to set a text to music; "Laughing Song" which recites the titles of all the other songs in the suite; "Dancers" which produces a staged performance within the staged performance, an imaginary choreography; a finale which presents the first song in a completely different arrangement.

A Picture of the Possible:

A text that describes another world, but does not exceed this world in its material means - it exceeds this world in imagining the possibilities presented by those means.

DIE ALLSEITIG REDUZIERTE PERSӦNLICHKEIT - REDUPERS (1978)

THE ALL-ROUND REDUCED PERSONALITY - REDUPERS

- A film about a photographer in West Berlin initially structured in simple, clear movements that cut through the fluff. The photographer, Etta, is played by the filmmaker herself, Helke Sander.

- Movement 1: long, steady, unbroken tracking shots that glide through the streets of the city. The Berlin Wall, graffiti on the wall, military infrastructure, advertising billboards, shop displays, a man kicking a football down an alley past a chain link fence. 

Briefly, in a window the reflection of a VW van with the side door open and the camera crew just visible, a great image of a romantic (but not ridiculous?) idea of this time and place (60s/70s West Germany) as a moment when art production was liberated, critical and experimental - as portrayed in DIE ZWEITE HEIMAT (1992). Although that series was also deeply critical, Sander's film goes even further in undercutting this idea whilst also presenting moments like this, producing an ambiguity like everyday life.

from DIE ZWEITE HEIMAT (1992)

- A film about the city and a photographer working there - the film sets out her life and its material / economic aspects in detail, for instance a breakdown of (squeezed) living costs, and scenes of her working in a darkroom or waiting in cold weather for a shot she might be able to sell to the press. Equally integrated into the montage are images of the city she sees, in the tracking shots and also in the direct inclusion of the (staggering) photographs she takes, scenes that surround their creation. In the soundtrack, through a voice-over, we learn her ideas about photography, "the passion for things that are none of your business", or an interest in "the fate of a leather ball". "One should be able to choose what is none of one's business". 

- When photographs are integrated into the montage the transitions from stillness to motion are near seamless - the film stocks appear as identical. The black and white suddenly becomes fluid and you get a sense of the photographer's art, picking a moment in this liquid motion, also knowing that colour is not possible. Images of the city in motion, a passing train or people dancing at a big conference. A relation with Hanne Darboven's film DER MOND IST AUFGEGANGEN (1981), which has a similar fluid-image effect, that film is like seeing through the eyes of a photographer walking around a city but without seeing any of the photographs they might have taken. In Sander's film, Etta gets too interested in the newspaper assignments she has to do for money. The effect of seeing these uncut photograph-moments doesn't produce a conclusion that the moment of the photograph is the best one; instead you see what is lost each time, people's voices for instance.

from DER MOND IST AUFGEGANGEN (1981)

- Movement 2: scenes from everyday life presented in a minimal number of shots, usually with a fixed camera. We learn more about Etta's everyday life, where she lives, that she has a child. In some ways these scenes become a response to BLOW-UP (1966), presenting the life of a working photographer who isn't a huge success driving around the city in a Rolls Royce. The parallels between the two films are particularly clear in the scenes where Etta develops film in a darkroom or makes prints in her flat, which have a similar hypnotic effect.

from BLOW-UP (1966)

- Anyway this film works with a combination of different elements, it contains fictional aspects and has a narrative but is clearly based on actual events, and the production is based entirely in real locations and appears to feature many non-actors (one of the most striking scenes sees Etta photographing a real demonstration of 6000 women marching through Berlin). Lots of films use these techniques but this one feels different, because it also acknowledges, and functions as a commentary on, the play of images in the world, and looks squarely at the power relations, down to a minute level, that underpin this. The montage of the film is itself this commentary.

from CONVERSATIONS IN VERMONT (1969)

- A moving picture full of other pictures, like CONVERSATIONS IN VERMONT (1969), in which Robert Frank films prints and contact sheets of his photographs being moved around, or indeed related work like the photographs of Walker Evans. He is always taking pictures of pictures. Here there is a shot of a politician making a speech in front of a huge drawing of Berlin. What is the motive for this commentary on images in Sander's film?

-  The answer might come in the narrative, which begins to follow a seemingly real, though it's not clear, group of women photographers (including the protagonist) who want to use photography to show how they see the city, which is generally critical and involves photographing what the authorities would rather hide, and then feature their work on billboards like advertisers can. They also have a concept that the Wall is actually porous in some ways, for instance to gases, germs, refuse (which is taken to landfill in the East), broadcasts (Etta listens to GDR radio), and especially gazes (some streets shown are divided by the Wall to the point where you are looking into the GDR by looking at the apartment building opposite).

- So far the structure has been alternating between the tracking shots through the city (later featuring buildings among huge voids of space), and the minimalistic scenes of everyday life (for instance a small, simple scene of Etta and her boyfriend reading magazines and eating an orange). 

from HISTORY LESSONS (1972) by Straub & Huillet

Once this double structure has been established, it begins to be subverted as the characters carry out their art project, which is based on a subversion of public space and market time. The tracking shots of the city now grow to include the characters from the other scenes, carrying all their tools. They mount a huge print of one of their photographs so it can be carried around and installed in different parts of the city. There's an astonishing sequence that begins with one of Etta's photographs, then cuts seamlessly to a moving image shot of the exact same composition, which is slowly entered by two of the characters carrying a big print of the same photograph into the frame; all the levels of the film collide. 

They also build a platform up to the top of the Wall with a curtain that fills the frame and is drawn back to reveal the streets of East Berlin. The characters refuse to ignore the Wall, and so does the film. Within this installation sequence there are also more details of everyday life, more eating orange, an argument about having children around, being exhausted at the end of the day, and a note in the voice-over that a male friend makes fun of their project. A multitude of differing points of view throughout.

- Then the excitement is over and the film returns to everyday life. The shots in this film are expertly exposed like photographs, there's a scene in a karate class where the whole frame is just a series of moving angles in variations of light grey, or an apartment at night completely black but for one white light bulb. There's a great quote Edda recites in the voice-over from Christa Wolf about how each day is made of points which can be connected if you're lucky, but fall apart if you're not and require lots of effort to have meaning. As if to echo this there's then a scene that cuts from Beethoven on the soundtrack to a field recording of GDR pop music on the car radio. 

Walker Evans - Billboard Painters 1934

- Things wind down and the women's group get into trouble because they want to photograph the city rather than specifically focus on women's conditions within it, and so are attacked from all sides. There are all kinds of problems documented with getting funding from people, with the state, with business, as well as being treated fairly or taken seriously in general (Etta has to wrangle with editors who keep printing her photographs without paying her, for instance), all issues that still feel pertinent.

- Rather than a simple dichotomy of dramatisation and documentary, this film constructs a system where there are several projects in motion; the structuring of the film, the photography projects (which are actually carried out even if they are fictions) that the film documents, the project of the GDR and West Berlin within it, and Helke Sander's own life and projects - she became a leading figure in the women's movement after making a famous speech at the height of the unrest in 1968. Rivette's idea of making something happen in the world rather than a film, then documenting it, a structure that reaches outside itself and engages with the world, or the process of imaging the world. A film that catches a moment in time through ideas as simple as incorporating snippets of radio broadcasts or political graffiti. You're also left room to think, wondering what in the film is part of each of these different projects, a scene with a rude magazine editor - is it a re-enaction? 

from OUT 1 (1971)

- Some of these questions are cleared up in the final shot which sees Etta wandering off again down a long street, with another fragment from Christa Wolf that strongly suggests the events of the film are based on an actual diary, while adding a little distance by noting all the problems that using that process might entail.

Christa Wolf

aviary: Bumping Into Andrew Salkey

A series of chance encounters over a number of years.

- First Encounter: DON'T LOOK BACK (1967) in which a camera crew follows Bob Dylan at the height of fame, accompanied by an entourage, through a series of strange encounters with different people in the mid-60s UK. The most famous of these meetings are those with rival musicians and hostile journalists, but the value of the film is in the smaller, chance fragments that catch a moment in time, and the context of the place, around the music tour that is the intended subject.

A group of excited kids somewhere in Merseyside yell for Dylan to come out of a hotel, but when he appears they are lost for something to say. They ask the perennial question "Have you any brothers or sisters?".

Later the High Sheriff's Lady invites the entourage to stay at her mansion house in May, after she becomes the Lord Mayor.

A strange atmosphere throughout, tired out and strangely gentle, rainy landscapes glimpsed from big shiny cars, or old fashioned railway trains with the tall seats, through the glass old Northern townscapes are churned through Harold Wilson's white heat, becoming shiny and new.

Then there's a moment where Dylan meets another journalist, but there is something different about this encounter. This journalist speaks in a clipped, refined way and says he is producing a program for West African listeners for the BBC. There's something odd in his manner, using phrases like "The questions are four in number" before listing each interview question in full before actually asking them.

Yet this man is also friendly and engaged, even passionate compared to the other journalists in the film, and seems to throw Dylan off slightly by mentioning a play, MADHOUSE ON CASTLE STREET (1963) by Evan Jones. This play was broadcast on the BBC and featured a young Bob Dylan just before his breakthrough to fame. The interviewer says he and Jones went to school together in Jamaica, and then begins recording the interview, beginning with the first question we have already heard, which is met with an "Umm..." before the film cuts away to stock footage of Dylan performing in a field somewhere in the rural South at the height of the civil rights movement. 

It's a strange scene which to a degree uses this journalist as a figure of fun, placing his questions about political engagement in the context of a string of other scenes where this topic prompts increasingly exasperated responses, and placing his polite manner next to the detached cool of Dylan & his entourage. At the same time, the sudden cut away to the civil rights footage (a performance outside the comfort of a concert hall (looks like a farm) of the Medgar Evers-referencing song "Only A Pawn In Their Game") suggests the filmmakers had some sympathy with the idea Dylan had retreated from genuinely radical action. In the scrapped follow up film EAT THE DOCUMENT you can hear members of Dylan's entourage mocking this man and his way of speaking a year later.

- Second Encounter: later, looking for images for an essay on a book by Samuel Selvon, who stands on the left of this photograph by the filmmaker Horace Ové. In fact, though he is difficult to recognise behind glasses, hat and beard, on the right is the same man from the scene in DON'T LOOK BACK. Somewhere between the second and third encounters, this link is made, and this man is Andrew Salkey.

- Third Encounter: walking into a new friend's flat which feels as though it's by the sea, though it's really at the top of a hill in South London. At the top floor of the building, it feels like being high up in a sailing boat, rolling around on the sea, you can hear the wind. On the bookshelf is a copy of HAVANA JOURNAL (1971) by Andrew Salkey. Flicking through, this book is about a trip to Castro's Cuba to attend the Cultural Congress of Havana held in 1968. Salkey goes along with C.L.R. James and the publisher John LaRose, who stands next to Selvon in the middle of the photograph from the second encounter.

According to this article on the George Padmore Institute site, the three writers were directly engaged in the debates at the international conference, questioning the ideas that formed the basis of the discussions, and even holding their own independent meeting in a theatre away from the main venue (a marked contrast to Dylan's own disengagement with straight-ahead politics? By this time the folk singer was in self-imposed exile, no longer touring and living in the countryside).

- Fourth Encounter: later, near the same flat, walking into a tiny bookshop. There's a copy of ANANCY'S SCORE (1973) by Andrew Salkey. This book features a series of linked short stories which use the folk character of Anancy, who features in West African and Caribbean folklore. The stories are collages of themes and language, combining references to old and new narratives, for instance placing references to the garden of Eden and the atom bomb in the same story, and using a writing style that contains a multitude of slang elements. 

There are parallels with Bob Dylan's use of structures, characters and narratives from folk stories in combination with different sensibilities (rock music or slang or the city itself as a setting, that whole feeling of 50s/60s American underground culture). There are also some overlaps in ideas and outlook, one passage reading for instance

"It happened now one daytime when Brother Sun was stretching far up into the big blue, Brother Anancy and his wife were walking up and down the banana field in the place called The Beginning. You might think that the name of this garden is a funny coincidence of a name, but that is the personal business of all names. Names must lead people on and cause a lot of botheration. Believe me: there's no other way that names and tags can serve any purpose, particularly when people looking up to names and tags, and using them to settle affairs for all time. People trap names and treat them as final judges."

The book also features illustrations by Errol Lloyd, a Jamaican-born artist who was part of the Caribbean Artists Movement.

One of Errol Lloyd's pictures.

- Fifth Encounter: washed up, walking down the street one day, slightly lost, unsure of anything that is happening. There's suddenly a main road and another bookshop. Something about it calls out, and it produces two little artefacts. The first is an anthology for schools called Caribbean Prose, edited together by Andrew Salkey. There are stories by George Lamming and Edward Braithwaite. The second is a postcard of Victoria Square, Birmingham, 1932.

- Slowly putting together a sense of the work of Andrew Salkey. According to his obituary by Stuart Hall, he was born in Panama, went to school in Jamaica, and eventually settled in London, also working in Massachusetts. He created an enormous body of work, including an epic poem about the history of Jamaica that took two decades to write, and through working at the BBC, editing anthologies, working in publishing, and helping to start the Caribbean Artists Movement, he was instrumental in supporting and popularising work by Caribbean writers. According to the British Library, "He was jokingly labelled ‘Chief Recorder of Caribbean authors and their whereabouts’ by close friend Sam Selvon".

- What is there to say about this little journey? Encountering Salkey in all these different places, it seems like he is still travelling around and still spreading the word. Looking back at DON'T LOOK BACK, especially after looking at the great stories in ANANCY'S SCORE, the encounter between Salkey and Dylan seems a terrible waste, a missed opportunity, at best a failure of communication and circumstance, at worst something more sinister, potentially even ignorant, malicious. 

- Happy times trailing around bookshops with friends, discovering all the famous and rebellious writers, but almost exactly at the same time finding by chance a copy of THE LONELY LONDONERS by Samuel Selvon, a quieter doorway into an incredible, seemingly endless constellation of writers and artists that is still quite difficult to access, slowly finding more old books by C.L.R. James, George Lamming, Joan Riley.

- travelling through texts, which travel through fictional places and representations of real places, or travel through real places as books, setting down on shelves, or travel with people, C.L.R. James losing Nan Milton's manuscript of her John Maclean biography somewhere in the underground, all the text put together is a big city full of chance encounters, encounters with histories that are overlaid back on the real city, a place to read in the park on the bus or with a friend, finding texts with friends and reading to each other, starting journeys through the places of texts and through real places that are pulled back through texts that are filtered back through places, texts begin the journey or come along and change it, and vice versa, you travel between the islands of the text and the place and the journey, all the text put together is an ocean crossed by readers and writers who crossed real oceans, 

aviary is a series of videos, radio broadcasts and texts, which can be sequenced in any desired order or combination, and is based on a series of journeys and pilgrimages tracing different histories around a group of islands & nearby places