Collage: The Working Day / Miles Davis Day / What I Say / Novel: The Death of Grass - John Christopher

 

RTomens, 2022

More constructionist art. 

It's been a Miles Davis kind of day - not 'kind', an actual Miles Davis day - not day, afternoon, to be precise. His electric era. Actually, his 'live' electric era. Which as you know is as good an era as any musician ever had. You don't know? You don't care? OK. Or not OK. I could get funny about it and tell you to bugger off then because anyone who doesn't appreciate electric Miles Davis shouldn't be spoiling my page with his/her eyes because despite your eyes working OK your ears definitely aren't. 

Miles Davis and collage are not so far apart, are they? Miles Davis and his producer, Teo Macero, actually, because as you know Teo was the master of sound collage, cutting and pasting together sounds (solos) by the band and making tracks as he went. Since the advent of CDs we've been able to hear the original versions, unedited, but it's not as if we could hear the joins as they were pressed onto vinyl. 

What I Say in an interview conducted by Green Linden Press is yet to be revealed. It will be on their site to coincide with the publication of my book, You Would Say That. You can pre-order a copy here. 

Self-examination is an interesting process. It forces one to...well...think about the whys and wherefores of creativity. Unlike many artists, I don't work self-consciously, with a constant flow of ideas and reasoning behind them as if prepared for an inevitable questioning. I don't intellectualise with a view to presenting myself as...a...clever, conceptually-aware artist.  Well, as Miles Davis famously said:  "If you understood everything I say, you'd be me!". Replace 'say' with 'did', of course. 

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Imagine a virus from China that wrecks the world! It could only happen in a sci-fi novel, right? Wrong? Anyway, I recently read John Christopher's The Death of Grass. I actually read it all the way through, which for me is some feat because in my experience Philip Larkin's notion that most novels are a beginning, a muddle and an end is absolutely right. You know how it is, you start enthusiastically, all the pages to come promising so much, only for that enthusiasm to gradually ebb away with each turn of the page until there's none left - next! That's my common experience anyway. Me telling you that I finished The Death of Grass should be recommendation enough, not because I'm a well-read Lit Critic, but for the reasons previously mentioned.

TTFN