stone shadow

Over a period of 36 hours in the last couple of days, I've traveled from London to Aberystwyth via Birmingham, and back again - all the while reading JG Ballard and the papers, and listening to PJ Harvey's Let England Shake and Gillian Welch. I was also trying out, for the first time, the 'distressed analogue' possibilities of the Hipstamatic photographic app on my iPhone.

On the way there, I carried the pebble from the beach at Aldeburgh (see 1st Feb post, 'I hear these voices'). My half-arsed homage to Richard Long's Crossing Stones entailed depositing it on the beach in Aber, & exchanging it for another stone to take back - circuitously, eventually, who knows when - to Suffolk.

What follows is a long-ish chronological sequence of images from the journey. In large part, rather murky, sub-aquatic glimpses and fragments of Britain from the train as I passed into and out of cities and night. A sort of flip-book of shadows and flickering light, with a fleeting and surreal burst of apricot sunshine on arrival at the sea in West Wales.

Oh the epiphany of the sea ...

Somehow weather, music, Ballard, newspaper (Bahrain, Libya, Tory government cuts, Berlusconi's trial - the 'usual' heady cocktail in these profoundly unusual times), and something parading as 'coffee' conspired to colour my mood and these images - in particular, PJ's devastatingly beautiful, sombre songs:

& the birds are silent in the branches
& the insects are courting in the bushes
& by the shores of lovely lakes
heavy stones are falling

the words that maketh ...

Four links to rather different kinds of material doing the rounds at the moment: all of them about language's constitutive power - what words do - and in particular the relations between language and violence.

They can be approached in any order.

PJ Harvey's new single 'The Words that Maketh Murder', from her forthcoming album Let England Shake:



Keith Olbermann on US television, in the wake of the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords - in a long forthright speech to camera, he dismisses the role of violence in political rhetoric within democratic processes: see here












Martin Chulov in The Guardian (19 December 2010) with the extraordinary story of the Q'uran handwritten by a commissioned calligrapher using 27 litres of Saddam Hussein's blood over a period of two years in the late 1990s, and what on earth to do with it: see here












And finally, gently corrosive and hilarious guerrilla interventions in the streets of London by Charlie Veitch and the Love Police, megaphones in hand: 'Everything you read in the mainstream media is 100% true ...'



p.s. Here's Seamus Murphy on the making of the films for Polly Harvey's Let England Shake:

The album is a dense world of Polly's vision, but what interested me most was exploring the eccentricity and enigma of England. The present exists in a complicated relationship with the past and England's island status, and her relationship to her land, geography and tradition is fundamental to the country's psyche. Contemporary England springs from colonial adventures, military ambitions and industrial prowess. It is also shaded by fading power and its military role in modern geopolitics. To open myself up to a country I live in but rarely shoot, I took a road journey around England. I approached it as I would a foreign country, traveling wide-eyed with minimal equipment — light and alone. I documented life first-hand in classical reportage style, using available light and real-life situations, this time with sound and pictures. I normally have the still silent image as my universe. I photographed, directed and produced the films myself, and worked with editor Sebastian Gollek in Berlin to complete the project. The ballroom scene from Blackpool is one of my favorites; it has what I hope for in any project, to find the extraordinary in the ordinary and to be ambiguous enough to allow personal interpretation. I am not trying to deliver a message. Just showing what I saw, how I saw it and, sometimes, how I would like it to be.

For a pre-release stream of the entire album, see here.

Thanks to my friends Pete Harrison and Tim Etchells for a couple of these links, culled from their own web pages.

polly jean

'There's too much of everything in the world, but particularly too much of everything that's not all that good. The world doesn't need any more art that's just all right. It only needs mind-blowing, inspirational, life-changing stuff' - PJ Harvey, in ‘Songs of Innocence and Experience’, interview with John Harris, The Guardian, 28 September 2007.


PJ was outrageously good in Bristol on Saturday night. She has many of the things I love about certain performers (more often in music than elsewhere). A confidence that isn’t bloated ego-driven. A quality of radical present-ness. A kind of lightness & strength in running with something to the nth degree, with phenomenal attack, right in it & on it but not seeming to be burnt, always there and watching, listening, her ample energies harnessed. She looks like she’s massively fed by and with her gang, the music, the worlds (and voices) she passes through with embodied blowtorch intensity, then lets go of oh so lightly. Beautiful. Elegant. Eccentric. Inhabiting the music of she. Her south-west England accent, so far away from narrow rock’n’roll assumptions, seems deeply apt here somehow – her songs are very 'english', with this country's contoured and grained shadows animated, an old soul exposed sometimes delicately, lyrically, sometimes with a roar from some underworld. Above all, she seems to have such a sure sense of her multiplicity without it ever unravelling into blurry dispersal – she is ravelled, joined up, alive, herenow - and her range of vocal textures and grains, as well as the barks, yelps, the intensity of investment & engagement in the doing are startling and massively energising. Full of uninsulated life. Joyous. Human. Loved it. Loved her.
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For PJ Harvey's website, see here

For John Harris's interview with PJ Harvey (‘Songs of Innocence and Experience’, The Guardian, 28 September 2007), see here

For the Chapman brothers' video of PJ Harvey's 'Black Hearted Love', see here.

‘Videos are usually made to help to sell a record. But we'd like people to watch our videos, go out into the street and burn their Porsches’ - Jake Chapman, Guardian blogs, 31 March 2009.

For Jake Chapman on the making of the video for PJ Harvey's 'Black Hearted Love', see here

Photos of PJ Harvey, with John Parish and Howe Gelb, from their gig at the Anson Rooms, Bristol, 18 April 2009 © David Williams