Cabaret seated

Chives is stirring in my loins. He is waiting to be reborn ~ he's seen his mug on the tweakèd CabaretSF site...

Meanwhile I'm excited to be meeting the Heavenly Hosts and Magic Wardrode Dept. on Saturday to descide format of forthcoming Frome Festival 2010 show (s?)

Would love to put The Chimerascope onto the website - it could be meged into a cheeky "What the Butler Saw" device I cobbled together.

The Chimerascope is a steam, clockwork, rain and crystal powered fortune telling device. Let The Seeker (that's you) come forth and ask of The Chimerascope what s/he will. Now ~ press The Red Button and generate your own Chimera ~ a fantastical creature made from two or more beasts. The complex nature of the beast you have created will indicate the answer you Seek.

Soon :P

Cabaret sited

just uploaded the Cabaret sans frontierès website. Strong on style - light on content at the moment. Ajoined to my own "under construction" site - annexed with (I hope) invisible cyber glue. Would be good to play with it - add some fun stuff. Intended to create my own website first but then the Cabaret got it's filthy hands onto my inspiration valve and twisted.

website

Currently slogging my way through the creation of my own website *groan* they're not much fun to make - they take me forever with lots of rather dull technical nibbling.

Still, must confess to a pleasant tiggling of excitement. Coming soon...ish

What exactly is the point? No.1

The Orphan - from my new set of picture postcards. Did I mention the postcards? The postcards don't blink like this one does admittedly. Nor do the eyes roll around like on yesterday's Chimera. If you're going to read my Blog, watch out for tiny details.

I realise, probably, no one will actually read my blog - and that even if they do, they probably won't notice all the little details - like the Orphan's eyes. But I can't help myself. And the alternative is far worse...

Tiny creative details obsess me - they keep me up all night. They hold just the same vital fascination now as the spell they cast over me as a child. You see, in the grip of minutia fever, time dissolves and you feel utterly alive and engaged. It is the Grande Alchemy: tweaking, refining and boiling down to essence. It is the search for GolD. It must be the "Bliss" that Joseph Campbell said we must follow.

Fair enough, Joe. But hang on - isn't it all a bit self-serving? I mean, what exactly is the point?

Well, I have two answers...

The first springs from those darkly darkest hours:
There is no point. Your creativity has no value. Your efforts are utterly futile. Congratulations. You are an accomplished masturbator... etc. etc. I could go on. Very easily.

The alternative goes like this:
There's a postman I see often around town. He's the archetypal chirpy postie, filled with radiant goodwill and a cheery "Morning!" that makes you feel that he both knows you and likes you. That's quite a talent. You get the feeling he was created to be a postman.

Last night I read in the Somerset Standard, that a postman was killed by a car while out on his pushbike. So - now I'm worried that it was him - the nice postman - whose name I'm not sure of but might have been Paul Sutcliffe, like the guy in the article.

So anyway, the point is; if you really are a cheery postie, it's probably best to just get on and BE a cheery postie. It's a good thing to be known and remembered for. If you are an obsessive creative detail nut, then just BE an obsessive creative detail nut.... And - BE SEEN being it.

Hence the Blog.
And the Orphan's eyes...

Postcards... they're ALIVE!

Wooo! My postcards have arrived! And they are beautiful - how gratifying to tear open a cardboard box and find hundreds of glossy copies of your very own **reasonably priced** artwork within.

There are nine designs in all - a combination of hand illustration and digital photo-manipulation. Like this little fella on the right. She is a chimera - an amalgam of several creatures.

I remember as a 10 year old boy watching Terry Gilliam on a Saturday morning kids TV show. He was demonstrating how he made his animations (for Monty Python) using pictures he'd cut-out from magazines. Easy and cheap. I was hooked. An arm here, a head there, yes - eyes and hair - I was Doctor Frankenstein! My freaks, monsters and fantasies were suddenly photo-realistic. And they even moved (if I didn't glue them down). Unfortunately, we couldn't afford Terry's animation equipment. Thanks Terry.

Discovering Photoshop years later was another revelation. With this amazing software, I could cut-out photographs, scan my own drawings and then obsessively manipulate them. Plus - I could draw and paint directly into the computer - using digital paint, textures, virtual brushes.... sweet heaven. It would be several years before I slept again.

So anyway, these postcards. Several people suggested I should produce them - get them "out there". Have tried to choose pictures which might actually sell. You know, in shops - Like Iksentrik (not that I've spoken to Ryan yet but...) or perhaps at Art Fairs, Frome's Artisan Market. **I'm thinking 80p each?

All nine images are rather dark, grotesque. I wonder if aspiring towards beauty would actually make a more serious artist of me. Hang on though. Surely the artists job is to reveal the unseen, the hidden, the overlooked - to unmask. This fascination with fear is all about externalising - exposing it. So perhaps when it's "out there" it can be transformed into something a little sweeter.

Hey! I'm an artist!

A Piece of Creative Cake

Crikey - Blogger has come a long way since last time I used it. But then, four or five years is a long time. I remember having to install complicated, clunky plug-ins just to upload photos. Not now - pics - vids... It's all free and it's a piece of cake. Yummy cake. Pimped my homepage too.

You'd probably need to be an old git to really appreciate just how miraculous and liberating the rapid evolution of all this creative technology is. Get a computer and a few peripherals: make a hit record [Bedingfield, 2001], get into social networking: promote yourself to superstardom [Arctic Monkeys, 2005], get a video camera: shoot a movie for national distribution ["Colin", 2009]. No more prohibitive production costs, esoteric knowledge, elite circles and exclusive clubs. Now we are all the masters - and we're calling the shots - in pro-quality high definition. Viva la digital revolution!

So - I should probably get a little personal webspace to indulge myself, doused in my own digital daubings. A public platform for my tragically unrecognised creative genius; an exercise in desperate vanity or the inevitable middle-aged stab at immortality. Easy. And cheap.

What's more, I'm changing my broadband provider (back) to Virgin just as soon as I'm released from Sky.con. While Sky can offer endless, lacklustre TV channels, Virgin has a reliable Internet connection, fast surfing and Deals. For example, a little extra sweetener is Virgin's 200Mb of free webspace thrown in. OK, 200Mb isn't a lot for a phat media fan - true - but there are loads of YouTubes and Photobuckets out there, all free and just waiting to get plumbed into yer site. Just because it's fun. And cheap. And easy as... scrawling off a Blog.