NORTHERN VOICES COMMUNITY PROJECTS 2013!

http://www.northernvoicescommunityprojects.co.uk/

Twinning!

http://www.northernvoicescommunityprojects.co.uk/Northern_Voices_Community_Projects/Twinning.html

NEWS FROM GARY MILLER!

'MAD MARTINS' My 1st of 2 new albums due in 2013: I am looking forward to entering the recording studio in January 2013 to record the first of what I hope will be two new Gary Miller albums for 2013. This first of these two albums is 'Mad Martins' - a series of songs I began writing 10 years ago about the "infamous" Martin Brothers of Tynedale for a project originally conceived by my friend and regular collaborator Keith Armstrong. The album is being recorded by my very good friend and regular recent collaborator Iain Petrie. As well as a good selection of songs of mine (about 20), the album is also planned to include a series of poems by Keith, and perhaps some other bits and pieces still to be confirmed! It may even become a double album! Special launch events for the album to be announced soon… I have been carrying many of these songs in my head for the last 10 years so it will be great to finally "get them out there" and "lay them to rest" before I commence on my next album 'proper' of all new songs for autumn 2013.

2013!

NORTHERN VOICES COMMUNITY PROJECTS

COMMUNITY ARTS EVENT IN THE MINING INSTITUTE LIBRARY, NEWCASTLE:

Wednesday January 16th 2013 7.30pm. Admission free. Bar and bookstall.

Northern Voices Community Projects Annual Awards event. The presentation of the annual Northern Voices Community Projects Joseph Skipsey Awards and a commemoration of the Hartley Pit Disaster with poems and songs. This event launches Dr Keith Armstrong's writing residency at the Mining Institute and will also mark the 45th anniversary of the death of Newcastle writer Jack Common and the 110th of his birth, with readings from his works. There will be readings from the NVCP commemorative book on Hartley 'Still The Sea Rolls On', funded by North Tyneside Council, featuring Rachel Cochrane, Catherine Graham, Keith Armstrong, Robert Lonsdale, Geoff Holland, Dave Alton, Gordon Phillips and more, with songs by local folk groups 'Kiddar's Luck' and 'The Sawdust Jacks' and by Chris Harrison (great great grandson of Tyneside pitman poet Joseph Skipsey (1832-1903), who will perform a settting of Skipsey's Hartley ballad), Gary Miller of 'The Whisky Priests' and a special guest appearance by Northumbrian Piper Chris Ormston with a set of tunes, including his Hartley Lament.

The NVCP  touring exhibition on Hartley, produced with the support of the Heritage Lottery Fund and North Tyneside Council, will be displayed in the Mining Institute from January 7th to February 1st.

THE MUELLER GIRLS

(for Andy Marx)

It’s a lonely day

in Tuebingen.

I’m floating in insecurity

along the Neckar,

riddled with last night’s schnapps.

Not knowing

where the hell

I’m headed,

I need a lady’s touch

just there,

where it matters.

That’s why

I’m homing in on Bismarkstrasse

to that scarlet house

where the Mueller Girls wait

to lick my brains 

a little better

than anyone else will 

this afternoon,

feeding my appetite

for breath

and lust

for that special feeling.

This minute I wish 

to be surrounded 

by girls,

for them to make me warm

and hold my dreams

in their strong arms.

Coming to Tuebingen

has become a habit

as natural as drinking;

I know just where to sit

in the Boulanger bar,

just where to drown

and just where to float

and drift.

Drink helps me

to alter my mind,

to raise and lift my spirits.

But it’s not the same

as Monika

lifting her skirt

and raising me up

on her massive bed.

And so 

we rock on

in this Swabian storm,

breathless

and shaky

as Hoelderlin’s hands.

I am lying 

with my head 

in her thighs

and only now

am I feeling alive.

She

is helping me

finish 

this poem.

It’s a long one

and needs to be shaped

into action.

She whispers crazy words

into my left ear

because I am left handed

and need her to tell me

just what to write

on these sheets

I caress

with a lyric touch.

She pampers my mind

with fresh ideas,

hot thoughts.

When other folk

are at their work,

this juicy text

drips 

from her tongue.

She licks all 

my poetry books

and comes to me

down Lange Gasse

in her boots

and stockings

from another century.

I go upstairs,

along the path

to the hottest girls in town,

to a golden shower

running 

with river water.

Open my mind

you can find 

sweet fantasies in there,

smuggled through Customs,

drenched with alcohol

and knowledge.

What do you say

to a Market Place massage,

a walk

through the park

with a lovely girl

whose hair is wild?

This life is limitless.

We must explore

the dirty lanes

behind Town Halls,

the balls

of light

in the graveyard of poets,

tongues

playing wildly,

this unforgettable hour,

kissing away

life.

KEITH ARMSTRONG

Wow!!!! A very honest poem!!!

Is it to keep for myself or can I share it with others ?

Thanks very much! Unfortunately in Boulanger is no Monika (yet) and a golden shower is also not available - but I`ll try to find a way.

Take care!

Cheers,

Andy

CREATIVE SCOTLAND

• 
  
• 
  

WEDNESDAY 5 DECEMBER 2012

 

Creative Scotland was a project doomed to failure

Ian Bell

Columnist

IT took fewer than three years for the bright, shiny new model to come apart at the seams.

All that effort spent liquidating the Scottish Arts Council (SAC) and dissolving Scottish Screen, all the hideous jargon masquerading as coherent speech, all that careful work to turn the arts into something called "the creative industries": what remains?

For one thing, there's a long session ahead for the board members of Creative Scotland as they survey the wreckage and wonder where their next chief executive is coming from. For another there is, or ought to be, deep embarrassment within government that a strategy – as these things are called – could become a shambles in such a brief span of time. If Andrew Dixon is the only casualty, justice will be in short supply.

The departing chief executive lost the confidence of those who make art. Some 100 of them wrote a letter to say as much in the sort of plain language that Creative Scotland never cared to master. Yet even at the end Mr Dixon seemed unable to grasp where, how and why he might have gone wrong. Those who remain to pick up the pieces, if they can, are unlikely to be any less perplexed.

This is fundamental. The people who make and talk about art or culture are worlds apart from those who regard such things as branch economies of their "creative industries". The latter are in the business of tourism, economic development, "gross value added", and the promotion of anything – fashion, computer games, advertising, cookery shows – capable of being called creative. The other lot care about art. There's a difference.

It has nothing to do with cultural hierarchies, elitism, or who is best served by a diminishing pot of public money. It is an argument, chiefly, over Creative Scotland's purpose. Scottish Enterprise, by its own account, is "here to support the businesses behind the creativity". It is already "helping hundreds of creative companies achieve great things". But it does not exist to aid the 49 theatre companies and art galleries who next year will face being funded on a project-by-project basis thanks to Creative Scotland.

That body doesn't deserve all the blame. It didn't break the solemn promise, repeated by successive Westminster governments, that Lottery money would never replace core funding. Creative Scotland was the victim, like everyone else, of public spending cuts and austerity. The decision to take the country's main arts institutions into direct government care was none of the body's doing. Neither Mr Dixon nor anyone around him took the actual decision to treat creativity as an industrial commodity.

Creative Scotland was eager to please, nevertheless. It talked the asinine talk of "experiential opportunities", "creative pathways" and "outcomes". It accepted the grisly "Year of Creative Scotland", now drawing to a merciful end, at face value, as a straightforward marketing opportunity. It did not once pause to ask a simple question: is this how art works? You can and must market a thrilling computer game or a fashion show. Good luck to you. But what has that to do with those who make art in solitude?

They could do with a funding body willing to listen and capable of listening. We could call it an arts council. Such was the burden, after all, of the letter from the 100. It pointed to a fundamental misconception. There is plenty of room and need for an organisation to represent and promote those creative industries. What is there, practically speaking, for those who work in art, those who tend to be remembered when a politician decides to boast about the national culture?

Creative Scotland is but one part of something called Scotland's Creative Industries Partnership. This also embraces the Scottish Government, Scottish Enterprise, Highlands and Islands Enterprise, Skills Development Scotland, The Convention of Scottish Local Authorities, the Scottish Funding Council, and Scottish Development International. Try getting poetry out of that lot. Better still, try getting these worthy bodies to understand the delicate balance between support for the arts and artistic autonomy.

Creative Scotland developed a taste, to put it no higher, for the artistic command economy. It quickly acquired the habit of telling arts people what they ought to be doing while turning a deaf ear – so the allegation goes – to anything it didn't care to hear. So-called "project-based funding", destroying any hope of artistic independence, was the predictable result. It was a notion dreamed up by people who see no problem in bureaucrat-sanctioned art.

The crack about reviving the arts council was not a joke. Collectors of jargon and threatened theatre companies alike are entitled to conclude that Creative Scotland is not – may the gods of literacy strike me down – fit for purpose. It was swamped, from the beginning, by contradictory demands, and it has sunk ever deeper into that mire with each passing month.

The old arts council was never far from controversy. Arts people hated it, too, for much of the time, especially when a grant application failed. That body suffered from its own contradictions. Arguments over public subsidy, its extent and purpose, were never resolved – how could they be resolved? – to general satisfaction. For four and a bit decades, nevertheless, there was a rough and ready agreement over what the SAC thought it was for. The same cannot be said of Creative Scotland.

Some of the 100 who wrote the now-famous letter were keen to say that the row "wasn't about money". They were wise. A good case can be made to show that governments driving austerity or driven by austerity neglect the arts at their peril. But in which sphere of the public realm is funding irrelevant? The ability to disburse £80 million makes Creative Scotland the envy of a great many important organisations and charities now being slaughtered by cuts. Arts people had better not forget it.

That must not become the issue. A cultural body could be reduced to handing out used fivers in the street and Scotland would still be entitled to ask what it was doing, why, for which purpose, and for whose sake. Far from providing answers, Creative Scotland has failed to understand the questions.

EPITAPH FOR A FROSTY GIRL

To please you

I made a Snow Woman.

It felt just like you,

melted away

in the morning sun.

Keith Armstrong