If you are sidling around the Newcastle area this coming week, I would heartily suggest that you check out the Crack, TINA, National Young Writers Festival action.
Firstly, there’s a ton of art what you can stick your face in. Theatre, poetry, talking, art making, installing, rubbing things against other things. All the majors. You could check out cultural hierarchies in music, get your Electric Naga on, or consider your cis-trans dialogues.
Secondly, and perhaps more selfishly, I am grateful to say that Tom Hogan and I have another opportunity to share our installation work, Side A/Side B.
We are in the lovely Lock Up, which is where we should be. And the website details are here. You can listen in for three whole days, Friday, Saturday and Sunday, 10-4pm every day.
Because you only get a few words to describe it there, we say: Experienced by two people at a time: take a seat, choose a side and conjure up the face of the one you love. A hypnotic, contemplative place of love and loss.
All of which is a very short hand for I love this piece. I loved creating it, and collaborating with Tom on it, and the very few times I have seen people enjoying it as I hoped they would, it moved me very much. I am, literally, so fucking earnest about this work that I don’t even care that I can’t express this earnestness here and am Trying To Be Matter of Fact, whereas what I really really want you to do is to go to Newcastle and listen to this, even as I realise this is quite an unrealistic request.
But that’s what I want.
This time, in Newcastle, it has the chance to be shared with a new audience, in a beautiful space and with time all around it if you want to do it twice.
And really, this piece for me is how I have experienced love – it is bloody and terrible and wonderful. It has broken my heart and left me completely untouched. It’s a fucking big deal. And no deal at all. And you’ve no obligation to experience it the way I do. And the whole thing goes too fast. I was rushing. I didn’t mean to be at the time, but somehow I knew that I was moving through the experience with not enough languor and all too much hurry. I wanted it to be the sensation of Persian fairy floss melting on your tongue and it was probably more like an overcooked lentil stew. But I made the best with what I had, and I gave it to you to share in it. And even though we could never share it because nothing is really shareable, it sits there on the record as a thing that I wanted to give. And that’s a nice place to be too.
If you want to take it home with you, you can do that on the Bandcamp place and Tom and I will love you in a special way too.
Ms Natalya Pemberton of RougeNoir of the image above, she knows what it feels like. This is what it feels like.
eleanor j jackson 