Things To Do Before You Leave Town
Animation by A LIne & A Dot
Music “Time Lapse” by Michael Nyman
Taken from my devastatingly attractive new one-man show, The Three Stigmata of Pacman.
Journey Across The Face of Henry Miller
3D Modeling by Richard Atherton
Film by Ross Sutherland
Music by BBC Radiophonic Workshop (circa Patrick Troughton)
Reworked from Aisle16’s 2005 production, Poetry Boyband.
This animation has been in a box under my bed for about five years. It was used in my critically acclaimed theatre production Poetry Boyband (”Pure Gold” -Gay Times*). I thought I’d dust it off, add a v/o and throw it up here. The 3D modeling is by Richard ‘Avo’ Atherton, who’s made music videos for The Coral and the like.
*You heard. A gay magazine compared my production to a BRAND OF POPPERS. You can keep your goddamn TS Eliot award.
Experiment To Determine The Existence of Love
Animation by Ross Sutherland
Reworked from Aisle16’s 2005 production, Poetry Boyband
A Brief History of Combat Simulation
Animation by A Line & A Dot
Music taken from the C64 game, The Eliodon by Charlie Kellner
This piece was commissioned by The Institute of the Future of the Book. It’s for a schools project. Here’s the brief: a bunch of kids are given a selection of texts supposedly discovered in the year 3000. Some of these books are from the last thousand years, some are from the ‘next’ thousand. In the future, no one knows what to make of these books. No timeline has been kept. All records have been destroyed (probably by their Mutant Ant overlords). An archivist from 3000 comes back through a timehole, and asks the kids to help him make sense of all the books. They need to select and annotate each finding, curating a “Museum of the Book”.
So anyway, this is my poem from the year 3000. It’s narrated from inside a video game. I borrowed the music from the title screen of Charlie Kellner’s fantastic The Eliodon on the Commodore 64.
Horse at Midnight
Film by Smeech
Graffiti by JLD
When I lived in Liverpool I was introduced to a style of poetry known as Broochism (invented by songwriter Tom Brookes?). I can’t remember the Broochist manifesto anymore, but it has something to do with being over 75% adjective and having to sound like it was written by an old lady who wears massive brooches.
Thanks to Nafe Jones, JLD and Smeech for capturing my horse. This was commissioned as part of the Bluecoat’s Chapter and Verse festival in Liverpool.
Three Computer Generated Poems
Filmed by Dave ‘Dave’ Bamford
Recorded at the Poetry Cafe, Covent Garden, October 2008
This film was recorded for a special poetry event at the FACT Centre in Liverpool.
I took famous poems and bounced them, line-by-line, through a series of automated Internet translation programs (mostly Babelfish). Once I’d translated, I deleted any words I didn’t like, then put it back into the translator again. After approx 1,000 translations, the poems had become a completely new text, divorced from its original author and lawsuits regarding Intellectual Property.
I began collaborating with my computer on writing poetry about 12 years ago. However, I have learnt a series of chilling facts about my co-author that have led me to fear and eventually despise it. A bit like what happened to Simon and Garfunkle. That is, if Art Garfunkle turned out to be a semiotic timebomb buried deep in the heart of our global communication network. Which in many ways he was.