beat: James Burt's weblog

New Banksy in Brighton

Sorry about the poor quality photo, but a new Banksy in Brighton is exciting yah? This one is on the New England Road near the steps to the station. There was a lovely, intricate illustration which someone painted over. Luckily Banksy was on hand. It's a little more slapdash than the piece on Prince Albert, but I guess he's busy selling to celebs now.   

Under the paving stones, the beach

On Thursday night, I made my second appearance at the Catalyst Club. The venue was packed and I was a little nervous - it was the largest crowd I've addressed. Hopefully my nerves didn't show when I was talking.

My talk was about Psychogeography. I gave a brief introduction and talked about how the practises involved make you more aware of your environment. One of the things I spoke about Brighton's amazing street art, something I occasionally post about in this blog.

My favourite ever Brighton artist was 'Dean', who used to tag around the turn of the century. Dean's logo didn't look particularly impressive, but great care was taken with its placement. As much as I love this street art, I never think too much about the people producing it. I consider the art as a natural part of the urban environment, as something that simply emerges. Dr. Bramwell told me he had a story about the person behind the Dean tags and I declined to hear the story, because I like the idea of these things simply appearing.

Thanks to everyone who came along, and to Kate Shields for the photo above.

• Louise Halvardsson came along to the talk and posted in her blog about a stencil in Hove.
• While looking for links on Dean I found a good post about chalk shadow outlines in Brighton. 
• Below is a photo that I took on Friday of a bin near Palmeria Square. Little things like this seem to be everywhere.

Psychogeography PDF Broadside

As part of my talk on psychogeography at the Catalyst last week I prepared a single-sheet handout with some suggested activities and further reading. One of the things that prompted this was Warren Ellis' discussion of broadsides. Laying it out was beyond my word-processor (quite fairly, since that's not what word processors are for) but I found a free, open source DTP package called Scribus which made it easy. 

Copies of the sheet are available below. Feel free to download it, print it out or whatever. I hope people find it interesting. 

• Download Broadside (PDF, 1.2MB)
• Broadside Image (JPG, 0.8KB)

I'm speaking at Brighton's Catalyst Club on November 10th

I'm very excited, because this Thursday I will be speaking at Brighton's Catalyst Club. Last time I spoke there was back in January 2010, when I talked about How to Escape from a WW2 POW Camp.

The Catalyst Club is something of a Brighton Institution, and may be having its 100th event this week. Each month it presents three talks, the subjects of which are not announced until that night. This means that people don't stay away because the subjects sound unpromising. Instead you give yourself the opportunity to be amazed by something you didn't realise was fascinating. I've particularly enjoyed seeing talks on Corsairville, The History of Boylesque, Algorithmic Art, Houdini in Australia and Vladimir Mayakovsky.

But the above description doesn't give much idea of the friendly, slightly rowdy atmosphere or just how much fun it can be. The event is at 8pm at the Latest Music Bar and tickets are 5 pounds on the door or online. And, just in case it didn't sound exciting enough already, I'll be printing some handouts.

In Loving Memory of Bunny

I love the tiny plaques on memorial benches, the way they attempt to describe lives with a short sentence or two. Often they leave me wondering about the person described and wanting to know more. One that I find particularly interesting is on the Undercliff walk, near the Ovingdean gap. Its text is simple: "In loving memory of Bunny". It makes me think of Bunny Munro, the title character in Nick Cave's book, The Death Of Bunny Munro, who lived in the area near this bench. I don't know the person that the bench actually memorialises so, for me, it's one of those strange moments where fiction and reality overlap. 

Playgroup Festival

I'm having a quiet Sunday evening, recovering after a weekend at the Playgroup Festival. I went up after work and set up my tent in time to catch the Hammer and Tongue slam. After that I wandered around the site, enjoying the atmosphere before going to bed.

It turns out that I was the only person in our area of the site that slept. At one point in the night, someone apparently had a full-on acid freakout next to my tent, calling for his mother and pondering (in a shout) whether he was Jesus. I missed that. I also slept through the partying Spaniards who were singing and drumming all night until some time on Saturday afternoon.

Since the Chatham House rule applies to festivals, I won't name the poet who won my respect with their heroic drunken antics. They set off wandering after a superb performance in the slam. At some point in the early hours they apparently beat the loud Spaniards in a rap battle. Later they were seen walking along a ditch, reciting classical poetry. After a couple of hours spent sleeping in that ditch, they bounced back to life and started all over again.

On Saturday I found myself getting more into the festival spirit and had a great time, wandering about with friends and having the sort of heart-to-heart discussions you can only have in damp fields. Tom and Chris gave fascinating lectures (I know now more than I need to about RPS and 'millicest'). AKDK played a storming gig and I spent the hours afterwards wandering about. I lost my voice, which was replaced by the husky party version. I met interesting strangers and had bizarre experiences and kept losing people then finding them again.

It was a fun weekend. I didn't try to catch that many acts, but once I got into the spirit I enjoyed wandering about and taking in the atmosphere. I think I had more fun than I've had at a festival in a long time. It was small enough to be intimate, and substantial work had gone into strange artefacts and performances. A lot of people from Brighton had turned up, which meant I kept running into old friends. The event wasn't perfect by any means (it definitely needed better water facilities and far more toilets) but I guess a festival is what you make it. I'm looking forward to next year.

There are various (possibly incriminating) photos I've not seen yet which are sure to appear on facebook over the next few days. I'm also hoping to see some of the footage filmed of Chris Parkinson's performance of The Wasteland AK/3D, backed by AKDK.

Photos of Brighton

Some photos of Brighton from last weekend. The first is of a tree Esther and I saw on the way to the Brighton Parkrun:

Lampost near Northern Lights/Quadrophenia Alley:

Sunday afternoon, after a swim in the sea, Ellen and I found the Punch and Judy man. We arrived just in time to see Mr. Punch beat the devil:

I meant to blog about last weekend, but I suspect I may not get around to it (or, at least, to any sort of detailed account). I am frantically packing for Playgroup tonight, where I will be spending this weekend. I'm expecting to have all sorts of adventures there. I just hope the weather is better than it was today,

Around Brighton

This Indian-style elephant sticker was on a lamp-post near my house.

The upper image is an advert for the Pavilion Gardens Cafe, which is apparently best represented by images of Jedward and Amy Winehouse painted onto milk-bottles.

Question: How come nobody told me that the garden at the Marwood was so large and so pleasant? I thought there was only the small area outside the toilets. I loved the art, particularly the portrait of Allen Ginsberg:

Anonymous stories near the Level

One of the things I love most about Brighton is the strange pieces of anonymous art you find about the place. Maybe such things happen elsewhere, but I don't remember much of it in Hastings, Norwich or Coventry.

I saw the first story below on Wednesday night when I was escorting Ellen to the Skiff. I saw the one below on a run earlier that day, but thought it was a strange notice rather than a story. I was pleased to find they were both still there when I went to work on Thursday morning.

Dead drops in Brighton

I'm rubbish at getting around to things. Back in January, adactio linked to a video about making dead-drops saying "I should get out there and make a few drops in Brighton". A few days later he posted a flickr set, dead drops in Brighton, showing him with wordridden and briansuda setting up some USB dead-drops. There was also a map to the locations. (For more information, there is some background/discussion of USB dead-drops on metafilter, as well as a catalogue website).

This weekend, about 2 months later, I finally got round to checking the dead drops with Vicky Matthews (who took the photo below). It was a sad story.

The drop in Kensington Street was unreadable. We couldn't find the one in Ship Street Gardens, only a couple of places where it might have been. The town hall drop was destroyed:

We only found the location of one of the two seafront drops. As Pier-to-pier complained frequently, salt air is no good for hardware, and the drive was too corroded to read:

I wonder what was on the drives. It's a shame our expedition didn't achieve its goal, but we did enjoy a beautiful misty day on Brighton seafront.