Monday, May 02, 2022

May Day fun, frolics & failure...

So.. an odd thing happened just as I was about to post this update: the entire entry disappeared. So instead of an a thoughtful and possibly insightful review of last week, here - one day late -  is a slightly frantic summary: 
Music first, as Saturday night was the hotly-anticipated Ukraine Humanitarian Appeal event at the Cheese & Grain: five superb acts performing to a full & friendly audience, with opening and links from DJ Patmandu. Here's The Back Wood Redeemers who followed Henry Wacey, Back of the Bus, Mighty One, and The Raggedy Men -  all brilliant. A fantastic night of dancing with friends and listening to fabulous music from these great Frome performers.
Sunday was Independent Market day, followed by an afternoon session at Bar Lotte from the truly brilliant Rosco Shakes, with daylight giving a slightly better opportunity to catch a snap of this fabulous funk-blues band. From a laconic version of Ain't nobody's business but my own, to a rocking Kansas city here I come, the Rosco team delivers superbly in its own inimitable style, with Tim literally dancing as he speed-plays the keyboard. 


This was a great week for arts: Mark Brooke's provocative and unusual images of Melissa Stanton-Matthews were on show at the Station Gallery, where on Thursday Melissa also read some of the poems from their shared collection of art and words Meet Me Inside - a candid sharing of feelings about 'being human' in a world that values beauty above other attributes.  Melissa's intimate personal poems chime with the series of portraits Mark created to show the real woman beyond the perfect model, but Melissa is actually very beautiful.

Friday saw a plethora of exciting art show openings: Black Swan has some amazing work from Simon Hitchens, whose Beyond Body exhibition explores the connection between our experiences and those of inanimate matter like rock, to ask questions about our concept of experience: "what makes a being sentient? Is a mountain or stone a being?" Simon is fascinated, he explains, by 'the difference between the human and the non-human – what passes and what outlasts.”


Showing until 26 May and well worth a visit.


Over at the
Whittox Gallery on the same night, another thought-provoking exhibition opened. Endangered tells an important story about the life cycle of eels in Britain where sadly they are now close to extinction. Julia Manning's beautiful wood and linocut prints chronicle their amazing journeys from birth in Somerset rivers to finally reaching the Sargasso Sea, and she has been working in schools to raise awareness and hopefully halt their decline. This fascinating and informative exhibition, which also includes some wildlife sketches by Nik Pollard, is showing until 25 June.


Finally in this splendid arty triumvirate of Friday night openings: the Art Fair at the Silk Mill & Bennett Centre was open throughout the weekend - a delightful throng of art and craft of every description. The quality of work by these local makers is fantastic, and their ingenuity is amazing too: Paul Juillerat's felted banners incorporating personal treasures, and esoteric art created from scrap by Matthew Sowter to name just two of the intriguing practices on display along with the paintings and high-quality craft work.

So Friday night in Frome was buzzing with arty vibes but unfortunately I'd booked to see Mark Thomas at the Rondo in Bath and missed all these openings, although did manage a full catch-up around the venues in Frome next day. Mark's lockdown shows had been funny and full-on political so I was hoping for some satisfying satire on the current state of the nation, but disappointingly his focus was on other issues, like having a row with the front rows and giving a  detailed description of his annoying aged mother's toenails, so I left at the interval to enjoy a stroll back through the city and a wait for the bus at Be At One, where barmen wear ear plugs but the vibe is always friendly. Here's Bladud in the Parade Gardens, from my afternoon stroll round the city.

And finally - I think, though I may have missed something as it was a busy week - the continuing benefit of lockdown for me has been Zoom, a portal to art talks and theatre performance when live visits were banned and this week a connection to two interesting meetings hosted by Penny Hay at Bath Spa School of Education, who talked with Liv Torc about the amazing work with the Hot Poets.
 Liv is passionate about poetry and about the urgency of need for awareness of our climate crisis: the Hot Poets project she's spearheading made such an impact at COP26 that the team have been invited to join the UN at COP27.  Liv talked fluently, and often funnily, about the contribution that poetry can make to essential awareness of issues, and about her own writing process: 'I look on it like sculpting a piece of clay - you have to work on it while its wet', she says. 
Later that day  Penny Hay also zoom-interviewed Mikey Please, recent recipient of a Bafta for his Aardman-developed animated film Robin Robin,  Mikey talked entertainingly about his own animations and the process with Aardman - surprisingly, it's so complicated that no retakes are possible meaning everything you see is the first take - and gave credit to all the team who worked on the project, including musicians Ben & Beth Please aka The Bookshop Band, and, especially pleasing for me, my writer/film-maker son Sam.

So there you are, that was the week that got wiped by my system, or at least the shreds remaining in my memory - with a final footnote which is also the reason there's no report here on the May Independent Market, as my morning was shared with 400 others forming a human chain around the Saxondale site currently under threat of cynical development. There's an alternative plan on offer which would benefit us all far more (you can view it here) and the Big Mayday Hug around the site will hopefully have shown how much support this one has, and the level of concern in Frome about the future of this area in the heart of the town.


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