Oh hey Lo!
We’re back baby!
The main headline for Pope this month is: travel. I’ve been zigzagging across the country like I’m being followed. A lot of trips to gigs on trains and buses, which I mostly enjoy. But I have to admit: I’m a fragile flower. I hate loud noises and loud people. I ride the quiet carriage with all the other nerds. My ideal train is, I’d say, the ghost train. Or the Orient Express after everyone’s been arrested and chastened by the group murder (sorry, spoilers). This is a shame because, occasionally, using the UK’s battered spiderweb of a train system does mean non-negotiably spending quality time with some of Britain’s most heathen units.
For instance, recently on a train to Bristol, halfway through the journey, some children alighted the carriage - and look, I know it’s not their fault that children are annoying. They’re children. They’re literally new people. They’re not cooked yet. Children are people served rare. They are human sashimi. So with their unformed, jelly-raw brains, they’re shouting and hitting each other, because they haven’t worked out how to transfer that energy and hatred into words yet, and do more permanent psychological damage. When they reach teenagerdom they’ll realise you can just say ‘nice shoes’ sarcastically and ruin someone’s life forever. But for now: screaming and knuckles!
And they really were going above and beyond, putting in a very special shift in the decibel department until it reached a peak and I had that classic danger-thought, ‘I literally don’t know how this could get any more annoying.’ And then, as if the gods heard and accepted my challenge, one of them got out an adult, full-size saxophone and started playing it at full volume. In the quiet carriage, packed, at 6pm. It was: extraordinary. I actually laughed. Why did he have a saxophone? Why did he have an adult saxophone? Why was he playing the adult saxophone mid-argument? Questions for the sky. I mean, I knew why he was playing it, obviously. Because he had it. Children are like musical theatre actors, in that if they see a musical instrument (particularly a piano), it triggers a deep, Bourne-esque sleeper-agent hormonal response that they have to mash out half-remembered show tunes on it, context be damned. It doesn’t matter if it’s your uncle’s funeral, there’s a Steinway just sitting there, waiting to have Defying Gravity palmed into it.
But why an adult-sized saxophone? Where did he get it? It completely dwarfed him. Certainly it wasn’t because he was so good at saxophone that he needed an upgrade, because it sounded exactly as good as a child playing an adult sax can sound i.e. horror. The honking, the squealing. The saxophone was going through puberty and getting mugged simultaneously. In fairness, it was being fingered by a child and was making the same noises you would make if that was happening to you. What’s woodwind for ‘this is illegal!’? Whatever it is, it was howling that.
The silver lining of getting about, however, is that I’ve laid my eyes on some pretty good stuff. I’ve spent some time in Edinburgh, a city I love so much, mostly because it appears to be built out of gothic deleted scenes from the movie Inception. It’s a dream-space city, all folding, winding set design, protrusions and uncanny angles. In actual dreams, you pass through doorways into rooms that are in no way linked in real life. You go down staircases into streets that stack on top of each other, and spiral and weave, and it’s all physically impossible. This is how the city of Edinburgh is actually built. With a hearty sponsorship from M.C. Escher. Roads fold down onto other roads, curve in on themselves and deposit you somewhere you just left. It’s a beautiful city and also a Victorian origami nightmare cake.
My favourite thing to do with time to spare in fresh cities is seek out the weirder art galleries and museums. You learn a lot about yourself, slinking round. For example, I finally visited Edinburgh’s Surgeons Hall recently, an anatomical museum of medical specimens - somewhere I had always wanted to visit because I really thought I would be cool and chill about seeing loads of pickled foetuses, severed growths and wax cadavers, disformed ampersand spines and organs floating in jars like aquatic gherkins. Reader, I was not. I am, in fact, hugely pleased to announce that I nearly vomited several times and had to elbow several more curious (read: deeply sick) visitors out the way in order to get some fresh air. For reference, the elbow was my own, not a particularly grungy one I had plucked from the display, though there was, let me assure you, plenty of gnarly choice. So I am not a psychopath, which is a relief. I am someone who is ok with the human race being a bunch of ham mannequins filled with offal and joints, but only in theory, in a cartoon way, not in an actual, it-is-inside-me, way. I am, we discover, squeamish. I squeam easily. I squeam and squeam until I’m sick.
Art is maybe a different kettle of fish. Most art I don’t understand. Which I’ve had to come to terms with. As soon as you give in to the feeling of not knowing, it’s actually really pleasurable. A rare occasion in which ignorance actually is bliss. You can just focus on enjoying the aesthetics of it, beauty and technique. Does it remind you of something from your life? Sit with that. Isn’t that sensational, that something, a line, a curve, a colour, two colours side by side, on a wall, can pick you up and take you into the recesses of yourself?
I’m often chiding myself for not reading books fast enough, but actually I spend so much time while I’m reading spun off, distracted by some word or plot development or the phrasing of something a character has said - either remembering or fantasising, going back or going forward in my own personal timeline, day dreaming I suppose - only to fall back out of time and forget there’s a book in my paws. A lot of reading is not reading then, it’s thinking, or at least, not active thinking, not Rodin’s-The-Thinker-thinking, but just being with your own head, taken somewhere new by introduction of something fresh on the page. Imagining. That’s what I’m describing: imagining.
Allowing myself imagination time with reading has totally changed how I go to a gallery now too. I’m not off to engage with capital-A Art™. There’s no right or wrong amount of time to stand looking at a painting. You can’t switch paintings off or on, they can’t be watched like a film. It doesn’t enter your head linearly like a stream of ticker tape, it’s never over. Most of the time art is just lines on a wall that you can turn up to, mentally, or not, and what you take away from it is yours to keep. For that reason, I always find it very difficult to walk away from something that I really, really find beautiful or fascinating - whether it’s the Garden of Earthly Delights or a sweeping view - because however long you’re up there, it won’t stop. I’ll take my last look as I go down the hill, or leave the exhibition, but it’ll just keep being there, being endlessly evocative, silently. Inspiring other people, carouseling them off into their memories, or sucking them down into the depths of it. It’s infuriating. When you leave, for you, it’s gone. You can’t just have it, however much you want it. It can’t be had. You’re just there in front of it. And then, well, you’re not.
More of Will’s cartoons?
Spear a mighty slice of Will’s website here!
More of Ben’s nonsense?
Pierce the microwave-able flap of Ben’s website here!
Ben’s Gigs
Ben’s aimlessly wandering the fringe festivals of the country over the next few months. Catch him doing stand-up (and not overly sincerely wittering on about art) here:
1st May - Machfest, Machynlleth, Wales - tickets here!
10th May - Brighton Fringe - tickets here!
15th May - Bristol Comedy Festival - tickets here!
29th May - Brighton Fringe - tickets here!
26th June - Alex & Ben’s Midsommar Flower Crown Carousel - tickets TBA
10th-11th August - Camden Fringe, The Bill Murray - tickets TBA
Feeling generous?
If you’ve got spare honk, why not consider giving to one of these amazing charities?
Arts Emergency - there’s been a lot of chat recently about the narrowing demographic of the arts and this charity is making a significant attempt to combat that! Donate or become a mentor!
Parkinson’s UK - Parkies provides care and support across the UK for people with Parkinson’s, and fund research into a cure. They do incredible work! People with Parkinson’s tend to be 50+ and depend on regular contact with others, so have been hit really hard this year. Please consider donating!
If you have a charity close to your heart, however big or small, and want to include it here {or you wanna get in touch for whatever reason!} - just send us an email benpope86@gmail.com or Tweet at us @LoAnEmail