Honoured to be revisiting the hazy daze of Haight-Ashbury (and North Beach) in the august company of the great (Barry) Miles… at the Times Cheltenham festival.
Fri 7 Oct 2016 8:30pm – 9:30pm, The Inkpot, Imperial Square
Also yakking about genius and dysfunction in the life of the head Beach Boy with Will Hodgkinson and Lisa Verrico…
Sun 16 Oct 2016 12:30pm – 1:30pm, The Sunday Times Garden Theatre
After seeing Olivia Laing speak impressively at July’s Port Eliot festival, I read her brave and remarkable book about a subject that’s almost taboo in our culture: loneliness.
The Lonely City is a study of alienation and estrangement – but also of art, AIDS, attachment and social media – and I recommend it highly. Laing writes of her own bewildered isolation in Manhattan, takes in the work of Warhol, Hopper and others, and says such interesting things about the terrors of aloneness vs. the joys of solitude. Like most of us I’ve experienced intense loneliness in my life – but also a kind of ecstatic solitude. The Lonely City made me think deeply about all of this.
Laing writes beautifully and with piercing honesty. “What’s so shameful about wanting,” she asks. “Why this need to constantly inhabit peak states, or to be comfortably sealed inside a unit of two?” She’s also brilliant on Facebook, Twitter et al: “I wanted to look and I wanted to be seen, and somehow it was easier to do both via the mediating screen.”
I’ll be Small-Town-Talking at End of the Road in Dorset next weekend: Sunday at 10.45 a.m. – not to mention watching Joanna Newsom, Teenage Fanclub and other greats. Stop by the “literary zone” if you’re in the vicinity…
Just a wide spot in the road that’s sunlit, silent:
you just standing there, you illuminated,
hands jammed in your jeans.
I fixed the moment with my phone
so see it still as in a dream.
We found a gift store on a bend
and wandered through it sniffing things.
I stood beside a roaring bear stuffed years ago
and bought a pointless room spray
made from balsam fir.
It sits at home, reminds me of that place
where we just had each other and were free,
where London did not call
and it was you and it was me.
Incredibly sad news just in that DAVID ENTHOVEN, one half of E.G. Management with John Gaydon (King Crimson, Roxy Music) and half of I.E. Management with Tim Clark (Robbie Williams, most famously) has died after being diagnosed only days ago with liver cancer. “Big Dave” was one of the loveliest, warmest, kindest, smartest people I’ve ever met in the music business, and a lot of us are going to miss him terribly. It was a joy to know you, man. My heart bleeds for all your loved ones.
An Audioboom snippet of the late great BOBBY WOMACK talking ’bout his gospel roots on a tour bus on the 1984 Poet II UK tour. Not long after we finished speaking, we disembarked and took a tour of Warwick Castle…
An audio snippet from my 2014 interview with Van Morrison for Small Town Talk… the Belfast Cowboy reminisces about Woodstock, Albert Grossman, Robbie Robertson and more.
But it’s so lovely here:
the hills that roll down to the river,
woods bedecked with lanterns,
yurts for mindfulness, the vegan carts,
the wildest meats this side of Yeovil.
And of course the glamping families:
not a chav in sight, no red-slashed crosses,
rabid Leavers from across the bay –
nor one black face unless you count the kora players
in from WOMAD yesterday.
Instead the earthy MILFS
with nut-brown feet and daughters
rifling through the vintage stalls in search of skirts
that say they would have rolled in Yasgur’s mud
had they been born in 1951.
We’re all too busy pinning flowers to our tousled hair
to listen to the lonely novelist who drifts among the trees
with shoulder bag and Sharpie pen
but who will spend more on Halloumi wraps
than he can ever hope to make by being here.
What right has he pronouncing on these boutique hippie kids,
this man forever longing to belong?
Why always separate himself and find the flaw,
why point to self-delusion and delude himself
he has some vantage point from nowhere?
He has no zany shirt, nor quirky feathered hat,
he’ll never be the weathered Trustafarian
in mud-flecked boots with wife of 34
who danced all night to raucous bluegrass songs
beneath the darting stars.
Still he’s as privileged as every other tosser here:
why can’t he just be grateful we are gathered in this paradise
to celebrate the written word and save the day –
one reading at a time –
from Trump and from Theresa May?
Having survived the middle-class bacchanalia of Port Eliot, I’ll hope to see some of you at the dependably charming END OF THE ROAD festival in Dorset on the first weekend of September. I’ll be small-town-talking about Woodstock/Bearsville with Julian Mash in the Literature “space” and it’s a lovely way to wind down the summer…
barneyhoskyns.com 