It took me a while but I managed to put the first chunk of pictures, there is a thousand more and I don’t know if I’ll manage to upload everything but if you went to the festival and want your picture, get in touch.
Click here to go to the thumbnail (which is not a thumbnail). Enjoy the pictures…
One more thing, Chris is at Index Office video-editing… just so you know…
Alan is a born speaker and an accomplished bard. His dark-brown voice sells the Stratford-on-Avon poets opulent sentences, like a shrewd farmer his best cabbages.
“For God’s sake let us sit upon
the ground
And tell sad stories of the death
of kings”
Everybody is listening, captured by Alans piercing yet smiling eyes and applauds enthousiasticly when the last words have sounded and the silence has set in.
Alan and his dog having a drink
Alan continues: “Well, they wanted us to know a lot of Shakespeare, but also Marlowe of course, his contemperary. And the romantics, Hopkins….” He peeks at his vehemently nodding tablecompanion.: “You are farmiliair with Gerard Manley Hopkins?” The other guy nods a little sheepishly: “Well, that is to say….” But Alan is already lost in thought and stairs at the glowing point of his fag.
Then he starts again:
“My aspens dear, whose airy
cages quelled
Quelled or quenched in leaves
the leaping sun
All felled, felled, are all felled”
Without a hesitation Hopkins …. verses roll across the table. The rythme of the sentences is more important with this nineteenth century poet than with any other poet, but Alan knows it perfectly. When the poem is over he looks at the group with siny eyes and a big grin. The “hear, hear” can be heard from everywhere.
“Off course”, says Alan, “I also write poetry myself. But I have no sense of rythme. So no rhymes for me. I write parlando poetry.”
“You know, when I try to sell Z, the streetpaper, I don’t start with a “wussy” good morning, or some small-talk about the weather. No, I come up with some lyrical masterpiece, something they remember, for the next time they see me.” Alan winks, stretches and remarks that the great Shakepeare also sold his poetry, simply because he had to eat.
Well, bard, thank you. And darn…. you’re right!
Z magazine, 10-23 Feb 2006
Alan will be performing and exhibiting drawings at the Festival in London.
Portrait and video by Gerrit S.
