Thursday, August 18, 2005

Big day today. The Greenbelt wristbands arrived: sign that the year's most-anticipated event is very near. Spent an hour putting them in envelopes and posting them off to each member of our team. This time next week, I'll be in the bar at Cheltenham Racecourse with some of them. Lovely.

Meanwhile a team of twenty young people from Oldham helped a group of us put on a free festival in Norris Green Park today. Part of Merseyfest, in which two thousand volunteers from all sorts of far-flung places (and Oldham) have been taking part in various community programmes, cleaning up the city and creating celebrations in places previously neglected or reviled.

Nogsy Park is quite well-used, though often by people who value it as camoflague for their nefarious activities. And when our team arrived on Monday morning the area which was fifty years ago a lovely rose garden was a glum, glass-strewn, graffiti'd place. Three days of litter-picking, repainting and general tidying-up later, we were able to repay the considerable local interest in what was happening there, by holding a free party for everyone - bouncy castles, face-painting, footy competitions, a tattooist, etc etc etc. And yours truly with Now! 61 on the PA system. It was good; and we'll be at it again tomorrow (if you're passing).

Driving my car, illegally over-full of young women, back to their festival campsite at Croxteth Park this evening, we noticed the big mainstage assembled ready for the weekend's climactic carnival events, a fairground at the ready, and what's reputed to be Europe's biggest skatepark taking shape. Reflecting on this, on the day's events, and on the glorious treat ahead next weekend, I couldn't help thinking, we Christians get a lot of things wrong but y'know, we're pretty good at putting on a party.

Wednesday, August 17, 2005

"Living God, you bury our past in the heart of Christ and you are going to take care of our future."

- Brother Roger of Taize, who died yesterday. I'm sure the good folks of Greenbelt will mark his passing well, next week.

*Where there is charity, God is truly there.

Thursday, August 11, 2005

It’s that time of year when discussions start to increasingly end with comments along the lines of “well that’s probably the best we can do at this late stage, we’ll just have to work the rest out when we get to site”.

It is of course kind of inevitable that a certain amount of issues have to take this route, but given the amount of other work that will occur ‘once we get to site’ it’s good to keep the number of known yet unresolved issues as limited as possible.

For various reasons I fear the number of unforeseeable issues will be higher this year, which should make for an interesting festival.

A rejigged site will doubtless be keeping things fresh and surprising for audience and workers alike.

There was a driving concept this year to freshen things up and make the site layout less like a baguette and more like a bagel. Mind you, looking at the very simplified campsite areas plan above (full version downloadable from here), one could be forgiven for thinking that the orange Festival Village Areas actually form more of a Muller Fruit Corner...

Tuesday, August 09, 2005

It’s very hard to write entries for this blog that give the intended insight into the lead up to the festival, but aren’t deeply dull and monotonous. After all there’s only so many times one can write “came home from work, answered 30 emails, made 3 festival phone calls, updated the intranet site, went to bed”.

Someone suggested I try to give a taste of the different sorts of things that are getting sorted in these numerous emails and phone calls. So here’s a taster from the last 24 hours:

Management Group meeting on Monday night in London, lots of talk about big issues, numbers on site, finances, strategy for next year etc etc The sort of stuff I could tell but then I’d have to kill you…

The meeting was sandwiched between grabbed conversations with key people on exciting issues such as T’shirts for workers, ticketing lists, graphics for lanyards, when toilets will be available in the campsite in build week, opening hours for the art exhibitions, venues for training sessions, programme for the big screen, street theatre, vehicle insurance, dance workshops and so on. The sort of stuff I could tell you about in immense detail, but then you’d probably want to kill me.

Emails over the last 24 hours have been on similarly scintillating topics such as CRB checks, Venue Managers, Centaur Programme, campsite areas, volunteer sessions, risk assessments, Public Liability Insurance for Inflatables, campsite graphics etc etc

Phone calls today have included, a potential new person to join our Health and Safety team, a new Venue Manager, a lovely person asking if there’s anything he can do to help me this week and Stuart our Traffic Stewarding Manager asking me to dream up three new names for the traffic teams (they’ve been based on Cartoons for the last few years, but need a change), because he and his cohort Nick “don’t do creative”. Those stewards do love their nicknames…

Exciting stuff eh? Oh the glamour of it all!

Hmmmmm…maybe just saying "went to a meeting, did some phone calls, wrote some emails…..sorted ‘stuff’ out" would be preferable?

Oh and in case you’re wondering the Ooomap-Loompas, Ewoks and Smurfs will be guiding you onto site this year, lead as ever by the lovely Stuart and Nick - or ‘my little munchkins’ as I’m now calling them. I encourage others to do likewise...they'll love it...and it is in keeping with the planned events on the Monday at Greenbelt

Friday, August 05, 2005

Regular readers of my blog will be very aware why I'm so excited about the Greenbelt appearance of Eyal Weizman. Let's just say that with an exceptional slide-show and penetrating analysis he opened my eyes to the way that the very landscape of the occupied Palestinian territories - the very look and feel of the place - is being altered by the conflict there. And when you start to understand, deeply, how the everyday has become exceptionally abnormal, then you start to understand, deeply, what this conflict is really doing to its people. Eyal's seminar will be awesome. And the Greenbelt audience will understand.

Thursday, August 04, 2005

There’s a small gallery on Fairfield St in Manchester called the International 3, whose tagline is "Art is Our Airplane".

I love that expression.

If art is your airplane, where will it take you today?

I’m looking forward to flying Greenbelt airlines in a few weeks time. The destination is often surprising.

Tuesday, August 02, 2005

I’d committed to cutting back on the Greenbelt work from the rather ridiculous levels of the last few years. Spotting an area of need, getting a solution up and running and then getting someone to take it over is a good pattern and delegation of the venue manager management was key to my plans to workload reduction.

A quick glance at my email folders suggests this has been pretty successful. Greenbelt 2004 folders contain exactly (spooky!) 2600 emails. So far the Greenbelt 2005 folders total 1642, which with only a few weeks left to go means it’s looking pretty good.

The continual improvement on the information we’re able to make on available via the website has had a major impact over the last few years on the number of ‘common’ questions that get emailed, but that notwithstanding I know where most of the ‘missing’ emails have gone this year...and I need to buy Ben a pint of quality organic beer as a thank you.

Monday, August 01, 2005

This is the month Bill Drummond comes to Greenbelt. For me his appearance is almost in the league of Billy Bragg's two years ago - ie, one of those gigantic influences from the cultural left-field (and way outside the church), who in all sorts of ways have altered my life, coming as a guest to that other major gigantic influence - the festival which perhaps more than anything else has shaped and formed me, over 26 years.

Now, I'd be pretending if I suggested that Drummond is as life-affirming as Bragg, and I'd be hiding if I neglected my very real concerns that this singularly iconoclastic artist might make all the wrong noises at Greenbelt and alienate a lot of people. But, alternatively, I'm hoping, he'll shine. He should shine because a substantial lot of Greenbelters like engaging with creative people who think angularly, and no-one's more angular than Bill Drummond.

This is an artist who calls his projects 'jobs'. Today I've been looking at Job No. 41 in the Catalogue on his website www.penkiln-burn.com, which is called A Friendly Thing To Do, and consists of knocking at the door of strangers in their homes and presenting them with a cake you made for them (look it up). It's one of those jobs which makes you ask, "Yes, but is it art?" Like most of Drummond's projects, such as his barely-legal adventures in sampling technology with the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu, or the one he's on at the moment, visiting homes of people on a line connecting Belfast and Nottingham, at their invitation, and making soup for them.

It's also one of those jobs which might provoke some recipients or observers to anger, like the classic Drummond episode when he and his sidekick Jimmy Cauty took £1 million in notes to the Island of Jura on 22nd August 1994, burned it all, then toured the country asking audiences if they might help answer the question 'Why did The K Foundation Burn A Million Quid?', well-documented in the book of the episode.

But it's also a job which might amuse some, like I'm amused by his Job No. 5 - How to be an Artist. This is the one he's billed to be doing at Greenbelt. The How to be an Artist Job Spec, he says, is 'To restore one's relationship with a work of art.' The story is long and convoluted (and the subject of another book) but essentially he decided that he wanted to get rid of his $20,000 print of Richard Long's photography and text work A Smell Of Sulphur In The Wind and when no-one would buy it off him he chopped it into 20,000 small squares and is now touring the country selling them off at a quid apiece. I'm the proud owner of one of these, mounted on a little certificate. If every Greenbelter buys one this coming bank holiday weekend, he'll be in clover. But will he or any of us be any the wiser about how to be an artist? Some would answer, no, to that, immediately. Drummond would probably cogitate and suggest, maybe. That's what I like about him. And that's why I'm so glad he's coming to Greenbelt to provoke us this year.

As I look at my diary this morning, there is the dawning revelation that I only actually have two weekends left before I head site-wards.

Aside from the nagging feeling that I should have spent more of the weekend just gone sorting out the boxes of kit that I’ll need to take with me (let’s face it emptying them from last year would be a start even…), it means there are important phone calls to be made.

Chief amongst which is the call to make my pre-festival haircut appointment.

Now experience tells me that this is a bit like ‘festival shoes’, in that most women, but few men understand this concept.

Let’s just say that if you’re going to spend a week and a half, walking round and round a large site, whilst living with only basic amenities, decent yet attractive footwear and manageable hair is a must.

It’s a girl thing...you wouldn’t understand…

Saturday, July 30, 2005

Nearly a year ago I blogged about Ella Guru, an eight-piece Liverpool band championed by no less a figure than Jimmy Carl Black, but in style about as un-Beefheart as you could imagine. I've been listening to The First Album again today, and it remains gorgeous: deep, mellow, sweeping, slow.

That first blog about them was in the context of other bands, who I was looking forward to seeing at Greenbelt last year. This year, Ella Guru are on. Late night, in that big indoor venue. Whilst pondering the likelihood that the beach they used for the cover shots on their cd is the very same beach on which Antony Gormley's statues now stand, the setting also (I reckon) for the cover of one of the other all-time great Liverpool albums, Heaven Up Here, I shall bring a pillow and luxuriate.