There’s nothing more to add.
So I won’t.
Don’t expect to have the final word.
Because I’ve had it.
And another thing.
Don’t get me started.
Let me be clear.
(Micro) Poetry on the Hoof: There’s nothing more to add.
Reply
Dear Roy Hodgson: please prove the English FA wrong and fail gloriously
Dear Roy Hodgson,
I’ve got nothing against you and happen to think you were on a losing to nothing when you came to Liverpool last year. We all know the results of that story and there’s not much to add to it now.
The new story you’re now part of though is alarming in the way its already being constructed: you’ve ‘steered West Brom to mid-table safety’; you’re a blazer man who ticks all the boxes; an FA man for the FA. Well, lets hope your appointment doesn’t’ lead to sweet FA, or that if it does, you fail spectacularly and come crashing out of the football heavens burning on all cylinders.
Because Roy, your appointment has all the hall marks of what is tired and miserable about English sporting culture and indeed our public life in general.
Steering your team to mid-table respectability has an air of desperation about it, its risk averseness wearing its heart on its sleeve or on another respectable part of your anatomy. Respectability? So that we can look forward to saying things like “unfortunately we just missed out on scraping into the quarter finals but second place in the qualifying qualifying group stage is no mean achievement?’ Is that the extent of the endorsement we can expect from your boys at the FA after the summer?
Because those boys at the FA, Roy, are trying to anoint you as one in the image of themselves: Blazer Men, the stalwarts of the English sporting club tradition. We all know a Blazer Man. He’s the bloke on Saturday afternoon who kicks you off the tennis court cos you’ve not got your membership card with you. The bloke in the bar holding forth on all things, unctuously and loudly. The bloke in the car park who has driven his Jag up the back side of your Ford Orion and driven away, oblivious to the trail of damage behind him cos he’s as pissed as a Friday afternoon lunch time fart. The bloke who will lead us to mid table security making sure his blazer elbow patches don’t rip and tear at the strain of it all. The Blazer Man. As exemplified by Trevor Brooking and his collection of gold plated carriage clocks. Cuck-bloody-oo.
Beware all those carriage clocks Roy! It’s no wonder you’re in danger of ticking all the boxes. All of them. Hoo bloody ray. A box ticker! We’re all living with box tickers every day Roy, they make up almost every department of every large organisation everywhere in England at the moment; they sit there in the neat and tidy offices, underlining things in red, covering their audit trail arses and ticking their boxes with a rapidity which puts the fastest PC to shame.
We don’t need box tickers Roy in our public life Roy, we need our sports heroes to tear up the boxes and start again. We need our public figures to show us there’s life after the box, the target, the service level agreement.
We don’t need you to tick the FA’s boxes for them., Roy. We need you to win convincingly, after much struggle, heart break and living on the edge of our collective nerves; but failing that, please fail gloriously and utterly. Please prove once and for all that the FA Blazer Men and their ticking clocks and ticking boxes should be thrown into a container and carted off to the South China Seas for them to live the rest of their lives in Rousserian decadence. For Gods sake, for all our English public lives’ sake Roy, go and fail properly: disasterously, noisily, embarrassingly.
However you do it, just do it with conviction. We may not like the results but it will be infinitely better than being steered to mid-table respectability. No one wants that in their lives, never mind in their football team.
AspireAustralia – welcome to our arts, education and regeneration programmes
Greetings to the AspireAustralia blog, a one shop blog spot with information, offers, proposals, hunches and ideas about our forthcoming arts and creative education programmes across Australia. We’ve been working in Tasmania since 2012, and are building relationships with schools, artists and educators across the country.
Our work in Tasmania started here:
http://drnicko.wordpress.com/2011/12/01/so-you-wanna-be-a-partner-presentation-to-the-creative-connections-in-the-early-years-tasmania-teams/
And carries on here:
http://drnicko.wordpress.com/2012/02/10/our-2012-international-education-conference-season-starts-here/
Watch this space for further action!
AspireBalkans – MISIM ZNAŠ, TAJ RAD; BRATE!
Greetings to the AspireBalkans blog, a one shop blog spot with information, offers, proposals, hunches and ideas about our forthcoming arts and creative education programmes across the Balkans. We’ve been working in Serbia since 2010, are building relationships in Macedonia, and looking forward to making new friends and colleagues in Bosnia, Croatia, Montenegro, Kosovo, Albania, Slovenia and across the region in the years to come.
Our work in Obrenovac, Serbia started here:
http://drnicko.wordpress.com/2011/08/29/poetry-on-the-serbian-hoof/
And carries on here:
http://pascotd.weebly.com/index.html
Watch this space for further action!
Some simple musical tips on effective fundraising
Fundraising in the arts has frequently relied on some unfortunate individual in a corner churning out application after application, destined to cut and paste from one incomprehensible form to another day after day until its time to go home and continue his or her hobby of filling in forms in the safety of their own bedroom.
But it doesn’t have to be like that. Fundraising and it’s associated activities is fundamentally a privileged role as it means that you’re involved in plotting out your own future, not having to rely on the whims and mercies of other fundraisers who may not have your best interests close to their hearts. The activity of fundraising should therefore be a much more joyous process involving not only your own heart, mind, body and soul, but those organs of your compatriots too.
Good – the best – fundraising – is like playing in a band where you’re all making music together in a spirit of collaboration, song making and making musical history. This need not be only a solo or duo act – it can be a collective one, where the pleasure might come from the improvisation around the table, the sense of let’s create a whole new world together through the reading of guidelines, the wrestling with language and the joy of multiple script writing like the comic teams who work together to write Friends and all those other income generating concepts. If they can do it with soaps, can we not do it with local authority contracts and tenders?
All you need is to know who’s playing what, who’s singing what and what to do with the drummer. Get that right, develop the right groove and your fundraising will become the most enlightening spiritual performance you will have encountered for a long time. Of course ‘artistic differences’ will surface once in a while – but if your income generating band got to make the equivalent of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon at least once in it’s existence, would that not be something worth living through? The only problem you’re left with is what to do with the unfortunate individual who’s still stuck in the corner.
Poetry on the hoof: It’s not Shakespeare’s Birthday
Its not Shakespeare’s birthday
But the anniversary
of his death day.
What is there left to say
About a writer who made generations sweat with dismay
About their innate inability
To comprehend the way
The people parleyed
In those days?
His iambic pentameter
His turns of phrase
Were well made
Worthy of praise.
But why would those, lazy in their attention,
Who failed to be swayed
By his ornate writing display
Useful during great state occass-ions,
Ask, does he really matter any more?
The doubters do not have much say
About his undoubted reputa-tion
That much cannot be doubted.
Was he gay? Many ask
But this is not the question to ask of mr willy the shake.
No, we should use his death day
To celebrate his poetray
And rhyming capabilities
Which put the rest of us to shame
Poetry on the Hoof: Best Excuses (dedicated to the End of World Creativity Week)
The dog ate my homework,
I didn’t have time,
My shirt didn’t fit
I thought it looked fine.
You said it was Tuesday but it was in fact Thursday.
I forgot to get up,
The battery was flat,
I didn’t know you had to ask,
I didn’t know life was like that.
I turned up on time but my friend had disappeared.
I expected something harder,
I expected something easier,
I expected some advice,
I expected to be looked after.
I expected something in ice or at least its equivalent.
I couldn’t put the heating on,
The switches wouldn’t switch,
The rails didn’t hold the weight,
The plane seats just made me itch.
The lines forgot to get in line and you lot gave up at that point.
It was the wrong kind of leaves,
The wrong kind of rain,
The wrong kind of snow,
The wrong kind of pain.
Someone said that someone left the cake out in the rain so I panicked.
The brief was too tight,
The brief was too wide,
My trousers didn’t fit,
My shirt hadn’t dried.
The stains got into my blood stream without asking permission.
If only if only if only if only,
We could have made the paper bigger,
We could have been given more time,
We could have had a budget,
(You should have taken mine)
If only if only if only if only,
We could have been so much better,
We would have been, had we known,
If it wasn’t for extra-terrestrial forces
We would have stayed at home.
If only if only if only if only.
