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I properly disappeared into this, our 24th Kick-About prompt, another complete world building around it and absorbing me completely. I kept discovering all these pockets of rage and sadness as I wrote this short story, not least because I’ve been reading a lot about so-called “conversion therapies” and ‘cures for homosexuality’, and not least because…
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Arguably, the wunderkammers gathered together by the likes of Ole Worm – our last prompt – represent pure expressions of human curiosity, untamed by such things as order, category, reason, or taxonomy, where the real and the imaginary are given equal footing. Now, with Isadora Duncan’s clarion call for free expression and non-conformity ringing in…
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Back in 2014, I had the pleasure of devising and creatively directing an EU-funded ‘visualisation of classical music’ project in collaboration with my students, alumni and staff. Our mission was to take on Verdi’s mighty Requiem, and not attempt to animate it, or fall into any turgid, representational mode committing us to grandiose CGI. You…
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In June 2020, on a trip into the woods, we came across a still, stagnant body of water, blackly sinister under the canopy of trees. We returned to the woods last week, and the strangely alluring surface of this scrying mirror didn’t disappoint, doing wonderfully witchy things to the still bare branches of the trees…
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Quite Normal was the short film I made back in July 2020 for the Kick-About #5, in response to Alice Neel’s 1932 painting, Symbols. The film was made very directly and simply, and without any actual video footage, the visuals in the film deriving from still photographs of poor reproductions of magazine advertisements from the…
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I’ve featured a few songs on here, songs accompanied by handy box chord diagrams, having had the discipline to commit their melodies and chords to paper, as well as to memory. Not so with this one, or indeed the many others like it. This song sits in a folder on my desktop as lines denuded…
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The latest Kick-About, inspired by Ole Worm’s cabinet of curiosities, saw me heading up to my attic to retrieve a heavy wooden box – not opened in years – from beneath a collection of other heavy boxes, I rummaged inside it for a parceled-up collection of ephemera from my past I knew I’d squirreled away…
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Surely it was curiosity that drove Eugen von Ransonnet-Villez, the subject of our last Kick-About, to construct a submersible so he could paint what he found beneath the waves. Ole Worm, Danish physician, natural historian and collector, gathered the eclectic subjects of his curiosity into a remarkable museum, a wunderkammer, which is this week’s jumping-off…
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Okay, so this one is going to take a bit of explaining. How was it, back in 2001, I ended up choreographing and compering a male strip show? How was it the participants in the said strip show were also my students at the time? It all sounds rather unsavoury, even more so for actually…
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The good news is, most universities are packing impressive sound devices now, installed and finely calibrated in the service of retention and the closing of attainment gaps, and if not quite that, then grimly determined to deliver on decent student satisfaction scores and value for money. We are encouraged to detect and manage the emotional…
Red's Kingdom 