... but I stopped. Now I'm a dad, and may blog again...

Monday, November 08, 2010

109:play laugh grow at blankspace

Play, Laugh, Grow is inexplicably the tune revolving in my head since awaking this morning.  The jingle to the Fisher-Price toys advert is burrowing its evil unstoppable way through the soft mulch of my squidgy little brain.  Or is it play learn grow? Pfft!  But you don’t care, do you?   Of course not; you’ve got your own annoying tunes stuck in your head, waking up with you in the morning, shouting at you in the shower and telling you the same thing over and over again.

Back to life, back to reality, and I’ve just come back from the two-storey frozen concrete block that is BLANKSPACE in its foetal state.  It’s a massive imposing dark concrete block like a North Korean prison.  It has a bullet hole in one of the upstairs windows.  Apart from that it’ll look lovely with some flock wallpaper and window boxes, a few doilies strategically placed underneath all the ornaments.  Actually no, we’re obviously not decorating it like that, and even though it was so obvious it didn’t really need to clarify it, I still didn’t want people thinking I really like doilies.  I'm insecure like that.

Downstairs it is a warren of spaces currently filled with wonky ladders, bottled vitamin water, old architecture magazines, and piles of sofa parts.  A lot of cleaning and tidying and a bit of skipping (with a skip, not a rope) will make the place look presentable, and some artistic licence will turn it into the coolest upmarket legit-art-squat in North West of Kunsthaus Tacheles.  There is room for a performance/rehearsal space, plans for a darkroom, other stuff I can’t remember.

Upstairs are some smaller office/studio sized rooms leading off a much larger open plan room, currently filled with all the artworks for Blank Market Open All Hours.  The bullet hole in the window means we may need to lock and load, defend ourselves against the swarming armies of gun-toting philistines.  And when that’s over some of us will pop on our artist’s berets; some of us our green Hunter S Thompson sun visors and start tapping away at our typewriters.

Time to start coming up with some ways to utilise this opportunity.  But not now, its bedtime.

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