Can't Play Won't Play homage to Picabia

I've just added a homage to Picabia to Can't Play Won't Play's myspace page. That's Mr Stephen Rowe on vocals, reading from a selection of Mr Francis Picabia's Poems and drawings of the daughter born without a mother, written in 1918 and dedicated 'to all neurological doctors in general and especially to' the three doctors who'd recently helped him with his neurasthenia and opium addiction. Picabia wrote the book after one of his doctors wouldn't let him paint cos it was interfering with the treatment too much.

My favourite line is 'That business in the local train would darken', which is a reference to Duchamp's clandestine rendezvous in a railway station with Picabia's wife Gabrielle Buffet for a few hours in August 1912. (Duchamp and Buffet would live together for a while in 1920 after Buffet gave Picabia the flick.)

Can't Play Won't Play

To complete today's multimedia goodness, you can check out Can't Play Won't Play on myspace.

No talent

In a fit of drunken enthusiasm in amongst the moving madness last week, I got on to Prime’s website and applied for an audition for New Zealand’s Got Talent for Can’t Play Won’t Play.

When asked to describe our act, I said ‘The name of the band describes the band.’ When asked why I thought we had the talent to win, I said ‘Our magic intertemporal avant-garde art powers.’ When asked who I most wanted to be proud of us, I said ‘Ourselves. As common-sense nihilists, we create our own meaning and purpose.’

Sure enough, the first letter for me at the new place was something from them saying we have been selected for an audition on Saturday. This occasioned a bit of debate within the band. While it may be an opportunity to get common-sense nihilism, as a local intertemporal avant-garde art movement, in front of a large prime-time tv audience, they expect quite a lot.

Not only do they want copyright in the performance, but they want you to waive your moral rights – in particular, the right of integrity, which is the right of an author or performer to object to treatment of a work, film, or performance that demeans their reputation.

So, what they’re asking for is us to show up early on Saturday morning, stand around in queues outside for hours on end whatever the weather (without smoking!), bring and set everything up, and give up all rights to our work – all so low rent tv entertainers can make fun of us for five seconds.

The sad thing is that people will happily do all this, just because they want to be on the telly.

A new chapter

I left the Mary Newton Gallery yesterday. Obviously, I'm not going to go into why I decided to do this here. You'll have to buy me a drink instead.

I'm going to concentrate on my show in Palmy in September. I've got the title, artist's statement, and a goodly number of paintings to select from. I'd also really like to get my comic published, publish the Common-sense nihilist manifesto, and do a Can't Play Won't Play CD-EP thing in time for it. The comic's the dodgy one. The way I'm doing the final version is very time consuming, but it should be worth it in the end.

Speaking of Can't Play Won't Play, here are our first attempts at 'Omnipotent spacechimp' and 'Dread the future':

Omnipotent spacechimp
Dread the future

Update: Rose pointed out that the first paragraph makes it sound like there's a salacious tale to be told. Unfortunately, that's not the case. I'm just angling for free drinks.

Something to admire...

...Mr Stephen Rowe's flash hi-fi.

Can't Play Won't Play did some recording over the weekend. Over a two hour period, we did four songs: 'The intertemporal avant-garde', 'Omnipotent spacechimp', 'Dread the future', and 'Got $20?' Considering we only started off with some rough lyrics for three of them, I reckon that's not bad going. The opinion on the day was that two of them need a bit of work, but that the other two were pretty good as is and one of those was (to use the technical term) fucking epic.

Of course, when you're in the middle of something, it's hard to get perspective. We'll just have to try the recordings out on Steve's Altecs!

Can't Play Won't Play at the Adelaide, 22 November 2006

We can't play and we won't play:

Dada manifesto:

Silly Sausage the clumsy nazi spy:

Can't Play Won't Play playing

My band Can't Play Won't Play will be performing live for the very first time at the open mike thing at the Adelaide this evening. After drunkenly heckling last week I rashly put us down to play, and so we've had to come up with something to can't play. If somehow everything goes to plan, we'll do four original (if somewhat minimal) songs and cover a Dada manifesto from 1920. It will of course be a total shambles.