Tim Cumming – Frames of Reference

Office Building At Night

A line from one of Raymond Chandler’s thrillers inspired the start of this poem, Shelley’s Ozymandias inspired the end, and time gave me the middle, worked on through the winter and spring of 2014, taking for its model Richard Seifert’s 1972 Brutalist Kings Reach Tower by Blackfriars Bridge, where I worked for a number of years at a west-facing window on the ninth floor in the Programmes Department. The soundtrack includes field recordings from Novi Sad, Posnan, Rue Git de Coeur in Paris, and Soho, and the fire was lit in a pot belly stove sometime in 2007.

Tim Cumming / The Rowley Gallery

PS: Tim is performing in Bournemouth on Friday 27th June at the Vita Nova theatre for the launch of Issue 2 of Boscombe Revolution. Tim’s film will be shown alongside live readings.

The Uncanny

This is a true story and it happened on Rosslyn Hill in Belsize Park, one evening a few years ago, though the pictures you see are not from there, no. These haunted trees are from the rookeries of the notebook, this winter’s trees signalling to each other through the pages. Continue reading “The Uncanny”

Deep Blue

Meanwhile Tim Cumming‘s paintings were part of a group exhibition at Sladers Yard in West Bay, Dorset, where on 18 January he performed with Three Cane Whale. The poem is Deep Blue set to three interludes from the band’s second album, Holts and Hovers. Continue reading “Deep Blue”

Twilight Music

We were at Union Chapel in Islington recently to see The Gloaming. It was our first visit. Why had we never been before? It makes no sense. It’s a wonderful, atmospheric venue with a long tradition of showing class acts in intimate surroundings, and The Gloaming are certainly a class act. We arrived early and sat on the hard pews for far too long, but the music was worth the wait. Continue reading “Twilight Music”

Gnawa Studies

The 16th Gnawa Festival in Essaouira on Morocco’s Atlantic coast is a largely free four-day celebration of the music of the Gnawa, what is perhaps the oldest trance music in the world, the root note of inner transportation and sufi trance that attracts hundreds of thousands of Moroccans and intrepid international visitors to Essaouira each June, over the weekend of the full moon. Continue reading “Gnawa Studies”

The Vision Thing

What first strikes you about these Ice Age objects, suspended on transparent plastic stands in glass cases amidst crowds of 21st-century humans, is that they are absolutely tiny. The largest works are approximately the span of a man’s hand, the smallest the size of a child’s fingernail. For a big show it’s an intimate experience. There’s a lot of squeezing about, bending down and peering in, the peculiar sensation of having to adjust your perception to match their scale, as if squeezing yourself down through the same narrow aperture that leads to the wonders of Chauvet and Lascaux. What you’re experiencing is time travel. You adjust yourself to the conditions, and when you become accustomed to what you see, it’s as if you’re looking back to your own time through the wrong end of a telescope, the one that makes everything far away but pin-sharp. Continue reading “The Vision Thing”

Pelmeni Poetry

The Pelmeni Poets (named after a favourite Siberian dumpling) are hosting an evening of readings at The Duke of Wellington in Islington on 8th May featuring work by Tim Cumming, Natan Barreto, Anne-Marie Fyfe, Katha Pollitt, Rosie Shepperd and Liane Strauss. More information here – Pelmeni

Goodbye My Darling

Sam Lee takes his coracle down to the river via Ridley Road and Smithfield accompanied by Gerry Diver, fiddle; Jonny Bridgwood, bass; Michael Wright & Saul Eisenberg, jews harp; Ed Hicks, banjo. For an account of their visit to Khartoum, read English Folk Songs in Sudan by Tim Cumming.

Radio Carbon

When cosmic rays strike the atmosphere they create the radioactive isotope carbon 14, which can be detected in living matter and decays at a fixed rate over many millennia. Radiocarbon dating is the method by which we measure prehistoric time, and with which our own detritus will one day be measured. The filmpoem Radio Carbon takes this transient yet permanent record of time as a personal metaphor, fashioning a hypnotic journey into the human past, from the neolithic to the present moment. It’s a film with eternity at its centre, the vastness of space at its core, and a reverie of images clustering to the lens like the flashing in a stranger’s eye. Continue reading “Radio Carbon”

From Powdermills To Wistman’s Wood

Here is an extract from a prose work in progress about family life in summer on Powdermills Farm in the 1960s and 1970s. My father, then head of art at Bournemouth and Poole College of Art, had hired a cottage there, in the middle of the moor, from the Duchy for £70 a year. No electricity, no running water, a ghost in the second bedroom, and sheep in the paddock at shearing season. It was a wild experience. Wistman’s Wood, primordial remains of the original Dartmoor landscape before its Bronze Age settlement, is a few miles walk from Powdermills, and remains one of the most atmospheric and haunting spots on the whole moor. The paintings were made on a return visit in 2009, and there are two of my father’s sketchbook drawings from the late 1960s. The poem comes from First Music, a sequence about Dartmoor, childhood and memory, in the 2011 collection The Rapture (Salt Books). Continue reading “From Powdermills To Wistman’s Wood”