William Shaw

41 Places website

41places — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 16:39:29 +0000

41 Places: 41 Stories

41places — Sun, 29 Apr 2007 09:24:45 +0000

UnMadeUp is now launched as a publishing house. The first publication, 41 Places: 41 Stories, goes on sale to Brighton Festival goers from May 8th at £7.99. In June it goes on general sale, price £8.99.

If 41 Places at the Brighton Festival counts as a first edition, this is already a second.

Email unmadeup@mac.com for more information.

Wikipedia

41places — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 10:20:04 +0000

How uncool is it to mention that someone’s written me a Wikipedia page? Some of it’s true, as well.

Political Theatre

Dave Briggs — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 17:54:50 +0000

Last night I went to see Pamina Devi, The Magic Flute Revisited at the Schollstheater Shönbrunn in Vienna. Classical Cambodian dancers painstakingly acted out a variation on The Magic Flute. The costumes were incredibly beautiful, the careful finger-bending, squat-legged poses exquisite, but it was, to me, at least, completely baffling, and very, very slow.

The woman I was with seemed equally nonplussed, but she knows Peter Sellars who had commissioned the piece, so at the interval we found him. He hugged her, shook my hand warmly, beamed excitedly. “Oh,” he said. “Just wait. In the next act, you’re going to see Pol Pot, and the Khmer Rouge… This is where it becomes brutal.” For about ten minutes, until the bell was ringing us back in, he animatedly describedhow the piece dealt with the horror of Cambodia’s history, the genocide, and the struggle of women in the regime.

Bouyed, we took our seats for the second half. The pricely formal dancing began again. Somehow this time it seemed to move even more slowly.

Later, the woman I was with said, “I think the interval was the best bit.”

Chapman Brothers

Dave Briggs — Sun, 03 Dec 2006 22:21:25 +0000

My piece on Jake and Dinos Chapman is in today’s New York Times (registration required). It was the result of hanging out with them for three days at the Frieze Art Fair while they painted portraits at £4,500 a pop (plus VAT).

Phrases that the New York Times were unable to print:

Simon Rattle is a twat.

Titles of Chapman Brothers artwork that the New York Times felt unable to repeat:

Fuckface

Two-faced Cunt.

Dave Briggs — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 13:10:52 +0000

It has not been the greatest year for getting things published between covers, but I do have my entry in Blog Digest 2007 to console me.
And now this. Actually I think my interview with Bros on how to be a pop star is frankly rubbish compared to some of the stuff in there by Chris Heath, Sylvia Patterson and Tom Hibbert – brilliant writers all. What on earth did I think I was doing in those days. Tom was my best man. Chris is godfather to my son (and a pretty rubbish one, his mother says). I get dewey-eyed about those days until I remember how fucking shocking the pay was.

41 Places

Dave Briggs — Mon, 27 Nov 2006 16:39:51 +0000

The Arts Council have given the surprisingly enthusiastic go-ahead to 41 Places. It’s 41 now. That was the project’s designer Richard Wolfstrome’s idea. It’s for the 41st Brighton Festival, you see? Clever. It’s exciting, but the drawback is I now have a load of work to do. I’m honour-bound not to explain what precisely it is, either, until the Festival’s official launch early next year. But, unsurprisingly, it’s to do with true stories…

Zlin

Dave Briggs — Thu, 23 Nov 2006 09:29:55 +0000

I spent last week in Zlin, Moravia, on an assignment looking at the buildings there with the kind help of the city’s chief architect Dagmar Nova. On the train out of there, sat behind me, were two middle -aged Americans, a couple who had been staying in Zlin. They were snipping in loud voices at each other, as if they thought no-one else in the carriage would speak English.

“This train is so dirty.”

“It’s OK.”

“See. The train’s not going yet. We would have had time for a coffee.”

He [triumphantly]: “Well it’s going now.”

“We would have plenty of time.”

They were going to spend some time in Prague, “to see some buildings that weren’t built by the communists,” they said, like they’d been visiting the ugliest town in the Czech Republic.

In fact most of Zlin’s buildings predate the communist era; curiously they’re as capitalist as you could wish for, built mostly in the 1930s by the remarkable shoe millionaires Tomas and Jan Antonin Bata.

Ironically, they used to call this place, “middle-Europe’s America”.

Guyana Gal

Dave Briggs — Thu, 28 Sep 2006 13:59:41 +0000

Had a email from Neena Maia saying that there’s even more to the Arjun story than she knew at the time and she’s going to add another story about him to her site.

The Truth

Dave Briggs — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 05:45:14 +0000

I notice that Kate Ansell, who wrote this story for Un-Made-Up, has linked to me from her site Everyone Else Has A Blogwith the phrase: This Is A Site For People Who Like To Manipulate The Truth.

I wish I’d thought of that.