Back in the Saddle

'Everybody make some noise!'

Bess and I are back at Mission Marquee Plaza craft fair. Following a couple of fallow months spanning the season during which Texan temperatures dip to not actually very warm at all, this is the first such fair of the year and it's good to be back - particularly after such an uncommon week. This winter has been genuinely cold, wet, grey, and relentless, feeling more like English weather than I am comfortable with; and we were all ill last weekend - Bess, myself and the boy with some chest infection which hit each of us on consecutive days. I'm still recovering. I went out on the bike just one day but had to get off and push whenever I came to a hill.

Then I noticed that all of the boy's anecdotes about occurrences at school hinge upon the phrase he then proceeded to as prefix to the thing which the person did, which is rarely anything of consequence sufficient to justify either the build up or application of such long, long words.

Then a white supremacist murdered fifty Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand, prompting our president to quickly delete the tweet he'd allegedly posted thirty minutes earlier linking some Breitbart opinion piece about how all Muslims are bad.

These are the contributing themes from which the general mood of the week has been woven, so it's really nice to be back to something familiar, and no longer coughing or sneezing as we had both feared might be the case. We loaded up the car the night before without even really having to think about it, and here we are, back on our old pitch to the right of the stage area and the drive-in screen. Being the first craft fair of the year, there are a lot of people here, and even some entertainment.

We've set up between a couple of women selling jewellery and a younger woman with bags of fresh herbs, all from her own garden. She also has a little dog, a friendly terrier called Radio, although we never get around to asking why he is so named. The cactus family arrive as I'm attaching my paintings to the display frame. We're usually right next to the cactus family, but never mind.

I pop over to say hello.

'It's good to see you,' he responds.

'Yes,' I say. 'Where's your friend with the truck?'

'My friend with the truck?'

'You remember I did a painting, and his truck was in the way so I painted it as well. He said he was going to buy the painting.'

'He might be along later. I don't know.'

'Well, no problem. If he's changed his mind that's fine too, but I have his painting with me just in case.'

We get ourselves settled. It's still a little cooler than we like, but better than it has been. Bess has already sold a few rocks.

The entertainment is a festival of sorts, something billed as Loopfest 2019. Performers have come from all over the world - Mexico City, California, Costa Rica, Holland and so on - and today they're going to do their thing on stage for us. There are about seven people sat around on the grass up at the front. I assume they are either the audience, or other performers watching the show whilst waiting for their own turn in the spotlight. These people are Loopers, someone explains over the PA.

It's a whole new kind of music.

It's the latest thing.

It's people playing music, sampling themselves, and then using the looped sample as accompaniment. I recall seeing it done in a pub in Coventry back in the eighties, except the guy was mostly applying his sampling technology to covers of House of the Rising Sun and the like. I've even done this sort of thing myself but with tape loops; but some nineteen year-old has a go and it's suddenly a fucking movement because he thought of it and it's like, awesome 'n' shit.

The first guy sounds like Fatboy Slim who some may remember tickling the charts two whole decades ago. Then there's a guy looping the noises he generates with an electric cello - which is actually pretty good; followed by some tool with a keytar looping his own vocal beatboxing - and the rest seem to be variations on country and western which would sound exactly the same played by a full band, perhaps better, and which makes me wonder whether the Musicians Union didn't have a point all those years ago when they tried to ban the synthesiser. If it sounds like Waylon Jennings with full band and yet it's all coming from just you and a pedal, my first thought is that you're performing with samples because you don't have any friends, and my second thought is that there may be legitimate reasons why you don't have any friends. Generally this is the most underwhelming amazing new thing I've encountered in a long time, which I state as someone who still finds vapourwave quite exciting.

'Could you do a rock with the badge of the marines?' asks some guy who stumbles up to our stall. My wife smiles and makes amiable noises, but it's clear that the answer is piss off, and rightly so.

Hi there, I don't like anything you have enough to want to buy it, but if I could persuade you to paint something completely different to any of the stuff you're selling here on your stall, then there's a possibility I might consider making a purchase.

We love these people almost as much as those whose unrequested advice begins with, you know what you ought to do?

I head off to buy tacos just as some hairy dude approaches mumbling something about Salvador Dali. I recognise his type from having spent most of my art college years avoiding him. I just know he's about to dump a load of useless suggestions on my wife, maybe if she could paint mandalas on a bong or a cigarette lighter or a Grateful Dead album…

I buy tacos and by the time I return, the hairy dude is stood alone in the middle of the field watching people sample themselves on stage. He walks backwards and forwards, and after studying him for a couple of minutes, we recognise this as dance. He holds two brightly coloured balls, one in each hand, and he's throwing them into the air then catching them. It isn't quite juggling.

'So what was he saying?'

'He read the sign,' Bess tells me.

We have a sign hung from the awning of our canopy, something along the lines of Bess & Lawrence Burton, Original Artwork in chalk. It seemed necessary to qualify ourselves as having produced original artwork so as to effect some aesthetic distance from persons selling their homegrown paintings of Batman and the Joker.

'He read the sign,' Bess tells me, 'and said something like, well, it's not exactly Salvador Dali, is it?'

'Huh?'

'I know.'

'What a fucking twat. I wish I'd heard him.'

I expect it was something well-intentioned which came out wrong, or was an innocent but fumbled attempt to introduce himself as a bit of a character, or at least as a guy who has heard of Salvador Dali. Arseholes will usually have heard of either Salvador Dali or Pablo Picasso and may even know that Mona Lisa was not the name of the person who painted her picture. When they attempt to engage you in banter on the subject of art, being way out of their depth they will assume that you will be fooled by mention of either Picasso or Dali. A very early issue of 2000AD comic, back when it was actually read by children, featured a letter from a young reader proposing that the art on Judge Dredd was so amazing that not even Picasso could have done a better job. It seems a fairly safe bet that the lad hadn't actually given much thought to how a tale of Mega City One's toughest lawman would have looked had it been drawn by the celebrated misogynist and pioneer of Cubism; and that's the mental age we're dealing with here.

Bess and I eat our tacos and watch a lone buffoon dancing in the middle of a field to country and western played on an effects pedal. Occasionally he raises up his arms to flash peace signs at no-one in particular. As usual, I haven't sold shit, while Bess has been pretty much cleared out.

It's nice to be back.