Thanks to gallery/bookshop/cafe Beach London, clinic has been invited to hold a workshop in the Event Space at this year’s Pick Me Up. The arts and design fair, that has come to be one of the highlights of the arts calendar, sits on the waterfront at Embankment inside the incredible Somerset House, and has previously hosted Rob Ryan‘s screenprinting studio, No Brow‘s bookshop, illustration collectives Nous Vous, Evening Tweed and the unfaltering It’s Nice That. With the Private View tomorrow night, the fair runs from Thursday.

Come join us on Friday 30th March, from 3 – 8pm for a book cover workshop. We will be selling copies of our second anthology which have had their backs covered. With the help of artists and poets, create your own cover, talk to other creatives, have your book photographed and take it away with you. With special appearances from Joey Fourr, Castro Smith, Pablo Jones-Soler, and video screenings by Rachel MacLean and Sabrina Ratte throughout the workshop, it’s shaping up to be fun.

We will also be auctioning off special covers made by the likes of Dominic Owen, Hugh Barrell, Billy A.B. and more. All proceeds from the day go towards funding our third book, due in the summer.

Find more information on Pick Me Up website and follow us @clinicpresents for sneak peeks of the books and other announcements.

OUTSTANDING

The word turns horribly
from brilliance to a dead weight.

You are OUTSTANDING.
Your bill is OUTSTANDING.

I’d rather sit outside
and play with the neighbour’s cat

than be caught indoors with this pressure.

I want to be able to spin this word

              O U T S T A N D I N G

till it blurs like a coin on the table
becoming round in dimension,
like a ghostly dome of flickering steel

that has nothing to do with its meaning.

For a mere £3 (plus p&p) we will send you a risographed collection of commissioned artwork and writing inspired by each
of the 11 tracks from r o m a n c e, the second album from Tubelord.

Printed in teal on 120gsm Munken Recycled with 150gsm Munken Recycled cover. Thanks to Victory Press.

Contributors:

Andrew Parkes
Benjamin Phillips
Castro Smith
Charlotte Geater
Crispin Best
David Nash
Dominic Owen
Frances Malthouse
Grace Miceli
Hannah Bagshaw
Harriet Moore
Harry Burke
Kyle Platts
Penny Klein
Rachael Allen
Rob Hope-Johnstone
Sam Buchan-Watts
Sean Roy Parker
Sophie Collins
Tom Rees
Wolfboy

It is the day I met the Catorialist. I had been staying at the Burrito Wizard’s place, a short skate from Skid Row on Broadway and fifth. The Catorialist lives in a top floor loft space overlooking the woman’s centre at San Pedro and fifth. There are less cats on skid row than there are in the suburbs where the Catorialist grew up. From his roof he points out an abandoned car seven floors below where he tells me a family of wild cats sleep rough. It’s the day we ate sushi on skid row and talking to the Catorialist I felt I had witnessed a moment in history that would forever go unrecorded if I didn’t tell someone.

The ladies came with trolleys piled high with their possessions. Eighteen year olds with ‘Fuck LAPD’ tattooed across their faces, grandmothers wearing twin sets and pearls, Nubian queens in fluorescent afro wigs mouthing along to songs that I can only deduct were playing in their heads. Quite often their various identification papers hung around their necks like the jewelry worn by ancient royalty. The only stipulation was that you had to be a woman and, whatever problems you may have on the outside, behave like a lady in here. One of the ladies confessed, after finding out where I was from, that she too had been to the Hacienda.

The whispers had been circulating amongst Skid Row’s population that morning. By the time lunch was due to be served, Tracy, the kitchen’s only full time member of staff, had to adapt her daily speech, normally reserved for recognising those who had made lunch possible and celebrating the individual properties of each ingredient used, to quash the rumours that we would be serving raw meat. Yes, Tracy concurred, there was a type of sushi that was made using raw fish but we wouldn’t be eating any of that today; the sushi we would be serving had been specially devised by our volunteer cooks for the ladies of skid row, including a sushi roll made using ham.

I used a soup ladle to dispense the soy sauce. Without a container or pot for the soy sauce it gathered in a small shallow pool on the side of the plates and I feared that by the time they sat down the surface of the plate would be covered in a thin layer making ‘dipping’ difficult. But then after the first few diners it became apparent that many of the ladies wanted the sauce poured over their sushi, in one of the ladies words, “pour it over all over, all over it.”

I was only able to judge their reactions after seconds were called. That was one of the best meals I’ve ever had, expressed one as she waited her turn. Like nothing I’ve had before in my life, said another.

The Catorialist asks if I want to go skating with him. The Catorialist is also called Max. Max has contacted an advertiser on Craig’s List about speakers for sale. Do you need speakers? I ask him when we are downstairs listening to music, the interior dominated by the stuff typically associated with hip young people, blessed with good manners, creative ambition, always working on a project aided by the latest Mac products. When I spoke to the guy on the phone, Max says, the first thing he says is that if you’re calling about the speakers advertised I don’t have those ones but I do have some others.’

Max asked what others? and the guy replied: all kinds of others, you’ll have to come and look but bring money.

We are inside the man’s home. There is a huge bed that takes up most of the living space. On one side is a kitchen area and on the other a huge flat screen television, showing an evangelist’s broadcast. Seated on the bed is a young girl, of about ten. She looks straight ahead whilst her mother is straightening her hair. Her mother is in a wheel chair with a saline drip attached to it.

It is true that the man does have various speakers but each successive set sounds much like the last set and I try to imagine what they would sound like if they were playing something more to my own taste. The man will cut Max a deal if he takes three pairs but as he explains, he only wants to buy one set. Well, in that case, the man says there is no deal but I will give you a good price.

Whilst Max counts out the money the man asks him where we live. On Skid Row, Max replies. It is obvious that neither me nor Max are residents of one of the many hostels, shelters or boarding houses that populate the old Skid Row, that in fact we must be residents of a newer Skid Row.

Now that we have two carrier bags weighed down by speakers, we wait for a bus. Max turns to me and says, I only bought the speakers for the children’s sake. But you needed a pair of speakers didn’t you? I ask hopelessly. Max shrugs, no, not really. I am looking the other way when I hear Max take God’s name in vain. The speakers are missing their grills. I don’t want to go back, does he? Not really, he replies but I can tell that he does really and all I need to do is say ‘let’s go,’ and we would be going back.

On the bus a young Mexican schoolboy traveling with his mother asks us if we know of any skate parks near downtown. Max writes down the addresses on the back of a letter from the boy’s school. Afterwards, the boys asks us if we are sponsored. I know that the boy’s question is prompted by the logic that why else would anybody my age be still skateboarding unless they were really good and able to make a living from it. He then asks us what team would we be sponsored by if we could choose any company in the world. We think about this before Max replies, Palace. We ask him the same question (he replies Plan B) before asking has he been skating long? A few months, he says, before telling us the story of how he used to think that Tony Hawk, the video game character was a hawk called Tony before discovering that he was the best skateboarder in the world.

The bus passes a once regal cinema. The entire front of it still intact from it’s hey day in the forties when I imagine Arturo Bandini would have taken a date there. It’s obvious from glancing at the foyer that it’s still being used for something these days and I ask Max what? Some sort of church, he replies absentmindedly probably thinking about his speaker grills and the 70 bucks he has spent. It’s my church, the boy says proudly, raising his voice, as if it is actually was his.

We get off the bus and go for coffee. When I return from the bathroom The Max is on his phone having a hurried conversation. Afterwards he tells that it’s the man from before. He wants to bring the speaker grills around. “To your place?” I say. Yeah, I said I would go back and pick them up but now he is insisting that he brings them around in person to my place. Is there anybody he can leave them with and you can say that you were out? Max says the security guard. Well do that then I tell him before asking you want the grills right? Yeah, he says. Well tell him to leave them with the security guard then.

Back at The Catorialist’s place we smoke pot and eat cookies his mum has baked him for Easter whilst watching the new Baker skateboard video. He asks me what it is like at the Burrito Wizard’s, he’s a trip right? I tell him I sleep on the sofa and we eat a lot of burritos. We arrange to meet at a party later that evening in Little Tokyo but I will get lost trying to find the address before deciding to call it a day.

An excerpt of this story first appeared in r o m a n c e (clinic, 2011). Illustration by Hannah Bagshaw.

As a request for permission 

In exile, he wrote
that he would spit in the faces
of those with permission to write.
So I wrote in the margin in pencil but what is permission?
in the hope that I have got whatever it is
only from him.
But what is permission?
The light is sunk into white horses let out
to run free in the rodeo ring.
The first becomes the last
becomes the first, the whole
thing caught in its going forward
and nowhere, water
circling a sink.
Hooves fall in and out of step
as will our applause.
To make a pattern and then
to embarrass it. Nobody
has ever not permitted
me. The opposite must be
here somewhere:

Loved horses running after themselves.

The water going somewhere.

The water is always somewhere.

If you accept these terms & conditions, click “I Accept”

and start here:

If there was once
I thought I saw clearly
how things go on on their own
it was sitting with a man in his,
the only shop not golden
with the village’s famous saffron,
but greyish with broken machinery,
while he placed watch after watch
around my arm, each keeping
to its own frozen time
like a child still hiding from friends
who long ago gave up looking.
Could we meet?
I mean, I didn’t buy anything.

First up is Java Knees aka Jake Evans, currently studying for the final year of his Illustration degree at the University of Brighton. His compulsive line-drawings echo preliminary drafts where mistakes and corrections are structurally integral to the composing process; calculated marks posing as sporadic scribbles.

What are the main influences on and themes of your work?

http://javaknees.tumblr.com/ 

http://retromingent.tumblr.com/

If you would like to become one of our guest headers topping our site, please drop in and send us some examples of your work to hello@clinicpresents.com

*

there is a wildebeest in our jacuzzi
he looks cheesed off maybe

we are looking at the wildebeest
from inside the kitchen

the fridge poetry
says a bunch of things

and i say “i feel a little bit constrained
by this wildebeest”

i look at your hand on your hip
it is doing “live long and prosper”

i think you know it’s doing it
and i make my hand do “live long and prosper”

**

we are looking at youtube
to see what to do about the wildebeest in our jacuzzi

sometimes you make quiet sounds
and i am trying to tell you a true story

i heard about a woman who unpacked her shopping

and then drove back to the supermarket

she sat in the car park there for 45 minutes
to not waste the time left on her ticket

but we are watching this video right now
and you are making quiet noises

and it might be important that we pay attention
and learn the plural in case another one arrives

***

there is a wildebeest in our jacuzzi
he still looks cheesed off

we are looking at the wildebeest again
from inside the kitchen

i am wearing your underwear
you are wearing my underwear

i say “jesus why couldn’t you have been
a sealion or something, wildebeest”

i look at your stomach
and it’s moving in a normal way

and i press the button to make the jacuzzi start
and the wildebeest slowly closes its eyes

~Design by Jack Hudson
~Hand screen printed by Nathan Bryant
~Photos by Jeff Hahn