The Mizzenwood Times  art

Oh, hello. A new musical by Mr. Luddyoo Papacy opened in the Lingua Pingu Theatre last night, and it received an enthusiastic reception from its first audience. This comes after the success of �Not�, a three part musical about the life of Fatima Myzical, which proved to be hugely popular with the public, despite the mixed reviews from the critics. It told the story of Fatima�s life from when she was fourteen years old, when she first booed her parents for refusing to become vegetarians. After this she always expressed herself through different levels of booing. If her mother asked her to do something and she wanted to do it, she�d say �boo�, but if she didn�t want to do it she�d scream �boo�. She had screamed �boo� when her father suggested she�d look much prettier in pink than in black � she used her loudest possible scream because she couldn�t think of anything more deserving of being booed than that. But then her mother made her sing in front of all her relatives. She just didn�t know how to express her feelings about that � she�d already used her highest boo. So the next day she got some of her friends to come around and boo her mother. They held up placards too, and they even sang an anti-singing song.

After that day, whenever her parents did something wrong she organised a protest about it, and she started writing letters of complaint too. She loved writing the letters and the placards for the protests. She always wrote the word �not� in black and �what� in red. And she always wrote �Bob� in seashells because she liked Bob and she thought he liked her, until he made fun of her handwriting one day. After that she wrote �Bob� in words that start with F. She spelt �O� with the words �and I never even said anything bad about him, not once, not even that remark about his stupid-shaped head�. But Bob apologised and she went back to the seashells.

Her mother once told her that she could tell the time by looking at the wind blowing the clothes on the clothesline. She looked out the kitchen window and said to Fatima, �See the way the wind takes them about once every ten seconds. It blows them out to the furthest point, and then they slowly come to rest again.�

�So what time is it?� Fatima said.

Her mother looked up at the clock and said, �Ten past four.�

�You didn�t get that from the sheets at all. Boo. Boo-oooo!�

Fatima called her friends around and they held a protest outside the kitchen window. When Fatima�s mother went to the shop, they followed her into town with placards condemning the sheets in the wind and criticising Mrs. Myzical, but she was used to it and she took no notice. There was an anti-war protest going on outside the post office, and they thought that Fatima�s anti-wind, pro-Bob position fitted in with their own aims. �They� was really just Bob himself, but he liked to think of himself as a group. He called himself a coalition. And he was a genuine coalition after he got Fatima and her friends on board. He wasn�t sure how the anti-wind message fitted into his position, but he wasn�t really sure of his position either, except that it was anti-something, probably war. So it fitted in perfectly. He wasn�t sure why he was protesting outside a post office either. The only reason he could come up with was that when he wasn�t protesting outside a post office, he wasn�t sure why.

The protest got a lot of media attention and this was the start of Fatima�s career as an anti-war protestor. Her parents were delighted because she stopped demonstrating against them.

This is the story that was told in Mr. Papacy�s musical, but some critics have claimed that Fatima Myzical didn�t even exist. It�s been argued that Mr. Papacy made up the whole story as an excuse for most of the lyrics being �boo�. Almost ninety percent of the lyrics were either �boo�, �not� or �roof�. Fatima was played by Bandolene Hop, famous for always singing a certain note as �roof� � do re mi fa roof la ti do. The part was rewritten for Ms. Hop. The protest in front of the post office was moved to the roof of the post office. One critic described it as �the forgettiest film I ever saw�, but he seems to have forgotten where he was at the time.

The critics have again been split by Mr. Papacy�s latest effort, �I spy with my little eye� Ow!� It�s a musical about laser surgery. You have to stay very quiet to hear it. Some critics say that it�s really just a documentary film about laser surgery in which they weren�t allowed to film any of the actual surgery, and that they had to wait outside the operating theatre. Some people say that it�s really just a door. Mr. Papacy says he welcomes this type of discussion about his work. �It�s really addressing the fundamental question �what is a musical?�. We need to challenge our conception of musicals. Does it have to have music in it? Could a bird be a musical? Or anything around us.�

There is no admission fee to �I spy with my little eye� Ow!� Mr. Papacy puts this down to a grant from the Arts Council, but when I asked a representative of the theatre, she replied, �There is no admission.� The audience of the opening night who waited at the door have praised it as one of Mr. Papacy�s best works. He told me that laser surgery is an issue that�s been neglected by the theatre in the past. �Lots of people have said to me, �Well done; it�s about time someone did laser surgery.��

When I went to visit the artistic director of the theatre I asked him if there were any plans to continue the theatre�s association with Mr. Papacy and he replied, �For the last time, get off my lawn and leave my cat alone!� He wished me to point out that he completely disassociates himself from the work of Luddyoo Papacy. Some critics have argued that he�s not the artistic director of the theatre at all.
-Miffy Rafter-Rafter.

Friends of Olivia Sleeve, Mizzenwood�s most famous novelist, have expressed concern about her safety since her failure to attend to annual Mizzenwood People of Light Awards. Her disappearance has baffled her many admirers who came to see her collect a lifetime achievement award at the People of Light ceremony, after having won numerous awards at the event over the past twenty years. Mrs. Cattica Gypsy, a close personal friend of Mrs. Sleeve, said, �I was talking to her earlier on the day of the People of Light Awards ceremony, and I met her on the following day too, but when she didn�t turn up for the People of Light awards we knew something was wrong. I�m very worried about her disappearance. It�s so out of character for her to go anywhere without telling everyone.�

Despite some suggestions that she couldn�t make it to the awards ceremony because of a flat tyre and a series of mentally unsuitable motorists who refused to allow her to command control of their vehicles, her friends and family remain deeply worried and hope she�ll turn up soon.

Olivia Sleeve lives in Mizzenwood with her husband, Phil, and her two sons. She says she has no ambitions in life, apart from living a simple life at home, far away from the media glare, and seeing her friends and family with a smile on their faces, even the ones who stabbed her in the back by laughing at her portrayal of a dying kitten in her most recent book. She�s never been one to bear grudges. Olivia is a woman who�s very reluctant to talk about her many achievements. Her books have won numerous awards, and she�s been compared to Joyce in her use of words and in her dialogue. One of the characters in her last novel is reading Ulysses and she often quotes from it. In a scene rich in emotion and feeling that echoes the structure of Ulysses, the central character, Pollen, responds to her husband�s claim that a woman�s place is in the home, but he doesn�t understand her response. He refers to it as being �inexcusably dull� and �at least two hundred pages too long�. Joyce had to endure that same lack of understanding. But Pollen overcame it. She freed her soul with the help of a woman who's blind from the neck up, who has a sixth sense that allows her to smell the presence of sad people, which is how she meets Pollen. She teaches Pollen how to paint her emotions, throwing off the shackles of society and brushes. Her husband learns to accept her for who she is � an artist who needs time to contemplate, and to rest her restless soul after the draining experience of painting the emotion of cats, a woman who feels a duty to nurture young talent, who will sometimes expect him to help with some of the housework.

Milton Burtle-Brattle, a leading Joyce scholar and friend of the author, said, �There are so many similarities between her work and Joyce�s. You can see it in something as simple as their use of the word �window�. It takes on an extraordinary meaning and power when they use it. The very sound of their �window�s are extraordinary. Even though every other author might spell it in exactly the same way, Olivia�s spelling seems to take on a power and significance that�s almost unnerving. I think that if Joyce were alive today, and if he were a woman who loves cats, he�d be writing books just like �Kitty Come Home. Come Home Kitty� Here Kitty� Here Kitty Kitty Kitty� Kitty?�, or any of Olivia�s books. The critics say that she couldn�t write her way out of a paper bag and the inside of a paper bag is the best place for her writing, but if Joyce were alive today, he�d be laughing at them.�

I�m sure that if Joyce were alive today, he�d agree with Mr. Burtle-Brattle in just about every respect. I can picture the two of them in a bar, with a glass of Guinness in front of them, two kindred spirits laughing at all the idiots who criticise them rather than face up to their own ignorance. And maybe Mrs. Sleeve would be at the bar too, but her boundless compassion would prevent her from laughing too much at the poor idiots. If it weren�t for those idiots, Joyce might still be with us. They drove him out of the country and into an early grave before he ever had a chance to share a drink with Mr. Burtle-Brattle, or read the work of Olivia Sleeve, or write it.

We can only hope that the idiots haven�t had their way again in relation to Mrs. Sleeve. One of her many admirers was heard to tearfully say, �They�ve got Joyce. Isn�t that enough? Don�t let the idiots take Olivia too!� We can only hope that Mrs. Sleeve will turn up safe and well before the launch of her latest novel, �Kitty doesn�t like the sound of the words little operation�, which is due out in hardback next week, priced 15.99.
-Olivia Sleeve.

There�s been a mixed reaction from the critics to Pronouncey Bar�s latest installation in the Young Ledwing-Glass Memorial Gallery. I spoke to Mr. Bar in the gallery yesterday and he explained the genesis of his latest work. He told me about his teenage years in Mizzenwood. When he was sixteen, a man moved into a house on the street where Pronouncey lived. This man wore sunglasses all the time and he always had a cigarette in his mouth. He never said much. A rumour went around that he once made a jazz album with mice and tennis balls. People wondered how and why he used mice and tennis balls together. Some people thought the best way to do it would be to drop the tennis balls on the mice. Pronouncey had just formed a band with some friends of his from school and they didn't want to harm any animals in the making of their music, but they had no problem with the tennis balls. They spent weeks recording the sound of tennis balls in different places, but their favourite sound came when they rolled it down the stairs. They started rolling other things down the stairs for the sound.

Pronouncey said yesterday, "We sent the demos around to record companies, but most of them didn't respond. We didn't really know what we were doing back then. We didn't realise that most of those record companies had no interest in jazz. But the best song we did came about by pure chance. Our drummer slipped on a tennis ball and fell down the stairs. We couldn't recapture that sound if we tried. I listened to that song again recently and it made me think of the music we make all the time while doing everyday things."

Mr. Bar�s installation in the gallery consists of a brick at the top of a stairs, so people can trip and experience for themselves the sound of falling down a stairs. Mr. Bar said, �I want us to hear the beautiful music of people falling down the stairs. People do things like that every day and they don�t realise they�re making music. I saw a young boy throw a bag of nails through a car window and I said to him, �Do you not realise what a beautiful piece of music you just made?� And no, he didn�t. I feel it�s my duty to tell people these things through my art. There�s music in everything we do, whether it�s falling down a stairs, or being kicked in the groin by a waitress.�

�Being kicked in the groin by a waitress� was Mr. Bar�s last installation in the gallery.

While I was with Mr. Bar in the gallery, three people fell down the stairs, and it certainly does make a distinctive sound. The feelings of the general public have been as mixed as the critical reaction. Those who experienced the fall for themselves have tended to be the most critical of the work. I asked Mr. Bar about an incident last weekend when someone threw a brick at him. He said, �I was so happy with that. I realised that a brick was exactly what my neck needed, and ever since then I�ve been wearing one around my neck. It was a beautiful thing � he could have thrown his bottle of cider or the brick, and he chose the brick. And I say, �You made the right choice. This is what I need. Thank you.� I see it as an act of love and yet some people portray it as an act of hate.�

I also asked him about the graffiti on the front wall of his house and he said, �I was over the moon when I saw it. One of the main aims of my art is to start a discussion on what art is. To have people discussing my art through another art form was more than I could possibly have hoped for. And the press response has been amazing. The word �wanker� is such an expressive word, and you hardly ever see it in newspapers. I really felt as if I�d achieved something when I saw that word in the graffiti and in print. I�ll never forget that morning when I went through the papers and saw that word in every one of them. I was overjoyed. It�s a vindication of everything I�ve ever done as an artist. It�s beyond my wildest dreams to have started people talking about art, and expressing such forceful opinions.�
-�24-hour dance� Marvin.