Tuesday 29 December 2009

dreams



I have been recording my dreams on and off for several years but only once in a while do i draw what i dreamt. 
Here are some stories of my dreams including illustrations. I hope you enjoy them. Psycoanalists are free to
deduce!
Lots of love
jimbino
xxx
dec 28/29 2010
wow i have been having such strong dreams just these last few days... last night i was in Estonia walking through a big park and i crossed a bridge and there was a palace on the other side. I went to the water to wash my cooking pot and suddenly lots of Russians came into the water too. One of them told me that Jesus was there. The water was really low but was rising very quickly and i looked out at the big lake and there were lots of bubbles on the water ... all different colours. The Russians were filling up their bottles with water and then emptying them or something... just dipping the bottles into the water again and again as the water rose. I looked at the beautiful bubbles on the water ... pink, green, blue, red, purple, yellow all the colours ... I thought... i have to come back and take a photo and suddenly i met my friend Roby who I love very much and only see once every 3 years. he was there with his girlfriend but she was very cool to me. He seemed distracted too and I had the feeling that he would have to leave very soon. 
   Behind the low concrete bridge the lake was full and the trees on the islands in the distance were black against the sunset.
   that was the beautiful part of the dream but it went on... about being given a place to sleep in a big hall full of people and my younger brother lying down and kicking another boy lying next to him but not aggressively... but strange. It felt a bit like the big sports hall at Viljandi folk festival where i stayed last summer with Triin but also more old and dusty and like a squatted old public school.
    

Friday 18 December 2009

FRANCE Paris October 2009

In October 2009 Triin and I went to Paris and Orleans by Eurostar. Here are some of my paintings made on the journey when I was not sightseeing!


A cool French dude in the park smoking a cigar!
Our wonderful host in Paris, Mikhael and his girlfriend and Helene who I have known for a few years now.


Freddy, a wonderful musician and circus performer who took us under his wing in Paris and who performed with us in Orleans and showed me all the tricks of truly French driving!



Fantastic drummer who was playing at a squat open stage night.

Wednesday 16 December 2009

JIMBINO VEGAN SONG BOOK

I have just completed updating my song book which has 40 original songs which I have written since 2003. It also has original illustrations and photos and all the chords and some background information about the songs. Available for £4.


Here is an example of one of the songs:

I GET A KICK OUTTA YOU

June '08 London melody - August '08 Rockstock-Helsinki ferry text

 

Late last night I went to bed                                    C/a-/d-/G7

Put a coin beneath my head                                    C/a-/F/G

When I opened my eyes to my delight

My bed and I flew through the night

The sea below was as black as coal

The stars above as white as snow

In a dark wood we did land

Where my clarinet stood with outstretched hands

 

       I get a kick outta you, can't take my eyes off you

      The way you move, makes me feel so good

       I get a kick outta you, all my dreams are coming true

 

Under the trees skipping ropes

Were dancing with happy jokes

They leapt and hopped and as they sang

The chimes of midnight slowly rang

Suddenly clarinet

Had vanished into the thin air

I looked throughout the forest

But of my clarinet I found no trace

 

      I get a kick outta you, why did I take my eyes off you

      When I danced with you, it made me feel so you

      I get a kick out of you, with your magic red shoes

 

The pale moon danced like a goon

The silent streets sang harmonies

My clarinet took my rough hands

And lead me to a distant land

Where streams of living water flow

And snow-white swans to giants grow

I touched the mouthpiece with my lips

And found myself on a milk white ship

 

    I get a kick outta you,

    In the valley of death I fear I'll get ill

    I get a kick out of you, reality all seems so unreal

 

The captain of the milk white ship

Was a crazy drunken insomniac?

He hunted for whales in the canals

While singing Turkish madrigals

He made himself walk the plank

And laughed out loud as his ship he sank

But I agreed with his philosophy

And jumped overboard shouting gleefully...

 

     I get a kick outta you, when I think of you

     I take a shower, when I take a shower

     I think of you, I get a kick out of you!


Painting of me and the giant snowball



I finished this picture in December 2009 to make into the family christmas card. It depicts a scene from January 2009 when there was a lot of snow in london and I went to Primrose Hill on Hampstead Heath with Bots, dad and Tom to sledge down the hill. Lots of people were going wild and some boys rolled a huge snowball which took some hours and then sent it down the hill and I jumped on it as it rolled and got thrown and just rolled out of the way before I was crushed. Ahhh, good times! 


You can check the video of the event on youtube below:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hC0twcvcAnY


The finished Christmas Card with effects added by my clever mum!

Tuesday 15 December 2009

CHILLING IN THE PARK

This is a new song I wrote this summer in Tallinn sitting in the park after a breakdancing event on a sunday in late summer as the sun set

CHILLING IN THE PARK
Chilling in the park 
On a holiday 
As the sun goes down
Chilling in the park 
feeling mighty fine
My feet are off the ground

I'm not in love 
And I've been drinking no champagne
I'm high enough
Having spent this lovely day... just

Chilling in the park 
Soon it'll be getting dark
Sun is coming down
So I'll tootle off back home
N' cook some macarone
Then stroll back into town

I'll do the shuffle, I'll do the rumba
And when the ladies ask for my number
I'll say "You don't need to call me honey 
Cos whenever it is sunny
You can find me...
Chilling in the park! OY OY!

Tuesday 1 December 2009

MAT'S PALACE


Every sunday night Mat Parry (PAZ) is the host and chief organiser for a jam session in East London called Matt's Palace (after Chat's Palace where the jam session started until the venue moved a couple of years ago). Mat kindly pays me to come and sketch some of the talented and very friendly musicians and the scenes in the Princess of Wales pub by the canal on Lea Bridge Road in Clapton. There is a wonderful mixture of openess to all-comers and a deep desire to listen, experiment and communicate artistically and emotionally as a group through jamming.
 Here are some of my pictures from that weekly event, if you want to use them for anything you are very welcome but I would very much appreciate being asked. 
you can contact me on
jimmymonahan@hotmail.com
  I hope you like it .. comments very appreciated!


Lance... top bass player
 Roger... very very good bass lines.


Drummer at Matts Palace, jazz jam session in East London. 

An old picture of a session just off Fleet street in 2007

2009 Mats Palace in the princess of wales
Great saxophone player! very nice stuff sir!
A sax on a table
Mat knocking himself out with that bass!

Mat

Haruna

Ollie and another tenor saxophonist

Ed Hicks

Monday 23 November 2009

MASKS

A bird head mask for my personal rituals

A papier mache gargoyle that fits on to the end of my clarinet 
to make it look like a monster stick.


A small hand-held grouch mask to be turned into a puppet one day

 These next few are characters from a russian fairy tale I directed and prepared called MOROZKO

BELOW: The beautiful daughter
The gormless and weak willed father


A pair of fruity lips



CERAMICS


Here are some of my remaining (undestroyed, lost or given away) ceramics which i made mostly in 2001 while I was studying art foundation in Filton College Bristol

     ABOVE: a bowel made with a honey glaze over two shades of clay thrown together.


Self portrait of me in clay covered with a gold coloured glaze. 
Made in 2001 during my foundation art course at Filton College Bristol.


Above: a small expresso or saki glass in white with the japanese character for SNOW below. 



A casserole bowel based on the song of the mock turtle from Lewis Carol. The mock turtle sings "SOOUUP GLORIOUS SOOOUUP, SOOUP OF THE EVENING, GLORIOUS GLORIOUS SOUP!"
ABOVE: the lid in the shape of the mock turtle
BELOW: decoration on the side of the casserole


Saturday 21 November 2009

puppet show THE FINNISH STREET MUSICIAN

This is a short shadow puppet show i put on for the midsummer party in Finland 2009. I made stencils of the figures and will give a brief discription of the story here. 


OK in the bottom left of this picture above you see the hero of the story... a street musician who plays jazz trumpet toot tooot toooooot! He was busking on the street one bright summer morning when the policeman comes to tell him to stop and just at that moment the lamp-post (far left) falls on the policeman and squashes him. The fellow in the towel is just a normal Finnish pedestrian taking some air from the sauna. 

A few minutes later a butcher comes and yells at the street musician to be quiet but as he does so a thief runs out of the butchers shop with all his money and the butcher runs after him with a meat clever (but does not catch the robber because he eats too many sausages... instead he gets a minor heart attack.)
A horrible old lady screams at the musician and tries to pour a bucket of water on his head from her window but she leans too far and falls out and lands squish like an old tomato on the street and a flock of ragged infested pigeons peck away her stringy flesh in a couple of minutes.
Eventually the crowd develops and a couple start dancing and fall in love and have many kids and tip the musician generously and they live happilly ever after and the musician comes most days when the sun is shining and plays delightful music (a little bit more delightful each time as he improves!)


                                                              THE END!

Tuesday 17 November 2009

LONDON october and november 2009

Here are some pictures I drew in London in the late autumn and early winter of 2009. These are various sketches made here and there... on the metro, at home, at a concert, in the street, in a park... etc... There are more pictures you can see in the MATS PALACE blog and MY HEROS blog too. 
    I hope you enjoy this eclectic unassociated group of pictures!
  


A Sheik gentleman on the district underground line near Whitechapel 
early one bright afternoon in early october.


ABOVE: 3 mills studios in Bromley by Bow where LISPA school is situated in London


Penny a half dutch student at LISPA first year course.

Some  students from LISPA on the opening day listening to the fire escape instructions.

Lawrence, a fantastic guitarist who I play a lot of music with this Autumn Winter in London. 

MURAL IN MY ROOM IN UUS MAAILM IN TALLINN sept 2009


   This is the mural i did in our room in tallinn in the week before i had to leave. It is based on the tree in the garden. i was stretching under it one day and realised how lovely it was to look up at the branches so i did a sketch while lying on my back and then transposed it to our ceiling with spray paints. 
    Below is triin as a honey monster... eating spoonfulls of honey from a fresh pot!  


Sunday 8 November 2009

THE STORY OF MY LIFE... part one my family!

 

In the beginning there was a bog. It was drizzling and cold and the sky was grey. In a valley between muddy hills a bony man came along carrying a spade. He was small and hairy. He dug earth, put it in his wheelbarrow and rolled it to his small house in the shelter of some scrawny trees. He neatly laid the earth in rows behind the fire so it could dry. He worked hard and was the master of the house. One day he went drinking with his friends and went too far "I have not had a sip for a month, give me the bottle" he drank it all went home and jumped on his wife. The next day he had a bad headache but his wife was smiling. He dragged himself off to the bog to dig earth under a grey sky. On the way he spat a lot then finally puked up.  On his way home the spot where he had puked up had turned into a slender willow and the places he had spat turned into small cotton plants. He cut down the tree and then picked the cotton. When he came home his wife was pregnant. He stayed up late and made a cradle from the willow and his wife made a blanket from the cotton. The next day they had a son. His son played in the hills and met a monk who locked him in a monastery and made him pray and study until the little boy was a scrupulous and pale faced stringy little scholar. After 7 years he grew a moustache and the monks told him he should go to the city to study law. He went home to see his family. He saw his father working in the bog and went to talk to him but his father did not recognise him and turned his back and continued digging earth. His mother was at the market so he left a note and went to the city to study law. There were even more monks than at his schools… thousands of them or shuffling about in their grey robes and dripping noses. In the school he was taught the methods of control for the giant empire which many years ago had invaded his land. He grew up and made much wealth and became one of the kings most sober-minded judges. He bought a large house on the outskirts of the city where his daughters could ride their ponies to the nearby beach when it was not too wet and where enjoy the country as he had done in his childhood. He had 14 girls and try as he might he could not get a son to continue his name then one day he met an old witch to ask her advice and she told him to drink a potion made from the mushrooms that grew between her toes and to put some of her earwax on his balls before having sex with his wife. He did that and true to form wife bore him a son. He had promised to give the witch 100 pieces of gold and a French kiss but the idea was so revolting that he offered to give her 200 instead. She took 200 hundred and pulled out a bottle of wine and slipped in a love potion inside which made him madly lustful so she got her money and much more than a French kiss. That was the last time he went to a witch.

Still he had a little son now and sometimes you have to do unpleasant things to get what you want. His son was the spitting image of himself and in fact grew up to be a judge just like his father and when his father died he grew his whiskers long like his father and wore his dads old clothes and worked in the same office. However one day his most beloved sister fell ill and the doctor suggested going to a warm climate. He applied to the king for a transfer and was sent to a distant tropical part of the empire where the King had conquered people of totally different races and traditions and imposed his rules upon them. To his surprise he really liked the warmth of the sun and the beautiful native women and their colourful traditions and his elite position of privilige among them. He fell in love with a rich and intelligent former princess of the land and had a mixed race son who entered the best new school in the land and was a limeric progedy. He would put his son on the table after dinner and the little half native boy would improvise witty limerics while doing somersaults between each stanza and everyone opened their mouths wide and screamed and involuntarily farted and laughed until they dribbled and fall head first into the curry. This happy life continued for several years until one terrible day when the Kings deputy in charge of the exotic land was celebrating his wedding. By this time our hero was an important judge in this far away land and was invited to the wedding. However in the depths of the slums of the city some destitute malcontent natives were far from happy at being ruled over by a foreign power. One saucy native with a vicious hatred of anything frivilish and terribly keen to impress his mummy decided to blow up the kings deputy.

The bitter conspirator crept in among the crowd with an icy heart and a soul full of hatred and anger at these foreign rulers. He waited at a crucial point in the parade close to where the rich carrages were going to pass. In the land of his birth, a tough mountainous place, gold had been plenty and even poor hard working peasants could afford golden rings and necklaces but silver had been very rare and only affordable to the most-wealthy. When the carriages came into his sight he saw a quite simple but silver coloured carriage just ahead of a more ornate but golden carriage and assuming that this beautiful simple silver carriage must contain the evil mouthpiece of the hated foreign king whose animal like soldiers had killed his brothers and sisters and commited gross crimes of impurity in his beloved land, he waited til it was nearby and then threw his bomb. As he ran he looked behind his shoulder and was shocked to see a beautiful native lady covered with blood being carried out of the wreck of the carriage by a mortified foreigner. The conspiritor felt pretty bad and jumped under a juggernault at the next village festival a few days later. The judge had been mistaken for the lieutenant and had lost his dearly beloved wife. The joys of living in the exotic land no longer held any attraction after that day… the colourful dresses brought bitterness, the exotic food turned to ashes in his mouth and the realisation of his position as a instrument of foreign oppression reminded him of his own conquered land where similar expressions of independance were taking place against the empire. He decided to go home and took his son with him… but back in his native land the revolutionary sentiment unsettled him… having seen the world he found the parochial and viscious minded malcontents who represented his homeland not to his taste. His childhood happiness was far behind him and he decided to settle his lot, unenthusiastically but decidedly, in the heartland of the empire where, despite the many wrongs commited in its name, educated and intelligent people could still talk crap about silly things round a warm fire smoking quality cigars. He moved to the very capital of the Empire and his young son, oblivious to the political questions that upset his father and full of the growing energy of youth, recovered much quicker than his father from the death of his mother and embraced the new lifestyle wholeheartedly. His privileged education continued and he became a doyenne of the arts, making a living praising the most elite and refined expressions of culture in this rich land. He fell in love with the beautiful daughter of a wealthy colonialist family. She had wonderful cool blue eyes and dark flaxen hair and would laugh and skip about with the voice of a hyena and the foot of a doe. His wife's life had been similar to his own, brought up in a distant part of the empire and now returned 'home' -she was gentle, beautiful and cooked a killer pot  of tea.

He became a critic of ballet and opera and many a night he spent in gold leaved boxes looking down on dazzling swan like women floating across the stage to dream like arias. He was a great critic of beauty and came to consider it his professional duty to take his studies into the wonder for he female form and it manners and graces backstage. His swarthy exotic looks (remember his mother had been a native princess of that far away land) and his wide experience in life made him not unattractive to these young and unexperienced girls whose young lives had been mostly spent in rehersal rooms and expensive social balls. One or two had made eyes at him and fell under the spell of his charm during his journalistic interviews and naturally his wife grew jealous at their attentions and he thought what the hell and left her and their several children. He married a few more ballet dancers and had many children who he loved dearly but distantly not letting anything much disturb him from his love of life and beauty.

His first wife was left to look after her large family alone but he gave her a pot of gold so she was ok for money and she was not poor herself so she lived on in relative luxury and a great deal of comfort but behaved like a widow to her true love. She may have liked to marry again but unlike her wild husband she was more conscious of the whispers of society so she stayed a single wronged lady with many friends and quite happy and held all night card games with her buddies where they developed some very bizarre slang. She had three girls who were all beautiful and pretty smart for girls, she also and two sons, one much younger than the other. The eldest boy was very much fussed over and nagged by his Herpe-like sisters  and he took his revenge by exploding paper bags behind them when they were kissing their young boyfriends in a quiet spot. He was very relieved when he had a brother and desperately tried to teach the young child to play boys games like bows and arrows and making temples in the garden and so forth: any manly sport which his sisters had never wanted to play with him. He was strong willed although not outstandingly intelligent. He inherited some of his fathers fire and passion for life without the wide experience and exotic charm. He wanted to be an architect from an early age and threw himself into his studies with all the energy and passion of youth. The empire by this time had crumbled like an apple crumble but a new more insidious mercantile empire was taking over the world and early on he noticed its creeping fingers scratching away the old traditions and communities of his hometown and decided he could best counter this by bringing the community together and struggling to save their lifestyles and group spirit. He fell in love with another archiltect on his course, a pretty and calm but spirited girl from a modest small town family. He met her at a brick fair.They married and she took on her role as a mother soon after and he continued to work as an architect and fight his pigmy battle against the new ruthless giants of the world. He did not manage to save peoples lifestyles because the monsterous power was too strong and rich and while he was a single man working with a bunch of local greengrocers, ironmongers, publicans and elderly residents, the monster had millions of slaves working night and day to break down the old structures of society and build new commercial centres where the slaves worked incessantly and the monster took most of the profits. But he DID manage to save many of the old buildings which the new monster wanted to replace with its modernist monolithic homogenous black towers.  His wife approved of his hopeless cruscade but as the children grew up their material deprivations that idealism and youth can shrug aside became less comfortable and eventually they both went to the countryside to live like cavemen…. Separately.

   THE END OF THE  PART 1

Sunday 11 October 2009

LIZ' WEDDING bristol october 2009




just got back from bristol for liz' wedding. After two days of practice tom told me on saturday morning that he was not sure if he wanted to come to Liz wedding in bristol. We managed to meet our ride at a lovely place in london.. this lady was so nice... she was a Jung analyst! WOW... so cool. We chatted a bit about psycology among other things on the way down. 
She was really pleasant and friendly. We hung out in the main square of bristol eating chips until martin came in his car and took us to meet some acrobats and start throwing ourselves around with them: tom was really up for it and i managed to keep my trousers clean. Then we went to martins house to see his grand piano.. he told us a 15 minutes monologue in the car about how he bought it. Quite boring plot but impressive when you consider he was dodging other cars and pausing in the tale to abuse the other drivers and by the time I got to his house i got out of the car and thought, well that was a good story and then i step into his place and HOLY COW he has a huge grand piano in his front room. He played a few songs... it sounds great! i dont know what he will do with his trumpet, drumset, flute and computer composer now .... anyhow, we rushed back to the party to play... Jan from berlin was there and ed turned up soon later. It was great... tom played well and people were dancing and the highlight was a little 3 year old german girl who did a headspin with me... she had never done it before but managed a few rotations.


 I was pretty high after the proceedings and it was very touching to see Liz and Ben dancing to zorba the greek. People were really happy with our music... i did a back flip off the amps and did not twist my ankle too bad. I was freaking out quite hard cos Liz doesn't get married everyday. 
I had not slept much the previous two nights so i was pretty exhausted but decided to check out the after party... I was feeling really good and friendly with people... I sat on the sofa and listened to martin chatting... he is good at that... he just talks incessently about anything... quite impressive and pretty funny. His favourite subjects are violence, women, musical instruments, attacking other breakdancers, famous people he knows, how to make money and generally how bad the world is and how it justifies his unscrupulous money making methods. Having said that, he may be a tough businessman but I defy anyone not to fall under his charm and as a friend he is very loyal and generous! I stayed the night in his house... in the strangely empty room with a squeaky bed...  as i fell to sleep at 3 am he started playing drum set upstairs with a voice sample of him singing in the back ground... 'I want a sunday-love, that does not end on saturday-love!' 
   In the morning i had trouble waking him up with a cup of tea. We left for Emily's place to find that tom (who had slept there) had taken the train back to london. Martin and i drove to quaker meeting and sat in silence. I was impressed by the ministery... they were talking about really important things and it was good to see idealistic adults speaking with energy, belief and authority about really important matters. I think i will attend more quaker meetings actually - good people. Most adults are just smug about their plexi-screen TV and big car and have obtained their life-long ambition of being comfortable and having what everyone else has. Quakers are really different... good people concerned about the world. They can be a bit cautious but I still admire them. In the middle of the silent meeting, Martin announced... without standing up as is custom... that he had two japanese made industrial water purifiers to the value of 20,000 pounds lying unused in his sitting room if anyone had a use for them... if no-one could have heard me i would have laughed like a chimp. He told me after he was inspired by the short first ministary about the waters of life and the second ministery about getting up and doing stuff... 'well, water IS the water of life so I decided to tell them about my water purifiers'. At shared lunch after one lady who knew martin told him such an offer was better suited to business news and martin cut her short saying it was not a business offer but out of the goodness of his heart and just a practical piece of ministary. He tore into this lady as soon as we got back to the car on account of her marrying a man who used to work in weapons research 'to burn children' while Martin was a "thoroughbred quaker" who was educated in a quaker school in York! 
We went to find my good friend Ollie but he was out... real pity... and then went back to Emilys to say goodbye. I planned to take the train back to london but martin offered to drive me... i wish i had refused... i could have slept in the train and it only cost 25 pounds.. .but he wanted to come to london to see a friend and said i could pay him the 25 quid... he gave me a nice blue jumper with MR MARTIAN in big letters on it... so i was happy to give him some money. I should have been more focused... i had been told that the roads in to london on a sunday are terribly packed... sure enough the journey took 4 hours instead of 2 and martins conversation about women and abuse of other drivers became a little heavy... he must have cursed over 100 other drivers during the journey and promised to shoot about 15 who he thought were trying to personally offend him. we eventually made it to acrobatics in london only 1 hour late and i started training... martin was not too into it and did a few flips... the instructor came and asked him if he wanted to learn how to do clean back flips and martin said he would stop training and sat on the side lines for the rest of the session. 
   We drove home and FINALLY I got out of his crappy car... god i did not walk anywhere since i met him yesterday ... inside a car you cant hear the noises of other cars ... just your stereo... but when the windows open you realize how much noise you are making... inside a car ever other car is not a person but a big piece of metal that gets in your way and even women with prams are obstacles that slow you down... martin himself quite characteristically started cursing some women with her kids... 'Who asked you to litter the earth with your vermin?' She could not hear and it is sometimes funny but maybe too offensive for the average citizen who would not see the deeper issues in his comments which often dont have any deeper issues. Funny guy but like most funny guys i know, just messing with words and ideas and rarely putting them into effect and also it is too easy for them to abuse stuff without actually trying to do anything about it. 
   Anyhow, back at home we eat and watched a Kurismaki movie then Martin started chatting to louis about the music business and then he left and i recorded the weekends adventures... a fun trip to bristol but boy am i glad to be going to bed!