Rufus Stone: 1.

It is a typical Somerset January day—the frost-hardened ground, brown and grey, mimicking the sky above. Rufus and Ellie Stone take the trail to the rail junction through the bushes, littered with the rubbish that is now frozen into the mosaic of the landscape. The junction holds a special meaning for Rufus.

Rufus is seventeen, his sister Ellie just ten. She loves walks with her brother because he usually brings his camera and gets excited when he talks about taking pictures. Rufus is her protector—tall, with a shock of curly hair that falls on his forehead—and strong from working on their parents’ farm.

The rail line splits in two at the junction, one part going to the north through a small village. The other line swings east along the ridge to the nearby market town. (Five years later [1963] this rail line would be closed by the infamous ‘Beeching Axe’, but no one knew that then.)

Ellie and Rufus sometimes spend their Saturdays in the town selling vegetables at their parents’ market stall. Ellie likes going to town because she gets to dress up. Rufus hates its and just sees it as more hard graft with no pay.

A six-foot post sunk into the gravel mound between the two rail lines at the junction is topped with a small greyish box. This sheet metal container has a lid on it, but more like a small door. Rufus imagines that the box was used for some signal wiring at one time, but now is empty.

Rufus’ mate, Flip, is olive skinned, dark-haired and shorter than Rufus. He is two years younger and lives along the rail line in the nearby village. The boys met two summers ago when Rufus was walking in the hills collecting berries. They have been best mates ever since.

Flip’s real name is Philippe. His younger brother is Antoine. Their mother comes from the nearby town and married a local villager. Being from the town and having ‘airs and graces’, she insisted on giving her children French-sounding names. Philippe quickly became Flip after a few rounds of bullying at school and Antoine’s father almost immediately shortened his younger son’s name to Tony.

One afternoon, Flip and Rufus discovered the metal box at the junction about halfway between their houses. The lads agreed to use it as their ‘secret hiding place’. From time to time, Rufus and Flip leave small gifts, photos and notes in the signal box for each other. Ellie is the only other person who knows about this secret place, or at least Rufus hopes so.

Flip has also become interested in photography. The lads have spent many days walking the Somerset landscape together, taking photographs with Rufus’ camera, and, on hot summer days, swimming in a nearby stream together.

Flip and Rufus love each other. At first, Rufus didn’t know what these feelings were. Both had always known, though, that being with each other mattered more than anything else in their young lives. They use any excuse to spend time together, particularly in the summer when school is out of term.

They love to lie in the deep grass on a hillside next to one another and stare at the clouds in the sky, making up animals and characters out of the billowy white shapes. When Rufus happens to brush up against Flip or touch him almost by accident, electricity courses through his whole body. This delights him, but almost immediately causes him shame too.

One particularly hot day when they were swimming, Flip didn’t bother to put his T-shirt back on. Rufus hid the worn, white shirt in his canvas army rucksack. He took it home and slept with it next to his pillow that night. He could smell Flip on the shirt and this made Rufus both happy and frightened. Because Rufus is the older of the two, he feels particularly responsible about his growing feelings for Flip. He knows innately that these stirrings could lead to something dangerous or forbidden in his small English country village.

Rufus finished school at sixteen and has worked on his family’s farm full-time for the past year. He hates it and wants to get away from this strict country life. Flip is now in his final year at school.

Rufus recently decided to confess to Flip about his feelings for him. Rufus thinks that maybe they should both leave the countryside together when Flip finishes school and find jobs in the town, or even move to a city where he could try his luck at becoming a photographer. Rufus has decided to tell Flip that he loves him and share his plan with him. He wrote a short, painful note and left it with a photo of the two of them together at the junction box a few days ago.

Today, Rufus is hoping that an answer will be waiting for him.

____________________________________

This is the first instalment of the background story for the short film, Rufus Stone, to be produced as the key output of our three-year research project, "Gay and Pleasant Land? -a study about positioning, ageing and gay life in rural South West England and Wales ". The Project is a work package in the New Dynamics of Ageing Project, "Grey and Pleasant Land?: An Interdisciplinary Exploration of the Connectivity of Older People in Rural Civic Society" and funded by the British Research Councils.

Two short A/V pieces we created for conference/workshop dissemination are also available. They both give the background and an overview of the methods used in the project.

Gay and Pleasant Land?

Exploring sexuality, ageing and rurality in a multi-method project

Beauty and the Bus

The usual crowd jostled on to the bus home yesterday. No seats downstairs, so the throng scrambled upwards. Nearly full up there as well, but found a seat. A cacophony of foreign tongue contributing to the high level of noise. A guitar playing behind me somewhere, strains of bosa nova and spoken Brazilian Portuguese. An auditory dreamscape.

A teenager in futbal kit, a young Ronaldo, moved forward, speaking to the girls. The girls averted their eyes, lashes fluttering at the sight of him.

Oh, England, you are a wondrous land.

English to Spanish translation

El público habitual empujado a la casa en el autobús ayer. N la planta baja asientos, por lo que la multitud revueltos hacia arriba. Casi lleno hasta allí también, pero se encontró un asiento. Una cacofonía de la lengua extranjera contribuye al alto nivel de ruido. Una guitarra detrás de mí en alguna parte, las cepas de bosa nova y portugués brasileño. Un paisaje de ensueño auditivo.

Un adolescente en el kit de futbal, un joven Ronaldo, se movió hacia adelante, hablando con las chicas. Las chicas evitó sus ojos, pestañas revoloteando a la vista de él.

¡Oh, Inglaterra, que son una tierra maravillosa.

Don Draper and some random thoughts for 2011

Thoughts at sea. These become parenthetical within the rhythm of the waves, the schedule of ports, the resting and relaxation--and the dreams. I report them here in a similar way.

Don Draper is, himself, his own invention. He is, therefore, Everyman or more pointedly, Nowhereman.

He is an idea man and his advertising firm is convinced of his brain-storms which flow like milk and honey from his ever-inebriated lips.

He produces a lot of ideas, but never has to execute them. Luckily, he has a staff of creatives who do this for him.

Which then/who's then, is the creative act?

Art is/creativity is/production is:

• • concerned with the impulse of creativity and the proclivities of production.
  • 
    
  • creative problem-solving is central to creative decision-making.
  • 
    
  • a reflection/a record of the time/space/culture which we currently inhabit.

How I problem solve creatively by listening to dreams:

A Dream at Sea:
The House and the Swimming Pool

Trevor was building a swimming pool next to the post-modern, but definitely retro-modern holiday house that he had designed, much akin to Alain de Botton's contemporary holiday homes. We said that the pool should be at opposite angles to the house, but Trevor insisted on a parallel configuration. We said, "No, no, no! that cannot be right!"

He began to cry and shed his clothes. He looked like a happy Buddha, except that he was crying so he resembled a sad one. We tried to comfort him.

Two rectangles -- how to place them:

1. side by side, length paralleling length
   
2. T-square formation

Change of Scene: Old Japanese woman with greying hair in a bun. I was lying in the grass and finding minuscule flowers, purple and orange--the most outrageous of the opposites on the colour wheel.

I placed the flowers in the old woman's hair.

She then spoke, herself in a dream state:

"The pool should be placed next to the rectangular house like a woman lying next to a man, her curves forming the negative space between the two of them".

So the pool should be curvilinear, not a rectangle. It's length should mirror the length of the house, but it's emphasis remain the shapes created between the two.

My father was right.

Alternative Thoughts for Researchers at Christmas

I have been thinking recently about a moment that happened at our Qualitative Conference in September.

In the tangential way that my world works, I came upon photographer, Freya Najade, serendipitously.

Several years ago now, I asked photographer, Richard Renaldi, to use some of his photographs of older people in a community project that we were organising in Leicester. I have also used his project, Fall River Boys, for a short audio/visual piece that I created.

Back to the present, or rather, almost a year ago now, I was reading Richard’s blog and he mentioned Freya Najade’s photographic series, ‘If you’re lucky, you get old’. Since we are currently working on our project on older gay and lesbian citizens in the British countryside and the film that will be the product of that research, I felt that her work might have resonance.

Part of my conceptual scheming for this year’s conference was to see how close to ‘Art’ we could move things, whilst still remaining within some construct of Social Science. For this reason, I invited an African drummer to open the proceedings, asked academic, Norma Daykin, to bring her Salsa Nova trio along to entertain and invited Freya to display her photographs, along with other ‘artistic’ expressions which peppered the conference.

Circumstances dictated that Freya couldn’t exhibit her actual photographs in a gallery setting; it would be necessary for her to ‘present’ them using PowerPoint in a more familiar academic seminar setting. Still, I thought that her work had a message for academic researchers and was willing to accept this more formal presentation.

Freya talked a bit about her photographs and shared them with the audience. Then it was time for questions. The key moment for me was when someone asked: “How did you go about deciding who to photograph and what the pictures would be about?” Freya replied simply, “I picked up my camera and began to shoot. It was through taking the pictures that the story unfolded”.


To me this is a key difference between the way we often work as researchers and the way that an artist works. Artists pick up their tools and materials and begin. They work out the problems through their media. They have an idea or concept, but very much allow the materials, the subject, the time and the place to dictate the outcomes.

Perhaps as researchers we spend too much time ruminating and worrying over the details of questions (semi-structured or not), ethical approval, our methods and so forth before we ever begin. Perhaps we need to pick up our tools and dive in more often. Margaret Meade went to the South Pacific with her questions but not knowing what to expect, then invented a method on the spot.

Romantically, perhaps, I hearken back to the scientist in her/his laboratory with all of its equipment, specimens and supplies. The scientist ‘experiments’ much in the way that an artist does. Perhaps as social scientists, we need to recall this and become ‘scientists’ again.

‘Art and science have a common thread—both are fuelled by creativity. Whether writing a paper based on my data or filling a canvas with paint, both processes tell a story’.

–Richard Taylor (2001), Associate Professor of Physics at the University of Oregon

I very much encourage researchers to pick up their tools and create. In order to begin to do this, we need to adjust our approaches to our work. I am grateful to one of the reviewers of my chapter in Phillip Vannini’s upcoming book, Popularizing Research, for making me think about how this happens. I responded to a particular question by stating: ‘Moving our work to arts-based procedures is not a series of isolated acts; it requires an adjustment in how we approach everything in which we engage—including writing for academic publication’.

With these thoughts in mind, I leave you with a holiday list of inspirations. Perhaps one or more of these will encourage you to pick up you brushes or camera, voice recorder or semi-structured questionnaire, and begin to experiment or at least find alternatives to the way in which we think of going about our work.

• Film: Peter Greenaway’s Rembrandt's J'accuse
  
• Classical ballet: Roland Petit’s Proust ou les intermittences du cœur
• Novel: Michael Kimball’s Dear Everybody
• Poetry: Diane Hamilton’s Lizard Licking, Donegal & Other Poems
• Photography: Richard Renaldi’s Fall River Boys
  
• Classical Music: Nikolai Lugansky, Rachmaniov’s Rhapsody on a theme of Paganini
  
• Classical Contemporary: Max Richter’s The Blue Notebooks
  
• Television: Mad Men; In Treatment
  
• Comedy: Modern Family
  
• Magazine: Dazed and Confused
• Downtempo electronic jazz: Nicolas Jarr, Nico's Feelin' Good
  

Happy Holidays!

Performative Social Science: What it is/What it isn't

A Seminar held at Bournemouth University on 13 October, 2010 presented my review of Performative Social Science (PSS) and a re-screening of one of my earlier audio/visual productions, 'The One about Princess Margaret'.


Actor/Director Sharon Muiruri, dressed as a Princess, greeted guests at the door royally with "How do you do?" and "Have you come far?" Bags of popcorn were waiting for audience members on each of their seats. The "Theme from Black Orpheus" played in the background and, at one point, Sharon sat down and pretended to play along to the sax solo on a toy saxophone.

My take on PSS then began as an audio recording. This was followed by the screening of 'The One about Princess Margaret'. The entire 50-minute production was pre-recorded as a Windows Media file, much as a Broadway or West End show is pre-programmed on computer. This amused me. I sat in the corner behind the computer, a bit like the Wizard of Oz.

This was accomplished in order to test some new ideas about presentation and audience, but also to expose, for the first time, my writing for my forthcoming (2011) Chapter, " Princess Margaret in Retrospect: the Story Behind a Short Film ", for a book entitled, Popularizing Research: Engaging New Media, Genres, and Audiences, edited by Phillip Vannini, to be published next year by Peter Lang Publishing.

The room was packed and an enjoyable time was had by all present. Listen to the audio recording, then watch the video below.

Audio Recording of
"PSS: What it is/What it isn't"

"The one about Princess Margaret"

Negative Space and Chance Movement

This short film tells a story of the Bournemouth University
8th International Qualitative Research Conference, September 2010.

The brief to the filmmakers was to tell the 'B" story, the in-between, the over-heard, the negative spaces of the conference. Negative space involves concentrating on the background—an excellent exercise in observation and listening.

This film represents the activity between events and the inter-connectedness of these negative spaces. The delegates at the conference turn out to be the subject of the film. The soundscape becomes the dialogue.

Fluxus is intermedia. Fluxus creators like to see what happens when different media intersect. They use found and everyday objects, sounds, images, and texts to create new combinations of objects, sounds, images, and texts.

‘Creativity is that uncanny ability to work within rule boundaries while, at the same time, changing them’.—Kip Jones

BU Qualitative Research Conference 2010 from Kip Jones on Vimeo.

Producer/Director: Rob Jones

Sound: Henrietta Rowlatt and Mog McIntyre

Camera: Yasir Khan

Editor: Chris Taylor

Executive Producers: Kip Jones and Trevor Hearing

Prime Cuts

Prime Cuts from Kip Jones on Vimeo.

By means of a short auto-ethnographic use of stock film clips, Prime Cuts creates a battery of visual memories which have become recurring themes in my own productions. They are, in a way, false memories that are created through the montage, collage and ‘mash-up’ of memory.

These visualisations have morphed and warped into what is now part of my personal visual arsenal of accumulated pictorial memories. These images form my personal visual biography and influence my visual work, directly and indirectly, consciously and subliminally.

As we observe throughout life, certain cultural images become private and iconic. They twist and turn and eventually morph in various ways to be included as our own graphic memories. These images are truly Ethno-Graphic. These visual memories become imbued with both intense cultural and personal meaning. Godard is often credited with having once said, "It's not where you take things from—it's where you take them to."

Originally screened at Bournemouth University's conference on Qualitative Research, Sept 2010 in a gallery-like setting with other works of art. I wanted to see how visitors to the gallery space would engage (or not) with the continuously playing video on the large screen.

What are your Prime Cuts?

Music used in the Mash-ups:
Max Richter
Morgana King
Kylie Minogue
Rufus Wainwright

He didn't leave a note.

-->

Sometimes, when children are ‘rough-housing’, mothers will warn them, 'It will all end in tears'. What sound advice for life's emotional journey.

Exit: stage right. A haughty exit. The kind only dancers can make. There was not even a furtive glance in my direction in the audience. This is how the beginning of the end began.

I didn’t want to live in a dacha outside of Odessa anyway. I am not fond of borscht or pickled anything. I don't want to spend my last years hearing about your glory days on the stage and then watch you go off to work in an office in your brother’s start-up Russian construction company. I hate the cold.

I have always seen myself retiring to a Bedouin tent in Morocco—an air conditioned one. I would watch the goats all day. A young man, my ‘companion’, will bring me tea. ‘Non, merci. Je préfère un jus d'orange, s'il vous plait’. A boy like the ones in the beach scene in Death in Venice. Young men who naturally put their arms around one another and give each other a kiss on the cheek. Not a French baiser, stylised and studied, but a natural, heart-felt kiss.

In my letter to you I said that I wished you had learned bravery from Masha.

When I was still at Art College, I was offered a job designing sets for a start-up dance company, The Pennsylvania Ballet, in its infancy. How different my life might have been if I had been brave enough then to take that gamble. It would have meant having to drop out of art school (which I did eventually, anyway). I wasn’t fearless enough, however. Or like the time Florence Dorn (of husband, Joel, who helped make Bette Midler famous) asked me to accompany her to London to buy a hat. She said we could stay with ‘the Harrisons’ (George and Pattie). I thought these were things other people did, not me. I wasn’t brave enough.

I was striking as a young man. I wish I had capitalised on my looks. Not in a calculating way, but in an intelligent one. I was too busy wallowing in my own emotional turmoil to see the potential of making the right choices and the right connections, and using my natural assets to help manage that.

So I wanted you to be brave. I wanted you to bridge the age difference, overcome the cultural and language barriers, and manage the impossible ever-changing geography of it all. I wanted you to believe in the potential of our connection.

In the end, your fears took over and made your decision for you.

Perhaps you and all of this so late in life were just cruel reminders of my own past mistakes.

Part of travelling again and seeing you for what I now know was the last time was to have some time away to contemplate my mother’s death. I wanted to be near you when I did that and to buffer any pain with your warmth. That never happened.

Instead, I wrote you a letter (in English and Google Russian) and left it with a book of photographs of you dancing that I had made. I came to your last performance (for me), sitting in the second row. I waited until you were a few feet in front of me, then stood up and exited ... stage right.

In terms of my mother’s death, I came to the realisation that no one would help me with that. My work colleagues mostly ignored it. The ones who did say something saw it as some kind of opportunity to talk about deaths in their own lives. Why do people think that this is comforting? Not one person mentioned ‘compassionate leave’. One insensitively suggested that I watch a documentary on Brian Epstein, ignoring the fact that the question pervading the film is, ‘Did Epstein take his own life six weeks after the death of his father?’

We will never know. He didn’t leave a note.

My mother’s death/falling in love again

"The sweat on their bodies”

I was introduced to live musical theatre at the Valley Forge Music Fair. It was summer stock for New York actors, singers and dancers performed in a tent on the East coast of Pennsylvania, outside of Philadelphia.

I lived my simple, country boy life about 30 miles to the west. It was at Valley Forge that I saw shows like Pajama Game and Damn Yankees and, for the first time, fell in love with live musical theatre.

Theatre in the round and being so close to the sweat on the dancers’ bodies made me believe that there was a possibility of connecting somehow. As a teenager, these theatrical encounters were a part of my growing-up world of serious sexual awakening. I had put aside my childish desire to be Robin to Batman or follow Flash Gordon around in his lamé hot pants. These new experiences were comprised of all the senses; but mostly, it was the smell of the greasepaint mixed with the dancers’ sweat. I was breathless from the experience.

Every summer I would look forward to these performances under that tent, the actors in such intimate proximity, darting up and down the aisles, making their exits and entrances. The tension of wanting to reach out and touch them was palatable.

I would hang around the parking lot after the shows, hoping that one of the cast would come along and say hello. I lie. Come along and take me away with them. I wanted to join this musical circus; I wanted to fall in love and get laid. I still get these three things mixed up.

Spiegeltent has arrived at the Edinburgh International Festival with great success. This year it will host a new range of sideshow acts, cabaret and spectacles.

Spiegeltents are hand-hewn pavilions used as travelling dance halls, bars and entertainment salons since they were created in the early 20th century . There are only a hand-full of these unique and legendary ‘tents of mirrors’ left in the world today. The performances at Edinburgh’s Spiegeltent are live, in the round and under canvass.

Marlene Dietrich sang ‘Falling In Love Again’ on its famous stage in the 1930’s and, since then, its magic mirrors have reflected thousands of images of artists, audiences and exotic gatherings. It’s old Cabaret magic that has somehow become new again. It reminds me of my youthful awakening.

Speaking of Falling In Love Again, I did. Not that I expected to. He is a Russian dancer on a ship. We first met three years ago. I have been extremely guarded with my emotions since our first encounter. We see each other infrequently—two or three times a year. The story, retold as it heated up recently, unfolds below:

A conceptual narrative diary compiled from daily Facebook entries:

News Feed

. Time for the sea again....

· I should stop pretending it's luggage and just call them costumes.

· Sea day today. He is dancing his 'starring' role tonight. Me, organising my own costumes for the voyage. Stockholm tomorrow.

· Have to go now. Lunch date with the dancers tomorrow and not a thing to wear.

· 'The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new lands, but in seeing with new eyes.' –Marcel Proust

· He wants me to meet him at midnight. I am getting too old for this.

· Actually it was magical and moving. Overcoming my tendency towards inaction has been a theme in my life. In reality, it has brought me every reward.

· Having lunch with him today at the ship’s Ben Brittan restaurant; it's become a bit of a tradition.

·Things are getting very close to the edge.

· Someone said: 'Explain this to me'. I said, 'When I was sixteen I swam across a three-mile lake and back. These days I am happy when I can do a couple of laps in the pool. The same for emotional life, really'.

· In spite of all my best effort, planning and resistance, I am a bit lovesick.

· Remembering Carol K and her admonishment, after listening to my tales of love sickness: ‘Yeah, but did you get a painting out of it?’

· Time to forget, put aside and plough on with all of the projects and problems that I left behind. In a way, they will be a welcomed distraction.

· Do I dare? Have I lost my marbles?

· I constantly watch the ship’s webcam now. I watch the ensign change position on the bow. I make mental notes of the breezes. (Get a life, Kip.)

· Sunny, very little wind or activity. Ship in front is refuelling.

Fedor Tyutchev, Russian poet:

Я встретил вас - и все былое
В отжившем сердце ожило;
Я вспомнил время, время золотое -
И сердцу стало так тепло...

I met you and the past

came back to life in my dead heart.

Remembering a golden time,

my heart became so warm.

· The Baltic Sea is peaceful and blue, the sun refusing to set so far North. It’s almost 10:30 pm. He is about to start the second show, most likely.

· Should I be like a Brit and take a mini-holiday on the Bank Holiday weekend? Should I? Should I just turn up on the ship? Should I?

· Decision made. Нравится ли вам сюрпризы? (Do you like surprises?)

· Good-bye, Bette. You're with Dad now.

· ’Everything that passes away is only a reflection...' –Mahler’s 8th

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‘Part of my intention in constructing a book out of a seemingly haphazard collection of notes was that these notes, by virtue of their accumulation and juxtaposition and patternation, would end up working overtime (not unlike what we might expect of the bits and pieces of a conceptual art’). –The Conceptual Novel: Michael Kimball Interviews Evan Lavender-Smith