City-Zen

We're proper chuffed to be doing our Hello Hubmarine set again within a week of Summer Sundae. I'm not sure if we've talked that much about the Time Travel Opportunists involvement with Hello Hubmarine - it's quite a difficult thing to 'nail down'. Basically, when doing our TTO stuff (books, parties, stories) we met a load of other folks who liked doing that stuff as well. So we joined up and called ourselves Hello Hubmarine and did some workshops and are planning to take over the world with the power of the pen. Or something. More on that another time probably.

For now, though, we're performing a half-hour showcase/set of stories, poems, and a song. We go on stage one after another, in quick succession, not stopping for introductions or rambles. It's a half-hour that's all about the pieces themselves. It's about the performance, not the performer. We did this at Summer Sundae at Phrased & Confused and if I hadn't seen the set a load of times before I seriously would have fallen off my chair. Jonezy and Joe Coghlan in particular raised the bar significantly for me personally.

The contrasting colours of each of our different strands of creativity are celebrated, not segmented. I play an Emphemetry song, Emma reads a story about kissing and newts (not kissing newts though), and Nathan talks crayons and spray paints; Jonezy delivers two pieces - a tragic lullaby and a call to arms; Joe Coghlan gives both sides of the story in an epic poem about suburban alienation and despair; Aimee Wilkinson nearly drowns trying to catch the attention of a lifeguard, and Catherine Rogers introduces it all.

So yeah, we're doing it all again this Friday at City-Zen, and are pretty prepared to do it anywhere and anywhen we can.