Hello again. This is a surprise, isn’t it? Me writing in my stupid blog again so soon, I mean, rather than a totally ignorant authoritarian real-estate and reality-television person being in charge of nuclear weapons. Let’s not think about him for as long as we can, hey? Which is about one minute. But never mind. here I am again, talking to you via the internet for ONE MINUTE ONLY. If you read really fast.
Where was I? Ah yes. Today I’ve not done any more work in the Sacred Dome of the Bonnefanten because it was King’s Day here in the Netherlands and they take their holidays seriously over here, as indeed we all should. So instead I’ve been doing other stuff and also lazing around a lot. One thing that has come to light during my idle hours has been the artwork for this year’s Glastonbury Festival of Performing Arts and Muntering Around which looks like this:
It’s called Hold Your Cool and it began life a fiendishly complicated linocut. Actually it began life as a vague idea and then became a scrawled sketch and then became a linocut, but it’s subsequently become a lino print done on a Vandercook proofing press at the workshop of the esteemed Richard Lawrence, then a digital photograph taken by the equally esteemed Peter Stone, then a colourful thing made by the total chancer Stanley Donwood i.e., me, and now it’s out in the screen world courtesy of @glastofest and so on. It is a long and strange and arguably arduous journey from idea to reality, so thank you to everyone that has helped me to do this. I really appreciate it.
Hold Your Cool is the title and it’s probably not too self-indulgent to use the internet to explain why. I spend a lot of time on trains because I can’t drive. And often I pass through Swindon, usually without stopping or getting off. This is not to denigrate Swindon. I know nothing about the place aside from the fact that it has a bus station situated underneath a multi-storey car-park that smells strongly of human urine and is frequented by characters unlikely to pass muster in a swanky restaurant. The rest of Swindon is probably great.
Anyway, the reason why I think Swindon is probably great is that, until quite recently, on the side of some huge and boring metal-clad warehouses along some railway sidings were the words HOLD YOUR COOL sprayed in letters about ten feet high. Every time I passed them I felt better. They were even spaced really well, like H O L D Y O U R C O O L.
It was like an instruction; whatever happens, whatever anyone says to you, however badly your work goes, however awfully your partner responds to your attempts to heal a rift, however frightening the newspaper headlines are, whatever your boss says to you, that idiot on the tube, anyone who takes you for a fool, all the people that treat you like shit. The feeling of inadequacy that’s the result of watching the news. The feeling of guilt. The horror. The terror.
H O L D Y O U R C O O L
Some fucking halfwit thought that this public service announcement was ‘graffiti’ so they covered it up. It’s my duty to the anonymous ‘perpetrator’ of the aforementioned ‘graffiti’ to take these heartfelt and beautiful words and spread them as widely as I can. Anyway, I’ll shut up now. Bye.