Red Dog Green Dog and Wod, Live at Cannings Court 14th September 2013

When, in the spring of 2013, a gigantic hexagonal 'monolith', flawlessly constructed from an unknown substance, was discovered in orbit around the moon, Gospodin Stotinki was among the group of scientists, artists and chefs who were sent up to investigate. Left alone on the spaceship after the on-board computer mysteriously decided to kill the rest of the crew, Stotinki spent the lonely hours in a weightless melancholy. As the beautiful planet rolled over itself in the night, he felt his feet longing for the reciprocal pressure of the earth. In his mind the ground pounded beneath him to the be-tranced steps of the Breton dances of his youth, that ancestral shuffle and stamp, the whirling cytoplasmic daydream of.....

Hearing a thud, he approached the cockpit of the spacecraft. Outside, requiring a space-walk to retrieve it, a small paper flyer was held against the windscreen by the wiper blade. Reading it through the grimy glass, the aching void of stars framing the paper on all sides, he pondered the nature of coincidence then, rubbing his hands with glee, he donned his spacesuit and stepped into the escape pod. He was on his way to Cannings Court.

  "Cannings Court is back!" blurted the flyer.

  "Red Dog Green Dog and Wod", will play for dance, late into the night.

  "Saturday 14th September 2013", it informed.

  "Cannings Court, Pulham, Dorchester DT2 7EA", it directed.

  

Beast of Bartcombe

When the mysterious disappearance of livestock in a Somerset village began in 1982, a variety of theories were put forward to explain these phenomena. The surrounding countryside was searched, armed vigils were held at the epicentre of the disturbances. Anecdotic evidence abounds, much of it contradictory. But recent discoveries in the Stoat Inc. Archive may reveal the truth.

Paranormal investigators, Stoat Inc. (formerly O.H.K.), were called in by Lord Heron of Chanter's End Manor after repeated sightings of a large mammal prowling through the grounds of the estate in twilight led to allegations that a big cat had escaped from the Lord's menagerie. The villagers were terrified. Strange tracks had been discovered.

Agents from Stoat Inc. were called to a country barn where a crepuscular stalking animal had been captured by a terrified farmer. Further investigation revealed the 'beast' to be a domestic cat.

But strange goings-on continued. The thatched roof of a village pub was gnawed through leaving a hole big enough for a tractor to pass through. Stores of grain were raided. Walkers were pushed over in the darkness and "sniffed by a snout of sorts..... a silky, snuffling snout," as one witness chillingly recounted. G.S. Poden of Stoat Inc. became fascinated by legends in the nearby village of Bartcombe linking the deserted manor house with ancient legends of Peruvian witchcraft and possible human sacrifice. According to his analysis of the data, events linked with the mysterious beast had Bartcombe Hall as their centre. He decided to investigate. Sensationally, we can now publish evidence of what he found. 

G.S. Poden was reported missing on the 7th of October 1981. A polaroid camera belonging to him was discovered in woodland adjoining the Hall. It contained this photograph. Despite repeated campaigns, his disappearance has never been explained.

The Hexagonal Society of the British Isles would like to thank Perran Anderson Brightman for his help in bringing the Stoat Inc. Archive to light after decades of obscurity and conjecture.

Man In The Hills

"We report here a legendary and, apparently, unique use of mosses for man camouflage, something previously seen in some insect larvae and weevils."
                                                                                Journal of Bryology 23: 264

It was in 1976 that Helvetius Kronk gave a copy of the newly released Burning Spear album Man In The Hills to his friend Gospodin Stotinki. Little did Kronk imagine the effect that his gift would have. Ignoring the vinyl disc within, Stotinki mounted the cover on the wall of his workshop and set his chair in front of it. His diary explains,

"Day after day I have looked upon that scene, imagining myself a homonculus shepherd wandering upon that face. In inclement weather I would shelter in the nasal caverns or build my fire out of the wind beneath the beetling brow cliffs. As I walked out into the world around me I saw evidence of great presences lying patiently in the landscape. Some were hidden in the hills and valleys. Others had been formed, perhaps unconsciously, by human endeavour."

Stotinki read the work of Katherine Maltwood but was frustrated in his attempts to recognise consistent patterns in the figures that he discovered. "I craved ever deeper levels of communication with the beings in the land. I had to become..." 

On a visit to Bèjar in Spain he happened upon the curious rites of the Moss Men. This was his epiphany. "Indistinguishable from the land I will recline like a moss-covered mountain, until I am the moss man, the man in the hills."

Stotinki was found in a partially desiccated state several weeks later. He was clasping the trunk of a tree and had a nuthatch nesting above his left ear. 

On the Map

'About the year 1215, a Zen priest called Mu Ch'i came to Hangchow, where he rebuilt a ruined monastery. By rapid swirls of ink he attempted, with undeniable success, to capture the moments of exaltation and set down the fleeting visions which he obtained from the frenzy of wine, the stupor of tea, or the vacancy of inanition. Ch'en Jung, about the same time, was noted for the simplicity of his life and he competence with which he fulfilled his duties as a magistrate... Finally, he was admired for his habits of a confirmed drunkard. "He made clouds by splashing ink on his pictures. For mists he spat out water. When wrought up by wine he uttered a great shout and, seizing his hat, used it as a brush, roughly smearing his drawing; after which he finished his work with a proper brush." One of the first painters of the sect, Wang Hsia, who lived in the early ninth century, would perform when he was drunk real tours de force, going so far as to plunge his head into a bucket of ink and flop it over a piece of silk on which there appeared, as if by magic, lakes, trees, enchanted mountains. But none seems to have carried emancipation further, among these priests, than Ying Yu-chien, secretary of the famous temple Ching-tzu ssii, who would take a cat-like pleasure in spattering and lacerating the sheet.'
                                                                Georges Duthuit, Chinese Mysticism and Modern Painting
                                                          
Gospodin Stotinki's contributions to the visual arts have been discussed in these pages before. Inspired by the extraordinary approach of 13th century Zen painters, a near-fatal incident in which he was unable to withdraw his head from a wooden bucket of ox's blood, marked an inevitable change of course from active painter to art critic. Stotinki's interpretations were often unconventional and have been unfairly branded as 'nonsensical drivel.' In this extract he considers Coldstream's 1937 painting On the Map:

'In a haze of uncertain heat two figures are baffled by a landscape which does not exist, an absence of countryside that can only be represented by a map of nothingness held facing away from the one who reads it. These are not, as is often suggested, the artist's friends Graham Bell and Igor Anrep. Close examination shows that they are aspects of the same person. A man, standing baffled by the cartography of the void, is accompanied by his spirit body who sits, barefoot, spattered with the dirt of a desperate flight or furious pursuit through tangled woods and mud-mired tracks. Now he sits in exhausted contemplation of what? A towering spectre of horror just out of sight? Beyond the figures, the Mister Punch simulacrum tree feeds its hungry dinosaur brood with unseen arboreal plankton.'

Homage to the Remarkable Mr. Hoban

'Some times thers mor in the emty paper nor there is when you get the writing down on it. You try to werd the big things and they tern ther backs on you.'

                                                                                                        Riddley Walker, Russell Hoban