Happy Birthday to...

[smokingboot]

chomper99, bytepilot and load_of_flannel:-)

Wishing each of you a fantastic year!

(btw, Chomper99, do you remember that exhibition you told me about, 'The rooks of Trelawney' or something? If you can give me some clue as to where I can find out more, I would be very grateful)

Comments

Re: Rooks of Trelawny

[lucyas.livejournal.com]

Yes, that is the subject of the exhibition. It is supposedly an exhibition of photography but in fact it tells a strange story of a man and his psychiatrist and a bunch of villagers who may or may not have been turning into rooks - or possibly the rooks are turning into villagers. They are taking the fingerprints of the villagers and photographing them and keeping a diary of the rooks. I can't remember which man is doing which activity - I think the psychiatrist is doing the fingerprinting and the patient is doing the diary and the photography. They get convinced that the rooks and the villagers are in fact the same thing and that they are also making their fingerprints all identical in order to confuse their observers. The diary of the rooks shows differing numbers of rooks in the woods until in the end there are none there at all - but there are lots more villagers, all with the same fingerprints.
The exhinbition is as surreal as the story. It is pretending to be about photography, but it isn't really it is more about the story of the rooks of Trelawny. And it is like a maze with narrow passages and little displays were you press a button and a kind of Monty Python-esque animation is supposed to happen but most of them aren't working.

Fantastic!

[smokingboot.livejournal.com]

This is exactly the info I wanted:-D

Thank you *does happy dance!*

I wonder, do you know of any books on the subject? Suppose I could telephone the museum and see if they know...

Re: Fantastic!

[lucyas.livejournal.com]

I would love to read a book on the subject but I don't own one. If you get the title of one, do let me know.

Re: Fantastic!

[smokingboot.livejournal.com]

There's this book, 'The Rooks of Trelawne' by someone called Andrew Lanyon, who also seems to have been involved in creating the exhibition; but I can't find a review, so I don't know if the book is a photographic album with the story as background text, or a full blown telling of the tale.

If I find it, I will let you know!

I'm excited now; I knew that story was totally mental, I just couldn't recall the details!

Re: Fantastic!

[chomper99.livejournal.com]

Hello. It was certainly the oddest afternoon I've ever spent in a museum.

Additional snippets that I recall:- the psychiatrist's patient was advised to take up anthropology as a form of therapy, but as lucyas points out it didn't seem to go very well. Adding to the odd effect of the content was that the individual parts of the exhibit were numbered sequentially only if you jumped about. You had to go from one side of a corridor round the corner and then back again to follow it. But the most bizarre part was the final display which was just an entire wall painted black with the legend: "6pm. The rooks have not returned."

We asked other people passing through the exhibition what they thought it was about and they muttered vaguely about it being about photography, missing the whole therapy/anthropomorphism/madness angles. The normalcy of Polo mints preserved out sanity at the time.

We asked the little old ladies at the admissions table if we could speak to the curator and they told us he'd be back in an hour. When we returned an hour later the museum had been closed for 40 minutes and was shut for the rest of the day.

Quality strangeness.

Re: Fantastic!

[smokingboot.livejournal.com]

This is all so bizarre, it can never be used for anything, cos no-one will ever believe in it as a starting premis!

I must try to contact the museum to see about the exhibition, which, 8 years on, I expect to have vanished in all its Pythonesque glory. We have Andrew Lanyon's book; I would love to trace the sources behind his story.