Failures #3

Zen Table: Kyley Williams

I had a vision/obsession with creating the most perfect outdoor table that I could build. I wanted to create a structure that was a layperson’s Zen—its creation my meditation. A design created (in theory) only in wood—no nails, no glue, no impurities. A design that appeared fragile—but was strong. Success was finally achieved after building—first a workshop, and then three prototypes... constantly refining the design of the structure and the jigs that created them. Clouded by perseverance I dismissed an impracticality recognised early on. An impracticality that in the end became insufferably irritating—as my utensil dropped through the table top, and in doing so ruining my bacon breakfast. A failure remembered every summer Saturday, remedied only by a cloth veiling the beauty of the table.

It’s A Mans World: Tim Checkley

So here is the story!! This was in like 2002 or something...

A brother of a friend’s girlfriend or something worked at a record company, can’t remember which one, like Warners or something, and he got in touch with me about a CD compilation they were working on called It’s a Mans World and the idea of the CD was that it was a retrospective of black American music from the 50s up to today, so it went from like James Brown into disco stuff like Earth, Wind & Fire and Parliament, and then into early 80s stuff like Run DMC and then later stuff like Snoop and Dre and so on and so forth...

So I got a friend of mine, Elliot ‘Little Elz’ Stuart, who is an amazing graffiti artist and illustrator to draw this huge fold out mural-type drawing of all these artists together in one street scene, that I would colour in and turn into the CD art, like make a logo etc etc etc. Well everything was going swimmingly. But it’s a really big picture and it was taking me a really long time to colour in. Cat and I had already decided to go to Japan, and the flight came up really quickly and before I knew it I was teaching English full time in Tokyo. Actually, working on this during my lunch-breaks on my laptop helped keep me sane through that time.

Well I tried to get back in touch with the guy a little later to explain that it was taking a bit longer than I thought, but he wasn’t returning my emails which I thought was a bit odd, but I carried on with it here and there. It later turned out that he’d gone to work somewhere else and the job had just fallen between the cracks and disappeared... and so this is as far as I got. Which is a shame as I think Elz did a fuggin’ amazing job and it would have been great if we’d finished it, but there you go!