I wrote a nice little piece to go with this but the site has refused to load it, bah. I’ll give it a while and see if it changes it’s mind.

*** No. AND it just deleted my attempt to rewrite. Oh dear. So I am going to type this quckly and post it.

These cards are from Samantha’s SEDUCTIVE Sunday Night Supper Club. I ran it with Charles Adrian for almost two years, first in Dalston then at BGWMC. We had fantastic established artists perform alongside new ones. This was very important. But what was more important is the lessons I learnt beyond how to run an event. (As Anna Sulan Masing and Gary Merry told me, everyone should run an event, produce a show, or organise a group whether or not you want to do it for life. It teaches you rather a lot about the world)

I learnt about the idea of the social club. In a place like London where everything is go go go, where I squeezed in two half hour meetings into an hour long lunch breeak on a regular basis, was always on the phone or computer which were also the first and last items I touched each day, in a world where community centres, libraries, post offices are closed down, I want a place where I can make real human contact. I want to be able to see my friends on a regular basis. I want to be a part of a community. I want to be with people, on a regular basis, who make my life better, who make my world bigger and more intricate and wonderful at the same time. We absolutely have the power to change (or affect, if change is too strong a word to swallow right now) each others’ lives for the better all the time. This is not an extraordinary thing that some gods on pedestals somewhere have the power to do. It’s not down to politicians or artists who are removed from us. We really all are beautiful and powerful and if this idea is something that bothers you you kinda just have to get over it, why? Because it’s important. Because I can’t make you see this about yourself and it makes me sad. I mean, Gaulier can show people their effect on the world – he is pretty much a guru in this respect, and it is a terribly difficult thing to accept, but god, it’s such an important truth.

(Look, I know I sound like a lunative evangelical, naive, idiot, but I am aware of this, and I am no idiot, and I am not always right, and I have a long way to go, I hope, in life. But, I am not always wrong.)

Samantha’s Supper Club was beautiful. It moved from being about me wanting to see acts I loved and was interested in, to me really putting this out there: I want to build a space where people could be happy and where I could change their lives. No, correction, where we could all change each others’ lives for the better. 

Supper Club gave birth to the Brautigan Book Club. I recall the precise moment when I spoke to my dear friend, David Duchin, about it. And if you know anything about either, you’ll see where they are similar and I hope, recognise what it is that’s important to me.

I am so happy that I was afforded the chance to build these spaces. (All year I have been talking about the kind of art or the kind of stimulus that generates space in everyone involved. Not just in the audience, but in all participants including the creators. This is what I mean about why I cannot get away from my belief in art being integral to life.) Friends, and friends of friends made this possible. The recognition we give each other, strangers or not, when we catch a glimpse of something we value. A glimpse is enough for us to go for it. The most precious things in life are rare. Obvious but all theory until we lose hold of this gold dust.

Supper Club taught me to trust my instinct about the good and the potential in people more and more. I would hardly ever know about someone but having pretty much unfounded faith in them led to all sorts of magic. Real magic.

And as for working with Adrian, well, I learnt that I never, ever needed to be worried about anything if he was in the room. 

What’s the point of this post? It’s not something I can answer right now. But it is written with love.

Btw, I am not #21. I don’t know who was!