Everything sort of began when me and Alex
Brenchley made a radio show together called PAM Sounds at university.
In the first show, in 2003, Alex said, ‘you drop a nuclear bomb on
Westminster, you wouldn’t get a mushroom cloud, it’d be a hash-cake-coke-shroom
cloud.’
And that line is in the book Silk Handkerchiefs which was published in
September 2009 by TRUE TRUE
TRUE.
Silk
Handkerchiefs
Paul Haworth
Silk Handkerchiefs
is the first in a trilogy of short comedy novels by writer and painter Paul
Haworth.
Wank
to Jeremy Kyle, postie wink, suicidal, hit on woman old enough to be my mother,
like a lubricious satyr, nigh-on assaulted by a male admirer,
lying in a pool of urine...shit like this, it never used to happen to me, I
swear. Now it were the story of my life.
Narrator Alex ‘Abs’ Brenchley is unafraid to tell, show and give all.
Alongside episodes about his youth at Westminster School, sexcapades in St
James’s
Park and Victoria Station, and life as one of the art world’s so-called Nutty
Solitary Men, Silk Handkerchiefs weaves its story of one fateful day in
the life
of Alex Brenchley...a day of tragedy, violence and the promise of LOVE.
The character and story of Silk Handkerchiefs have been developed through
radio shows, YouTube videos and short stories written by Haworth since 2003.
A performance of Silk Handkerchiefs took place at the Barbican Art
Gallery in London in July 2008, as part of The
House of Viktor & Rolf. Alex
Brenchley’s misadventures will be continued in two sequels.
The narration richly fuses Cockney, hip-hop slang and verbose Dickensian
English. The book offers a delirious account of 21st-century anxiety at its most
extreme and hysterical and captures the London of 2007 as if it was only
yesterday.
Silk Handkerchiefs – hilarious, ridiculous, true!
The window display we made for the book in November 2009 at Athenaeum
Boekhandel, Amsterdam.
Here is a PDF of the first pages
You can get a copy from TRUE
TRUE TRUE or at these shops:
Galerie Gabriel Rolt (Elandsgracht
34, Amsterdam, NL)
Minotaurus
(Sint Antoniesbreestraat 3d, Amsterdam, NL)
Motto Berlin (Skalitzerstraße
68, Berlin, Germany)
Pro qm (Almstadtstraße 48–50, Berlin,
Germany)
Mzin (Paul-Gruner-Straße 64, Leipzig, Germany)
Boys Boys Boys (Neuer Kamp 19,
Hamburg, Germany)
Donlon Books (210-3 Cambridge Heath
Road + 77 Broadway Market, London E2/E8, UK)
Koenig Books at Charing Cross (80
Charing Cross Road, London WC2, UK)
Koenig Books at
Serpentine Gallery (Kensington Gardens, London W2, UK)
ICA (The Mall, London SW1Y, UK)
Owl
Cave
John Sandoe (10 Blacklands Terrace,
London SW3, UK)
Section 7 Books
(65 Rue Rébeval, Paris, France)
Motto Zürich
(Langstraße 84, Zürich, Switzerland)
Payot Lausanne (4 Place Pépinet,
Lausanne, Switzerland)
Salon für Kunstbuch
(Mondscheingasse 11, Vienna, Austria)
Spoonbill & Sugartown (218
Bedford Avenue, Brooklyn, NY, USA)
Printed Matter (195 Tenth Avenue,
New York, NY, USA)
The Books (43 Gamgodang-gil, Seoul,
South Korea)
split/fountain
(452 Karanghape Road, Auckland, New Zealand)
I am currently writing its follow-up Alone, Desperate and Going Nowhere
===============***================
Silk Handkerchiefs on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/silkhandkerchiefs
*****
Hard times
Broken rhymes
Crimes of compassion
See faces on the street: ashen
It's written across your faces
Packing heat but holding no aces
If I could just make you forget
Your lives of misery, woe, dysfunction, depression, solitude and debt
You have an ailment
Let me be your treatment
Let me entertain you
Life is more than a sales campaign where you
Pick up a bargain
Be it a real angora cardigan
But still you cannot pay
All we do is pay and pay!
Pay for love
Pay for luck
Pay for fun
Pay before it's even begun
And then it's over
Over and out
Left thinking - hold up - what was that all about?
"Is that all there is?" one inevitably asks
No jokes, no laughter
No happy ever after
Just...
CRISIS! CRISIS!
Unhappy accident, disaster
But could life pass us by any faster?
Yes, we live in hard times...
But these, my friends, are our times...
------------------------------------------
==============
"What
a ridiculous dichotomy that I can walk into any HMV in the country and
see my artwork on the Noah and the Whale album and yet this so-called art
world
won't give me the time of day. What's wrong with this picture?"
CLICK
HERE TO READ 'THE MAN IN THE MIRROR'
THE RADIO SCRIPT
CLICK HERE TO READ THE SCRIPT FOR THE BARBICAN PERFORMANCE
yes, I have wi-fi but I'd give it all up, in a shot, to have a wife.
> Memories. Memories, they're all you end up with. I tell
you, back then, when I was king of this bleeding town...if you told me this is
how I'd end up...bloody Nora, I wouldn't have believed it, would have said
you're off your head. Abs: sexless, ladyless, sipping tea, chastity, imprisoned,
afraid, listless and in misery. You must be having a larf! No, no, wrong man,
guv, that ain't Abs. It was...it was just before my A-levels that I last made
love. And I did always make love - yes, I had many lovers and some of these were
passing encounters, mere minutes, but I never (said with disdain) had sex. I
never shagged or had it off. No, no, I made love. Well it would have been just
before my A-levels - when it was I who sentenced myself to a scholastic death -
when I last made love. That was in...2002...which is now six years ago. Six
years! Bloody Nora! You know what's happened! Too much of this (hand-wank) it
drives a man barmy. I've lost it, lost that indefinable attraction, that magic,
the spell I could cast over a woman, it's gone, and I...I've been re-virginised.
I have. I'm a virgin, a 24 year old virgin.
>
yes, I have wi-fi but I'd give it all up, in a shot, to have a wife.