Monday, Second Lesson, Art

The bell went again to signal second lesson, Art.  I’ll never work out why they’ve scheduled a lesson in the Science block before one in the Art block which is a ten minute walk away.  I don’t know why they don’t just let us do Art with the Chemicals in the Hazards cupboard.  I bet that’s how Damian Hirst started.

All the poisons locked in a cupboard which is a happy joyful shade of sunshine yellow

Me, Fazzy, Gazzy and Yazzy all trudged off down the stairs, upon which a fifth year lay, face down, covered in shoe laces[1].

The Art classroom is massive, one you could fit lots of Gorillas into if you had lots of Gorillas and they were at a loose end.  It has lots of windows for looking out of, tables to sit at, chairs to sit on and pictures on the walls to curl your face at and say, “Surely not?”  It reminds me rather of that program that used to be on TV where they’d show you art that people had sent in[2].  They’d show you a picture made out of shells and it would say, ‘Dave, 32’ at the bottom.  The pictures on the walls in the Art room are like that.

Hazzy with his lass, yesterday

Mrs Reed is a hunched weirdly shaped woman who never speaks apart from telling you what work you should be getting on with and to ‘stop doing that as the floors have just been polished’.  As always, she shuffled into the room and grunted the word “collage” before sitting down, nearly breaking her jaw on the desk.  I can’t help feeling I’ll never get into ‘collage’ unless I get some proper tuition in this subject.  I decided to make a model of two spiders with massive heads having a fight on the back of a raisin out of Papier Mache. Scazzy painted a picture he called ‘Debonair man haunted by goat ghost’ and Razzy sprayed WD40 all over Pazzy and called it ‘Can’t squeak; won’t squeak’.  Pazzy then fell over on the Parquet floor (which had just been polished) and slipped about so much, Tazzy plugged some mini-speakers into his personal stereo and put on a song called “Ain’t no stopping us (breakin’)” by Ollie and Jerry.  He later revealed that he wasn’t in fact break dancing, he was just trying to stand up.

Ollie and his best friend Jerrry, doing some boogaloo

My project went well, but I didn’t get it finished. I feel a bit like Schubert in that respect.

The bell finally went, interrupting my day dream about what it must be like to paint the ceiling of the Sistine chapel and just how long your brush would have to be, signalling break time.  We get 15 minutes to generally mill around the school grounds, play table tennis in the house blocks or chase each other meaninglessly for sport.  I choose to spend most of my breaks in the Music block where you can be sure of finding like-minded individuals or other people who don’t quite fit in with society.

Jazzy was in Mr Wigwam’s room, playing his saxophone.  He’s one of the best players in the school orchestra.  None of us have the heart to tell him that there are no saxophones in a symphony orchestra but he seems content playing whatever pops into his head whenever he likes.  I play the Trombone; it’s an awful instrument.  The horrible tuning is compensated for by being able to ‘hook’ personal possessions from the Euphoniums who sit in front of me and knock them out ‘accidentally’ with the end of the slide if they annoy me.

The only thing a trombone is good for

In the music room there was a first year who’d lost his glasses in a fight with another first year who had done that thing where you whirl your fist around in what the first years have termed a ‘supersonic-haymaker’ – on the final upward twirl, he’d snagged his thumb knuckle on the poor lad’s glasses and sent them across the room – hence his lack of eyesight enhancing framed-glass apparatus.
He’s in hospital now.  Mr Wigwam has got a big cupboard and it has lots of books in it.  We sometimes lock Mazzy in there because he has got big teeth and no one likes him.

[1] The liquorice ones, not real ones, obviously.

[2] The Gallery, presented by Alan ‘Art’ Garfunkle’s Uncle