SEE ANOTHER OF MY BLOGS, "CHESS FANTASIA", HERE
SEE MY PROPOSAL FOR MY FIRST SHOP IN SURREY - A CHESS AND GAMES SHOP CALLED "PAWN" - HERE
SEE MY PROSPECTIVE AUTOBIOGRAPHY "CARPE DIADEM" AT THIS LINK. It is a bit silly - it's a bit pompous to write an autobiography at 32. It's really a Don Quixote search for the Nobel Prize for Literature. If I ever got that, I would be very tempted to give it away to 724 women. 41 women have been awarded a Nobel Prize since 1901. 765 men have received one.
JOURNALISTS: I AM AVAILABLE FOR INTERVIEW IMMEDIATELY. PLEASE SEE THE BOTTOM OF THE SCREEN FOR STIPULATIONS ABOUT INTERVIEWS. I promise they are not as stringent as Bobby Fischer's.
LOCAL COUNCILLORS IN WOKING: I would like to work in collaboration with you on small business projects in empty shops in the Woking area of Surrey, UK.
ADAM SMITH: "BRITAIN IS A NATION THAT IS GOVERNED BY SHOPKEEPERS" (The "Wealth of Nations", 1776 edition)
The deal is simple. I am going to make special chess boxes that are for sale for £1,000,000 each.
That £1m would then go into a microfinance scheme to provide small loans to people with good ideas for shops to help them take over the enormous number of empty shops and buildings we have all over the UK, particularly in town centres. This is basically a way of trying to do something about what the New Economics Foundation in London refer to as 'ghost town Britain' or 'clone town Britain'. I am starting with my own country, the UK, but the principle could obviously be applied elsewhere in the long term.
I have seen hundreds and hundreds of them on my travels round the UK over the years and I have seen them in all sorts of different parts of the country: this is a generalised problem, not merely something limited to certain isolated pockets or areas. Although there are several heartening and inspiring examples in the other direction, at times it has seemed to me that the small, independent shop has been rather akin to a collapsing and endangered species. While such a reality is obviously depressing, seen from another perspective what we are looking at is a vast number of opportunities to create better, more sustainable, less exploitative employment where people at local level have greater autonomy and control of their affairs. Numerous psychological studies have shown that one of the major determinants of happiness is control over one's own life. What could be more fascinating a challenge than creating a shop that is under your own control and designing and tailoring its stock and layout and turning it from an idea into a reality in collaboration with people you trust and work well with?
The other day I took photos of 16 empty shops in the centre of my hometown using an £8.99 disposable camera. The image above was one of the pictures that was developed which I think was just an accident but I thought it looked like a Mark Rothko or Patrick Heron painting and so I wrote 'New Business Forum' on it. The NBF is my idea for one part of a larger microfinance organisation called Microfinancica Britannica. The idea for the NBF is that does something about these empty shops and helps us revitalise local economies and provide good and sustainable employment in the process by providing small loans to people to get their businesses off the ground. Once they are up and running, the loans can then be paid back. Other branches of Microfinancica Britannica might be dedicated to other goals - for example providing small loans so that artists can take the steps to becoming full-time in their work. The NBF segment is named in honour of the New Economics Foundation whose work has inspired me to think in different ways about economics, finance, business, employment and local communities and their relationship to wider ecological principles.
At the same time as offering the chess boxes for sale I am also exploring as many other flows of funding as possible as I have wanted to create a microfinance scheme for a long time to address the problems we face using alternative and imaginative economic and financial ideas and systems. My major concern is that people at everyday level have as high a level of control over their own affairs as possible. Philosophically, and as a result of having read a multitude of empirical examples from around the world, this is when I believe that the best decisions are generally made.
Best wishes,
2nd October 2010.
Woking, Surrey, UK.
devereux5000@gmail.com.
My first four potential ideas for shops in the area are listed after the photographs. The picture above right is just a picture of a park bench in Woking park. I liked the autumnal leaves and the colours and the way that it is beginning to dissolve into abstraction. The picture below is a tin I am making called "Microfinancica Britannica". It has a quotation from E.F.Schumacher on it ("Small is beautiful"). It isn't brilliant quality because I am using cheap marker pens on it and they don't work very well on the material of the tin.
On the first photograph below, the two images on the left show some graffiti in Woking: the top one says "from here to fame" and the bottom one quotes Albert Einstein that "in the middle of difficulty lies opportunity". I am not endorsing graffiti necessarily. Some of it is great art but much of it is not and when it involves unpleasant messages it can be a blight on a community. The artist Banksy's recent use of an abandoned area around London Waterloo station, through negotiation with Eurostar (who as I understand it own the land), was a brilliant example of how abandoned space can be made beautiful by skilled graffiti art. Perhaps more importantly, much of the artistic, creative, dynamic and entrepreneurial energy of the people who create it would also be extremely well used in the creation of interesting shops and boutiques. For that, people with good ideas need help and support, as few unnecessary obstacles and barriers as possible, and financial backup to get the project past the initial stages - hence the idea of a microfinance scheme on a similar model as the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh. After all, being a member of a nation with a few too many empty boutiques is not exactly chic.
Personally, I would like to start a chess shop in the local area in Woking (possibly sandwiched between a coffee shop and a sandwich shop so that all bases are covered), and I would like to have it up and running as soon as practically possible. Rather than calling it simply "Chess" it is obviously tempting to call it PAWN and create an entirely fresh kind of pawnshop. The Pawn Facebook profile can be found here.
My second shop project in the local area would be dedicated to contemporary and past jazz and potentially called JazzMATTazz and my third local shop project would be a poetry shop called POET TREE and my fourth shop locally would be an art and photography shop called HART and named in honour of Tony Hart whose art TV programmes years and years ago inspired me to draw and paint when I was a little boy. My fifth would be a general record shop possibly called HEAVEN SCENT which was the name of an independent record shop in Guildford which was a good place until it closed down a few years ago. I would like it to have a totally open approach to genres but on a purely personal basis would quite like a healthy dubstep and drumstep section so I can augment my collection.
In an ideal world I would also like to see the return of the Thomas Thorp bookshop which was superb and was at 170 High Street Guildford until it closed down a few years ago. I also think that there is the potential for an independent cinema in the area, which was a project that I and a friend from school came close to developing in the 1990s. A little cinema that showed the classics and the auteurs (Kurosawa, Bergman, Visconti etc) as well as the hot new independent and underground films, and also sold really good popcorn, would be first-class if it could be practically arranged. It might obviously have to be called KINO after Giles Barratt and the Kino Orchestra.
NOTE TO JOURNALISTS: WITHOUT THE OXYGEN OF PUBLICITY, POSSIBILITIES ARE LIMITED.
I am personally available for interview immediately. If it is an interview with photographs or a filmed interview, I do reserve the right to put a paper bag on my head with "WE ARE ALL ARTISTS" written pretentiously on it in black marker pen. That is my Bobby Fischerian stipulation. I will not stipulate particular room temperatures in which to do interviews and I might even buy you a coffee although funds are limited.
I do not desire to do interviews to become famous. I have no desire whatsoever to be famous as the concept of coming out of a taxi at 3am in central London into a hullabaloo of paparazzi does not appeal to me one iota and I do think that the 1948 UN declaration of human rights' inclusion of privacy is highly significant. However, I do want to get word of my projects out and without the oxygen of publicity they are highly unlikely to get anywhere at all. If they do get somewhere, there might in the long-term be a lot of jobs created if things are organised properly. So please contact me immediately and let's get talking.
07974971737 or +44 7974971737 from abroad. I am devereuxmatthew at Skype though I am in there fairly irregularly so please feel free to arrange a time there first by emailing me at devereux5000@gmail.com.
POST-SCRIPT: Monday 4th October 2010.
(Please click on the image above to view a bigger version of it).
I have just invented a new game in honour of Sim City and Civilisation, which I played obsessively as an adolescent.
1. Take a photo of an empty shop near you.
2. Load it into a graphics package and redesign it into the kind of shop you would like it to be.
3. (The step I haven't done yet: turn it into that shop in reality - unless somebody nips in there first and turns it into their own shop)
In this case, this is a former Chinese restaurant on Chertsey Road, Woking, which is a potential location for my chess shop PAWN ("a new kind of pawnshop!"). At the bottom right I have copied and pasted an image by John Tenniel from Lewis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland". Carroll, real name Charles Dodgson, lived in a house called Chestnuts which is in Guildford, a neighbouring town to Woking in the county of Surrey.
A former schoolfriend of mine is apparently planning to set up a computer games company here in Woking which is great news as he will do a superb job. It might be an interesting project to make a shop design game. Perhaps titled "Million Town" after the songs by William Orbit and Kruder & Dorfmeister?
POST-SCRIPT: Saturday 9th October 2010
Below is a piece of artwork I have just made. It is called "Humanai" as in "Human v. Artificial Intelligence". It is subtitled "Man v. Machine: Ever the Twain Shall Meet" and is sub-subtitled "what is 169,518,829,100,544,000,000,000,000,000 multiplied by the 100 billion neurons in the brain multiplied by the speed of light squared?" and is named in honour of Mark Twain (and his 'greatly exaggerated reports' statement). The original with original signature and notes on the back is for sale for £169,518,829,100,544,000,000,000,000,000. Copies of the image printed off the internet are worth zero. It might be possible to organise some sort of hire purchase/installment plan/closed-end lease payment structure if it is not possible for people to stump up the £169,518,829,100,544,000,000,000,000,000 in one go. Alternatively there might be a share system. I haven't quite worked it out yet. Thanks to the jazz musician Finn Peters for informing me on the radio that the brain has approx 100 billion neurons and for Jez Nelson on BBC Radio Three for allowing him the airspace to inform me.
