On holding one’s own funeral

Hi, I’m Richard Tyrone Jones, poet, writer and Director of ‘Utter!’ spoken word, and on 18^th February 2010 I decided to hold my own funeral (despite not really being dead. Hope that’s not a spoiler).

I first had the idea as I approached my 29^th. I had wasted the best years of my life, screwing up a promising comedy career, relationship and then, job, by my very bad decisions, and as time had run out for me to put it right I was approaching the effective end of my life. I was probably also inspired by the guy in the League of Gentlemen who holds a dress rehearsal for his own funeral – but on doing some googling, I found that no-one (that I could find) had actually held their own funeral before and been present at it. SO, why not do it as an egocentric art-piece?

However, after re-watching Logan’s Run http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logan%27s_run I decided that 30 was the real end of life; and was planning to hold an event where people dressed according to their ages (white for birth to 8 years, green for 9 to 15 years, yellow for 16 to 23 years, red for 24 years to 10 days 30 and (my idea) black for the over-30s, those ‘already dead’). But I decided Carousel would be a little expensive to re-enact. The main thinking behind it was that your funeral is the one time that all of your friends, from all your walks of life, come together to remember you. What a shame that a) by that time, many of your friends will be dead also and b) you won’t be able to attend either. Holding your funeral while you’re still alive gets rid of these problems. Given this, when some close friends said they couldn’t make this one, but they’d come to my real one - I felt a bit put out. What, so you’ll only come to my funeral when I’m not there? Cheers!

I do tend to make life difficult for myself: at Mark Watson’s last 24 hour show, I and others from ‘Utter!’ set ourselves the challenge of organising a rota of people to read Andrew Motion’s work non-stop for 24 hours, thus creating a ‘Perpetual Motion’ machine. (We tried to get Andrew Motion on the phone to talk about it). And this took a LOT of effort too. The absolutely gorgeous orders of service were designed by Paula Amaral of the Invisible Dot (who I’d absolutely recommend for further design work – ask me for her details). The ginger wigs had to be affixed to the dolls. I had to lie motionless in the coffin for two and a half hours (not as hard as you might think. Co-codamol and muscle relaxants).

I had to select the music no-one would’ve listened to while I was alive, organise a photographer (Jack Carr), organist (the excellent Niall Spooner-Harvey) and readers, write my will and of course, get the gorgeous bamboo coffin all the way over from Tufnell Park’s Green Endings funeral parlour (many thanks to Ben & them for the lovely £475 bamboo coffin, although they turned down free publicity on the order of service) with me and my excellent vicar James McKay having to endure the most bitter, angry, shouty divorced taxi driver EVER, to the extent that I booked a more expensive cab company on the way back so I didn’t have to run the risk of getting him again. Oh, and the flowers, and Ferrero Rocher for the buffet. Needless to say, all this obsessive-compulsive behaviour wiped out any money we made.

We got some nice publicity in the run-up: a mention in the Londonist (who put it well) http://londonist.com/2010/02/book_grocer_17_-_23_february.php and Time Out; a few people seemed to think I was actually dead – which was fine by me, as anyone who genuinely cared if I was dead would presumably have read the notes and discerned it was a spoof. A couple of people thought it was in very poor taste. On the one hand, I agree but simply don’t care: on the other hand, we are all going to die. I promise those people, hand on heart, that I will die at some point. The only was this would be taking the piss out of the dead would be if I were never to be numbered amongst them. Furthermore, after I’m dead it’ll be a bit difficult to laugh in the face of death, won’t it? I also don’t agree with any argument that it’s offensive for people who’ve lost someone recently. This presumes that in a couple of months that person’s death will somehow no longer be painful.

When you programme an event like this (or even if you don’t), someone will always die close to it. This sadly happened with John Rety of Torriano poets, who published Paul Birtill, who did a good and very comically bleak reading as part of the funeral. But as Paul said, John had a good sense of humour and would’ve found this quite ironic. Sadly Nathan Loughran, who’d re-written his song ‘My funeral’ to be all about me couldn’t make it to deliver it in person as his gran had passed away. Mind you, she was 103, probably longer than I’ll reach.

The evening was full, fantastic and went down very well. Below are both Rob Sears’ and Tom Phillips’ eulogies about me which I greatly enjoyed. The mourning babymammas were greatly upset, and the corpse didn’t corpse. The hardest thing was, having done all my usual control-freakery beforehand, having to sit there still during technical problems during my message to my biological children and while the mid-range on my ‘bad music’ was so low it made the swearing inaudible. Ex-housemate Alain English read a poem about me which made me seem much more successful with girls than I actually am ;0) and current housemate David Floyd married a great new version of Dylan Thomas’ famous villanelle – ‘Do not go ginger into that good night’ - with poems from my book Germline (although we sold fuck all copies)We’re still not sure whether eccentric scene stalwart Kittie Launch, who got up to say some things about me on the verge of tears, thought I was actually dead or whether she just wanted us all to think she thought I was dead. Either way, we all kept a straight face… until I was carried off into the Whitechapel’s Crematorium oven and leapt out screaming from the fires of hell, protesting I was too young to die…. and of course, that wasps make cardboard.

That people gave me a round of applause for not being dead at the end was quite a nice ego massage really. And besides, you can hardly be dead for your own wake in the pub afterwards, can you?

Here’s a couple of blog reports about the event:

http://theliterarylook.blogspot.com/2010/02/two-minute-book-reviews_19.html

http://23doves.livejournal.com/

For more pictures see the ‘Utter!’ facebook group: http://bit.ly/utter

Many thanks to all already mentioned, the pallbearers and readers, artist-in-residence Kat Austen, Lawyer Lewis, Joe Rigby and Lucy Halpin, and to Rebecca, Richard and the Whitechapel for having us plus anyone overlooked (there were so many!).

The next event, ‘Utter!’ Fiction is back at the Cross Kings on Thursday March 18^th with Joe Dunthorne, Stewart Home and the fictive stars of the future. ‘Attend’ on facebook here: http://bit.ly/utterfiction

And pre-book your £5 tickets here: http://www.wegottickets.com/event/72580

—–

EULOGIES:

—–

TOM PHILLIPS

Richard Tyrone Jones: A Personal Tribute From One Who Knew Him

The Richard Tyrone Jones that I knew was, in many ways, an iconoclast; proudly outspoken, disdainful of orthodoxy, and resolute in standing up for what he believed. Those who knew him best will long cherish the debates and disagreements with him that could often stretch far into the night. Of these, I think the one that will linger most profoundly was the recurring argument over whether wasps make cardboard.

“Wasps make cardboard,” he would say. “No they don’t, they’re wasps,” we would riposte. “Yes they do,” he would insist, becoming heated. “They chew up wood to create a pulp and then use it to create nest structures. It’s a rudimentary form of cardboard, but it’s definitely cardboard.” “No it isn’t,” we would hit back, “cardboard has clear structural elements, such as multiple layers of paper or a strengthening corrugated fibreboard interlay that makes it necessarily distinct from a mere crude mass of thick wood pulp, rendering any description of wasp nests as ‘cardboard’ as being essentially meaningless.” “Oh, fuck off,” he would joke back, and the issue would become moot until the next time we had the argument.

Richard was frequently a cunt, but not the bad kind of cunt - never malicious or disingenuous, driven by neither disdain, arrogance or loathing. He was an “ooooh, you cunt” cunt; he was never a fucking cunt. To those who knew him best for his poetry, his comedy, or his sexual advances, there were many more facets to Richard than can be contained by such basic signifiers. There was Richard the historian, peppering his conversation with references to medieval bylaws in an effort to confuse the listener about which century we were in; Richard the heroic over-sleeper, frequently lapping his own timeline and waking up after he’d already gone to bed the following day; and of course, Richard the music lover. His friends will always remember the glowing excitement with which he’d talk about DJ Filthnozzle’s new EP of dark dub-gabba muffcore shitbreak tunes (I’m not sure of the exact terminology.) Richard’s Bad Music, we used to call it, affectionately.

If I can return briefly to the issue of wasps and cardboard, I thought I might read to you from this print-out of the Wikipedia page on wasps.

“The term wasp is typically defined as any insect of the order Hymenoptera and suborder Apocrita that is neither a bee nor ant[1]. Almost every pest insect species has at least one wasp species that preys upon it or parasitizes it, making wasps critically important in natural control of their numbers, or natural biocontrol. Parasitic wasps are increasingly used in agricultural pest control as they prey mostly on pest insects and have little impact on crops.”

There then follows a number of sections: 1 Taxonomy, 2 Categorization, 3 Characteristics, 4 Biology (which is broken down into three subsections, 4.1 Genetics, 4.2 Anatomy and gender, 4.3 Diet), 5 Wasp parasitism, and then 6, Cardboard, which reads simply “Wasps do not make this.”

I added this section immediately upon learning of Richard’s death, to ensure that the public at large were correctly educated about the issue. I feel it’s what Richard would have wanted.

Richard cared deeply about learning, about education, about Truth. It’s a testament to his restless, urgent creativity that he manifested this passion for truth mostly by consistently and repeatedly lying to people, often at great length. I was privileged to collaborate with him in a minor role on several of his more extended lies, in the form of his guided tours of North and East London’s eldritch places: Archway, Crouch End, Stoke Newington. While these tours traversed the borders of plausibility with an adventurer’s glee, they were merely the first hints of a far grander ambition; a planned, comprehensive history of London’s thirty two boroughs that would be vast in its scope, and entirely inaccurate in its contents. His death has denied us these tales - of the ancient, asthmatic monster that lurks wheezing beneath Haringey; of crazed Slavic aristocrats who believe they hold dominion over Hackney; of the secret places in London’s backstreets that can only be found by those not looking for them. The Gaspingey, Count Gablody, Guoms; this psychogeographical fever dream of epic proportions has now died along with Richard. Except I just told you about it, so it hasn’t.

If there was one thing that summed Richard up beyond all else, it was the way that his own imagination sparked the imaginations of those around him - encouraging, inspiring or shocking them into looking at the world anew, and leaving them all the more determined to create, to forge a more fascinating reality. This life gives us little, and places many obstacles in our way; we are tiny and powerless against the enormity of the world. But Richard, as beset with the wrongs of life as any of us, showed us that even when the suffocating crush of reality threatens to overwhelm us, we can still fabricate wonders.

We are all of us wasps. But Richard taught us that we can make cardboard.

—–

ROB SEARS

Today is Richard’s birthday.

It should be a celebration.

Instead, we’re gathered here to commemorate his passing from the prized 18-30 marketing demographic.

Because of the cult of youth that our Society has embraced, we have to say goodbye to Richard today and consign his body to the flames of irrelevance.

His ashes will be scattered on a scrapheap outside the M25. His friends and family will completely forget about him, except when his name comes up with that creepy Autosuggest feature in Gmail and they think, “Oh yes, Richard Tyrone Jones, the Ringmaster of spoken word. My son. Such a shame he got old. And shit.”

But tonight is a chance for us to share a few memories of the man we’ll all soon have forgotten.

I met Richard at university, so I might have seen a different side of him to some. But I think his approach to conversations will be familiar to everyone who knew him. He had this way of entering them, like a fat man lowering himself into a crowded hot tub. It was amusing to behold and, however carefully he went about it, someone was likely to be disturbed.

When I introduced Richard to my then-girlfriend in the second year, the first thing he said was: “You make a good couple because you’re both fairly attractive.” (I thought that was funny and also a compliment but my girlfriend moped all night.)

On stage, he didn’t bother with the niceties. The first time I saw him perform was at the Playroom Theatre in Cambridge in 1999. He ran on to the theme from Top Kat and furiously tore open a Tesco bag containing more Tesco bags containing more Tesco bags until soon the boards were littered with polythene and he finally reached at the centre of all the bags, a loaf of bread. And he took out a hammer and he totally destroyed that bread. During those minutes the bread became a hate object for Richard. And when he had finished, he calmly left the stage without any word or sign to the audience.

What did this mean? Something about excess packaging? Food waste? I only wish I’d asked Richard this in his twenties, while I still had the chance, though I don’t suppose I would have got a straight answer. The fact is that people in their 20s don’t think straight or speak clearly, but people over the age of 30 are too physically depressing to concentrate on for more than a second or two.

That performance, with the bread, was part of a comedy show – but comedy couldn’t house Richard for long. In later life, he became a poet. But poetry couldn’t house him either. He was a comedian and a poet, and a raconteur and a host and a fundraiser and a community organiser and a million other things. Richard was a force of nature, forever splurging over the normal categories, particularly in his capacity as a sperm donor. By the end of his useful life, he had fingers in so many pies he ran out of fingers and had to use other parts of himself.

I’m not somebody who believes in heaven or hell. I guess I think that people just get to thirty and that’s it. But if Richard could see or hear us tonight, I’d say to him: “Mate, I’m sorry but don’t you think this entire thing is in really bad taste?”

Thank you.