Jonathan Greenbank

 

This weekend was rounded off with a trip to Manchester – by chance we sat on the train carriage’s seats 27 & 28, our dates of birth – to the Strictly Come Dancing live show (long story) where another lookalike – Mark Ramprakash? – won the competition.

And that evening, an interesting twist in the elaborate eviction / escape process of Celebrity Big Brother involved the housemates’ opening of fortune cookies, each of which told that individual’s fate. The rest of the month buzzed by in a blur, with the only remaining stories of note worth telling involving my best mate’s finding of a flat having moved to Australia and a quirky landlord coincidence; my finding of a watchmaker named Jonathan Greenbank; my subsequent discovery that in Kent there’s an immigration officer called Jon Greenbank who made the news for deporting four members of staff in a Chinese restaurant there; and my meeting an artist who had created a work nine years ago whose title had stuck in my mind ever since:

“AS IF IN A DREAM, DREAMT BY ANOTHER”

I was overjoyed to be able to discuss the title with him, relating as it did to stories of… immigration. Moreover, its coming from a John Berger book about refugees encouraged the notion that many immigrants felt – that someone else was controlling their weird life. This I believed, was almost a replica of what I have been living through aswell, that is, should they so decide, others can switch off this fantastic adventure whenever they choose.

It is now six months since my initial visits to the fortune tellers, so next month seems an appropriate time to assess exactly what evidence we have of the predictions having come true – as you will have read, many have for me, with only three seeming to remain outstanding:

The dying of something like a heart attack in my nineties… a long way to go, yet.

However, I am intrigued to discover if any of these have resonance with your lives in any way: if so, please let me know by e-mail (theartist@jonathangreenbank.com) or discussion on the forum.

The last day of the month I felt terribly ill after a Bourdain-inspired Lapin aux Olives. As I lay in bed, somewhere, a new facebook campaign was being conjured up. Doppelganger week, in which everyone involved was to use a lookalike of themselves as their profile photo.

So, we descended the Empire State and began planning the wedding. No date or definite plans as yet, however here’s a sneak preview if you’re interested… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0ChbqaTIs8

Then a hot dog for breakfast, before a horse and carriage ride around a snowy Central Park. Our horse’s name?

Chance.

horse!

Following Christmas lunch at a McDonald’s, and buying a Barack Obama woolly hat, we decided to visit the Central Park Zoo to share our good news with the animals, a la Rocky and Adrian…

Jon and Lise share the good news with the animals at the zoo

A walk through the park followed, reading the bench plaques as we went towards Strawberry Fields and the Dakota but more importantly the San Remo, where Sigourney Weaver’s apartment was in Ghostbusters, plus some streets full of Brownstones that also looked strangely familiar. The rest of the day included a few celebratory drinks, a visit to Madison Square Garden, and a cracking Chinese meal including… you guessed it, fortune cookies.

Boxing Day, still no bags, and off we went to the Statue of Liberty – a dream come true for me. Especially wearing the foam crown. Ellis Island was also an incredible experience, I searched for my forefathers on the database to be avail, but the coincidence to beat all coincidences came on the boat back, as we boarded ‘Miss Liberty’ with the real Miss Liberty in the background.

look closely...

The World Trade Centre was a surreal experience – not because of the eerie life losses or rebuilding taking place, but because we saw the same French couple that had been sat next to us in the McDonald’s and stood by us at Liberty Island.

French couple (she looked a bit like Grotbags)

The rest of that evening was simply brilliant, we got soaked on Wall Street, had ten beers at the Heartland Brewery at South Street Seaport, and the most perfect meal at Les Halles, the Brasserie owned by one of my heroes, Anthony Bourdain. The steak tartare, made tableside, was especially good.

Then, we returned to the hotel to find a bottle of champagne had been sent by our families, plus one of our bags had finally been delivered. Although, a couple of things, including two of Lisa’s Christmas presents, had been stolen. Unbeknownst to me, William (http://www.jonathangreenbank.com/archives/57) had been employed as a baggage handler at Heathrow.

Our final full day took us uptown on a bus tour to Harlem, Bloomingdale’s, and Serendipity – although it wasn’t meant to be, the three hour wait put paid to our lunch plans, instead heading for Katz’s Deli which unfortunately is best known for the scene from When Harry Met Sally (please don’t think that Meg Ryan was omnipresent on this trip) when instead it should be best known for its amazing sandwiches and the overall experience of eating there.

Walking through Little Italy, then Chinatown, I found a business card for the Good Luck Car Service and we walked the Brooklyn Bridge as the sun was setting and everything was right with the world. We even found the Ghostbusters headquarters – now a fire station – before arriving at the Spotted Pig, a wonderful gastropub serving offal and fine ales, owned by Jay-Z amongst others. There we were served by a lookalike of my old flat mate Doug.

Still, the best was yet to come.

After hours of searching, Lise found the ring of her dreams at a jewellers in the Diamond District, next to the exact phone box from which we’d rung our parents three days earlier to share the news. Eddie made the ring, Seymour cleaned it, and I sang Beatles songs with Reginald Dollar, the coolest Coolio impersonator you’ll ever meet. He tried to sell me a wedding suit before divulging the details of his lawsuit against WalMart.

Hey Eddie! I got a ring needs fixin'

You had to be there.

But we weren’t for much longer. With a heavy heart, and a missing holdall, we returned to JFK, to be upgraded and be offered $100 compensation. On the plane back I watched Julie and Julia, a great reflection of what it’s like to write a blog you think nobody reads, and upon return the second bag turned up – with more stuff missing out of it, therefore BA are currently dealing with our complaint.

Jetlagged for the remainder of the month, enough of the Fortune Tellers’ tales had proven true – seeing an engagement ring on my hand around thirty; crossing the water and having a good time; coming into money, and getting good news on December 17th.

New Year’s Eve brought with it an entirely new chapter…

The flight was a little late, but the bad weather meant we had had another couple of days filled with concern and uncertainty, so an extra hour was irrelevant.

The first thing that many of us do is check the films that will be shown: I flicked through the inflight magazine and found a lookalike of me and Lise before turning to the film listings. Anyone aware of the new procedures on BA transatlantic flights will know that such excitement is ameliorated by the ‘on-demand’ service, offering about forty films to choose from. My appetite was whetted when I saw the listings, particularly one movie I’d been waiting to see for ages following a recommendation from the highly skilled builder of this very site, who knows me better than most people on this earth, and said that 500 Days of Summer could have been written about me.

me and lisa looking for muppets compilations

It didn’t disappoint – the central character Tom’s Joy Division t-shirts, hopeful romanticism, love of The Smiths, and basically his whole personality, was reminiscent of me, and the narrative jumped back and forwards as well as any of my stories. But what really stuck was a quote towards the end of the film, something that stuck with me and was to resonate loudly later on during the trip.

                        “If Tom had learned anything, it was that you can’t ascribe

                         cosmic significance to an earthly event.

                        COINCIDENCE – That’s all anything ever is. Nothing more…

                        Nothing less.

Coincidence.

                        Tom had finally learned – there are no miracles.

                        There’s no such thing as fate.

                        Nothing is meant to be…”

Now this knocked me a little, as events such as the proposed strike and weather problems plus the fortune teller’s predictions, made me more certain than ever that this was all meant to be, but I watched the heartwarming UP instead of worrying about what I’d just been told by the narrator of an Indie flick.

We were on our way.

Suddenly, things went wrong upon landing, however. Our bags had not accompanied us on the journey, and so we travelled to the hotel ‘light’ but safe in the knowledge that at least one would be joining us soon enough.

Times Square was its usual buzzing self, and aside from the bags balls-up, everything was looking good. At Planet Hollywood we were even sat under Sly and Slimer, having noticed memorabilia from Big and Ferris Bueller (two of my favourite films) and West Side Story and Grease (two of Lisa’s) on the way to the table.

The following day brought with it some amazing experiences – The top of the Rock for the most amazing views, the sun was shining, a bus tour, then a fantastic Radio City Music Hall Christmas Spectacular. The biggest coincidence of Christmas Eve was that our tour guide on the Downtown bus, looked a little like me. Albeit a lot cooler, with the necessary knowledge and accompanying Queens accent. Then, one of the old Rockettes was a great lookalike for Lisa’s mum, and, after the show, we had our photograph taken by the spit of Barbra Streisand.

After a wonderful meal at the Grand Central Oyster Bar, we returned to the hotel, still no luggage… but It’s a Wonderful Life! was on TV.

(Note exclamation mark)

No luggage meant no presents on Christmas morning, so, wearing pretty much the same clothes as the previous two days, we set off for the Empire State Building nice and early.

Now when I said that things were meant to be, every hope was pinned on us getting to the top of the Empire State. If you’ve seen An Affair to Remember you’ll get what that means, if not, go and see it. Sleepless in Seattle is, in my opinion, a little less relevant, however, both could be said to have relied heavily on chance, destiny, fate… and both inspired what happened next.

the entrance

You really couldn’t make this up.

Another strange month, culminating in a life-changing few days in New York, more of which next time.

But the twenty two days before our departure was event-filled and offered yet more – as if it were needed – evidence that my seven ladies were telling the truth.

The month started with a trip to a self-help guru training day, all very useful, and the journey there brought chance encounters with two very influential old tutors who had sat themselves (separately) in the same carriage on the train there.

The following day, on a different train entirely, I met an interesting family who themselves showed a sincere interest in what I was writing in my little notebook about (them) and proceeded to borrow my phone, discuss Christmas spending amounts, and comment on my niceness, whilst swigging Stella from a can. What intrigued me about this meeting was that they now have my phone number – long story – and I wonder to myself, will this development come back to haunt me?

It hasn’t yet.

This was the day I also completed a ‘mental toughness’ questionnaire, and I was not entirely surprised to find out a couple of days later that I had the lowest possible ‘mental toughness’ score, one category of which looks at how ‘in control’ you are of your life. Every participant receives a ‘coaching’ report full of useful advice for improvement – I will be looking to follow this over the next few months and check my progress….

Perhaps the highlight of the start of the month was the World Cup. I prayed that England might get paired up with Algeria, the land of my fore fathers, and just as Derren Brown suggested might happen, my wishing came true and the two countries will play each other next June in South Africa. I immediately began collecting information on Algeria, though planning a sojourn there this year proved problematic when BA advice suggested nobody travel there unless it’s absolutely necessary… However, I also found out that one of their squad plays for Blackpool.

All the above, and following, was played out against the backdrop of a rather uncomfortable domestic situation in the flat above that which I recently moved into, the woman there, in between drunken-sounding screams, sounds as if she could be the two-faced individual / one who likes a drink that the fortune tellers warned me about?

A school trip encouraged me to consider converting to Judaism, and a TV drama was aired about someone whose life is dictated my fate and numbers, meanwhile hands came back in to my thoughts for a reasons that will soon become very apparent. And, at my grandma’s ninetieth birthday – the age I was told I will also live to – we discovered that two of my relatives were buried together, nine days apart, over a hundred years ago.

However, the main reason that all of this paled into insignificance during December was because the proposed trip to New York was put into serious doubt ahead of the planned strike by BA cabin crew during the period our trip was booked. Days of uncertainty, waiting for contradictory press statements, were nightmarish, given what was in store, but all the while I kept a secret security inside myself that told me everything would be ok.

You see, whilst most of the fortune tellers had foreseen me crossing the waters and having a good time, others had seen the year ending on a high, and a couple had suggested I consider living abroad, one in particular had been adamant that I would receive very good news on December 17^th.

Lo and behold, an announcement was made on December 17^th that the strike ballot was illegal and we would, after all, be going to New York…

A month of great change.

As predicted, the flat move went through finally, and I am very happy to be here. Other aspects of my life, in terms of moving (recent and potential) brought with them less good news, therefore the predicted career change looks more enticing than ever, especially given some of the experiences encountered through University-arranged talks and workshops: more of which later.

This month I had a great time at a christening, the first I had been invited to since such an event was predicted by the seaside seven. There I heard of the subjects’ mother’s recent visit to a medium, and what she had been told about the children… which came only a couple of days after a riveting story I heard about a young boy who sees ghosts. And, I discovered that where we now live was once a social club one of my best friends used to drink in before regularly scaring himself on the way home by staring at the building’s ‘ghost brick’. Perhaps it will turn out to be haunted though by characters from its time as a fire station, when the chief fire man shared the name of another of my best friends and my god son. All this being a flat where an old tutor, who once told me I reminded him of himself when he was younger, lives on the next street, I found out this month.

The warnings regarding ‘a bottle or glass’ were also painfully resonant this month when, after months of anticipation, I went to see one of my heroes (Morrissey) as part of my birthday present. As many of you will know, the concert lasted about five minutes before the singer sulked off stage after being hit by… a bottle or glass.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tLUI7IGb38&NR=1

Once again, a birth and a death took place on the same day in November, though this time they affected a colleague, and the very creator of this site. And, as many of those ladies told me, I came into money unexpectedly this month, ok so they were a couple of months out, but there is not much  that I was initially told that is left to come true now.  This financial gain was also predicted by a horoscope in our now local paper, and a fortune cookie which said ‘if you had your life to live over again, you’d need more money’ the very day that one of the cheques arrived.

Plans to cross the water are continuing apace, and the year does seem to be “going out much brighter than it came in”. Coincidences, quirks of fate, are happening more frequently now – maybe I am looking out for them – but how else can you explain those above, or the time a couple of weeks back when I returned to the old place to cheekily check the mail box and arrive at exactly the same time a couple who looked remarkably like me and Lise, entered the building accompanied by an estate agent who said he was about to show them around my old flat?

However, perhaps the strangest coincidence this month was passed on to me by a course mate, who, during a visit to his friends, noticed a fortune cookie message pinned to her notice board.

“HELP! IM LOCKED IN A FORTUNE COOKIE FACTORY” said it.

Now, I have a decision to make. Clearly, Brigitta’s desperate pleas were bound to end up in other people’s post banquet entertainment, but I never expected such convergence at this stage.

Therefore, do I dismiss months of research and pondering? Accept that it was not my destiny to intercept her s.o.s.? Or at least, not just mine.

brigitta's message

Or, do I investigate this event further, exploring the notion that this is all just another intricate layer of the elaborate game I am mixed up in?

You see, my lines of enquiry are already shifting, and this is where I need your help…

I spoke at the start of this post that I had been lucky enough to attend several fascinating glimpses of the worlds of curation and collaboration. One of these introduced me to the seminal article by Roland Barthes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland_Barthes) which I will now (rather ludicrously) reduce to snippets of still-hard-to-read soundbites, but you get the idea:

“writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost… the explanation of the work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it… the author ‘confiding’ in us… the novel ends when the writing becomes possible… the text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture… the writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original. His only power is to mix writings… when the author has been found, the text is ‘explained’… but there is one place where this multiplicity focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author… the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author.”

Subsequently, over the coming months I will be asking you to play a more active role in my narrative. The exact details are yet to be revealed, and many of you already play major roles in my life story so I don’t want you to feel that you have to intervene any more than you already do, by acting differently the natural order might be upset…

But in the mean time, please can you look out for any lookalikes of me that you think are particularly good. Celebrities, colleagues, anyone who might be mistaken for me – now, in the past or even the future. You can send me links or pictures, comment on the forum or email theartist@jonathangreenbank.com and your input would be greatly appreciated. Apparently, my godson thinks there’s an Uncle Jon lookalike living next door here – unless that was a ghost too.

http://www.123people.co.uk/ext/frm?ti=person%20finder&search_term=jonathan%20greenbank&search_country=GB&st=person%20finder&target_url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.clubwebsite.co.uk%2Fglanconwyfc%2Fcommittee_members.pl%3Fpage%3Dprint&section=weblink&wrt_id=216

I will leave you with two horoscopes that I read on the last weekend of November. One  mentioned that “problems with education make for a stressful time” whilst the other said “we all have our negative moments, but they pass… fotunately, the stars are giving you a deeper insight and a sense of how something is shaping up.”

‘Til next time – Happy advent.

October was a funny old month.

It’s quite apt that it ends with Hallowe’en, that horribly over-egged pudding of a celebration that not many people actually understand (more of which later) because in several respects it was a dark thirty one days.

However, much of what has happened could well be deemed to have resonated with what I was told during the fortune tellings I had over the summer, and for that reason alone, I must stay positive about events overall.

A major contributing factor to that optimism is the hugely stressful though ultimately wonderful flat move I am currently experiencing… however many blisters the confusing IKEA instructions cause, I am very proud of my most recent creations (two wardrobes, two bedside cabinets and a chest of drawers) and am certain that the whole process was set in motion back in Blackpool.

In case you are unfamiliar with my back story, the short version is that I visited seven fortune tellers over the summer and am currently documenting how much of what they told me, comes true. Several of them talked about moving, one in particular advised me to ‘not hang about; make a decision and stick to it, you’ll be happier’… the very next day we saw this flat and the rest, as they say, is history.

The new place is number 8, one of my lucky numbers apparently, the postcode includes a 7 (another lucky number) but moving has been rather difficult due to my sentimental nature and subsequent difficulty in sorting through the flotsam and jetsam accumulated over the years. But then, all of this is about letting go of the past and looking to the future (“2009 will go out better than it came in…”) so I suppose I just have to deal with that.

October though as I said was not a very happy time overall. This was largely due to changes in the workplace, changes that were foreseen during my visits and were promised to be positive ones, though getting hit twice within three weeks by the same twelve year old does not offer job satisfaction.

Stress levels rose with the workload, and emotions were high as I dealt with a birth, death and marriage on the same day early in the month. The death was particularly saddening, and not entirely as described.

This account is quietly dedicated to his memory.

However, I also received a christening invitation and there were a couple of great wedding celebrations this month, the first of which involved my discussing with a fellow guest their encounter with one of the fortune tellers I myself had met, whilst for the latter I had been asked to request a tune for the DJ to play in the evening. By a strange twist of fate, it was This Charming Man – on the same weekend that my hero collapsed whilst singing that exact song.

Also though this month, I was fortunate enough to meet a couple of my other inspirations, artists to whom I gave this website address so that they might read and hopefully see the links with their own, much more celebrated, ouvre. Michael Landy and David Shrigley haven’t left a comment yet, maybe they will discuss an issue on the new forum – why don’t you too? – but given how much they have influenced my practice, I’ll let them off just for now. I also contacted Sophie Calle, who this month I discovered was to open an exhibition in London, and has been a major player  in both my research and my life over the years. I hope she found my heartfelt ponderings interesting. In fact, if you’re reading Sophie,

je t’ai vue… tu as mes sentiments distinguees… merci bien…

Some other little coincidences caught my gaze this month, which were not directly related to my studies but added weight to the theories I am investigating. We had the curious case of Stephen Gately, whom I discovered a couple of years ago shared the same butcher as I when purchasing the most expensive steak ever. And, we had the fantastic story of the boy who was believed to have flown away whilst stowing in a hot air balloon but actually didn’t… in the same week as Pixar film ‘Up’ (about a stowaway boy who flies away aided by balloons) was released.

And, he was called Falcon.

And finally I discovered that the motif on my favourite shopping bag – has anyone else gone as over the top as me recently to save the environment? – was actually designed by my old Uni tutor and guiding light.

A couple of horoscopes told the truth this month – one said that the time was perfect to launch a makeover project (the week before moving in here) whilst another… and, to echo the words of another fortune teller, someone whose drinking I have worried about, fell ill this month, nothing serious you understand, but enough to concern me somewhat, whilst the two-faced texter reared their ugly head once again – this despite my thinking I had come up with a cunning plan to deflect their attention. Still, it’s sorted now, I hope.

So, the 31st of the month brought with it ghosts and ghouls and freaks and fools, and my favourite story of the month was found in my new local paper. It basically involved a local faith school holding a Superhero themed disco on Saturday night, under the strict proviso that HALLOWE’EN COSTUMES ARE NOT ALLOWED. For me it was refreshing to see such an approach, given that only a day earlier I had witnessed a queue of fifty students outside a fancy dress shop waiting to buy their outfits for the weekend. I am generally disappointed to see such a celebration, not even of death, just of poor horror films or generic clichés, accompanied by a lack of understanding of what exactly All Hallows’ Eve even refers to.

Especially when, during said decant, I attempted to part with a collection of superhero comic book images, and found those illustrating this blog.

Remember, remember, to read about November.

Green Day famously sang ‘wake me up, when September ends’ and that rings true with this boy’s life.

The month started well, with the private view of the exhibition and I recieved some excellent responses to my submissions. People were fascinated by my stories, whether genuine, fictitious or a bit of both, and offered me their own anecdotes about psychic tendencies and phenomena. It reminded me of being told that I would be successful in my work, and to be careful of how much I tell people.

September was going to be a good month, I believed.

Then, no sooner had I felt on top of the world, that another common theme from the readings raised its rather ugly head. Changes were indeed afoot in work, but whilst it had been suggested that these changes would be for the best, it was soon evident to me and several others that this might not be the case. I even had my first ever argument with a colleague this month, though new guidelines mean that I’m not allowed to discuss work any more.

It’s perhaps for the best as the other mention of my changing profession and working for myself has never seemed so appealing…

Back to the month’s events, though, I did soon receive some good news. A friend (colleague, sorry) came into money.

A mere coincidence, you think, however the circumstances suggest a small element of something more coming into play. You see, said colleague looks exactly like me. The resemblance is uncanny. We look like brothers, you might even say. Especially when you learn that we share the same birthday, admittedly five years apart, and of course work in the same place. But the fact that I had been promised money this month and his wife had had a funny feeling about the bathroom floorboards in their new home, which he then dislodged to discover £1600 in used banknotes, to me suggested hope as to the truth of what I had been told.

There were further funny goings on this month too. Strange twists of fate, unexplained until I sit here typing away: such as the pupil who had exactly the same keyrings as me and is named after another of my lookalikes; my solo trip to a pub who inexplicably played the album that me and my old flatmate had designed the cover for on the day of my surprise party, attended by that same fellow; and then an act of serendipity in which I was asked a question by a friend on behalf of his mate, I had no idea how to help so, when reminded of the request, guessed a random website I didn’t even bother to research and on that very site, he found exactly what he had been looking for all along.

Of course, in September we also had Derren Brown’s questionable attempts at ‘events’, specifically the predicting of the lottery numbers on the 9th… clearly, I will have to investigate his methods much further as they themselves rely on “suggestability… predictability… random decisions” and people’s wishing things to come true based on their will power combined with a ’state of fear’. Fascinating, albeit dubious, stuff.

Nothing in particular happened on the 13th/14th, as I had been distinctly promised exactly a month previous, though a couple of days later there was by happy accident an episode of Friends aired on E4 which featured the half dozen… playing the lottery, and discussing how they could make themselves luckier for the rollover jackpot. During this month, I even bought a couple of lottery tickets, based on my own lucky numbers and a set dreamt of by my best friends, partly maybe attempting to force the coming into money. No luck came my way though. However, many of my horoscopes over the month did have some resonance with what actually happened, but then it was a rather surreal month overall, what with a surprise 30th party based on time travel, so I suppose anything could have happened.

It turned out to be perhaps the greatest birthday I’ve ever enjoyed. Unfortunately though, a couple of other moments soured the positivity, with a sudden death of someone over seventy (as was multiply predicted)and an expectant mother’s unfortunate loss.

Roll on October.