You dream that you have woken but that soon you are slipping back again, not into sleep but into unconsciousness. Vague panic reactions. Layerings of different kinds of unconsciousness. A mechanical bird brings the answer to your questions.

*

M. watching an almost motionless Jim Fletcher in the drifting, dramaturgically flat and rather circular monologue Sight is the Sense… says to me afterwards that she had spent some time during the performance thinking “what would this be, if it were choreography?”. I was so happy with this thought, and with the perverse but beautiful image of her sat there listening and thinking, hard at work translating the shifts, turns, spirals, associations, jumps and flows in the text into steps, gestures and moves through space.

*

Afterwards the rain seems to blurr everything and soon pretty much all that remains is the image of a beggar on the streets of Brussels – a guy who sits on Anspach every day with a beat up set of bathroom scales set out on the ground in front of him. It’s as if (you guess) these scales at least nod to the chance that his presence here – with downcast eyes and torn paper cup – is work rather than beggary.

When x tells me that Barack Obama has moved to Sunderland after a few months playing for Bolton I am not too surprised. He's shown some promise for a young player and clubs like Sunderland are probably always on the lookout for fresh talent. I don't make the mistake of confusing this particular Barack Obama with the president elect of the United States of America, and in any case I'm aware that X has a handful of quite distinct Barack's in operation right now. After all, his up and coming footballer is stored on the same hard drive as his Obama 'lone survivor of a mutant pack searching for answers and his father in the dangerous atomic wastelands of Washinton DC', in Fallout 3. And neither of these two is sensibly confused with his Barack Obama the small time pimp and drug dealer, who recently woke from a trauma-induced coma in a prison hospital in the town of Stilwater, and who following a daring escape has resurrected his gang the 3rd Street Saints, in a quest to reconquer the city and eliminate his rivals who now control the streets. Perhaps most distant and unconnected of all is his further Barack Obama who is busy seeking portals, fleeing assassins and from time to time slaying goblins and dragons left right and centre in Oblivion. Seems like the president elect Obama and his numerous alter egos have a lot of very different battles ahead of them in these next months, in many many different worlds. We'll be following Sunderland in PES 2009 with interest.

*

Even stranger when you think the real Obama will have this nation to preside over. 

Barbara Campbell wrote about the performance/time entry below, quoting this part:

Or those times in performance where you think for a moment that time has stretched or slowed, or that time was somehow stopped or had been forgotten but that now, in this moment only, it has started again, remembered.

She wrote:

Best thing on Australian television when I was growing up in the 1960s was a children’s program called The Magic Boomerang. I’m hoping (cause I wasn’t watching out for this as a kid) that the said boomerang was owned by an Aboriginal boy but what I remember well and loved most was that the performance of the world did stop when the boomerang was thrown, spinning seemingly endlessly in the air. And boomerangs being what they are do indeed draw a magical arc in the sky, a parabola where you seem to hold your breath until you see the forces of physics? spirits? take hold and turn that spinning thing around at which point you can exhale. The world would stop for everyone except the hero boy boomerang-thrower who was able to act quickly enough to get the good guys out of danger. Long live the deus ex machina.

Just more romantic remembering.

I wrote:

That’s a lovely image. Is all remembering romantic? No, I guess not. But there’s something about the fixed-ness of the past that lends itself to that – the past always allows us to fetishise the particularity of what was – in its beauty, force, awfulness or other qualities. I’m not sure that that’s romantic – strange the force of things we feel that we witnessed – even if it’s just the trope of a children’s TV show. these things have such presence in us. psychic landscape and all that.

She wrote:

Isn’t it this fetishisation of our memories (a very particular version of the past), childhood ones especially, that tends towards the romantic? But only if we never allow ourselves to challenge those memories. In this case, with the Magic Boomerang, it certainly needs challenging. Since writing to you about that show I’ve checked the website to find out more. As I half-suspected, the boomerang-throwing hero was not a young Aboriginal boy. From the synopsis: “Tom Thumbleton, a 13-year-old boy who lives with his parents on a sheep farm near the fictitious town of Gunnaganoo, finds a boomerang among some Aboriginal relics his great-great-grandfather left in the attic of their homestead.” Such a lot of brutal history barely hinted at in those simple sentences; it makes my stomach churn. The 45 episodes were aired in 1965-66, ie just months before the landmark 1966 referendum that gave Aboriginal Australians full enfranchisement. Before then, they were allowed to fight and die in our wars but had no voting rights nor were counted in any census. And this was the least severe of the injustices.

“strange the force of things we feel that we witnessed” – indeed. And the things witnessed as a child go beyond the psychic – encompassing the somatic, guiding us consciously, unconsciously, subconsciously towards what/who/where/if we will be.

Me:

Can I quote you on the boomerang? I’d love to add that text to the notebook.

She:

Yes but given what I’ve said above, it would be necessary to include the qualifying background don’t you think? I know it rather undercuts the simple beauty of the magic boomerang but nothing is simple where Indigenous politics or history is concerned.

*

Recoiling from time to time Nick Cave gets tiny electric shocks from the microphone during the set, stepping back from it, in something between alarm and irritation. I'm getting these tiny shocks he says vaguely, almost, but not quite asking for technical assistance. After a later shock he looks concerned for a moment and then makes a joke out of it "Please" he says "Please don't let me die in Sheffield". It seems a reasonable request and it's one that he goes back to a few times during the night which is otherwise all deserts and moons and melting snow, and rain and beautiful girls and guns of course and bad towns and bad men and blood and fire, and eyes and rage and knives. No one wants him to die. The crowd are too happy with him caught in a boiling torment of lust and doubt and need to want him dead, they are too happy with him caught in melancholic near-suicide mode, they are too happy with him bent double self-tortured and writhing in a sweating, howling, yelling rage of incomprehensible confusion and guilt to ever want him dead. But mostly they want him living so that he can kill. Stagger Lee is what they want to hear. Again and again. Stagger Lee, Stagger Lee. Those are the cries between songs. Stagger Lee. They want him coming out of the darkness and into town, and they want him not dead but murdering,  blood and brains and the rest of it all over the walls and floor, red right hand, but mostly Stagger Lee. And in the end they get what they want.

*

On the floor in the window of the toy shop at St Pancras Station a gaggle of battery operated toys have walked themselves into a corner. The fluffy pig is down there, nose pressed right into the angle, head actioned in a relentless twisting, a frenzied side to side, like he's digging for something caught there between the glass frontage and the wall, his feet propelling him forward, the glass wall holding him forever in place. Forever or until the batteries wear down. Behind this stuck pig, a soldier thing marches back and forth and a few other creatures amble the neighborhood, heading here and there, purposeless, mildly pathetic, and for the most part forgotten. One of them, a duck perhaps, or chicken, is tangled somehow in the lower wire framework of a postcard stand, another (the clown perhaps or the puppy) trails an accidental ribbon of sellotape, gummed with dust and human hair, like an amateur street sweeper. Best of all though is the giraffe, who, at a lanky ten inches tall, has walked himself to the window and is gazing, staring straight ahead, big eyes fixed on the feet passing by, and on the stretch of marble veldt that extends beyond his prison. For motion he has two modes, a pointless side to side juddering jig (net effect = zero), which alternates with a stepping-forwards-with-intent that culminates with a kind of head butting jerk motion. It's the latter that makes him the star of the show. He's right against the glass and every headbutt forwards is directly into the window, bang, pull back, bang,  as if, with the cute face and wide eyes he is trying to hammer his way out, or destroy his good looks, or somehow get the kind of psychiatric attention that is no doubt his due. Giraffe's face though is a total blank, the action, calm, repeated, like one hard-man trying to prove to another that he has no feelings whatesoever, nutting the glass repeatedly – bang, pull back, bang, pull back, bang – the whole thing done with that kind of numb expressionless conveyer-belted animatronic anger you expect from caged animals and humans without hope, a numb rage that suits the context and goes largely un-noticed.

*

Elsewhere.

On a large blue billboard The College of Christ the Redemeer advertises its courses in Theology, Computer Technology, Business Studies and English Lessons.

Not far off in the South London rain a chalk-board slogan beckons you to the

Most of the lettering in white chalk, the word English capitalised in red.

Thanks. But no thanks.

we are walking on the roofs, and he's talking us through the
footprint of the building from above,
the different areas, gesturing around, we're stood on a 3-d map.
Below that's the foyer… out there that way, that's the fly tower,
over there, right up the edge there that's the studio.
We step this way and that on the silver roof paint,
that part there, with the tiled roof, that's the original stage and auditorium, it's just fraction of the complex,
then we're on the move again, wary of the edges, stepping the low 'walls' which mark the boudaries of the separate buildings/extensions/additions to the structure below
look he says, that's the city wall, he's pointing out and down to the stone structure running off beneath us and away from the building, before it's sandwiched between two much more modern structures. We look out over the city trying to get a fix on location,
below us the warren of the spaces we've walked through – under stages and over them, through corridors, passages, second-foyers and studios, past offices and apparently random apparently windowless rooms, through construction spaces, ascending and descending to second balconies, third balconies etc – knots and unknots, tumbling in mental space, as it tries to match, settle or cohere with the plan view we have from up here but whichever way I picture it, whichever way I twist, stretch, bend or compress the model in my head, it seems unlikely that the space below our feet could ever contain the whole of what we saw.

*

later, in another city. Up there on the stage one of the dancers in the golden 60's mini dresses (it's the one with the beard) neglects to put down her bottle of beer as they traipse to the stage for the song, so that the section with the synchronised hand movements – the Supreme's Stop In The Name of Love – has only two outstretched hands to gesture the punctuation Stop!, and a third which seems to vaguely proffer a bottle.

“First we look to buy a nice house and car. Then we buy guns and other weapons. The rest of the money we use to relax.”

Suddenly it’s all Somali pirates all the time, all driving speedboats, all loading their machine guns and rocket launchers, all chewing the narcotic leaf qat and dreaming of ways out of the zone – here, here, here and everywhere else. Where is the amazing Kathy Acker when you need someone to mix this stuff up a bit?

*

Initially, the team created a procedural sky rendering approached based on algorithms — which led to a totally unconvincing skybox that was clearly inferior to what a hand-authored skybox would be. “We considered it to be a total failure,” he said.

He explained that a great deal of focus must be put on the tools that surround the algorithms, to allow the systems to be properly harnessed. In the end, the game shipped with a revamped procedural sky system that ended up much more effective than the first attempt. It takes into account myriad weather patterns, atmospheric conditions, and other variables.

Following earlier post on games testing, and in general zone of The Broken World, the quote above comes from a nice piece here at Gamasutra on virtual world creation and how developers, like those of Far Cry 2, are increasingly minded to use what they call ‘procedural content generation’ to make spaces, environments and so on from sets of rules and more-or-less random variables. I still can’t quite explain or understand why I find this kind of thing so totally fascinating. Link via Boing Boing.