Strange thing about the early slot in the huge city pool is that they seem to test the fire alarms at a set time each day, when there's not so many customers around. So as you make your way through the water in the great emptiness of the competition pool, not quite yet awake, you often get this voice booming from the PA:

This is an announcement for all staff and customers. We are about to test the fire alarms. No action is to be taken. We are about to test the fire alarms. No action is to be taken.

Then a short pause, and the fire alarm itself comes on as promised, which in this case is just a short bell sound followed by another announcement:

There is an emergency. Would all staff and customers please exit the building by the nearest possible route. Please evacuate the building.

I've liked starting the day with this strange contradiction, living between the denial and the assertion of an emergency.

Later at the cafe down the road to get coffee, three days running I came in through the door to find the same song greeted me – 10cc's 1975 art pop I'm Not In Love. It wasn't the childhood song or the words I thought about so much, as the fact that my routine was colliding me with yet another sonic repetition. I had to imagine the cafe owner coming in at the same time each day, switching stuff on and hitting play on the only compilation CD, the same tracks playing through over an hour or so before 10cc came around with its pre-sampler loops and whispering voices, just in time for me to come in through the door.

Emailing a little with Christine Tomeh about participating in Home Works: A Forum on Cultural Practices, a festival involving performance, video, installation etc., the next edition of which which takes place in Beirut this April. I loved this description she sent:

The first edition of the Home Works Forum opened in early April 2002, coincided with the outbreak of the Second Intifada in Palestine, the second edition opened in late October of 2003, after a six-months delay due to regional upheavals caused by the US invasion of Iraq, the third edition was due to take place in mid-November 2005, again after a 6-months delay due to the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri in February 2005. At this point the Home Works Forum has (we think) settled into a regular schedule of regular disruptions. This unpredictable dynamic has become a rhythm, a paradoxical routine. Because the practical and political circumstances around our work are always breaking and shifting relevant questions about dislocation and disruption have imposed themselves repeatedly.

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Two days after No Country For Old Men I’m still in an enjoyable shock about how casually at a certain point it throws away one particular narrative tension, and how much (very cruel) fun it has at the viewer’s expense in denying access to a certain scene. (If you’ve seen the movie you’ll know what I’m talking about – if not, I’m not spoiling the surprise). In a not-unrelated conversation just after the film M. asked “Oh yes. What did happen to the money in the end? Who got it?” Took us most of the ride home to remember/figure it out, and even then we weren’t totally sure. I loved this sense of certain things (characters, plotlines, events) moving slightly in and out of focus as the film went on. Loved also the film’s mini-theme of very badly wounded guys buying clothes off of strangers for disguise, bandage or tourniquet purposes.

Ant Hampton sent me info on upcoming London showings of the Rotozaza performance Five in the Morning. It’s next week –  February 13th and 14th – at 7.15pm at the Shunt Lounge, London Bridge. Tickets are £5 – free to Shunt Lounge members. Here’s more info on the show, including a very nice New York Times review.

Also got mail from Michael Thomas of the Chicago based performance outfit Lucky Pierre who says they are “collecting short writings (memories/fragments/ http://timetchells.com/images/analysis) about a big topic, the Vietnam war”. Contributions in the form of writing or images are welcome, and are held anonymously, being gathered on the project’s web-page in digital stream of consciousness/fragment archives titled Collective Vietnam. Here’s one fragment of the text submitted so far:

I have a memory of my eldest brother burning his draft card in our backyard in Kansas City. I don’t know whether this was an act of civil disobedience, a celebration of the war’s end, an empty “high draft number” display, or a false memory. It was summer and he wasn’t wearing a shirt. Or that’s how my memory has it. I was born in 1961 and he was born in 1952 or 1953. That is the only thing I remember about the Viet Nam war. And it might not actually have happened.

For myself I can’t decide which of the fragments from Michael Herr’s amazing book Dispatches I can pretty much quote from memory would be best to send them. Think it might be this one:

I went to cover the war… behind the crude but serious belief that you had to be able to look at anything, serious because I acted on it and went, crude because I didn’t know, it took the war to teach it, that you are as responsible for everything you saw as you were for everything you do. The problem was that you didn’t always know what you were seeing until later, maybe years later, it just stayed stored there in your eyes…

Came across this in my notes from a few years back, quoting an interview with Christopher Walken in the New York Times.

When he first started in film, Walken would immerse himself in researching a role, but it didn’t take. Instead, he adopted a novel line-reading technique. When he received a script, Walken would immediately cross out all the punctuation. Nowadays, he no longer has to mark up the pages he just doesn’t see full stops or commas any more. ‘It lets you decide what the important word is,’ Walken says. ‘It might be the noun, it might be the verb. It might be a word you never thought of.’

Walken also does his lines in various voices. He gives me an example. He pretends he is going to the gas chamber and says, ‘I don’t wanna die.’ First, he does it straight, then in what he calls his ‘Mamma mia what a pizza’ voice, followed by that of a Gestapo officer and, finally, in one of his favourites, Bugs Bunny. ‘That’s why I love listening to people with accents,’ Walken says. ‘They’re always emphasising the wrong word, and it makes me think.’

 Searching for the above online I then chanced upon this:

“Sometimes,” says Walken, “in a scene, without telling the other actor, I’ll pretend that I’m Elvis. I’ll just pretend I’m Elvis and the other actor will not know. And it’ll make me smile. Or even just smile inside. I’m doing Elvis and this guy doesn’t know I’m doing Elvis. I do it when things are getting stale. I’ll do it to, like, juice things up a little.”

The full interview of the above quote (from The Guardian, in 2003) is here.

Watching the right hand of the audience member in front of me shift to her companion's back as the performance continues. She makes vague stroking motions at the base of her partner's spine while he leans forwards. Her hand climbing slowly upwards. Patting. Circling. Her fingers go up towards his neck. I recognise it instantly as the kind of  apologetic, absent-minded massage that gets made to a lover you have invited to something which proves to be difficult, or boring, or unbearable. A present, a making-up, even as the event itself unfolds, a silent negotiation with someone who you know already, 'hates this kind of thing'.

Small ways to say sorry. A touch with the hand, or the fingers, or the leg, or the foot. A whispered word. A kiss on the neck or the ear. A sustained moment of contact – thigh pressed next to thigh or knee to knee. Repeated patting of the palm. Tracing letters (or hearts or kisses) on the palm or the back of the hand. Eye contact. A smile. A shrug. Pulling a face that says 'I am going crazy with this too…' or pulling a face that says 'I am sorry.. I know!'. 

Saturday I was sitting for the portrait by Toine Horvers which I mentioned already here. The task at this point was for him to get a photograph that will be the basis of the picture and at the same time for me to describe my face more or less as it appears in the same light and situation, generating text that will the be written over and layer the image. Getting the photograph was simple enough – 12 shots in natural light, straight to camera. Once it was done I spent 30-45 minutes sat in the same place – in the open doorway of Hugo’s studio (best light in the neighborhood) – staring at my reflection in a mirror on a music stand that trembled now and then in the breeze. I wrote fast as much as I could, (it was cold and I was half naked), and didn’t allow myself to revise or re-structure. I found the work pretty hard – in a good way – realising again and again that I didn’t have the skills (or the right kind of visual or mental organisation?) to be methodical in the task – and guessing that Toine, trained in life class drawing, or photographers Hugo or Tamar (who took the picture) – would likely have made a much more systematic and clear job of it all. Started to think too, that in my whole written output since the age of 20 or whatever there’s probably never been a single detailed description of a face anywhere – probably few descriptions of faces at all. Trying to figure out what that might mean and guessing that it might be something to do with how seriously I’m taking my fictional propositions. Below there’s a chunk of what I wrote on Saturday. In Toine’s final work this (and the rest of it) will get written across the picture, comments on specific parts or areas of the face written specifically onto or over them, the general description or phrases written bold and all over…  a kind of mapping the text to its subject that produces the kinds of concentrations, obliterations, spaces and re-emphases that the tests already show.

…stray hairs on the top of the forehead. Like trees, isolated trees sticking up out of floodwater. The place where the hair of the sideburns meets the beard on the right (as I look at it) is where the mix of colours is most intense – white, ginger brown, grey. Slight pink of the cheeks. Thick heavy shadow in the corners below the mouth. A burst of white on the right corner of the chin. Points of light in the eyes. The hair of the beard moving upwards onto the cheeks, thinning out, individual hairs visible – white grey black. Too many to count? Probably, A spot in the middle of the chin itself here where seems to be no hair. Smiling changes everything. Suddenly there are new lines that go from the corners of the eyes to the edges of the face. Three or four lines going upwards, more going downwards. The lines filled with shadow. Lines from the corners of the nose, reaching down to the mouth. Lines under the eyes, layers of shadow under the eyes. Dispersed blemishes – a tiny faint spot to the right side of the nose. Above it to the right another even fainter spot. On the other side a larger spot, not discoloured, just more like  circle of raised skin. A strange line almost following the cheekbone (but higher) on the right-hand side. Worried again that I am losing track of left and right, then laughing about it, which produces new lines, movements, shifts the shadows. Filling into the detail of my face, I am completely unable to make any kind of consistent orientation. Eyes scanning it. No sooner that I started on describing one thing I already lost interest in it and found something else.  Eyes again. A sudden stillness where you think, for no reason, now I am here. Ears. Sea shell curves and shadows. High points of light. The Guggenheim. Eyes. The number of times I sat in front of the camera in the daylight of the widow of my own bedroom for some video or another. Only there always talking or thinking. And here writing. The tensing and relaxing of the muscles under the eyes. Swallowing animates the neck. There is the biopsy scar on the left side of the neck.  Hairline crack in the skin. To the base of that scar, where it curves to the Adam’s apple you can still see the smaller lines left by each of the stitches. There, just above that is the blue/purple mark, the small indentation which Vlatka always called hers and which the surgery in 2004 – the biopsy or the sternotomy I can’t remember – basically destroyed, knotting it into scar tissue. But then, a year or more later it returned. The difference between the first hairs of the chest – wispy, vague, tangled  and the lowest hairs of the beard (the ones that spill down the neck). The scar like  a railway track snaking across, a ridge that catches the light,  going nowhere. In the centre of the chest, leading up to it I can just see the thicker scar from the sternotomy – the drawn purple line that divides me. And left of that at the shoulder, the mess made by numerous pacemaker operations. A single similar scar at the right – that strange white skin of  scar, again the stitches.  A tangle of scars – plus some hairs, some discoloured skin. Face moving a lot now because I am laughing because I have the sudden idea I am describing a monster. Wondering if every face described would be this way once looked at in detail. No, definitely not. Softer light now. Kinder. And my face relaxed. Unable to keep its public shape, its camera shape, too long. Or aware that it is dissolving in any case by virtue of this disorganised description. Aware that I am not sticking to the facts. But not sure what the facts are. Smoother forehead now, but still marked by 5 lines…

Talking to Ong Keng Sen about Vietnam and Cambodia. He describes the flood of exiles/emigres returning in recent times to the former especially, somehow trying to recreate the lives they’ve lived elsewhere. He describes their presence in the captial and elsewhere (their bars and cafes, their arts scene, their.. ) as in some way as like scar tissue. New tissue whose very presence reflects damage, and which although it sticks out, is still in the first instance, a part of the same body. Layer after layer he says. Old scar and new scar, untouched skin and altered skin as metaphors for the change in a country.

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Talking to Eva Meyer Keller and Alexandra Bachzetsis about play doctors. That strange feeling that overtakes you sometimes – when watching other people’s work – that you could fix it. An effect of the distance and the space for fantasy I am sure.

Eva also sent me images from a new project she’s doing in collaboration with Sybille Müller. The piece will involve a small group of kids working together to create versions of catastrophes – floods, hurricanes, explosions and more – using household materials. Looks like it will turn into a very smart piece – a more epic sequel perhaps to her brilliant Death Is Certain. Here’s a quote from her talking about that earlier piece:

“I’m just handling/ using harmless things, that everyone has at home in the kitchen or in their toolbox… Things you find in the supermarket… Everybody knows how it feels to have a knife, a hair dryer or an iron in their hand. At the same time, I’m not trying to recreate a kitchen on stage at all. It’s more that I invite these objects into the theatre and let them stand for what they signify. Throughout the performance they gain or change their… characteristics….. In the mind they might become torture tools… “