The Closest You Can Come To Escape

23 July 2007

A nice invite for my video Starfucker as part of a show which will be in Stadtgalerie, Bern this September 8 – October 21st.

Curator Barnaby Drabble wrote me:

I originally saw the work in a hotel in St Sebastian at around three in the morning when i drunkenly turned on the tv set in the corner of the room and encountered the work (in Spanish) broadcast on a late night arts channel. I was thoroughly confused about what exactly I was watching, I had been hoping for figure skating.

The show Ein Zweites Leben/A Second Life sounds great in fact, with the following narrative explaining part of it’s rationale:

As a short and easy overlooked side-plot in his most famous detective novel The Maltese Falcon, the American author Dashiel Hammet introduces us to the story of an everyday estate-agent named Flitcraft who, after a close brush with death on his lunch-break, leaves his wife and baby and simply disappears. When Hammet’s detective Sam Spade manages to track him down he finds him living under an assumed name in another suburb, similar to the one he lived in before, married to a woman more or less the same age as his wife, with a baby much like the one he left behind. When confronted by Spade, Flitcraft shows no remorse, explaining that in his organized life this was the closest he could come to escape.

In the third in a series of international exhibitions looking at contemporary pop-cultural phenomena the British curator Barnaby Drabble shows works from a selection of artists who deal with issues of re-enactment, multiple identities, double-agency and parallel worlds…

 

Homework

20 July 2007

Kids in Conakry, Guinea gather late at night to revise for exams in the airport’s main carpark, vying for positions under the streetamps. The country’s economy is in severe crisis and most of the country, under martial law, is currently without electric power. A scene that’s at the same time too strange, vivid and touching, too depressing and somehow optimistic to have been invented – with a reality like this one Science Fiction scarcely seems necessary.

The lot is teeming with girls and boys by the time Air France Flight 767 rounds the Gulf of Guinea at an hour-and-a-half before midnight. They hardly look up from their notes as the Boeing jet begins its spiraling descent over the dark city, or as the newly arrived passengers come out, shoving luggage carts over the cracked pavement.   

“I used to study by candlelight at home but that hurt my eyes. So I prefer to come here. We’re used to it,” says 18-year-old Mohamed Sharif, who sat under the fluorescent beam memorizing notes on the terrain of Mongolia for the geography portion of his college entrance test.

I found the story by a link at the excellent BoingBoing.

In Mail

A friend, E, from whom I didn't hear in a long while wrote this to me:

"the other day, I put on a jacket which I hadn't taken for ages. what I found in the pocket was a theatre ticket from 1994. A moment which made me really feel how fundamentally times have changed in the past 10 to 15 years. But which also brought back something from that time, you know, the Proust kind of thing. It was BAK Truppen at Theater am Turm Frankfurt. A company which probably no longer exists, a theatre which no longer exists. Even the money which the ticket was paid in no longer exists. (but both, this company and the theatre, had fundamentally shaped my vision of theatre/performance.) I know it sounds banal, but there are those moments which make things clear in an unexpected way. sharp. and at the same time such moments bring back an imprint of how one used to be, used to feel and no longer is. makes me think about in which way I no longer exist. I mean, the "I" from that time, from ten years ago, it just no longer exists. again, nothing to be sentimental about. strange enough that all the correspondance from those times still is hidden somewhere in the far back of my computer. hard to believe, taking into account how often one changes the computer, the crashes etc. but, no, it is still there, isn't even dusty, the system still can read it. of course I cannot go through it again, just one glimpse, there it says, "that I can´t know you like this". no. seeing it with different eyes, we used to say. but what really is it that's different? sediments of experiences. can I still write to you like this? for a moment I feel quite close…"
 

Small Pieces

19 July 2007

New Tony White story at 1001 Night’s Cast here, complete with the narrator cheerfully drawing attention to the total absurdity of his or her own selections of material. Once again (as I wrote about a little here) there’s a very beautiful sense of letting disconnected things (stories and voices) sit together in a suspension, and then just leaving it all for the reader to figure out.

I just caught up with the fact that The Fall’s Mark E. Smith made a collaboration with Mouse on Mars by name of Von Sudenfed. I guess I wasn’t paying enough attention. One track here.

 

Background Artist

17 July 2007

Days doing micro-editing on The Broken World – moving into the final phase with it. I love Word’s track changes function because it at least starts to show something of the layers and layers that a text has. Some of the sentences I am working on I must have written in their first form three years ago and they’ve been through endless variation, wholesale rewriting here, erasure, restoration, minute additions and subtractions. (See also my recent project for the Sheffield Pavilion in Venice – City Changes).

On the level I’m working at right now what’s interesting to me is that a lot of the work is so much refining (or pointless twiddling). I’m *supposed* to be tightening the structure in the middle of the book (which I am doing, honest) but at the same time I do get sucked into details. Waves of work in which I add words here and there, making it flow more easily, followed by days in which I decide this flow is too comfortable and I go thru removing the new stuff, even erasing words here and there from the original, cutting up the flow in places.

Another delight of this stage (or any stage) is the process of endlessly adding to or tweaking jokes. It’s amazing the amount of fun to be had just slightly changing the punch-line or pay-off of something, or adding a whole new clause to an already ridiculous sentence.

 

I get a sense doing this work, and again in writing the recent story for 1001 Nights Cast that somehow I trade majorly in comical irrelevance and apparent digression. Narrators/voices that are never really getting to the point, or who are straying from the point very often and as far as possible.  Also the totally irrelevant fact from the background pulled out as preposterous foreground. Makes me think (on a tangent) of that description of movie extras (or is it scenery painters?) – as ‘background artists’. Manipulation of background. As if foreground were (is in fact) only ever an excuse for what you are *really* doing, elsewhere.

 

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Best graffiti of the week, an artfully dripped set of stencil capitals: YOU WANT IT SO BAD

 

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Best sight of the week, so far: aeroplanes slowly criss-crossing the darkening sky above Central Park as we watched The Decemberists last night.

Sold The House

14 July 2007

Best overheard cell-phone conversation:

No, no you don’t understand. Mum has sold the house.. But she doesn’t own it.

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Drama Queens Controllers

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Came across an interview with Michael Elmgreen whose project Drama Queens with Ingar Dragest at Munster Skulptur Project I wrote the text for.

I borrowed the picture above, which shows the operators in charge of moving the remote controlled sculptures.

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Alex Petridis is often best when he’s criticising. But here he gives a positive but very amusing write up to Birmingham band Poppy and the Jezebels.

Murky Notes

13 July 2007
1001 Nights - It Is Murky And Opaque

I just submitted my story for tonights 1001 Nights Cast. It will be broadcast live at 20.53 UK time at the site above – just less than four hours from the moment of my posting this. Later it will be added to the archive on the site where you can read it. The prompt for the story was “it is murky and opaque“.

Meanwhile Lyn Gardner at The Guardian has something on her blog discussing the publication Programme Notes which she, I and a whole load of other contemporary performance people have contributed to. The book is available from the Live Art Development Agency here and consists of writings, case studies and so on exploring the relationship between mainstream theatre venues here in the UK and more experimental practise. Its a fraught topic, and one which can induce feelings of despair (!) but the hope is that things in the UK are slowly shifting towards a more challenging, open and inclusive definition of what theatre might be, especially in the larger spaces.

Let’s hope, keep fingers crossed (and lobby), that further cuts to the Grants For the Arts scheme, or a negative result for the Arts Council in the Government’s upcoming Comprehensive Spending Review don’t make the environment for innovation even more precarious or hostile.

Simulated Mission

12 July 2007

I definitely won't be applying for this which sounds more insane than almost anything Ballard ever dreamed up. You can wonder really what the organisers – the European Space Agency and the wonderfully titled Institute of Biomedical Problems – are looking to discover. Perhaps the strangest thing about it though is that Endemol aren't involved in any way, at least not yet. As soon as the floods have subsided I am thinking of organising a similar experiment in my cellar, if anyone wants to participate. 

Food, Irony, Dogs and Dust

11 July 2007

A place to eat where the words ‘fresh food prepared on the premises’ seemed more like a warning than any kind of advertisment or inducement to consume. Indeed as a statement it only seemed to flag the need for more detailed enquiries, suggesting questions like – where exactly on the premises was the food allegedly prepared, by whom and when?

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A very strong new story from M John Harrison at 1001 Nites Cast from the great prompt “not a hint of irony“.  Maybe it’s my jetlag but this one seems more melancholic than the others Mike’s done there. Perhaps it’s all in the narrator’s distance from events, and in his articulation of a world in which certain possibilities cannot or should not, or can no longer be explored.

For no good reason (I think) the story brought to mind these lines which I’d cut and pasted from an online guide to Beijing, a few years ago.

After the destruction of all the capital’s dogs in 1950, it was the turn of sparrows in 1956. A measure designed to preserve grain, its only effect was to lead to an increase in the insect population. To combat this, all the grass was pulled up, which in turn led to dust storms in the windy winter months.

I’m writing again for the 1001 project on Friday – I have the feeling its going to be a strange one since because of timezones I’m getting the prompt first thing in the morning and I have to have it written by noon.

High Negatives

10 July 2007

In the walkway down to the plane, the guy behind us says:

"Clinton won't be elected. She has such high negatives".