months ago. you are sitting in the lobby of a hotel somewhere (not England), waiting for taxi… as unseen, to your left, a pair of receptionists make early morning wake-up calls – one after another, after another after another. The calls coming out of phase with each other "Good morning. This is your wake-up call.. it’s 7am..", "Good morning. This is your wake-up call.. it’s 7am, this is your wake-up call….", "Good morning. it’s 7am.." And as you sit there you imagine all those sleepy hands reaching for phones, all those interrupted dreams, all those narratives (lives) starting over again after the interregnum of the night.
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afternoon of new years eve. city centre. light fading but not yet gone from the sky. a man and a woman in a blurred dance, she pulling cans of special brew from a polythene bag, opening them and pouring the contents out into the gutter, the guy staring at her in resigned show, at a metre’s slow motion distance staggering slightly and watching his lifeblood glug out there into a set of mingling pools on the cracked paving. no one pays much attention.
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Some nice material about Anna Chapman and her appearance on a Russian chat show, Let Them Speak, here .
On being asked if she would die for her country, she gives this very natural and easy going answer: "The incorruptibility of a person is one of the most important qualities. The only thing more important than patriotism is to be humane. Love of the motherland is vital to be a happy person."
Also an appearance by Chapman’s grandma, narrating how, as a child, Chapman had a favourite book called, The Tale of the Military Secret. "We used to play out the roles… I would tie Anya up and say, ‘Tell me the secret!’ But she would always reply, ‘No!’ very severely. And I would shoot her."
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New project. As if I didn’t have enough to do I launched a new web-project which will be updated daily with new entries through the whole of 2011. Scurrilous and often abusive or obscene Vacuum Days is a rolling version of the booklets of imaginary events I’ve produced from time to time for specific contexts in the last couple of years.
Vacuum Days, 2012