But Who's Counting

 

 Further facelessness. 

 In the temple-like vault of a former bank stand six-hundred-and-fifty defaced and numbered photographs of the artist Sarah Maple and her child, one defacing for every breastfeed given over a three month period. A lot more than I expected. It's called "Labour Of Love". I don't know if it will still be up on Saturday.

 

 I was down there today to scout the marble counting house I'll be in this weekend as part of Gemma Brockis' contribution to The Golden Key, a massive City of London commission from Coney and Friends, which will see the normally dead-at-weekends Square Mile come alive with activity and riff raff like me, and perhaps you! 

 

   

 

 Specifically, we'll be part of The Maze of Adventures: "Choose wisely, friend," insists the blurb  – a voice from a simpler time perhaps, before the pound found itself battling gravity like Indiana Jones – "as you will not able to see them all..." That isn't much help, sorry, but we'll be there somewhere. I'm not sure if I can give away the vault's exact location, but when I used to do the Ghost Bus Tours we'd get stuck in traffic outside of it for anything up to half an hour and have to vamp about plague pits – Oh, I hadn't thought about them! The City's full of subterranean material, but I think we'll be sticking to counting.

 

THE YEAR IN REHASH: APRIL - I've Decided To Read Aloud All of Daniel Defoe's "A Journal Of The Plague Year" On Youtube.

 Another day, another three of my favourite, or at least more conspicuous posts from the last twelve months: April saw us head indoors and online and I'd never felt so grateful in my life to be living alone. I could still see my friends because everyone was now making stuff – it turns out it hadn't been the internet keeping everyone listless, it had been pubs. Carrie was Nincompooping now, and Arthur Shappey was learning the piano while the canon of his facial hair slowly aligned with John's, so I thought I'd joined in, and it staggers me to think that April saw me not only embark upon this project but complete it and move onto The Complete Works of Shakespeare before the month was over. That's how much time was slowing down. Plague Year's still a very pertinent read by the way; there was no way this was going to be over by the Summer. This is from April the 2nd...

 

London in 1665 (source)

 A couple of days ago I started reading Daniel Defoe's "A Journal of the Plague Year" which I just happened to have in the flat, and I found it so interesting I've decided to start reading it aloud on youtube for anyone else who might to enjoy these insights into 1665 (dressed for some reason in "It Only Hurts When I Laugh" pyjamas.) It's a novel rather than a journal, a work of well researched fiction, as Defoe was actually five when the plague hit, and I haven't finished the book yet so there might be all kinds of horrors in store. Be warned, it starts, as much apocalyptic fiction does, with a dry list of the initial death tallies, so if you want to jump right into the human interest stuff with the narrator debating whether or not to leave the city or stay and look after his business (plus some laughs) skip to 12:52, and if you just want to skip my opening waffle go to 1:40. Here then are the first twelve pages.

 I should be able to post one of these a day if you fancy subscribing. Or if you're interested but don't want to have to put up with me reading it, the full "journal" is available to read for yourself online here. And that's a hundred straight posts in a hundred days! I do find it odd that I started this before, as it were, I needed to. I think I've been subconsciously self-isolating since the election, basically. Posting happy thoughts only though. Happy thoughts and the plague. I hope everyone's doing superbly! Big love.

Frankenstein Postlude: My Brain's Goofy Stage

 Here's something I found, unposted from 2015: I had my brain scanned. It was an experiment in which I had to lie in a tube, playing word association games every five minutes, between which my brain was supposed to wind down while I counted to twenty. But I found the counting surprisingly difficult, knowing I was being scanned. It's one of the most basic things to forget, and there are very few clues to find your way back into it if you've simply forgotten how to count. Afterwards, I was shown the inside of my head, which was great fun. Yours is probably not dissimilar. Enjoy.

 It should play.

What NONO What

 

Blimey is that the time?

Three in the morning. Um - Ah. Look. I found these:

 

I can't stay. Sorry. I shouldn't even be here. 

Look! I did those when I was four! How cool!

If I had more time I might argue that the unloading of all this stuff actually relates to a conversation I had in Cambridge today about ideas, the instant of an idea, the storing of that idea, the writing down of it, the changing of it, the losing of it, and cleaning. I've been asked to participate in something called "I shall never be clean". I'll explain. Just not now. "You can't clean anything without making something else dirty," Jeremy pointed out, and I think this project of his is going to be a bit of a clearout after ten years of not making. And those are often very good.

 

Actually as I'm here I might as well clear some things up:

My phone is now working again after a couple of sessions on the radiator, but its session in the coffee has made the joystick stick a little. Joylessly.

The documentary I was voice-overing yesterday for the SciFi channel turned out to be about "Heroes", and not Mary Shelley or string theory, which I'd sort of guessed really. And it turned out I'd been hired by Steve Hore who made that show-reel where I get born. Surprise. Lovely.

It's pronounced "George Ta-KAY" apparently. Not Takeye.

Laurence and Gus had their final table-read today, which I couldn't make (Cambridge, see above) and having totally failed to make good on a promise (at least to myself) of an epic sketch concerning Elizabethan conjuror (read "map-reader") Dr. John Dee and his earless, klepto stooge Ned Kelly, I submitted instead some last-minute stuff that was old and weak and listlessly tinkered with at five in the morning WHICH IT IS NOW AS WELL!!!...

NO!!!

HOW CAN IT BE FIVE?!?!? Hhhhh...

Anyway - thereby ends with a snivel and a whimper an assignment that up until that dawning has been all grins and zeal.

Anyway.

And Shunt are giving me everything I ask for and more regarding "Jonah". Which is incredibly exciting but does mean I have to get some work done now. Or maybe fume with hubris and balls this up as well. I see Chris Goode (see past strands and tangents) has kindly posted the following plug on his blog, which has made me laugh and will have to make do in lieu of a press release. Now GOOD NIGHT. NIGHT. GOOD NIGHT.

"This revival might be garbage, who knows, but the several times I saw it at CPT, it frightened and baffled and upset me and made me laugh, all in ways that I normally associate only with getting out of the bath in a heavily mirrored room. It is ruthlessly inventive, acutely painful and, oh, stuff. It is also very titillatingly close to this new invention of mine called theatre."

 

FOLD YOUR ARMS (seating)

"So what did you think of the music?"

I couldn't say. I wanted a table.

And here I return belatedly to the text "It's not their job to not look stupid." (Although the easier option will always be to do what I did in the last post ie. throw some old, recently unpacked English exercises up on the net… Actually, here's another: 

 

You see, there is such a thing as having too many apples. Apparently if you start attracting tigers then you know... And what was Mrs. Burnside doing while I churned out this unchecked, speculative drivel? Counting apples. I've lost my thread now. I mean it's barely worth returning to but I might as well.) Two points really. The first:

Last Wednesday in the Shunt Lounge (an increasingly common point of reference in these posts, though not - I sympathize - a Common Point of Reference) three musicians sat improvising in a tunnel on a raised concrete plateau before a lit bank of about 200 no-frills, pull-out, flip-up seats. I think one or two of them were making exploratory noises with instruments while the other processed these on laptop. Anyway it was packed. People were blocking fire exits.
But:
Now:
If you wanted to listen to this music, you had to watch it. (Or else stand at the side and watch other people watching it.) You couldn't sit at a table or lie on your back. You had to place yourself in the socially awkward position of noisily clambering over well-dressed strangers to sit still on a hard seat, fold your arms and watch three men variously scratch, drop and tune things or stare at a laptop. Which as a performance, if you think about it, looked stupid. But only because of how everyone was seated. Do you see?

2nd point: In that same Lounge I was reunited with Silvia and Gemma who had just returned from Sardinia. They'd been invited to perform a show based on Pinnochio up in the hills. Here the paying audience were seated in a mini (and driven around) while an unpaying, unseated audience of neighbouring Sardinian hillbillies heckled, threw rocks, threatened arson and finally went to the priest who recommended a sentence of death by hanging for witchcraft. At any rate that was the verdict that reached Silvia and Gemma in a black Pinto at two o'clock in the morning. So they moved on.

I don't really know what conclusion I meant to draw from this except that, I don't know, between these two points there surely exists a happy medium.