Door Number 3. (This is going to be a drum.)

 A nice plug in the Guardian yesterday for Gemma Brockis' Oddvent calendar, and thanks to Gemma for allowing me to grant all of you ole unattendees Very Important Person access, as we say in the threshold business, through today's door. Click here to open it and witness my contribution – possibly inspired by the Cosmic Shambles' many show-and-tells – there's more information about the calendar here, and if you need one the password for today is "help". (My first idea was to giftwrap an egg, but I'm not doing that now, so giftwrapping an egg is still going.) Enjoy! 

 

 UPDATE: Now the Calendar has vanished, my contribution's up on youtube.

I Want To Be In That Number...

 

 News: Gemma Brockis has made another website! The tiny moments of contemplation afforded by the December tradition of looking for a door, wondering what might be behind it, then opening and finding out, have inspired her to curate her own advent calendar, and I've signed up to be one of the doors. The brief she sent out says "this is not for children. Though I imagine there might be some things they enjoy. That's not to say it's marketed as an ADULT ADVENT CALENDAR but it's particularly for people living alone. So. Hopefully not children." Gemma explains more here.

With Apologies to Any Orthodox Antiochians on Little Edward Street

 Act Three won't be up before midnight now, I'm afraid, as my laptop crashed five hours into a six hour load, so apologies. Also, I've just this moment decided that, once I'm done with Richard II, I might switch to posting an act every other day now, rather than every day – planning and performing one day, and editing the next – so as to leave a little more room for discoveries, and see if this makes for a happier hobbying (and also to give me time to work out what I'm actually going to do for a living). Now that my days are more ordered, it's clear that I've definitely been working more than eight hours a day on these, which wasn't the plan at all, but I've also managed to get outside every day, an improvement on two months ago, and today I found a door to a secret society, so that is what I'm sharing. Annoyingly, you can't necessarily tell it's a secret society from this photograph, because the narrowness of the alley down which I found it meant I had to photograph the door in portrait mode and panaroma, therefore it looks a little distorted anyway. But the tell, of course, is that the door is narrower at the top than at the bottom. All doors to secret societies are narrower at the top. The narrower the top of the door, the more secret what's behind it. (Alright, this a church. But for buildings that anyone can just walk into, some churches have really nailed that "House Of Secrets" look.)

Arithmophobia Is All Around.

 I've just finished watching Don't F*** With Cats on Netflix. It wasn't what I expected, and I think I might have hated watching it. This is not a recommendation. But I wanted to see how it ended, and as someone who's worked with both Jack the Ripper and Shakespeare I felt maybe I should keep abreast of contemporary developments in self-mythologising monstrousness. One of the problems of course is that everyone always joins in with the mythologising, and this documentary confesses to being as guilty of that as the next ghoul, but in its adoption of horror tropes it brought to my attention one I'd never considered before, even though I as a writer have also used the trope (and I can't find it on tvtropes.org either), namely that of the Scary Number.

 A camera cranes in onto the "19" on the door of an apartment in Paris for example, or an internet café owner in Berlin will point to a stall and say "This is it. Number 25."  The cliché is that certain numbers have a power, but they all seem to, just the fact of them - the factiness even. 10 Rillington Place. Room 237. Inside Number 9. Arithmobia is a fear not of specific numbers, but of numbers in general. And that's what I can't work out - whether the Scary Number is simply a horror trope borne of True Crime, or whether it speaks to something more primal... The Matrix.... The Prisoner... Like shadows, snakes and skeletons, have we always just, secretly, found numbers inherently evil?
 Because if we have, I can see that becoming a problem.

The single most simple invention 1: DOOR

 

 Is the above a less attractive proposition than the below?

 

 

 It's Shunt's new door. I like it. The old one was just a flat grey surface, and had to be broken down by the Emergency Services when a reveler got locked in for the night… underground, in the dark, with the rats... imagine. We get a lot of revelers now. "What are they queueing for?" asked Nigel. I know. Closed, the door is the perfect entrance. Opened, everything starts to go a little wrong: a bucket is rattled, names put down if you want to see a show, necks stamped – "Just the write the fucking names down, Simon"... Season at the door "can't stand ditherers" (I had no pen) – But what can we do, ye cannae change the laws of physics... 

  No-one likes lists. But if they hand people a page of Danielle Steele instead, and say that everyone with a page of Danielle Steele will get in to see your show, then you're simply left three minutes before curtain running in and out of four-hundred pouting midriffs looking for the one friend you have to hand a page of Danielle Steele to because you couldn't just put their name down on a list... 

 And you really hope it's worth it... Even though so much fun is clearly being had, you really hope something somewhere in the future is being – well – funded by all this. Because if that thing in the future doesn't exist, then for two seconds, three seconds, all these beautiful people turn in your head into shiny insects swarming round a corpse. And that's loonythink. 

 

 The shed that stands in the corner of Gary's bar was covered in silver foil to mark a week of Andy Warhol, and it lasted a night. Roland's idea. He was curating for that week, the week of "contains violence". And what did Ned Mond say when he turned up? Something cool about this night being an antidote to the National Lottery ("a tax on the barely affluent") where the wealthy pile in to give artists money for booze and have their photos taken in front of a giant can of soup. 

 And then he started to tell me about the Nitrate Mining Ghost-towns of South America he'd been looking up on the internet. He'd found one with a theatre. And a population of one. He was thinking of taking a show over. 

 The audience for our little bit of "contains violence" was limited to the number of headphones. So forty-three, I think. It went well. It's going to be very good when it's finally on at (ie opposite) the Lyric in Hammersmith (there'll be two-hundred headphones by then, and two-hundred sets of opera glasses, and hopefully two-hundred punters standing on the balcony... that's going to look great). In it, I had to lip-synch to a speech about "arsehole-bleaching" originally recorded by David (Rosenberg, who made it). The only way to pull it off was to just do it as him, big eyes and arm-span, and so I found that interesting. I've tried lip-synching before, in shows I've made myself, but never come close to getting it right... or rather "never got it right", because it's lip-synching. It's either right or it's wrong. That's also what's so interesting… 

 

 

 I used to wonder if David always put in these "arsehole" references to weed out the no-fun crowd and stop his work being taken Seriously-For-The-Wrong-Reasons. But then Ned said something about how much easier it is to stage Threat than it is to stage Dread ("because Dread's like… almost the absence of Threat") and how well David pulls it off, and he's right, so now I think it might have something to do with creating that absence of threat, all the bumhole stuff. Like the head-banging to the Dead Kennedys in a neck brace I had to do. Or like the e-mail he sent out, requesting the presence of a bank of naked spectators for a photo-shoot to publicize the show. There's a sample of it up there. Except the Lyric aren't going to use this image now. And they didn't like his original title of "Upskirt". And the Lounge is closed now, and with it, that door.

 

   Nigel, who you can just make out backstage, he's going to be curating for three weeks when it re-opens in late January. And yesterday I said: sure, I'll do something. I'm going to resurrect something of mine called "Jonah Non Grata". The thing Roland didn't want to do.

 The original plan was, well, not to. But before I called Nigel up to say "No" I popped into Christ's Church in Spitalfields for the first time yesterday (I'd just finished milking money's last money at a corporate voice-over in Moorgate, and the door was open) and it was really disappointing. It looked like an enormous, well-lit writing desk. And I thought "Shunt's much better than this rubbish. I should do something there." I looked up the word "liminal" today (Chris Goode's blog very helpfully has a link) and Christ's Church certainly wasn't liminal. 

 So I might do a late show, close an area off, by the locked front door if I'm allowed. Right down the other end from the shinier revelers. If and when they return. The idea of doing a show about Jonah actually came to me first seven years ago, when I was at an audition, playing with a door and thinking about flight, and doing something funny. And "Liminal" refers to "the second stage of a ritual". It comes from "limen", which means threshold. So it is the state of not yet passing through a door. So yes, I said "Yes", and we'll see.

Monty Hall Problem? What Monty Hall Problem?

Hello again. I haven't been here in ages. Obviously I lack motivation. There is a cure for this though. I will come to it.

 

I haven't really been writing for Laurence and Gus either which is bad, there's going to be a read-through on Monday... It's just every time I've sat down to write since receiving the commission I've always seemed to end up returning - like Grendel - to a tired squall of my own making on Chris Goode's blog "Thompson's Bank Of Communicable Desire" (all hinted at in my last post - blimey - two weeks back!... It's been going on that long. Well it's over now, and actually it has a happy ending. If you're interested to know more, cut and paste this little honey:

http://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=28051672&postID=8131853324620900174

 

I come in about half-way down and then never shut up. Actually I might try a summing up in my next post. No, come back.)  Anyway, yes, so as I was saying to the producer over a risotto, I am obviously phenomenally unmotivated. 

 

What does Derren Brown suggest? Well now I know because I've finally got round to reading his book (not to motivate myself, no, that was not the idea, no... nor to find out if he uses stooges. He states unequivocally in the book that he doesn't though. I'm a little disappointed by that. I think it's fine if he does. I didn't want to know.) Anyway he suggests "Playing with Pictures". Visualizing the writing of this blog, according to Derren Brown, means that I should picture it from a FIRST-PERSON perspective (ie not looking on at myself writing this, my first clear mistake) and big like IMAX (like the one in Hertfordshire where Miss Meikle and I saw Beowulf - "MONSTAH!" - after driving through the first snow I've seen this winter. Actually, yeah, good thing I didn't stay in London that evening and get some writing done, I'd have missed the snow) I should "make the colours rich and intense", turn up the brightness, bring it in closer, in my face. And finally I should "add sizzle". Thus:

 

And it works!

 

Later on, Derren writes about the "Monty Hall Problem", and it's the following episode played out today at lunch (and slightly reminiscent of my conduct in the Thompson's squall) that I am actually here to record:

 Me - Jess, do you know about "the Monty Hall Problem"?
Jess (with whom I work, and who is American) - I know about Monty Hall. No.
Me - There's three closed doors, and behind one is car and behind the other two there are goats, and you have to choose a door. Then I open a door behind which I know to be a goat. Okay? Now I ask you if you want to stick with your choice, or change and pick the remaining closed door. What do you do?
Jess - I stick.
Me - WRONG!
Jess - No it's not.
Me - YES! YES! Okay, say there were a HUNDRED doors instead, and you picked one, and then I opened up NINETY-EIGHT doors and they all had goats and there was just now the two doors left again. Yours and mine. Think of the probability. Would you still stick with your first choice?
Jess - Yes.
Me - But that's wrong.
Jess - No it's not.
Me - Wh... why not?
Jess - Because you never asked me how I feel about goats.

 Excelsior, Jess! I'll write about Shunt next time. Catch up then.