Notebookery 10 (2006-2005)

 Here are earlier pages from the same notebook, including, in reverse chronological order - and not that I encourage you to go looking for them -  rehearsal notes for the show that took me to Japan, Sulayman Al-Bassam's Kalila Wa Dimna, (hence the recurrence of jackals and murk), and Shunt's Amato Saltone and Tropicana. Two pages down is a polaroid of me (far left) in the lift on the Tropicana's last show before I shaved my head and took over as the operator. The shaved head was to make it easier to produce a silicon replica of me for the lift operator's autopsy. You can see both it and me four pages down. The replica's nostrils are narrower because of the clay pressing down as the mould was made.

You Don't Have To Be Mad To Work Here

Here's a little something for your peripherals:

Rules for Replacements

Okay, let's write a bit about shunt.

Much of "The Boy Who Climbed Out of his Face" was devised in the old Guardian Building in Farringdon. You knew this because the word "Guardian" was still readable in the shadows on the lobby wall, like the shadow around a stolen painting in some old farce. In the first two weeks of rehearsals we spread ourselves about a bit, finding whatever rooms were free and making up material to show each other, as is usual. Then we all watch it. And it's great, really great - in fact it constitutes some of the happiest memories I've had of watching theatre; I laugh a lot. Of course far more stuff is made than ends up useful to the final piece, but seeing what you've got when you lose that stuff is also a kind of making, and the stuff you've made and lost was still great to make, because you could take it in any direction you wanted, and that was interesting, and you were getting paid. And of course you can always put the flotsam on a blog.

I knew that in the first room which the audience entered there'd be three monitors, a long desk, and a table, and so, in the hour assigned to come up with something for this room, I thought I'd try and make an idea of something to be playing on those monitors - something which might suggest to the audience that they were replacements*, something which might indicate some standards of behaviour expected of them, and something they probably wouldn't be paying much attention to. And I knew we'd be wearing masks, so I made the headgear out of gaffer tape and a photocopy stuck to the wall of - so I was told - Antonin Artaud. I'd also just downloaded Trent Reznor's soundtrack to the film "The Social Network", which is what you can hear playing. It's a great default soundtrack - which reminds me of what I should post next...

* "There's genuinely an assumption made about the audience... And actually the shows that haven't gone so well, or maybe taken longer to resolve, have been ones where we haven't had complete clarity of what the fuck the audience were doing."  This interview with David Rosenberg, given a couple of years ago, is great.

shit and shithead (and the GURUN observation deck)

Halloween. A three-day leave from the Dungeon starts today and I can tell it's gotten colder while I was inside because my shirts still aren't dry and it was British Summer Time when I hung them out five days ago. I've not that many work-related scars to show for the half-term push: a slight wonkiness from where I cracked my nose on Bedlam, a black toe from where I dropped the cleaver, some blood in my hair that turned out to be real from where I failed to clear the chain hang on no, okay maybe I have been showing signs of tiredness... A corporate event on Monday evening saw us warming up in Torture with an exercise that required us to evoke through collaborative improvisation a given landscape which the poor schnook who'd just been sent out would then have to guess ("Chess Championship", "The Final Frontier" etc. It's not that easy to evoke Uhura actually if you don't have a chair, very easy to topple). When the final landscape we were given turned out to be "Inside Simon's Head" everyone just started screaming. So yes I must have been showing signs of tiredness. Oh and he guessed it. Meanwhile next door in Shunt, Luke was stuffing my rubber double into a minicab to take to a party. 

 With my looted corpse the toast of Stoke Newington and the contents of my head a warm-up exercise I went to relax in Gordon's Wine Bar with some churlishly unloaded cheese, a deck of cards, a bottle of red and Ms. Meikle who was down from Potters' Bar, herself fast becoming the toast of the cat-neutering circuit. She taught me Shithead. It was very relaxing...
SHIN!
GURUN!

 I'll explain those in a minute, but no I've been fine fine. Just busy. Simultaneously occupied and vacant. None of your business. Been looking forward to a few days off and a chance to kick back and enjoy some perspective.

 

... So it was very profitable to find myself at 11 o'clock this morning summoned to the twenty-ninth floor of Centre Point and staring out of a sound-proof window at Hyde Park, Wembley Stadium and this evening's weather rolling in over Chiswick. Here was perspective alright.
"Our clients have decided to write their own copy I'm afraid, and it's, um... incredibly repetitive. But what we want is, you know, warm and friendly... " In my booth there was a pint mug of about thirty pencils to the right of the microphone. The engineer, seeing that this was clearly too many as we came in, left me with three for some reason. On the other side of the glass before me was a plate of perfectly arranged biscuits no-one dared touch, an equally untouched dish of fuck-me fruit and two warm and friendly men unwittingly slinging my financial ass out of the fire. And beyond the sound-proof glass to my left: the bigger picture... SHIN! GURUN!

 

An hour later and twenty-nine storeys down I happily bumped into David from Shunt outside a coffee shop in Portland Place taking a quick break from his day-job in anaesthetics, writing in a notebook. It's the first time I've seen him in a suit. I told him about the medical modelling. The last time I bumped into him making notes outside a CoffeeSomethingNationBucks he'd told me about the theatrical commission he'd just got from the Lyric Hammersmith which would let him try out the forty-odd remote headphones he'd already bought in bulk: The audience would stand outside on the balcony, watch an actor or actors in the building opposite, and through the cans be able to hear the inside of their heads (not screaming, I'm assuming, other stuff). Today he asked me if I wanted to be in it, and was I free to help him try something out at the Lounge next week. It wasn't even midday yet...

 But man it's got late now. I'm meant to be resting. Instead the area beyond my peripheral vision has just switched from black to white.
I'll leave you then with some Manga sound effects from Eiji Otsuka and Housi Yamazaki's excellent "The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service" which I bought because of the cover. All the speech balloons have been translated into English of course, so you have to keep switching between following the action from right to left and following the dialogue from left to right, while the sound effects - the Kapowees, the Screeches etc. - have been left as pictograms and then translated in a big glossary at the back (ie the front). And here, in no particular order, are some examples, verbatim:

ONGYAA ONGYAA
baby crying

KPFU
sound of a refrigerator door popping open

SHUGOGOGO
sound of propane stove

ZUZUZU
body slowly climbing in

PAKU PAKU
sound of flapping mouths

CHAPOON
splash of pebble hitting water

GYU KYUN
spirit being pulled into the bullet

KYUN
last bit of the spirit being pulled in

GORORON GORORO
sky rumbling

KAR KARI KARI KYUDWOOOON
air crackling then loud lightning

TSUU TSUKU TSUU CHA ZUNCHAKA ZUTCHA TSUU TSUKU ZUN
sound of music being overheard on someone's headphones

SHIN
sound of silence

GURUN
sound of world spinning

PAKIII
sound of a bolt falling through glasses at terminal velocity into eye socket
 

 Happy Halloweeeen!

Now We Are Loads (My mate's name is Legion.)

On hitting thirty I had a dream in which I met myself and was very polite, an entirely believable reaction but not at all what I would have expected, so I consider myself quite lucky to have found this out. I really wanted to make a good impression, as I might upon a friend of a friend, but was probably a bit too formal as a result and it was my other self who finally broke the ice by bringing our foreheads together and vigorously rubbing the back of my shaved head.

"Now you have a go," he said.
I did. It felt odd.
I didn't have this dream again and we haven't stayed in touch.

On Sunday morning, two years after this dream, I found my doppelganger (see "General Interests" on the homepage) still bald and lying on his front in the corner of that area of the Shunt Lounge known as "The Penthouse". Having spent two years gathering mould (and, oddly, dolls) in one of the presentation rooms now used for storage, he'd been cleaned up and borrowed for a show. The people in the show had dismembered him, hollowed him out a bit so he looked baggier like Brando and given him spongy joints. I no longer looked much like him, but he also looked a lot less like me. Fortunately the cameras were there to capture the moment.

And I dreamt of this double again that night, not the other self, just the husk. More than one. I was curled up at Michael Palin's feet but could still see out of the train window a line of them standing on the horizon, like Gormley's Angel of North if you look east at the right moment out of a train going to Edinburgh. They were standing shoulder to shoulder and the line never stopped. And some were hanging from pylons, and some in fields, all dressed differently, hundreds and thousands of them. And the train was going round in a circle. I think it must have been a ride. A very arty ride.