Snowflakes Are Cyberpunk

 Modified dust. It's why the statement "no two showflakes are alike" exercises our imagination more than, say, "no two daffodils are alike". Because how many different modifications could there be? 

 Well, here are a couple new to me:

 

 Photographed on cold plates in 1910 by Wilson Bentley, and showcased on the excellent Public Domain Review, Bentley's work is how we've known for so long what snowflakes look like, although I didn't know they could look like this:

 

 In fact, I assumed these must have been models or mock-ups, but as those who follow me on twitter will know - and I'm assuming there's an overlap - snowflakes can ineed produce axles. Many thanks to redscharlach for the tip.

 

 

 On a side note: Apparently, in the new game Cyberpunk 2077, you're able to "customize" your character's genitalia, but in reality you're only given the four options: big penis, little penis, vulva, or "off". Also, the be-penised models – presumably in deference to any possible gay panic among male players – turn out to be never-nudes who take showers in their pants; I guess you can take showers in this game. Also, the little penis is big.

 

 Sorry, I was listening to this podcast while out in the snow. Maybe snowflakes aren't cyberpunk. I don't know what cyberpunk is.

July 2013 - Perfs

Cleaning out my bag today, of flyers, receipts, impulse-bought journalism, and that white stuff at the bottom that could be bits of mint, or rock, or - What is that stuff? - I found an advert for the film "The Selfish Giant". Everyone gave it five stars (by the time you reach five you really do have to count - five is so many stars) and I thought "Oh yeah, everyone said that was beautiful. I wanted to see that. Or I meant to see that. But I didn't, and now it's not on. This unattended stuff builds up. Maybe I should just cut and run..." which is what it feels like now I've reached this summer of exciting bits and bobs, about which I suspect I have very little interesting to say now, so late after, even though some were highlights of my year...

I mean, I had an excellent time working again with Hannah Ringham, on "Ghostphone", but what's that?

And it was brilliant working with Desmond O'Connor, Zoie Kennedy, and Jonny Woo on "Life By Misadventure". But what's that?

Well, it meant I got to go to Latitude. I've never been to a festival before. (There was that near miss with Anthony Neilson, whose lesson - "Let's never ever work ever with or for the bored" - played a huge part in then accepting Des' invitation... But then I also traveled up with Ian Leslie's "Before they Were Famous" and great as that was, Ian is to boredom what Keanu Reeves is to whatever it is Keanu Reeves is good at.)
And it meant I got to sing, and play an angry child. Epic, neck-deep, freedom-fighting fury. A real labour of love amidst all Des and Zoie's other labours of love. 

 

And then I found out that maybe I don't like festivals. I was waiting for some money to come in. I was running around looking for meal tickets. I liked the woods, and the tents we slept in, but not the bigger tents so much. There could be no mistaking them for a coming together at the end of the world. There was nothing like a community, even though we all wore 3D specs for Kraftwerk.

And there were no jokes being told in the big tents as good as the jokes we told each other, and no music as unifying as the clanging of the communal bogs.

The Choosatron

Very quickly - Last night I was in the Hen and Chickens in Islingtonto see "Pekka and Strangebone's Comedy Showpiece" for a third time (it's excellent by the way, if you're doing nothing tonight get yourself along) and I ran into some friends from the Wireless Theatre Company all huddled round a guy from Minnesota called Jerry. In his hands was this:

What looked like a receipt printer was in fact printing the text of a choose-your-own adventure, and the thing that looked like a calculator was actually the number pad into which you key your choices. Written in marker on the lid after the fashion of Calvin and Hobbes was the name "The Choosatron". It was Jerry's own invention and you can out more about it here. He was not short of drinks that night.

"You Are A Shark"...?!

What I saw in "The Architects"

I was walking a little oddly yesterday, because I'd just done a photoshoot for David Rosenberg promoting his latest piece, the Glen Neath-scripted Ring. (Had David tried to call it "Ring Piece"? Of course he had.) None of which really brings me to this write up of Shunt's latest show, which ended last Saturday, but the post's late enough and at least I don't have to worry now about spoilers...

I loved "The Architects". I saw it tonight (for "tonight" read January 11th) and Keeps and I got back from Venice only yesterday, so my bar for using the word "love" is pretty high. 

 It was giddily rewarding to turn up, having felt so thrown by my non-involvement in this one, and be returned to the days when shunt was just a company I followed, and to find that they are still by far my favourite makers of pretty much anything. Critically they do themselves no favours by wearing their genius round their ankles I suppose, but good, it's still there on display, if only those without a sense of humour wouldn't be so squeamish. And still thrown, of course I come away wanting to tear off the stuff I think keeps it from being perfect, but that's what fans do, and here "perfect" doesn't mean something small and achievable, it means that thing which alerts you to what it is you should be wanting, which is massive. 

 The myth of the Labyrinth was the starting point this time, and I've long thought the labyrinth is shunt's real medium (there's a quote somewhere in Ken Campell's "Violin Time" which I can't find now, about how great it would be if the National Theatre could create works backstage). But there was also an interest in the myth of the feral child that goes back to devising of  "Money", which clearly informed the depiction of the Minotaur.

 

 

 Yes, we saw a Minotaur! And we got fed to it. Or at least in the perfect show in my head we did, as soon as it was revealed to us we'd never left the labyrinth (and the hollow cow wasn't the only commission in which people get screwed). But what do you do with an audience once you've killed them? "You kissed our children goodbye" the monitors said, and I realised that having been treated to the simulation of a cruise, only now were we really being made to feel like heroes, because now we were being sent to our deaths. Except it turns out we weren't. There was still some stage fighting and aeriel stuff simulating dying to get through, but in amongst that sudden shift in vocabulary was the glorious revelation of our killer: a child with a terrifying mask that hid an even more terrifying face, who looked lost and then lobbed a brick. 

 I remember Gemma talking about the seeds of it last year. She said the Athenians would never have seen anything like Minos' palace at Knossos. Of course it seemed like a Labyrinth. She said that "bull" meant what "wolf" meant, that "minotaur" maybe simply meant "feral", that Daedalus who designed the palace said to hold the Minotaur also, less famously, designed the cow-shaped contraption said to facilitate Queen Pasiphae's impregnation by a bull in the first place. And I knew the myth, the Athenian virgins sent by boat to be sacrificed, and I left for New Zealand imagining a pamphlet found through the letterbox entitled "Why We Eat Children". 

 So I knew all this, and maybe – maybe – this gave me the edge over the rest of the audience, but really it was all there in the show, SPOILER alert and all. Having sounded that, I must admit the spoilers I read probably helped my enjoyment, if anything, since I knew enough to time what in hindsight seems the best entrance, and to find what I suspect was the best seat. In fact, I'm pretty sure the show is unspoilable. No spoiler can prepare you for that scenery. It's no insult to go on about the scenery if your medium's a labyrinth, and Lizzie Clachan's scenery here is unbeatable (and I've just got back from Venice, remember.)

Nige?

 It was so simple, although making it that simple must have been complicated (Kudos, Louise Mari). And it was funny, really funny, and when your jokes involve two hundred and fifty moving subjects, blackouts and a live band, that too must take a while to get right, longer than any critic will give you. I hear there was only a month's rehearsal this time, an altogether more affordable working method I guess, and one that produced similarly happy results over a decade ago with the Tennis Show, my first experience of working with shunt, and again a beautifully simple idea. So this seems the way forward, and that it didn't include me I find a bit worrying. But not while I moved through it. Or sat at the back, in the corner, basking in the kind of isolated fantasy landscape Chris Goode probably finds so resistible, but for whose construction I only ever feel a child-like gratitude. And here, that construction is the subject. I mean, it's called "The Architects". It's the kernel of a myth told to us – and with us – smartly, lightly, meticulously, hilariously. Is anyone else doing this? I got it and I loved it.

Right, there's a "Sightseers" review knocking round here somewhere as well...

He too woke with his head in the toilet of an inconceivably large house he must have once commissioned, with the odd rope hanging between platforms, and walls you couldn't see, "If I was a Rich Man" playing in every wing, and his very own Nightmare Room.

Lie Down And Be Counted.

 From win and tonic

  Follow her. She is the Queen of Twitter, a loved one, and a candid inspiration. She ran the bar when we were doing "Money", and physically I haven't seen much of her since, although she came on the Ghost Bus once, beaming (and hey, once we shot the shit on twitter with Jennifer Ehle, that was a good night). I hope she doesn't mind if I recommend her filthy tumblr account "win and tonic" here, or her blogs 1 and 2, and in spite of the homelessness, and the bureaucratic and chemical nightmares recounted therein, she remains the funniest thing in my internet. Kerry, if you're reading this, I'd like to dedicate the following song to you. I only really got into the Bonzo Dog Doodah Band four years ago, in hospital while heavily medicated. "Humanoid Boogie", "Eleven Moustachioed Daughters" or "Look Out There's a Monster Coming" were the only thing I could listen to in that bed, nothing else sounded in tune. The following song isn't strictly speaking the Bonzos, I know, or Atenolol, butsometimes Innes hits the spot. Actually, I'd like to dedicate this song to all of us. All of us need a little what you need right now, La Win. But also, all of us should be so lucky as to have what you have. Wit, guts, imagination, rack.

Brief (catching the light)

.. And when I stumbled home from the party there on the kitchen table was a commission for 12 minutes of material for Laurence and Gus: Hearts and Minds - my first commission! - recording in December. So yes an excellent birthday, but I should probably not be blogging now but focusing instead on that brief: the eternal verities, hopes and fears, an intimate history of humanity, heartfelt knobgags (nobgags? the spelling of "nob", that was also brought up at the brief).

 

The Dungeon's nice and quiet now. (Perhaps too quiet: our senior actor emerged from his office with a shirt and forehead covered in pink dye just in time for a visit from York, which it turns out is what happens if you squeeze too hard on a stress reliever). I took five year's worth of notebooks onto the floor and, trying to catch the light in Whitechapel, panned for one-liners.

Meanwhile Shunt had got its hand on the Blackpool illuminations. I spoke to a designer called Phillip who had accrued more than a thousand pieces before being let go. A designer - Blackpool had finally decided - was surplus to requirements, and Phillip spoke darkly of the flashing mess left in his wake as a giant fibreglass tulip very conspicuously bloomed above the bar.