The Bed-Daughter and Some Messy Artists

 from Notebookery 1, where you'll also find the Artist and the Exterminator

 Here's another record of a stepladder-set tale told in my dyed-black days of 2000 or so, this time at shunt's cabaret in its original venue of Arch 12A Bethnal Green, and accompanied by Jeremy Hardingham. I'm so happy to have any record at all of anything Jeremy's done, and of the messes we made in those days. His approach to physical illustration looks – at least from what can be made out in this video – more chaotic than Tom's work on Phonella's Shopping, but no less precise. I also included a tiny bit of footage he took of his flat with my Hi-8 camera as prelude, because I liked the pull out and reveal. 

 Inspiration for The Bed-Daughter probably came from the idea a myth is a real person's life mangled beyond recognition, in this case: the biographies of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera – a potentially souring insight I share only because the floppy-haired twenty-something who originally wrote this would want you to know. The music is by Mouse On Mars.

 Content warning: tobacco use, live flames, hair othering, face shaming, insect powder, mention of nails through extremities, an almost entirely passive female protagonist, and David Rosenberg in a vest. 

 

 

UPDATE: As with the Phonella's Shopping video, I added a transcription to run as subtitles because the sound isn't great, but for some reason both still just play the auto-generated captions when I hit CC. Does anyone have a clue what I'm doing wrong?

Blacking up

This is the Council Chamber of the Battersea Art Centre, where "Ring" takes place. The picture was taken Monday afternoon. Those aren't lights being rigged I now realise, they're whatever the opposite of lights are: black velvet gaffered to the holes in the ceiling. As part of a less specific refit the chamber walls have also undergone a rushed, artificial school-play ageing. Even in this light you can make out the phoney splurts of grey around the detail in the roof. 

It's a lost space dolled up as a found one. Tea candles burn everywhere, sheet metal mirrors have been screwed into the ceiling and lightbulbs hang like bunting, unfitted. I've no idea how much of this is temporary: there's a lot of building work going on (and the dressing room I'm sharing with Daniel Kitson has a few sheets of plastic where a wall might later go). I hope they keep the carpeted dining booths they've erected on the central staircase, those are dreamlike. And I hope they lose the "Arbeit Macht Frei" buzzguff beneath:

Apart from one "scratch" night, eight years ago, of the never continued Self Portrait As Frida Kahlo, this is perhaps surprisingly my first time performing at the BAC. I used to come here as a child and print badges, but I don't think I ever saw a show here, not back in those days - That's not true I've just remembered! When I was ten I saw my Dad's friend Ted tell a story about two crows nattering to each other while feasting on a dead soldier's eyes! Eeee, that must have been in the Council Chamber, and thirty odd years later here I am, in the dark.

We finally had someone leave tonight. Total darkness is strangely claustrophobic. That's not the right word. Claustrophrightening. Everything seems taken care of though, The staff are incredible, most of them I'm assuming are volunteers. It's all a bit out of my hands anyway. I'm keeping the headphones on now. 

It's like, how much more black could this be? And the answer is, none.

The buzz has been good. It's selling out around me. I think it's all going according to plan. You should come, we should see. In the meantime there's an excellent, spoiler-free interview with David Rosenberg here. And you can hear him have more binaural fun in his podcast "The Ear" here. And you can get tickets here. And here are some reviews - spoiler-free summary: Like, and even the people who don't like are coming again:

One Stop Arts
Whats On Stage
A Younger Theatre
The Upcoming
Spoonfed
Evening Standard
The Guardian
Time Out
Everything Theatre
Exeunt
London Magazine 
What's Peen Seen

... And its opposite, the Melon of Cheer:

(originally posted on myspace here)

Viva La Vida indeedah! Mark Cousins is currently curating a season at the BFI of... well basically just films he really, really likes that nobody's seen, he's calling it "Levelling the Field" and last night it was the turn of Paul Leduc's 1986 Frida in its ONLY SURVIVING PRINT, mind. If you get the chance to see it again this Tuesday do, really do. This is particularly sage advice for anyone among you who saw and appreciated the following aspects of last year's Ian Curtis biopic Control: That nothing in it feels like a dramatic reconstruction, there's none of this "dialogue moving the action along" balls, not so you'd notice anyway, the talking's always part of the portrait... That the casting is spot on (in the case of Frida, Ofelia Medina) so you never feel you're being shown something, rather the camera's left rolling to pick up a living subject going about its human affairs... That it's surprisingly funny. And that the songs are good.


 

It was towards the end of this bit that I fully regained consciousness - That's one thing, if you do go Tuesday, wrap up warm. I keep forgetting about the BFI's cryogenic air conditioning. I ushered there back in - hell - the twentieth century and have never to this day managed to stay awake for a single screening, which is why I look so well-preserved. It was still a very good film though, and timely. Timely because in my frustrated non-knuckling down to the Secret Agent screenplay, hereafter known as "Fat Adolf", I had completely forgotten what it was I had been hoping to achieve when I started, and "Frida" brought a lot of that back. As the five-year-old note plastered two posts back testifies I had never initially intended to write a pithy thriller, I wanted something where a scene might simply consist of a lost fat man failing to rescue a fly from his tea, something that would take care of the pence and let the pounds take care of themselves, like pretty much everything I've ever really enjoyed writing.

What's the real stumbling block? Dialogue. I love dialogue, but the more a film can say without it the better. Staring at this unwritten screenplay I had forgotten that. I'd groggily assumed this professional sketch-writing gig would inevitably hone my skills as a screenwriter, but that's all nonsense, isn't it, bum maths and a false lead. Instead I'm going to write this screenplay with as little dialogue as I can get away with... There's a lot of important talking in "The Secret Agent" but I have the answer: Birdsong. Like in Big Brother. Not necessarily birdsong, but that same unsynchronized ambience reminiscent of surveillance, and the silent movies. In English-speaking countries wordless performance seems far more embraced by theatre as an option these days than by cinema, which is odd, and bad, because it's so much easier to not be heard on film.

(Mark Cousins introduced Frida with an overwhelmingly infectious generosity. In his notes to this season he writes about "the cultural forgetting whereby not many people have heard of Paradjanov and Diop Mambety" CLEARLY going for the two maddest names he can think of, but still meaning EVERY word of it. His enthusiasm is fearless. Pick up a BFI guide and have a read, it's stirring stuff. I love him.)

(Also found in notebook.)

FRIDA-DAY

If there was a "Fridaday", like Comic Relief or that day where loads of strangers dress up as Santa, bump into each other and finally converge upon Trafalgar Square, except that on Fridaday you would go about your day dressed as the world famous, injured Mexican self-portraitist Frida Kahlo, looking out for other Kahlos, maybe approaching one of them and sitting down somewhere for a pastry... would that work? Might you be up for it? 

 

Details of the day could be posted on a website, along with photographs and costume suggestions: Frida Kahlo biting a necklace, - with two birds, - leaving the church, - with a blue satin blouse in a hospital bed holding a mirror, - with a rabbit, - holding a baby goat in Chinese pyjamas, - with flowers in her hair, - with a doily on her head, - on her death bed. You could meet, be beautiful and compare injuries. A dad might be seen dragging his six-year-old son to school in a plaster cast dressed with a hammer and sickle... or Rugger playing Kahlos with smeared lipstick and joke shop boobies tearing down Charing Cross Road... Monobrows could be given away free with copies of the Radio Times.

Self-portraits are paintings of mirrors. That's what really interests me about dressing up as Frida Kahlo. That and love and damage. I am not Mexican, do not paint, have never had an affair with Trotsky, and have known neither great pain nor poverty. But like Frida I can't give birth, and I seem to spend quite a lot of time in bed.

Here's the homunculus from the Natural History Museum whose job it is to show "what a man's body would look like if each part grew in proportion to the area of the cortex of the brain concerned with its sensory perception" covering his nakedness and having a bash:

 

"Neon Trotsky?... Oh yeah. I met him at a party. The theme of the party was communism. I was sitting in a wheelchair. He said, 'Is it alright if I come over to talk to you?' and looked about. I said, 'Sure,' and budged up. 'Cheers. Actually I'm hiding from someone.' 'Who?' 'Stalin' 'Hang on,' I said, 'You're neon Trotsky!' 'Shh. Listen, your eyes are weary magnets, Do you want to go for a ride on my bike?' he asked. 'YES.'...

"And he lifted my shitty, wooden body onto the back of his ceramic, double-rotor, 2-wheel-drive, 12,000 rpm Citizen and off we thraped into the night, startling the brown horses, doing wheelies and endoes up an Olmec Ziggurat. And everything we touched turned into a toy...

"And I felt so at home with him as we lay together, making colours, explaining light...

"I barely needed to breathe...

"But I had to explain to him that I was just on the rebound from Josephine Baker with the bananas, and that otherwise Paris was a total nightmare, everyone telling me what a gift my body was to the surrealists. Well THANKS...

"I mean, I know we age and die. I read Doonesbury."

Happiness: An Apology

It turns out that contrary to my twitchy, unproofed posting last night there may indeed be such a thing as tender sadness... So behold (and in memoriam) the "Smokers' Corridor" at 6:00pm, June 30th, 2006:

 

Now this passage through which I pass into work each morning must be known simply as "the Corridor". And that's that. The end.

At work today they put me in the "Bubble."
It is a closet-like, triangular room with a two-way mirror that enables you - by the depression of a foot-pedal accompanied by shrill, pre-recorded screaming - to superimpose your own face onto the reflected faces of punters lost in the Mirror Maze adjacent. Scarily. Like a film by David Lynch in fact, if you found the right face. The Bubble's a little claustrophobic though, I think because of the shape more than the size. Rooms shouldn't be triangular.

If prison cells were triangular... spacious but still triangular, still a shape that no room in which you are to spend a great deal of time normally comes in... would it be more difficult to become institutionalized? - I just thought: You can't smoke in prison anymore. Or was that the case anyway?

And so much for the Smoking Ban deadline I had set myself. I was meant to have finished my radio play about Frida Kahlo. I haven't even started it. Nobody knows who she is.

And so much for setting fire to myself in Parliament Square in protest... I could probably have managed the dousing, but would never have struck the match. Imagine standing there, defeated and stinking of fuel. And imagine the journey home, desperately trying to remember the least flammable route.

Here's that picture closer up:

SHOOTING AN ELEPHANT in the ass: A rite of passage

 

Two important crossroads reached today... the first, when I was suddenly asked if I wanted to play on the Girl's Team for the Works Do Five-aside (in many ways a dream appointment, ideally kept in a raffishly unbuttoned tux) only to back out because of a prior engagement to wargame over at Friend Ned Mond's. I am a boy.

The second, upon the field of conflict: an "abandoned holo circus" (hollow circus?) beautifully stocked by said Mond. I have fought only once before. My gang "The Henmanunatics" (mutant refugees from the subterranean Tim Henman Project), have met rival clown urchins "Hammertime" on their own turf. My general – Joyce "George, don't do that" Grendel (in foreground above) – oblivious to anything but showmanship, has raced ahead into the centre ring, stormed the podium, and shot a giant wind-up lion in the ass, sending it charging into a dormant, military-issue firework which will in turn blast off to land at some as-yet-unspecified point in our midst in thirty seconds time. She then delivers a mortal wound with "double-barrelled stump-gun" to some garish homunculus lurking behind the legs of a trampoline, BUT on turning to deliver a similarly fatal volley of whatever "stump" might be to his neighbour, Pogo, Grendel's gun jams. So Pogo shoots her in the spine and she explodes. This is my first experience of a fatality. My gibbering, parthenogenic wrestler "Cupasoup" and inside-out werewolf "Mammal Night-Rate" both flee the field of battle in despair. Then the rocket lands just shy of my enemy, sending up nothing but sawdust...

Now, surveying all this from atop a stunt ramp is my hopping mutant lieutenant, Jimmy 3-Knees. Joyce is dead, her murderers sheltering beneath a trampoline. So Jimmy – determined to take up the flame of Joyce's Romantic recklessness – bounds onto the back of an artificial elephant, from which – although totally exposed – he has a clear line of sight to the enemy's own hastily promoted commander, Dirtbox, whose gunning down would most likely provoke a rout, and certain Henmanunatic victory. He shoots once. He misses. He has one shot left... Joyce would have taken it, and hazarded whatever unobfuscated flack the enemy had to return. But Joyce is dead... And, in that second, the cloud of Jimmy 3-knees' grief clears, and he realizes: He's in charge now, it's not just his own life he's responsible for any more.

And, can I just say, all these were emotions GENUINELY GOING THROUGH MY MIND as I sat on that mat in Ned Mond's flat, faced with the following choice: Gamble my last shot on an act of typical, self-destructive, mutant panache, OR Shoot the elephant in the ass and send it – and me – charging out of harm's way.

Faced with this choice, I turned a corner. Faced with this choice, I found what seemed at the time a perfect model of maturity... Reader, I shot the mechanical elephant in the ass. And nothing happened. I am now a man.

None of which, as I see, brings me any closer to completing my radio play about Frida Kahlo.

Below, you can just make out, between the legs of the trampoline, Jimmy perched like Sabu on the elephant's back before the inevitable enemy flak sent him flying limply onto a tusk. Joyce Grendel lies fallen on the podium to the right.