Badphone in a Coma

 In its very last day at Canary Wharf, I finally got round to experiencing COMA, the Darkfield show in a shipping container I'd recorded back in 2019. Pre-plague. I had to remind myself of that when I heard my old voice expressing conern about being coughed at in the face.

 

 The pill in the little tray lay unswallowed at the back of my throat throughout the twenty minutes. That's the problem with lying down. But I managed to get the top bunk. Once the lights went out, all I could hear was me reading Glen's lines from an ipad; binaural radio's so much more prevalent than it was when we first made Contains Violence in 2008, or even Ring in 2013, and like that old film of the train pulling into the station, I don't know how much longer our brains will stay fooled. I guess I'm saying, it was more like what I was expecting than I was expecting.

 

 I'd actually booked for Saturday, but had dismebarked at the adjacent and preposterously similarly named "Canada Water" station by mistake, so missed my slot. The attendants were brilliant, but I didn't want to hang around on my own – Canary Wharf was making me miss things – so I decided to head back into town along Regent's Canal, as I hadn't walked that stretch for a while, but I got that wrong too, and turned off one rivulet too early.

 

 Heading north, I didn't recognise any of the buildings, but I'm used to that. A lot's gone up. 

 It was round about the time I took the above picture that I decided I should finally get a new phone. Not for its own sake, but because I realised I wanted a better camera. That was an exciting moment. I hadn't wanted anything in ages. I used to want to make films. I tried taking some video with what I had, and was happy with the sounds I caught. There was a party going on in a flat, coots and car horns, sirens, a solitary firework.

 

 And soon it was too dark to photograph anything. See? 

 This is a whole palm tree I found discarded on its side in a weir. I definitely didn't remember there being a weir.

 I also misread a message sprayed onto the unlit footpath as "some peace. some time." until I realised one e was an l, and all the o's a's. You don't get that in Notting Hill. But I couldn't photograph that either, so here are some swans I saw on London Beach on Friday. I think that's new. I guess the new King doesn't want them.

 

Sometimes This Blog Will Just Dip Into An Octopus's Umwelt

 Continuing on the subject of natural wonders: "Maybe I can never really know what it means to be an octopus..."

 Imagine if your hands were your legs and your tongue and also had brains, so actually imagine that you're a leg that can hold and taste things, but also that you're the owner of that leg. Okay, stop doing that with your hands now. That's a  hard ask. Let me put it another way...

 Imagine being not a top-down monolith of neurons, but a guerilla collective so attuned to your environment you could actually change colour. So imagine your brain wan't just in your head. Maybe you don't imagine that anyway. Maybe you're quite active. Maybe you just do that with your hands naturally. I'm not really making myself clear. What am I trying to say? Let me put it another way...

 Imagine owning an octopus!

Make Yourself At Home

 I shower and get dressed before sitting down to work these days, and showering's still new enough to me to trigger memories, but I don't know of what, of being on holiday perhaps. I work mainly in the kitchen as well, on the hardwood floor, so when I step into the living room now, where I used to try to work, the carpet beneath my feet triggers– but again, I don't what. I suppose if I can't remember, I shouldn't really call them memories, but they seem to occupy the same imaginary space. It might also be the same space that going outside occupies if you're not used to going outside, or being somewhere new, remembering something as it's happening. Not déja vu, but feeling exactly as you'll come to feel again when you remember it. "Membering" is probably not the best word for it, but I think it's whatever the opposite of waiting is. I also think it might have something to do with posture.

Dream City Cheats

Not like this.

 

 Ian Hubert's youtube channel hosts beautiful minute-long performances – "tutorials" in the same way that watching someone make balloon animals is a tutorial. Comparing him to a guest on The Paul Daniels Show is meant as a compliment by the way, but I'm sure bafflement isn't Hubert's chief aim and that for anyone with Blender who understands what he's saying, this patter's packed with practical advice. Still I just enjoy watching him. 

 I wonder if there's something in these shortcuts which might help to answer a question about the human brain that's been bothering me for decades: how every single place we go to in our dreams, from the old bedroom that's not quite our old bedroom, to the cities we're driven through and the crowds we're passing, are fabricated night after night, without gaps or repeats, for just a second. Let alone why. Here's Ian building a city:

 

 And its people:

 And its moths:

 

(art by anon) 

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.

Excuses, excuses and Heather Couper

Ack, daylight.

The sun says hello. Good afternoon then. My system of parallel alarms clearly hasn't done the trick. My sleeping body's learnt how to operate two snooze buttons simultaneously and instead of waking up I make it only as far as REM sleep where Sean Penn's crouched behind me in the back seat of a left-hand-drive Buick tearing through an orchard, saying how shit an actor he thinks Michael Caine is: "He always plays the same damn thing! He always does the same fucking thing with his hands! He should - Like one character should maybe have two fingers blown off so he's only allowed to use three fingers - Find something different to do with his hands. At least that would get him to fucking act for fucking once!" And I go "Well, hmm..." and watch the trees streak past and think "Shall I tell him how over-rated I think he is?" but don't. And then the alarm goes, my lizard brain kicks in, slams it off, goes back to sleep and now I'm channel-hopping with my Dad in a hotel in Spain... I tried to find a graphic to illustrate "lizard brain". I think its proper name is the cerebellum. There's supposed to be a lizard bit and then a mouse bit and then a monkey bit and then dolphin bit, but I can't work out where the lizard bit initially is. It's not the kernel. I think it's more like a little old-man-of-the-sea brain that clings onto the back, curled up like - now I come to think of it -

Anyway by half past one in the afternoon some part of me even tires of being tired, and I reach a hand over to the off-white, Glen-Larson-schemed replacement phone I've been issued with since the theft of the one on which I used to play Sonic, and start playing Snake.

And Heather Couper's on the radio, discussing the anthropic principle. This as I understand it points out that if you throw a tin of paint against a wall it's got to leave SOME kind of mark, even though the chances of it leaving EXACTLY that mark are infinitesimally small. Ergo the presence in this universe of life intelligent enough to ask "Why are we present in this universe, ie here?" proves nothing but, well, itself... It's a very simple principle, confounded perhaps by my decision to explain it in terms of paint. Of course I remember Heather Couper back from when I was a kid watching her on Saturday morning television explaining Space or Halley's Comet or warning us not to look at an eclipse. She had a white jacket and a red shirt and a perm back then. Lovely, warm Heather Couper.

Was she always on because we were sending so much stuff into space? Were we? Or had we just got something back? It's odd to see in hindsight the conditions of your childhood environment revealed as blips, not constants. Are kids still even into Space? I know for a fact they still receive the same basic grounding I did in Ancient Egyptian burial technique, because whenever I ask them what this double-pronged eye-ball gouger's for their first response will always be "Oo, pulling the brains out through the nose!"

And I was reading Michael Palin's Diaries (1969-79) recently, in which he unwittingly charts the day-to-day gestation of the world into which I got born. Everything's so recent. I was amazed. Such-and-such a day saw the rise of the IRA, the discrediting of the Left, the gentrification of Notting Hill etc... I'd hoped, you see, that reading these diaries would help get me back into the act of writing (I hadn't forgotten about you) and bought quite a number of other books by writers about writing in this same vain hope. Read 'em all. Played Sonic. Then Snake. So I've read Brian Aldiss' "Bury My Heart in W.H. Smiths". And I've read Kurt Vonnegut's "A Man Without A Country", where he jots down "the funniest joke in the world" (Last night I dreamed I was eating flannel cakes. When I woke up the blanket was gone) although I found a funnier one I think on page 131:

"When I got Home from the Second World War, my Uncle Dan clapped me on the back, and he said, 'You're a man now.' So I killed him."

Another interesting thing about Palin's diaries: He writes nothing at all about the business of crafting sketches for Monty Python, but will meticulously chart the progress of a possible voice-over gig. (And it only takes him half an hour to write an entry. I can't be a writer. That explains it.)

And here's Anthony Neilson's advice to young writers, if you're interested. I've done some homework. And I don't disagree with what he says about the liberating discipline of "story", but all this stuff is just so self-evident and, as advice, useless. It's unilluminating. "Thou Shalt Not Bore". Oh, you think? It gets us nowhere. Silly, old, fantastic, paperbacky Brian Aldiss would be the first to point out the wrong-headedness of this simply as advice to a writer, let alone someone wishing to write for the theatre - SPECIFICALLY for the theatre. If all you want to do is tell a story then set up stall somewhere unheckleable and accessible to millions. Make no mess. Never fail. And, ahhh BLAH BLAH (I wonder if that Sean Penn dream had anything to do with this) anyway I'm awake now, my fingers hurt, it's dark, that was five hours well spent, and if there's one OTHER thing I learnt from the Palin diaries it's that sketches don't write themselves. So I'm off to play Snake. Stopping only when the measure of my own success makes me bite myself in the ass: 

 

 

(Hm. That's two posts now that I've ended with the word "ass". Maybe I'm a writer after all.)