Words we sometimes said in the basement of the Ned

 Notes designed by Susanne Dietz

 

 Yesterday was fun, and crammed, and with Serena and Tom on the chocolate coin exchange and Hannah checking bags (but not opening them –"Very nice, Italian?") a slight shunt reunion, happily. Thank you to Coney for organising The Golden Key, and to Gemma for having me, and to you if you came, and sorry if we were full. When we were trying to find a mood for the bar outside our snug and kennels, I don't think we anticipated how much time would be spent simply queueing, but that's the thing about unknowns. Choas inside the kennels was a lot more welcome, and I was very lucky to be teamed with clowns as kind as my fellow accountants Sachi Kimura and Julia Masli (the word "accountant" has a nicely ecclesiastical ring to it, once you don a robe). It couldn't all be unknowns though, so I wrote a little text for us to say and here it is.

Counting the grains of rice:

This is a new idea.

Each of these is a promise. Not a big promise. Not a particularly important promise. Still, probably more promises than it’s fair to expect any single person to be able to keep. Which is why they’re kept here.

 

Originally, a promise was much bigger, and most people would be unlikely to keep even one. They were about the size of this table, and made of something dangerous like limestone or cows. But one night, there was a storm. And a promise sank to the bottom of the sea – so it wasn’t lost, as the joke goes, it was at the bottom of the sea – and all the islanders had to decide whether or not to still count that as a promise kept. Which they did.

Maybe that’s why we’re underground.

 

Eating a grain:

This won’t be missed. Something will be missed. But no-one will know it was this.

Taking another grain:

And what’s the smallest thing you can promise? What’s worth this?

 

 

 Proving I'd licked a duck by sticking a grain of rice to it was a lot more fun though.

More Espionage For Kids!

 Further to the spy kids' induction held over the weekend at the Imperial War Museum, here's a bold and beautiful set of Rainy Day activities from shunt's Nigel and Louise. I've not seen enough of their work since the shunt lounge closed, but these photos of the first "Spy Day" seem indicative of the kind of thing they've been up to: in this case, filling a warehouse in Weston Super Mare with children intent on defeating a man dressed as a raven.

 

 Thanks to the pandemic, the sequel to this show is now an adventure we can all go on. As with their more adult Party Skills For The End of the World, there's an embarrassment of exercises here that could easily fill the whole day, including passport forgery, and learning how to distinguish between a rook and a jackdaw. I personally have not yet tested the softness of my tread by laying a trip of toilet paper on the floor, nor built my own laser maze, but if you have time and children, and a bit of courage - it's recommended "for Dr Who aged kids (7-12ish)" - the whole thing is wonderful and free and waiting for you HERE.

 

 And speaking of the virtual work of shunt associates, you still have until Saturday the 31st to enjoy Silvia Mercuriali's Swimming Home in which I played a small part, and which I also enjoyed hugely as an audience, though some water did go up my nose, while Gemma Brockis' Winchester Mystery House of an online course, The Kiss, gets similarly immersive here.

 And finally, continuing the Frankenstein Hallowe'en countdown, here's what I wrote about 1939's Son of Frankenstein.

"Toast Can't Never Be Bread Again"

  I'm very glad I've continued bingeing Netflix's Orange Is The New Black, which having lost its way a little in season 3, has not only found it again in season 4, but absolutely Gone There. I don't want to spoil it for those who haven't watched, so there's only so much I can write, but for something made under Obama, the series is proving a blistering accompaniment to MAGA – and 2020 in particular. I also wasn't prepared for how much the season 4 finale would make me pine for 2009. This isn't a spoiler, because it's a flashback. All of Litchfields' inmates' flashbacks suggest a seemingly limitless budget – every backstory builds a new world – and Poussey Washington's last night in New York is such a specific and unembarrassed celebration of the goodness of people without proper jobs, and of the places they make, and of the accompanying greatness of the city they play in (those aren't even real monks) that it seems to yawp "Fuck viability!" as if they'd made it this week.

 

   I'd felt that city slipping away here ever since the closure of the Shunt Lounge. As I may have mentioned. We lost so many places to play around in in 2010. And I had been thinking about changing the blog's wallpaper too – those hangers have been up for decade – but now I've decided they'll stay because, as this episode's reminded me, it's good to be reminded.

 

A Nice Quick Job And Or But Others

 I left the flat comparatively early today to record a series for Definitely Human. All twelve episodes. Imagine that. Three hours in front of a microphone, having fun playing an absolute nightmare, while everyone else does the work. It was hot in there though; I caught myself in a mirror at the end of the recording, and I looked like I'd been pulled out of a cow. It's cooler now at 5:59am. I did sit down to write this at a reasonable hour, but you know how writers like to get comfortable and, well, I ended up trying to reupholster the chair. I couldn't get all the screws out in the end. Or entirely back in again. (I'm surprised to see neither "giving up" nor "quitting" are tags on here yet.) Now it creaks beneath me, still mainly a nice chair, rescued from the Shunt Lounge ten years ago. Oh, if anyone remembers sticking chewing gum on the underside for later, come and get it, guys.

My Space Revisited

 

I think this was called the "Arena Space". Everything was much lower-res back in 2007.

 

 The zip's stuck on my jacket, so if I'm leaving the flat, which I very seldom do, I have to climb into it like a hazmat suit, which seems apt. Today was World Theatre Day, and because there's no theatre, and because this is what I was listening to when I went to the shops for salt, and because the Shunt Lounge was such a big, useful focus for this blog when it started over on myspace in 2007, I'm posting a conversation Gemma Brockis had with Chris Goode about the Lounge in 2018 long after it had closed, (and just as we were working on restaging 2003's Invitation to a Beheading). Chris' retrospective take on the place provides a nice sequel to this post. I know he wasn't fond of the word "spaces", and he still might not be, preferring "places", and this rebellion against Peter Brook's idea of theatre as an "empty space" played a large part in the conversations we all used to have. I'm reminded of them these days when I talk to Helen Czerski about science presentation. She's a practical physicist - more specifcally a bubble physicist - and hates the aesthetic of the lab, as well as the word "discovery". Similarly, M. John Harrison posted recently in the comments on his blog that he hates "ideas". I love sticklers. And I hope Chris gets entirely better immediately. 

"But there's now so many ways in which that space is overlaid. Even when we were there in 2010, six years after Tropicana, the technicians would be referring to the 'Autopsy Space'... even though they were at school when we were doing that show, which had the autopsy in that space, and there's absolutely nothing in that space to suggest it was the 'Autopsy Space'... One space was called the 'Act Two Space', even though Act One, and Three, Four and Five fell away before we even opened the show... The cumulative effect of all of these references, all of which were theatrical, basically, and ephemeral..."

 

It was even more low-res in 2005.

 Make space. Make room. I've just realised the words"space" and "room" are entirely synonymous. If we can have rooms then, I guess we can have spaces. But yes, neither's ever entirely empty.

GO, GONG GANG!!!

 WOOOO!!! Give me an O! Give me a U! Give me a T! Give me an S! Give me... another T! Give me a... Give me A! Give me... hang on...  GO, FINNEMORE!!! How's that for not getting sixty per-cent on anything, you lovely fella – Sorry! – lovely Fellow! And please note, readers, that the Writers' Guild didn't just give John this award last night in recognition for his Outstanding Contribution to radio comedy writing, or to comedy writing, but to Writing – which is world-straighteningly just. Because John strives, and for as long as I've known him has always striven (striven?... strove? strived?) to be an outstanding writer, not just by not his own self-punishing standards, but by those of every single audient in front of whom he goes out and performs this stuff. Performing it alongside him is one of the least worrying things a person can do, and being asked to do it has always felt like a prize in itself – perhaps the only prize John will never be able to win. 

I mean, just look at the list of works above! No. Look at it. Closer... Nothing missing, is there, Writers' Guild? Just look at the breadth of that. That episode of "Safety Catch" he wrote? Yep, that's there. "Dead Ringers"? Yep. Mm-hm. All there. Yhm. Nooooothing missing, nope... 

 OH! AND my friend, and former creative fixture of the Shunt Lounge, Season Butler, has won Best First Novel for "Cygnet", which I raved about last year on Instagram thus: "a bit like what I guess it feels like having a biro stuck in your throat so you can breathe easier feels like – shouldn't make you safer but does", which was meant to be a recommendation, because it is also brilliant.

 It's a shame there's nothing of John's you can currently enjoy as well. Wait... let me check that list of works again... Anything? Mm? Maybe also to do with swans? Nothing? Nope. Oh well. Hallelujas all round.

P.S. Don't forget! Frankenstein Wednesday tomorrow! Let's see if that happens!

"Here are some phrases..."

  This is me trying to transcribe an audience's reactions to a show I performed nine years ago, a promenade version of Jonah Non Grata at the Shunt Lounge: Is that someone saying "This is an asshole of a night" 40 minutes, 40 seconds in? I can't be sure. I might leave that bit out. It's tricky. What sounds like "Good question" on one cheap set of headphones turns out to be "Is it Russian?" on another, and if anyone can tell me what I'm saying 22 minutes and 28 seconds into this, please let me know, or I'll just have to go with "I've discovered a new version of ham" which it definitely isn't.

 But it's a surprisingly creative procrastination exercise. Initially I just wanted to subtitle the video using youtube's CC function because so much of it was inaudible (and because it beat writing something new), but the subtitles seem to be taking on a nice life of their own now, and something new seems to be making itself. Of course it might just seem like that because subtitles immediately make something look more like a documentary, or it might seem like that simply because I've spent nearly a week staring at the thing, but so much of the show concerned the reading or repeating of text - phrases in a foreign accent, instructions, hymns, Ian Livingstone's "City of Thieves" - that it seems apt to see this text finally take centre stage. Subtitling also means that any audience murmur I can make out also becomes part of the text now. An unpleasantly fraught audience relationship has become an engaging dramatic narrative. You could never do this in the live show. This is the book. It's almost like a comic. Finally. And the fact that so many of the words are inaudible might actually be helping that transition. Words and pictures.

 I still haven't made a decision about Edinburgh though, obviously. This transcription is what I'm doing instead. I'll let you know when I've finished, but in the meantime here's the test piece I did a few weeks ago. I say "test piece" but I don't know who or what I was testing, maybe just people's capacity for attention.

 

Whoo! Song of the Year!

 

Coffee or Tea?

 Lisa Gail is of course most famous for the far horribler hit 3 Second Rule, but I think actually I like this one. Anyway I couldn't shift it from my head at work today. Having said that, work today did chiefly consist of shouting at a foggy queue in cockney about smog and textiles before trying to herd 25 of them into the spewing lines of two black-parachute-silk-filled crates, killing the lights, turning on the sounds of coughing, hooves and "Timmy?!" and leaving the punters to God, all on a three minute cycle, so maybe my head hates me... The London Dungeon is moving. Bit by bit. Something had to be done with the room that was once Sweeney Todd's so management decided to make it a room of fog. The big fans and the black silk are our designer Verity's nod to the opening scene of "Money". True. Up the workers!
   

 P.S. I've just remembered another callback to shunt, which is the appearance of smoke in London Bridge Station occasioning the arrival of the Fire Brigade and subsequent instructions to the downstairs feature, reliant almost entirely on filling a room with smoke, to not have smoke.

Lounge Flashback: November 18 2008

 I've just come across this old post from 2008 and been struck by how much of what's been knocking around in my mind following the closure of the Lounge turns out to be quoting from it verbatim, so here's a link. Clearly I think in recycled soundbites.
  Reading through these old posts it also occurred to me that I might continue to write about the Lounge by just making stuff up. Keep it alive here if nowhere else. Last Thursday I saw an aerialist made out of bicycle called "Lady Ganymede" whose owner used to source ring tones for the Vatican, something like that...

Always Be Closing

 There is a cabaret tonight at Shunt, starting at 6. You are all invited. Only, Shunt is now at Bermondsey Street. All of it. So, if you're lucky, you might even be able to pick up a cheap chair. They're good, I've bought two, carried them off like a bailiff following the father's downfall in a Perrault. In other fairy-tale news: that small door on Joiner Street leads nowhere now, because of course the Lounge beneath London Bridge has – as I may have hinted at – after months of happy and open communication between all parties keen to prove the viable compatibility of artistic and commercial concerns, been suddenly thrown out on its arse by a shower of useless pricks.

 

 No news is good news, and that's the news. I'm not really sure even now, some three or four weeks after its last night, how much I'm allowed to say, or what the plan is, which is a bit why this blog – in which the Lounge featured so centrally – has been so quiet recently... that, and just the abominable anger and sadness of how's it all transpired. Anyway, here belatedly are some stills from that last night, the 26th of June:

 

 Of course, we'd already had a last night back in November, with the place stripped, and old changing-rooms re-revealed, and the recognition that this wasn't just the Lounge we were saying goodbye to but the spaces of "Tropicana" and "Amalto Saltone", and that was a nice night, with seeing old friends and looking ahead and we knew where we stood. This night was different, of course.

 

(I don't know what's going on here, 

but four hours later there was an egg and spoon race.) 

 

 And naturally the Shard asked Shunt to "leave the place as they found it", but while we're not short of volunteers, none were found willing to rip out the toilets and the plumbing and the electricity, replant the sawn-off steel, or smear shit back onto the walls, so sorry about that.

 

 Two nights ago someone called Hilary came to see "Money". She had programmed what turned out to be the Lounge's penultimate week, and had hung from piercings in her shoulder while singing Verdi, something she can only do once a month, but that's not the point, the point is on Friday she lit up as she told me something I had found for myself whenever I came to put on work at the Lounge, but have probably never acknowledged here: that there was nowhere as helpful, as generous, as responsible, as unquestioningly encouraging, or as just plain big and playable-in as those vaults, let alone for free.

 

 Hillary told me she had made exactly what she wanted to make there, and everyone had come, and nobody known what to expect. (And then I walked home with a chair on my head.) So all I'm saying is, when I would describe the Lounge in terms of a mini-Edinburgh-Fringe reprogrammed weekly, impressive as that sounds, I actually did it an enormous disservice: it was far easier than that. Art got made there, even by accident. Not good art necessarily, of course not, but how are you going to know until you put it in front of strangers? 

 

 

 And there was no flyering, no feedback forms, no mentoring schemes, nothing except anything you wanted. Half a panzer coming through a wall? George would build it. A live, seven-foot wide video link to New York above the bar, or the running of a fake lift for your own promenade? Andrea would rig it up and get two volunteers to stand either side with a cue sheet and pneumatic forklift. And on and on. That was the Lounge. Something like one hundred people on that payroll, three of them paid for by the Arts Council. No really, just three. And now what? The Foundry gone this past month too. And East 10. But it's the Eighties Revival, non? "Always be closing." 

 

  

 "Oh well, it keeps you honest!" said an old acquaintance. God I hate poets. Okay then, back to the ghetto. And while fifty per cent of the world's cranes stand idle in Dubai, the Great Work of transforming London from a temperamental network of human-scale cultures into a collection of incredibly large, fucking stupid objects best viewed from twenty storeys high proudly changes up a gear.

 

 

 P.S. With not quite the numb pang that accompanies the deleting of a dead friend's number from your phone, I have removed the Lounge's video from my myspace homepage and placed it below. It's more of an advert than a tribute I know, but what are you going to do? Oh yeah, you're going to come to the cabaret! Tonight, quick! Here.

 

 

The Shunt Lounge

from Susanne Dietz on Vimeo.

I had not heard of Kenny Strasser

... and nor has the News. Therein lies the secret of his power, the power to make appearance after appearance on local news networks masquerading as a reformed junkie and "yo-yo master". Everything Shunt-wise is a bit up in the air right now (just as something falling off a cliff might be said to be up in the air) so until it lands, let's sit back and enjoy K-Strass and his demons in action. Actually you sit back, I still can't get through this in the one sitting:

Thanks to videogum for putting me onto this. And more here.
Oh, and I've just received the call: Money is definitely booking until the end of September, and all of a sudden we're selling out so good Yay. Meanwhile for the Lounge it's business as usual, i.e. we're closing. I think Saturday's the last night. Suddenly. Again. How terribly state-of-the-nation.

Yeah... 's hard.
 

UPDATE: This is of course, I realise years later, Mark Proksch.

This Handsome Chair

The other night my baby and I met up after the show and went to the Shunt Lounge to get smashed before walking home which has become a happy weekly thing. She asked me to tell her a story that night, and weak on cross-eyed Joyce's plum gin I made up this, which I thought i might as well put down here, without the ums:

'Once upon a time there was a handsome chair.

And all the bums in all the land wanted to sit on this chair. And they did.

But the chair did not like bums and longed one day to be sat on by a face instead. And all the other chairs said to each other "Who does this chair think it is, for whom bums aren't good enough?!"

But then one day a pervert turned up. And the pervert placed his face on the handsome chair and sniffed the seat.

And so the handsome chair learned that some faces are every bit as bad as some bums.

And the handsome chair decided to set out and find for itself where true beauty really lay. But being a chair it could get no further than falling on its side.

So there the handsome chair lay, on its side, and the police saw it and said "Was this the site of an incident?" And all the other chairs said "Yes! Yes, this was the site of a terrible incident!" And so the police taped off the handsome chair with incident tape and nobody was allowed to touch it and all the bums now sat on all the other chairs for ever and ever until the nuclear apocalypse.

And then all the people died and all the seats of all the chairs gathered radioactive dust.

And when the aliens finally landed they saw all the chairs covered in dust and said "Let's not sit there."

And then they saw the handsome chair, on its side, whose seat had gathered no dust, and they righted it, and took their turns to sit on it. And they all had faces in their bums.

And so the handsome chair and the aliens with faces in their bums lived happily ever after. The end." 

 

 Phew, good thing I got that down!

 In other news, "Six Impossible Things", the radio play I was in that got pulled from iplayer can now be downloaded here. I say something with my mouth full towards the end. It's "Sad times." The rest is pretty audible.

"Hhuhhh...?"

 I think today sees the last location shooting for the fourth series of Mitchell and Webb. I was driven over, bright and early, to Pinewood Studios last Friday to watch the Caesar sketch I'd written being filmed. I'm not used to being driven: "I'd love to see the look on John Terry's face when he wakes up this morning! Sir?" 

 Shit. A: Sir! B: John Terry?! Think! John Terry, headlines, something about sex, football? Is he a footballer? Maybe I can steer the conversation onto O'Reilly's interview with John Stewart, will the driver have seen that? He won't, will he. And we drove through the gates of Pinewood and I was very excited. Look!

 

 (James Bachman took that. My camera's bust.) Pinewood's not as paved as I thought it would be, I have to say. I picked the wrong shoes, should have gone for something without holes. And it was very quiet, although I suppose it was eight in the morning. Wandering about the perimeter I thought it looked like the Kazakhstani space programme, only with more posters of Terry Scott. The atmosphere on the Caesar set itself was lovely, however, lovely and warm, really cheering. My only worry is the decision to film the whole thing underwater, which might play merry hell with the timing. But we'll see. 

  Great comedy can certainly be achieved underwater, as the film below demonstrates. I saw it that same evening at the reopened Shunt Vaults. (They're open again tonight. It will be quiet I think. Even if it's packed, it will be quiet, which is how we like it. Things might get ugly if too many people turn up expecting a DJ or live band or noise, but I hear Nigel's dashing over between shows to do his Barry White Mussolini, so then again, it might all be fine.*) Anyway, Gemma supervised the construction of a cinema – what more do these people want? – and that's where I hid out last Friday. Occasionally, someone might pop their head round and go "You have got to be fucking kidding me. Are you all on acid? Are you on acid?" And then go, "Are you all on acid?" And then leave. But I think the film's brilliant. If you're not hooked within the first seconds though, don't waste your time:

 And it's interesting to see the one actor playing the husband clearly not "getting it", especially as everything I can find online about the film's director – an avant-gardist named James Sibley Watson Junior – suggests HE didn't get it either... deemed the whole thing a "failure". But I get it. And the lovers, they certainly get it. They're hilarious. They're inventing a new type of comedy before our eyes. Can there be any funnier shot of someone sitting on a straw hat than this? Any greater pun than "I have given you my awl"? What it reminds me of most is when, very occasionally, you dream a sketch, and in your dream it's the funniest thing you've ever seen and you'll be thinking "I wish I'd written this," and then you wake up and go "Brilliant!" And then you realise IT'S THIS FILM.

*update: I have returned. It was not quiet. But it turns out I like that as well. And despite having nothing to do with what's on, I enjoyed passing up and down once again with my baby, and a discounted beer in my hand, like I was the King of Art.

The Buzz

(originally posted on myspace here)

Coming up shortly another romantic, police-state-themed anecdote, but first:

Let me fill you in on Money. So yes we're into our second run. It's January - no it's not it's February, sorry - the snows have departed but Winter's still on us like the knackering corpse of some giant squid and the "houses" (industry term) are smaller as a result, but baby we're nailing it. It's so nearly all there. A-hundred-and-thirtyish shows in, and each one different, and each one - chiefly thanks to Lou who's sat in on about a-hundred-and-twentyish of them - zipping along now with a minimum of anguish (not an absence but a definite minimum). Although the first half takes place in a waiting room I have finally been talked round to the idea that JUST LETTING THE AUDIENCE WAIT does not make for a good show - kills it (industry secret) - nor I now realise does it even lend authenticity: the audience is in a dream, you never wait in dreams. At least I never have, surely that would play havoc with your REM. 

And external validation has come anew from both The New York Times (I know, what? They can make or break a show, bud! "And I mean that as a compliment." The New York Times) and The Independent (again) in the first review to actually acknowledge the writing as anything other than a terrible mistake, which is great because you know, there's words of mine in there and you know, they're doing a job (even if it's the same job Chinese newsprint performs in a cocktail umbrella).

OH! And then, last night, Derren Brown came. Because Neil Patrick Harris had brought him. And they loved it. And it's on twitter. And they lurved me. ("Staggering" Derren Brown... Now where can I take that?) I am using short sentences to try and convey the magnitude of this. Awe. "Hi, I'm Neil." Aw. Yeah you are! And your boyfriend David Burtka's lovely! And - and Derren's first words to me were "Where do I know you from I know you I've seen you it's driving me crazy is it a - a play have you been in a play is it channel four a - a meeting - I've seen you." No. We'd never met. But look, standing here in front of me is Derren Brown WRACKING HIS BRAINS. That was a good night (but no seriously where can I take it?) 

And the Lounge? I don't know. It's opening its doors again to something tomorrow and I'd like to be there to see what. Maybe I'll be a stewardess. Maybe I'll have some kind of tiny show to hang from the title "We Should Sh" (good title eh?) but I doubt it, my baby's sick. I must go to her. I must find something to call her other than my baby...

And this is a while back now, but we thought it might be romantic to go to the fair, my baby and me:

And she took me on The Waltzer. I'd never been on one. And I thought I'd die. I'm thirty-five, I've been in a fire, I thought I'd die. I went pale and couldn't walk. I was too old and she said sorry. So we left the fair. And as we passed a news-agent she also went pale and said "Ah! Can't you hear that?" The shop had a hypersonic Mosquito "youth crowd dispersal system". No I couldn't hear it. I'm thirty-five. IN YOUR FACE,  YOUTH!

SPOILER WARNING

 

 Back in the office at Money I've just been told the Lounge, which closed, stripped, on Saturday (above), may now be getting another extension until March. Nigel's face when he heard the news was... did you see that Doctor Who on Sunday when David "Oh nwoh, oh no nwoh, I'm sorry, I'm so, swoh sorry" Tenant went and saved Lyndsay Duncan's life at the last moment, even though the time and circumstance of her death had been QUANTUMLY ORDAINED, and so do you remember how she reacted? Like that. Shunt and me and Nigel's brains will hear more tomorrow, but yeah there may be murk at the end of the tunnel yet. Whoop awe. 

 

 

"Under these arched bricks... we have communed with people from all over the world, discussed in all languages, and understood each other."

Mateusz Odrobny

The Wallpaper at Brady's

(originally posted on myspace here)

This is my twitter wallpaper. It comes from Brady's, in Brixton. Yes that's another thing that happened last month, I started tweeting. Because John Cleese does. Once I tweeted Tom Waits teetering, but it's not a page I particularly recommend you visiting. However if you get the chance to see inside the building I actually took it from, visit that. This is Brady's below. I'd see the clock face at eye level whenever I went swimming, but for my nine years living in Brixton I never actually saw inside Brady's. You didn't go inside Brady's:

I'm posting this between shows from the low-lit office of "Money" once again, dressed in my riot gear and balaclava. I can hear a woman's voice from the other side of the Venetian blinds go "No, it's a real person. That's fucked up!" Well them's the breaks, miss. By tomorrow I'll need to have written fifteen minutes of material for That Mitchell and Webb Look, from scratch, but I promised to post shots of a site that the Shunt Lounge (closing tomorrow - TOMORROW) had considered relocating to, and Friday the 13th's an apt a date as any. Because what Brady's looked like on the inside did not disappoint:

Okay but I bet that wasn't really a torture room. 

Okay but I bet there weren't really witches... This is three or so months ago. We'd taken a break from rehearsing Money to be shown around and it was probably the first time I'd returned to Brixton in daylight since the fire. I felt very at home. Very excited.

"Oh, Jimi Hendrix was born in this room, you say? Wow. We're all vampires anyway."

Ooh! And what's under the mattress in the corner? Actually forget that what's the other side of that window?

I see.

"Wow! Let's leave!"

And the view?

Oh I loved it. Imagine if we moved there! And then imagine if I moved back! We're not moving there though... BUT - Actually I'd better get my balloons, it's showtime. We shall continue this anon. Bye bye, Brady's. Hit it Dr. Buckles! Loveyoubye.

The Public Reaction

(originally posted on myspace here)

All finished!

"Yeah but hang on, Simon, eff off! You can't just disappear for a month then swan back online with 'The Public Reaction' like nothing's happ- Oo! Footage!"

Haha! Yet again I deflect your fictional carping, my shit-giving mental construct...  And now, look, if you didn't know by now, dear actual reader, regarding our show "Money" the press were good to us, very good. They said this ("cool"! four stars) and this ("teasing"! four stars) and this ("DISCERNIBLE"! four stars). There was also a not basically accurate reference to Shunt's own finances here ("Oo yeah let's read that!" four belms)... which, which, which...which is as good a place as any to mention that the Lounge will now finally be closing its doors at the end of next week. The fourteenth. Moving off. Sharded. So get your skates on. (Shit. Money's staying where it is though. That's safe. And sold out. Go Tweaks!) Various new locations have been considered. I'll show you one of them in the next post, and that will lead me on to other relocations I must fill you in on, which will in turn - basically it's alright, this blog is now sorted. Let's celebrate...

Whee.

Right I have to head off now. I'm using the Lounge's internet and everyone's gone. Nigel promised me a giant Nosferatu head left over from Halloween if I came round, then he shouted at me because I was on the computer all the time and wouldn't go with him on the boat in the tunnel of balloons George had made to look like the Super K Subterranean Neutrino Observatory after it had shut so I did. And it was good. Get your skates on.

And speaking of tweaks, you see that guy on the left in this video? That's us, in rehearsals. Okay, mainly me... Who's the guy on the right? No idea.

But the results speak for themselves.

FOR KIDS: Bimbo, Evita and Flaps (Remnant)

(originally posted on myspace here)

Today's post has suddenly been erased. Hecht. Oh well, I can't be bothered to write it again. But here's the contents:

Peter Arnold was outside in the sun, hard at work on a giant labia.

"It was meant to be a diaphragm," he explained.

"Is it for the show?" I asked.

"No."

What's missing from this picture?

 

 At nine o'clock it was still light in Battersea Park, and I'm trying to put my finger on what it is that's missing, and why I feel I'm wasting my time here. I mean, look at it. Where else would I rather be? Just behind me is the vicarage I lodged in when I left school, attached to a round church with a photograph of the planet Earth where Jesus would normally be, or at least that's what was there back in 1993, when I first left home. And it's becoming difficult to maintain that enthusiasm for independence now I'm 34. London has never looked more beautiful, and I'm limping to keep up. Battersea Park is practically deserted and there are party-boats on the the Thames but this doesn't feel like home tonight. It feels like a very well-appointed waiting room. 

 

 I don't know what's missing.

 Maybe this is because of the fire, because my home has gone but I'm only now getting ready to entertain. Maybe it's because of the pain in the right leg. Maybe it's because I should be writing. I've had another week off and done... not nothing I suppose, no, on Tuesday I went to the hospital to blow into a robot and receive a clean bill of health, good, and on Friday I went to "The Hospital" to eat Eggs Benedict and discuss a script about a hitman - but it's not much. I mean, Gemma went over to California for the week and still managed fit in research for the show (from a book about Manet... and there's a mur-mermuh-mermuh programme about him on iplayer right now in fact). It's all good stuff she's found. Here's some:

"This is a quote from the charge d'affaires at the British Embassy in Paris in 1869.

'The second empire has gone off the rails. It is no longer being guided it is hurling itself at an accelerating speed towards the abyss'... 

"The 1867 expo opened late. On the opening ceremony, they were surrounded by builders. because of bad weather, barely half the exhibits were there. Of those that had arrived, only a fifth had been unpacked. The opening ceremony, conducted by Emperor Napoleon was on 'a muddy fairground amid packing cases, tarpaulin-shrouded exhibits and crews of frantic workmen' one observed described it as 'a sickly child that was bound to die', so. That became the biggest show in Europe. It's all ok... 

"London in 1867 had a heatwave. They drank cold tea and gentlemen wore wet cabbage leaves inside their top hats... 

"Abolishment of arbitrary arrest and obligation of workers to carry identity cards... 

"Napoleon went to war in Alsace Lorraine with bladder stones. In a lot of pain, he rouged himself, and tried to die in battle but failed. He lamented he was 'not even able to get himself killed.'... 

"During the seige, they killed all the animals in the zoo to eat. The richer Parisians therefore dined on all sorts of curiosities. Castor and Pollux, the two elephants in the Jardin de Plantes, had been cruelly and bunglingly dispatched with a chassepot firing steel tipped.33 calibre bullets. Elephants had long been the most esteemed and well loved residents at the zoo. They were fed honey cakes and were said to enjoy the singing of patriotic songs. Their keeper, M. Devisme, had protested at the execution (which was watched by several big-game hunters and other Parisians) and afterwards fell sobbing in the snow, huggling the trunk of one of his dead charges. Elephant steak promptly found its way onto the plate of Victor Hugo who was further satisfying his gastronomic curiosity by tucking into bear and antelope. (Horse meat gave him indigestion. Wealthy Parisians were able to choose from zebra, reindeer, yak and kangaroo)" 

The night before Gemma mailed that, I had a dream about dying elephants in the Shunt Lounge, a whole pile of them at the foot of a low ramp being gored by elephants that had failed to make the jump and goring the next ones in turn. It was a mess. Maybe I need a desk. There are four canvasses stuck to the wall of the room I now occupy. They're stuck there with blue tak. Two are blank. The other two bear this picture:

 

 But as long as this isn't my home that's not my problem.