What is privacy for?

(originally posted on myspace here)

It's an odd thing but sitting in a spotlight in the dark you're constantly glimpsing bits of your own face in the peripheries. This happened as I watched Mel perform Iris Brunette sitting beside us one by one, assigning characters and engaging us in coversation. I was there as a member of the audience but also (like quite a few others there) as somebody who knew her and somebody used to performing off the cuff, so when it came time for her to address me it was difficult to know quite how to play it: She was being brilliant, should I shut up? Was I having to pretend to be a member of the audience even though I was one? I watched silently for as long as was polite. Then I was asked my name, which I guess was a question anybody could answer, so I answered that. Then I was asked what made my heart race? I said "noise" which was dumb - I was very conscious of my heart racing right then in fact as both she and the spotlight stayed on me. But what I wish I'd said was "hiding."

And I think I got an idea of how to end "Iago's Little Book of Calm" (the radio adaptation of something sweary I wrote for the stage five years ago which ends with the central character noticing the audience, a much harder trick to pull off if they're not there). I think the solution might have something to do with talking to yourself. So thanks for that, Mel. Her shows often give me ideas, not directly as such, they're just good places to think.

The same can be true of Chris Goode's blogging. Laid up with this cold I finally got round to looking at his rehearsal diary for Hey Mathew this afternoon (upon which Jamie opposite is currently employed). It's an eloquent, passionate, generous and witty account of a type of rehearsal process I instinctively distrust (perhaps, as Chris suggests, because it's not a process of rehearsal towards a show as such but a process of investigation that should - and on this evidence, justifiably does - exist for its own sake). It was here I saw posted: "Can anyone help me out with thinking about this thing about stripping away the privacy from intimacy? And -- if you fancy it -- what exactly are you using your privacy to do?"... and I tried to post the following in response. The capchta was sletedso:

"Privacy is simply being granted control over the company you keep, isn't it? 'Let's go somewhere private' means 'Let's get rid of the unknowns.' A couple of years ago I was thinking a lot about hiding... about writing a children's book about a boy who loved playing games involving hiding, and then found out that being onstage felt entirely the same (dozens of copies where then made of him, all of whom ended up after an initial polite camaraderie keeping out of each other's way). So yes I was thinking about the joy of hiding (on one's own, rather than in a den, although THAT IS YES THE SAME) and about the stage as a counter-intuitively perfect hiding place. When I turned eight I would spend every school break walking up and down talking to myself, and this continued until I graduated. It was and is simultaneously a completely private yet public activity, and inasmuch as I am taking on different voices while talking to myself and, in a sense improvising dialogue, it is also a performance, even though it is not done for an audience, which is only something that's just occurred to me. I would say you hide on stage because you disappear, but this takes us down needlessly controversial, well-farrowed tracks about the nature of truth in performance, so won't. Maybe I made some notes I'll have a look no I can't find them. What do we use our privacy for? People affect each other - (actually I'd accidentally written "People effect each other" which is a bit more profound) - It is polite to refrain from effecting somebody without their consent. So privacy I think exists in case we're scary. Intimacy, on the other hand, requires company. A person can't be intimate on their own, can they? As an adjective "intimate" almost means "descriptive of an atmosphere requiring privacy" or something you wouldn't do in front of a third party. Except in the case of performance where it really just means somebody's doing their job. Maybe."

So yes I wrote that and then I went and saw Melanie's show. Mental, eh? And it's true about the school breaks. They used to call me "Walkie Talkie". Cough.

"Is it from the horses?" (NONBOND NIGHT 3: BULLDOG DRUMMOND)

(originally posted on myspace here)

Of course, while plugging all those shows I completely forgot that this very evening Mark Evans' glorious Bleak Expectations II hits our ears again, with Richard Johnson and my excellent sister no less. I am perhaps a little biased, but the studio recordings of these shows were perhaps the happiest I've ever attended. Hear the love in that room. And tonight's choice of Non-Bond was therefore obvious:

It turns out Richard Johnson had a brief career as Bulldog Drummond, a thirties sleuth re-invented for the sixties by bringing on the ladies and shooing the helpful schoolboys and scarfed Germans lurking in sewers... Reinvention is nothing new, which might be at the heart of what bugs me about The Dark Knight sorry to return to this but I don't want people looking back going oh yes that was the torture decade. Anyway this should hopefully clear the palette after Gareth Hunt kicking a ninja in the briefs.

But if Joanna Lumley and Johnson in a tux isn't classy enough, here's a coach. My friend Melanie invented it today when we popped into the Education Centre of the Royal Mews. Everything else was sold out so we pottered before the bored bay stallions in their stalls and the gold splurges of palm-tree and cherub (when it dawned on me that I actually know nothing at all about the eighteenth century, except that it turned out a lot of stuff like this... Was it really just one hundred years of nothing until someone somewhere carved one triton too many and they all started killing each other and painting and writing again? And we could tell the stallions were bored because one knocked his bridle off a hook with his muzzle and then, when it was replaced, tried to do it again, learning. They should be given something to do in there, handed some paints or a trampette or something, like that elephant). I haven't sat down in a tiny plastic chair testing coloured pencils and looking over to see what the girl next to me is doing since I was, well actually quite old now I come to think of it. And I fell back on the old standby of drawing lots of carnivorous plants. And Mel got to keep that. And I got to keep this. And then we ate and smoke and drank. Harumble!

This is what we do. Part 1

 

"This is what we do."

Those words spiral in white from a gobo across the floor of the new cafe in Broadcasting House. Free-standing plastic pillars are covered in catch-phrases. It's like the Millennium Dome, except it's a corridor. It employs whatever the opposite of Feng Shui is, a bit like that triangular cell I hypothesized about a month back, and is an even worse place to stay behind and have a drink in than the Drill Hall, which may be the point. Oh you BBC!... whose buildings have inspired literary and filmic dystopiae for nearly a century now. Always at the forefront of baffling and inhuman architecture. "This is what we do." Isn't that what they hung around Morgan Freeman's neck in "Unforgiven"?

What I was there to see was excellent however, and not the work of idiots, so I'll stop being mean: Two recordings of "Safety Catch", a new sitcom about a hapless arms dealer by Laurence Howarth (an alchemist of comic assonance - eg. "infertile wind-surfer") and an excellent idea all round as it gives him the opportunity to a) write a treatise on the nature of evil without anyone minding, and b) have carte blanche to a motherlode of new and amusing-sounding words like "Uzi", "Howitzer", the "Gambia", and "Chad".

These two nights of recording ran either side of Chris Goode's last London preview of "Hippo World Guestbook", which was also an excellent idea perfectly executed (and an uncharacteristically simple idea for Chris): the reading aloud of a selection of six years' worth of comments from a hippo fan site guestbook... first about how much they like hippos, and then about how much hippos suck, and then about how much people who think hippos suck suck, and then how about much they like to fuck hippos if anyone is interested in visiting their site to watch, and then just endless adverts for internet gambling and viagra, and then nothing... in short, a neat portrait of the death of, well, hope Hahahaha. In the bar afterwards ("Bar"? Pub. Downstairs) Chris said something about being "surprised by the people coming out of my mouth" and I thought to myself: "He's talking about acting. *Gasp*. Not theatre-making, not even "performance" - which he's said is like Texas and I can't work out why - but Acting. Capital A. Pretending to be someone else. Awwwww, he's got it!" Which was pretty petty of me actually. It's on in Edinburgh. It's very good.

When Chris originally told me about it I was immediately reminded of my own first glimpse into the dark heart of an internet community, when I finally got broadband and discovered youtube and found a lovely little film someone had posted spoofing someone else's lovely little film, and then read the comments beneath... There were over a thousand. Some people loved it. Some people didn't "get it" and made the usual complaints about "twenty-five seconds of my life I'll never get back". Some people retaliated with the usual "you wasted even more time writing in to complain" which in turn inspired charges of retardation and general volleys of hatred increasingly based on what country a post had come from leading in turn to heated debates about the state of Israel and the existence of God, the War, and on and on and on and it went EVERYWHERe, and it was all AnGRY and in a way... actually... that was the one thing I missed from Chris' show: None of the dissenting "Kill All Hippos" posts that he read out had to be taken that seriously. They were evidence of vandalism, nothing more. Sad, but not scary. Not as scary, anyway, as an open forum's flip into the dark side can be.
Nor as scary as, say, my own flip...

When I last visited Chris' blog I did a very bad thing, and I'm not sure I can go back. Why does this happen? I'd just come home from Dungeon team-building exercise. I had made someone cry without noticing. Go team. I was a bit rattled so I sat down to the powerbook and saw that Viv had just joined F*c*book and posted photos of Sofia, so I cheerily insulted her ("hunchback") and then her baby ("Dylan Moran") and then moved on to Chris' glowing review of my friend Mel's astonishing Edinburgh show "Simple Girl" and insulted that ("I..." actually what the hell am I doing quoting this stuff again) and then went Ahhhhhhnm-nm-nm-nm-nm-nm-nm and got into bed and went to sleep.
And then woke up.
At seven.
Pale.
And waited until twelve.
And made some phonecalls.
And received some texts.

In our kitchen now are five large bin-liners full of uneaten cake from Morgan. And there's a sixth in the hall. And I'm off to Edinburgh today. I still don't feel that well. I'm just waiting for the water to stop dripping from the lightbulb above me and the ceiling to stop fizzing from where I let the bath overflow and my room to stop smelling of Copydex. I may be gone some time.

And I am so very sorry.

(To come in Part 2: Nice stuff about the BBC... and everyone... redemption... padlocks folded into swans.)

cirque de mel (BIGGER THAN MY GREAT GREAT GRANDMOTHER)

... except I can't work out how to open this post with the word "The." Well it's been a while. I'm rusty (Hello). I ran my bath upstairs. The downstairs bath no longer has any hot. I got in and found there was a wasp hovering around. I got out and tried to hover in a manner that might influence his own hovering towards the door. I didn't flap I just waved my arms, switched the light-saving bulb on and off... He knocked about the bulb and the lintel, inscrutably. Both of us looked stupid. Neither of us were equipped for this. Neither were a credit to our separate species. "Basta! We are the paragon of dumb animals" I thought after the bath and set about building a circus from youtube:

 

  A lot of silent acts had to be cut I'm afraid, but they can be easily found. "The Miller and The Sweep" who just whack each other with sacks until they're both grey... "Princess Rajah" who can belly-dance with a chair between her teeth... The legendary Annie Oakley from 1894 displaying a marksmanship that has to be taken a little bit on trust given the state of film stock from 1894... The stripper on the flying trapeze and "the Gordon Sisters" endlessly boxing for Thomas A. Edison...

Edison's own electrocution of Topsy the elephant however (to illustrate the dangers of Tesla's Alternating Current) I left out after much deliberation. It did smack of epoch, but this wasn't going to be that kind of circus.
And I would have loved to have had the extraordinary "Julian's Troupe Acrobats" on the bill, but they refused to be embedded.

 

 Darrell Bluett stays. He has to. I can't stop watching him. I don't know why. I even thought of reproducing his act myself verbatim, then found someone else on youtube had already done that. I am glad.
 

 And in the world: I compered. My first time properly: the Wambam Club at the Battersea Barge. Our burlesque act Lady Chocolat never arrived but I'd written two songs that day to cover. One was called "Scrap Brain Zone". It was accompanied by the music of Sonic the Hedgehog from my phone and was supposed to sound a bit like Julian Fox ("I'm a blue hedgehog. And I'm running around a factory that's very, very dangerous. Collecting Gold Rings..." etc.) The other was "O Suck It In", an attempt to phonetically reproduce Asha Bhosle's "O Saathi Re" (from the 1978 film "Muqaddar Ka Sikandar") into a language that let me join in... an old idea, but a great opener. Coincidentally there happened to be a large and mainly Asian birthday party in that night to see the burlesque act, so witnessing me singalong to a Bollywood legend probably sweetened the pill of her absence considerably. Definitely. It wasn't racist. They could tell I just wanted to sing along:

Oh suck it i-i-i-i-in.
They let me market your demons.
They let me market your demons.

Oh lower your belly on me.
Suck in and put your belly on me.
Oh lower your belly on me.
Suck in and put your belly on me.
Remind me of Butch my cleaner.
Then let me knock at your knee-knaw.

Oh suck it i-i-i-i-in.
They let me market your demons.
They let me market your demons.

Johnny Hayseed,
I need you knee-deep.
On yon façade we'll eat brassy monkeys.
Up with the southern butchers!...
Who aren't bad people.
Bjorn says when he's king
He'll pardon them mostly.
And build the office on me-ee-ee.
Build the office on me.
Make love and stooge on me.
Only joking for real.
And let me knock at your knee-knaw.

Oh suck it i-i-i-i-in.
They let me market your demons.
They let me market your demons.

Hurry, hurry, Carnaby.
Just take it easy.
Sandstone may easily be the pushier moon, heh?
It's the third year BC.
Who saw the burly detective?
My old nun said to me it's too easy to hate.
Bjorn ain't too thin now-w-w.
Bjorn ain't too thin now.
Who said the rude thing now?
Someone joking for real.
They let me market your demons.


P.S. That's Asha Bhosle singing on my homepage now. (I may switch back to the Eno though at some point because his music is actually supposed to be used as wallpaper. Just makes it more ethical.) Anyway we'll catch up properly tomorrow maybe.