I saw a short show I think you'll like about British guns.

 I found this old photo of what used to be the Trocadero. There's a Crystal Maze at the top now, and occassionally I work there. Every Maze Master gets to choose their own costume and I chose pyjamas and a dressing gown. These make the wearer look simultaneously completely lost and completely at home, but I have subsequently remembered it's a costume I've chosen a few times before...

  And it's hard to run in slippers. The best of a number of good things about this job is that you get to share a green room with people who are making things. Our boss recently emailed us details of some of those things, currently being shown at the Vaults beneath Waterloo, and attached was a spreadsheet with thirty-three new works on it. I've only seen one of these so far, this evening, and this is a plug for it. Gang, I think you should go and see "Tuna"! It's on at six tomorrow (Sunday, so okay, today) and then that's it, I'm sorry. But Airlock have made a fabulous thing. Rosanna Suppa's teen narrator makes a divine comedy of the hell of not being listened to, populated by merciless physical caricatures drawn from a life growing up in a house full of guns, which burst out of her like something out of Tetsuo. It's a heck of a dance, but it's also just someone talking to you, knowing you're listening, and proudly asking nothing. Rosanna says here, "A recent audience member described it as ‘like the first time I took speed’, which sounds like a good thing, because the way he phrased it, he’s done speed since." She also says in that interview "There was a person's flesh worth of fish on there'' which is just a phrase I like. God, I laughed. Tickets are HERE. It's directed by Robbie Taylor Hunt, lit by Catja Hamilton, nobody seems to have put a foot wrong, and I hope it happens again.

Manage to watch this to the end and I'll buy you a pint...

 Ahahaha indeed. Here, try playing this simultaneously underneath. It might help:

And welcome to the new look Unattended. Yes, the old myspace blog has finally become unnavigable - de-evolving from codex to ROM-sapping scroll - so I heaved the whole lot over here to blogspot like a grownup and have been up late sewing tags, all to ensure the Blog Mark Two is hopefully user-friendly now to the point of harassment. What do you think? Too noisy? Try the "Obama", it's delicious...What a haul it's been. "Fat Adolf" remember that? That Secret Agent screenplay I kept going on about which I still haven't written or started to write? - Ah, it's 7:16 in the morning - that would call for a "Sleeping/Not sleeping". It's good to have a system. Happy rummaging!

How Do We Get To Carnegie Hall? (a brief history of music)

(originally posted on myspace here)

I caught the "slightly expanded" transcript of this talk a few months ago on the very rewarding blog of David Byrne ("the Noticer" I call him). The subject, how the space you perform in dictates what you make, is obviously very close to my heart (a lot of the ellipsis-heavy stuff I say in "Money" is tailored to our oblong acoustics) and there's something particularly exciting in seeing an entire history of an artistic medium presented purely in terms of the changing spaces that have showcased it. Anyway it's on youtube now (delivered by Byrne disguised for some reason Jim Jarmusch) meanwhile I'm off to try and make another trailer for the show (Ben Brantley of the New York Times may feature heavily).

 

And here is that expanded version on Byrne's own blog.

And here is the New York Times on us, yum.
And, oh, here is Michael Billington, being wrong on the New York Times, petty I know but we're playing sometimes to audiences of just fifteen right now, so I'll tear my consolation from whatever seedy nook I can. (On the plus side these smaller numbers are really helping the acoustics. Good, dream- like echo.)

George W. Byeeeee!

  

Uncanny.

Or how about this?

"It is a durable, ubiquitous, specious metaphor, that one about "the veneer of civilization" hiding the nobler reality beneath. It can conceal a dozen fallacies at once. One of the most dangerous is the implication that civilization, being artificial, is unnatural: that it is the opposite of primitiveness... Of course there is no veneer, the process is one of growth, and primitiveness and civilization are degrees of the same thing. If civilization has an opposite, it is war. Of those two things you have either one or the other. Not both. It seemed to me as I listened to Tibe's dull fierce speeches that what he sought to do by fear and persuasion was to force his people to change a choice they had made before their history began, the choice between those opposites." 

 (From "The Left hand of Darkness" by Ursula K. Le Guin, which I'm reading in the Dungeon as the fifth child this month glancing up at the flickering mortuary photograph of Ripper victim Annie Chapman turns excitedly to his mother and whispers "Look, it's Harry Redknapp!") 

 

 Anyway can somebody please arrest everyone involved now? Cheers! (: ?@

This beautiful Arizona evening

 The night of my thirtieth birthday was spent sitting in the kitchen with a bottle of cheap white wine watching the first uncontestable election victory of George W. Bush. He didn't steal it this time, they chose him. I couldn't face that again. So last night I stayed up long enough to see Obama gain - what was it, 150 seats? against McCain's 90-odd - then McCain suddenly gained another 20 and I remembered Kerry and knew exactly where this was going.

  

 This morning was very grey, wasn't it. I turned on the telly and... well McCain's victory was still a kick in the guts even though I'd called it. Obama's wry but wounded speech in Chicago, the tears in the crowd, the quiet, broken rage, everything as I'd imagined, the predictability of the whole scene was almost a comfort. And the tension had been unbearable so at least we'd been put out of our misery, that too was sort of a comfort... And then McCain took the mike in Pheonix to give his victory speech, and I thought it odd that he wasn't smiling.

 I mean it was very odd. Especially given the ecstatic noise the crowd was making. There was no pointing at the crowd either, I can understand that he wanted to come across as, well sobre, but why wasn't he smiling? He just stood there flanked by single-star-spangled banners, his lips pressed, palms out, and it looked like the crowd would never shut up. But when they let him speak I have to admit he was more gracious than I'd ever seen him: "Thank you. Thank you, my friends. Thank you for coming here on this beautiful Arizona evening. A little while ago, I had the honor of a call from Senator Barack Obama - " at which point the crowd struck up again, like a wind, almost like they'd lost. There were real jeers. The cameras picked out face after face and none would have looked out of place in a meeting at the warehouse in a straight-to-video Steven Seagal film. McCain put his hands out once again and signaled weakly for silence. Finally he got it, and he held it. For what seemed like a minute. And then, it was extraordinary. It was sort of beautiful... "Guys. You scare me."

  

 Silence from the crowd. And then: "My fellow prisoners... Goodbye." And he opened a door in the air behind him, turned to raise a small old hand above his head for the first time in twenty years, waved farewell, and walked through it smiling.

  

 Ah man, the look on their faces! And then when Sarah Palin stood up to the mike and they all started cheering again but just as she's about to speak the ground suddenly LURCHES TILTS ALARMS SOUND ALL THEIR FACES PRESS UP AGAINST THE GLASS AND THEY REALIZE THEY WEREN'T ON THE PLANET EARTH AT ALL BUT ACTUALLY STUCK IN A TWO-DIMENSIONAL PRISON SPINNING THROUGH SPACE!!!
 

 Dude. No I have to say I didn't see that bit coming. That was cool.

and we sat at the Blackwatch table

(originally posted on myspace here)

Last night I think I finally cut the Gordian knot of "Iago's Little Book Of Calm". I cut the Gordian Knot, stole the Gordian posts and then bombed Gordia, electronically deleting all references to Gordia in the process. The play probably lasts seven minutes now. Good. It should always have been slight as a paper cut, I'd just forgotten.

And here I appear to stand behind David Tennant, unshorn and taking a private snap of Ella with her Ev*n*ng St*nd*rd statuette for Outstanding Newcomer. Claire Bloom was in that room. She's worked with Chaplin. I have nothing very coherent to say about the afternoon right now... when you hold the award newsprint comes off on your fingers I noticed. And Charles Dance had a hacksaw in his pocket which was odd. And I was very, very proud. And everyone was nice, and happy, and interested. Ella's speech seemed to go down well, which was good as we'd hammered it out in Cafe Nero half an hour before and really made an effort:
"Hello. Thank you very much. I'm very pleased to be here. Thanks to the cast and to Neil Labute for putting me in a play called Fat Pig. I'd also like to thank the producers of Fat Pig. And everyone who came to see Fat Pig. That's Fat. Pig. I hope you all have a lovely afternoon. Thank you, I'm really really chuffed to bits."
Textbook! Go Team! Go Ella!

A little bit of politics: walls

(originally posted on myspace here)

In a break from rapping at Bishop's tonight we got onto the subject of Lego.

Peter reminded me that in the old days if you wanted to make a spaceship, it would normally involve inordinate amounts of trellis and possibly a tree. All of which has nothing to do with what follows, although maybe the image does, but probably not.

After an early night to bed I woke at five this morning. I filled a large cup with some water and ice, logged on to iplayer, and rustled up a documentary about the Nigerian schism in the Anglican Church. Bring that schism on, thick bigots, say I. It's the only thing that makes me wish I believed in God: I'd love to be an Archbishop. I'd bandy around words like "charity" and "evil" like it was my birthright. Surely that's the whole POINT of being a religious leader though. Don't pussyfoot around Leviticus, just say "Jesus had a much better idea: instead of looking to the Scriptures for our morality let's trust to our own informed and inherent empathy, not the most original of premises I know, but I AM AN ARCHBISHOP so I think that this was GOD'S idea, new idea, even though a lot of people had thought of it first, still we should clearly listen to THAT and not the old mad, survivalist, cutting-it-in-the-desert stuff, admittedly it doesn't seem THAT MUCH like a religion, but OUR churches are mainly lovely and old and yours, while admittedly incredibly popular, aren't - look, YOU ARE EVIL and you imprison homosexuals, albeit your services do look a lot more fun." But no, that apparently would be foolhardy and that's not how the Church works.

And it clearly didn't send me to sleep, although it was quite draining. So then I loaded up a whopping two-hour-plus slice of Boris Johnson taking questions from the London Assembly, which was every bit as enervating (a word that still stubbornly refuses to mean "elevating" crossed with "energizing"). Tossy guff about "Ken's pet projects urgh AH OOH newts (laughter) MUH that number by the pound sign is very big, I'm sure smaller numbers exist therefore that could be cheaper MUH UM New Routemaster ie not a Routemaster AH consultants, what do they do? MUH BUM knife crime" and then that silver gitfox from the BNP started getting excited about some definitely non-racial study he'd just commissioned as to what percentage of the - now, it was some section of the community, I can't for the life of me remember exactly which one he'd decided to single out for study, but there... no, it's gone - anyway the "something" community was affected by knife crime, at which point I shut up my laptop, popped on a fleece, and threw myself to the alsatians.

And then... and then... and then at Bishop's this evening I caught Barack Obama on Channel 4, quite shrewdly talking to the assembled Berlin throng as though he'd already been elected (a charade I'm sure the rest of the world will be quite happy to go along with even if it turns out he loses. I would.) The telly played the speech's book-ending soundbites, "The road is long", and the hokey moonshine of "I speak not as a candidate for President but as a citizen" and I was none too impressed but thought I'd look up the rest, tonight, just now. And good:

Dude, did he say "a world without nuclear weapons"?

Twice?

Of course, the last time I felt this good about a speech it was Tim Collins' address to his troops before the invasion of Iraq (as jotted down here by the lady standing behind Kenneth Branagh) so, you know, fuck it. And indeed, looking over this central third again, I can't really put my hand on my heart and swear that David Cameron could never have made this exact same speech albeit lying through his shiny head. So why post it?

Well, I think it's when he talks about walls. Living in London I've seen a number of barriers go up in the last five years, mainly black and yellow, sometimes orange and slotty, and sometimes tortured metaphorical barriers I try and cram into this sentence like the barriers to anyone under 21 buying alcohol in a shop. Every politician seems to think barriers are the answer. So, yes, it's nice to hear someone talk of walls coming down for a change. And that's the nub. It's not just that he talks like he's already been elected, it's that - although he does mention the war - he talks, uniquely, like a leader in a time of peace. And that he gets his countries and his history right. And that, although I don't know the size of his claque, there's 100 thousand Germans there waving Stars and Stripes, and someone in the audience is clearly ululating... "Hope" is such a potentially duff word. But no I think, here, he's nailed it. I just wish Hicks or Hunter were still around so I could check.