is, when all is said and done, super-awesome. But why would on Earth would I wish to make a - ugh - "drawdio"? you might ask. Well watch.
Quick Tip: Don't breath the fumes. Thanks as ever to videogum.com In
other news, I've started reading the second volume of Michel Palin's
diaries and the phrase "valuable writing time" keeps coming up. What is
that? Bong. Morgan's just bought another chainsaw. Bong. Went for a stroll in Whitehall. Nowhere does ice lollies and Liam Fox comes up to my tit. Bong.
Oh and finally, I never did follow up that place-holder about scripts,
did I? Well the moment's passed now I guess, but my cross-purposed
response to Chris Goode's original enquiry can be found in the comments here, and my monosyllabic contribution to his unscripted piece "World of Work" here. Happily, complying with this request turned out to require less time and imagination than turning it down. Bong.
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 forgetten 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.)
On hitting thirty I had a dream in which I met myself and was very
polite, an entirely believable reaction but not at all what I would have
expected, so I consider myself quite lucky to have found this out. I
really wanted to make a good impression, as I might upon a friend of a
friend, but was probably a bit too formal as a result and it was my
other self who finally broke the ice by bringing our foreheads together
and vigorously rubbing the back of my shaved head."Now you have a go," he said. I did. It felt odd. I didn't have this dream again and we haven't stayed in touch.
On
Sunday morning, two years after this dream, I found my doppelganger
(see "General Interests" on the homepage) still bald and lying on his
front in the corner of that area of the Shunt Lounge known as "The
Penthouse". Having spent two years gathering mould (and, oddly, dolls)
in one of the presentation rooms now used for storage, he'd been cleaned
up and borrowed for a show. The people in the show had dismembered him,
hollowed him out a bit so he looked baggier like Brando and given him
spongy joints. I no longer looked much like him, but he also looked a
lot less like me. Fortunately the cameras were there to capture the
moment.
And
I dreamt of this double again that night, not the other self, just the
husk. More than one. I was curled up at Michael Palin's feet but could
still see out of the train window a line of them standing on the
horizon, like Gormley's Angel of North if you look east at the right
moment out of a train going to Edinburgh. They were standing shoulder to
shoulder and the line never stopped. And some were hanging from pylons,
and some in fields, all dressed differently, hundreds and thousands of
them. And the train was going round in a circle. I think it must have
been a ride. A very arty ride.
