Now We Are Loads (My mate's name is Legion.)

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.

Free Hugs

Quite a long day at the Dungeons now Summer's here, but with evidence of coolant. Then popping home to pick up a video of "Jonah Non Grata" to lend to Superthriller's Roland. He was performing in the Lounge tonight and had suggested that we collaborate in the future on "just something". I thought Jonah might be it. So I'll see if he "gets" it and if he does: Great, and if he doesn't: Great, we should probably be working on something new anyway. So I handed him the tape and watched Superthriller play. And saw old friends in vests. And we all danced. That was fun. I'm glad I came. I was tired. There was Greco-Roman wrestling too, which ended at about three in the morning:

 

I'd never seen live wrestling before, and the first fight just seemed to be a kind of karaoke for hecklers, serving as a background to our baying rather than as a form of entertainment in itself. But then 2am came round, the MC bawled "Let's get rrrrready to watch weird people!" And on came the Juggernaut and the Electric Eel (pictured) and then the porn pro, and then the clearly misunderstood Grim Reaper (bellowing his hidden pain) and then the tiny topless Hitler, and yeah it was good. Lots more dancing. Also good. All good. I must sleep. It's past five. Sorry. Pretend I told you a joke.

WHOOZIT ACTIVITY SPIRAL

 

It's a while back now, but I caught Stephen Fry on "Shrink Wrap" being - I don't know, interviewed? analysed? - about his Issues... or rather about interviewer Dr. Pamela Connolly (ie Stephenson!)'s issues with his issues, which according to her, were the wrong ones. What I found so interesting was how little she believed him, and how undamaged he finally appeared. Yes, it's possible that Stephen Fry has been living in total denial of a condition which only a protracted series of television gigs can diagnose. It is also possible that nobody in television really wants to hear anything he has to say anymore and, rather than giving him a pen and paper, have given him a panel show and let him relegate himself from creative comic force to - pretty literally - the much drearier and much more passive position of Icon. At no point was he asked about his work, which regardless of the nature of the interview would seem to me both interesting and crucial (especially as he kept referring to fears that he was a workshy fop getting away with murder). He just kept getting asked about the bumming.

But this is really about the internet, and a pretty chilling thought I had at the bus-stop, which is why it's in today's post: Stephen Fry claims to be the second person ever to get online. Douglas Adams, he claims, was the first (I think that's it). Both thoroughly embraced this new technology in all its forms. Both are heroes to me and to many. What struck me waiting for the 35 however... what dropped my jaw... was this:

Come the invention of the internet, neither got much bloody writing done did they?

The "Whoozit Activity Spiral" by the way comes highly recommended by friend and collaborator Viv. It keeps Sofia quiet. That's Sofia below, not above, that's someone else's baby, from the internet. And that's not the Whoozit Activity Spiral that they're lying on either, it's the Whoozit Gym to Go, but I found the image and I thought: Ah, bright colours, spirals, hangy things... that's sort of what I'm trying to do with my room.

Boxes still unpacked. I spent most of today finally and exhaustively catching up with Mond's European adventures. On the internet. (I love him.) Not writing my synopsis for Puffin. Not writing songs for the Wambam Club. Not catching the Swiss Pole-Vaulter in the Shunt Lounge. Activity Spiral, my eye! I did finish "His Dark Materials" though (which it could be argued is more than Philip Pullman did.) Look, I'll shut up now. Shh. Here:

Light and Portable

 

So the Lounge has reopened. Excellent.

Now: At two in the morning I finally considered the possibility that the accumulation of books and coats and scraps and dice and educational stickers from Kuwait and stocking-fillers (thirty-two years' worth) left to me by my emigrating parents nine months back may never in fact see the outside of a stacked box again... that having holed myself up in a rattling room with enough wallspace or, failing that, floorspace to postpone indefinitely the fate of every single object I have ever owned or made I may now, in fact, in short, be stuck... in a big and cheap room in a loved house, but still stuck. Then again, this is how inventions happen, isn't it? But it's also how "The Italian Job" ends... And I'm not sure I should spend the rest of my thirties on my knees in a teetering coach.

Ned Mond's traveling around Europe right now, calling himself Ian Jones and clutching his dearest possessions to his chest in a tin of Bisto, enviably. It's a fiction, of course (an internet campaign for Ford as it happens) but a fiction that Ned will both script and act out in his own clothes and facial hair for the next three months, which by my calculations makes for a pretty hefty fact-fiction intersection:

"We are what we pretend to be," says Mother Night, "so we must be careful about what we pretend to be." Well Ned has gone for a more socially backward and protectable persona than his non-internet self. And who doesn't?

Goths.

One of the most interesting aspect of all this is the option of joining him out there, fictionally. You go to wherearethejoneses.com, write up your own character, send in the audition tape and wait for the call. It's a bit like the site Second Life, I assume, but real. Oh, speaking of which... Here I was going to post a youtube link to a fat avatar walking naked and soulfully around Second Life holding a big sign up saying "Free Hugs" and sporting a very unruly, six-foot phallus, but they've taken it off.

And "Big Nick" is hitting the road too, leaving the Dungeons after nine years service to be by the sea with the woman he loves in his sixty-second year. And we all met up in the Shipwright's, colleagues past and present, reunited to say goodbye. And there I bumped into the woman who three years back said "If I kiss you I think I'll see another side to you. A sweeter side, a more tender. And that's not a side to you I want to see." And I bumped into M. Berry, who's just put up a poster on F*c*book for a film he's starring in. It's called "The Devil's Chair." There's no tagline, but I suggested: "Oh sorry, yes sometimes it does that."

No Harm Done Then (circa 1978)

Click to enlarge.

Dongly things and Dont's

I found the above panorama on my phone when I woke. I have no idea when I took it or why. I was in Ellis' guest nest surrounded by computers, box files and what Douglas Adams called "dongly things". I got to my feet (smelling, I have to say, great) and a small, dark cube on a shelf suddenly went click... and then hummed. My immediate reaction was to freeze, but I trust Ellis implicitly and realized that any cybernetic sequence I may have set off by standing must be there for my own welfare. So I pulled myself together and headed downstairs, to be treated to a plate of tabbouleh followed by a bacon roll.

When I first knew Ellis he wasn't in IT, he was a director from the much under-rated "Do that again, only less shit" school and he passed on two rules to me that I have never forgotten:

1. "Never put on a play you're in love with. Every play has bits that are pants."

2. "If anything in a production is shit and the director says it's not his fault, he's lying."

He is also the most fictionalized man I know. He's just appeared in a novel and back in 2000 there was this (for the broadbanders):

Which is also a pretty fair picture of how he approached theatre. Which I appreciated.

I decided to head home via Abbey Road, which I've never been down before and I'm glad I did. It turns out it's a very long road but also, architecturally, the maddest in London. Take Rowley Way for example: I came across it in a sudden downpour. It comes out of nowhere like a dystopian Hanging Gardens of Babylon (a good thing) offering neither shelter nor, once you're walking down it, any clue as to what might exist outside of Rowley Way. There's no horizon to Rowley Way, just this strangely maternal arrangement into sloping concrete rows and columns of potted palms and security cameras and chrysanthemums and tiny plastic garden features all apparently thriving on neglect. Those inhabitants of Rowley Way who are wearing anything at all wear the usual no-fit gangster fashions. They're supposed to look stupid though, aren't they? These clothes, they're meant to be annoying, yes? Regardless, when the weather cleared up I headed down Regent's Canal into Camden Market and that family-friendly rave emporium "Cyberdog".

I love Cyberdog. They have live dancing on the counter there now. It's better than Hamleys. I didn't go there to buy clothes - obviously... I don't buy clothes, anywhere - I just wanted to slip into that loud, daft, comfy nineties bubble again, with its wide-of-the-mark utopian vision of twenty-first century living. Actually there was a t-shirt there I quite liked once as well. It had a little red computer display that counted down from 50 to 0 in the chest and I thought, if you're going to have a screen in your chest then that's the one to have. It would make you seem more dangerous... provide a useful air of suspense if you meet someone at a party. They would stick around talking to you at least until your t-shirt reached zero, I'm sure of it, just to see what would happen. But it wasn't in yesterday. Not that I asked. Not sure how I'd wash it anyway.

SETTLEMENTS (time excellently spent)

To my right (your left) is Ms Meikle. We met arbitrarily (pictured) at a Superthriller gig, when I was in the mood to be met. That was last year. Her veterinary training has come on quite a bit since then, and now they let her inside cows.

She's been staying in a caravan in Dorset, training on a farm, birthing calves, visiting the abattoirs, waiting for the cows to die, inspecting meat, considering the waste of such finely evolved teeth in the head of an animal that once bled to death has only about a fifty per cent chance of ever being eaten, going for runs and getting shat on a lot. And as mentioned in the previous post I invited myself over. We're both mumblers, but she seemed fine with it over the phone I checked.

My God I learnt so much. The amount of roadkill on the 12 mile stretch from Salisbury to Sixpenny Handley alone was an education. She looked like a millionaire when she picked me up from the station in her bauble-coloured Clio, and it was a red sky at night. And the caravan was family-sized and quiet and stuttered with valances but with everything, like Japan, in its right place. And she'd never heard Miles Davis so I flipped open my powerbook and I put that right and then, as requested (since she'd played me Hot Chip) cradling Bulgarian red and amaretto and orange we moved onto Arvo Part, King Oliver and O Superman. "You have a lot of stuff that's good for... if you don't want to think about anything, but you don't want to think about nothing either," I made out, and nodded. And she told me about the local walks and the abattoir and the time it takes to die from a bullet wound and the great times she had at Matt and Fred's in Manchester just sitting by the music and smoking roll-ups - Ah! - Laurie Anderson pronounced "Smoking? Or Non Smoking" and neither of us are "smokers", but it hits home. And tipsy enough not to mumble, we basked. Like Michael Caine and Clive Owen in the film "Children Of Men" if you've seen that. Exactly like that.

And so it went on for two days: dropped off by Salisbury Cathedral while Ms Meikle went to work... Magna Carter, Second Hand Books, checking out Scope for board games and finding a bag of South American Lying Dice, free tea in the town hall while I sat at a bank of laptops being market-researched... yes, a dip had been reached, I wasn't feeling very much like Ferris Bueller. But: Then: a call from Mia Sara Meikle to say she'd been given the afternoon off. So: Back into the Clio and off to the settlements. Stone Henge, wangling free entrance by impersonating Egon Ronay (both of us! in a big coat! No! Fences are fine. Neither of us have an issue with fences), and then the Roman Villa, four-hundred years in the making, sixteen-hundred years hiding in a hill, mosaics, pins, bones, sun and unburied treasure. And time.

And another day. And a big walk. And an idea for something fomenting. Farms and flies around a horse's eyes, which is normal apparently, and a light drizzle so I don't get burnt. And pizza and packing and a lift to the station. And forty-eight hours in which I haven't been rotten to anyone. I am a passenger. I naturally passenge. Thankyou for that, Ms Meikle.

No, I didn't want to come back. Every single paper on the midnight train to Waterloo (I know it's not called that) carried as their main story an event gleaned from a television trailer for a show about the Queen which was unresearched, unimportant and, unlike the weather or the Magna Carter, never even happened in the first place. Where's the facts? Where's the stuff? What did I learn in London today? What corner in what track did I turn to be delighted?

Actually, when I left work at six today, I found, lying in the middle of Joiner Street, pretty dusty and passed on either side by the six o'clock rush, a bra.

I just haven't found a name for it yet.