Victory Over the Sun

Club Ponderosa 176. To put on an unperformable play, written in futurist cubo-jibberish, originally envisaged with impossible suprematist Malevich costumes, and to do so in translation, is an ambitious project. The participants were very effectively present and partially in-role as the spectators filed into the auditorium, mingling, offering tea and... Vodka! An excellent touch, although a constant circulation of fresh shots during the show could have been good (personally I had the hip flask, of course). The impression of the performance overall was one of having walked into a theatrical workshop in full flow, indifferent to the audience's presence - this is simply what the troop was doing anyway, watch if you wish. All well and as it should be. Good. But what actually left the performance lacking was not a language gap, but a dearth of imagination of how to represent the themes. There needs to be more movement in a piece that has essentially been pared down to mime. Of what there was, the choreography was good, the songs were effective, but there was little of dynamism, and often a state of stasis flavoured the rambling scenes. If the piece cannot be performed on a grand scale as some kind of allegorical ballet, then perhaps it should be effectively paraphrased into a serious of symbolic sketches, interspersed with musical or poetic refrains for flavour. Where was the conscious mechanisation of man once the Victory over the Sun was won? Meyerholdian Biomechanics would have worked a treat here. Where were the displays of mass enthusiasm or quiet, common reticence? Ultimately there were several gulfs that correspond to the gulfs between spectator and performer, performer and performance, performance and piece. Though the troop had attempted to internalise the performance, the regular stasis of it meant this was not very apparent - it was as though the frigidity of the bewildered spectator won over, as though the leap taken by the performers into the performance had not been great enough to jerk the audience into life and carry them along. We should have been dragged into such a performance, swept up by it. The piece itself had barely been brought to life because there were not enough limbs to its thematic interpretation. The piece provides the perfect opportunity to break down these barriers - indeed that is a principle theme - Victory over the Sun, dominance over the divine, democratisation of creative possibility, godmanhood, human self-determination. And yet like good capitalists we watched the performers put on a performance of a piece to be performed. A piece about creativity, fixed and defined like a heirarchy of cultural capital. There was no real victory over the sun here, just mute performers and blind spectators in ecstatic awe of the oppressive god of creation.

Uncanny Street and Schulz's Crocodiles

A significant bridge, from the realm of everyday to the future, to freedom, fusing possibility with the present, the meeting point of East and West, Hampstead and Hackney, work and play, the back way, site of secrets and desires, a shortcut instinct street, where the bike blocks the cars going uphill or beats them on the way down, which is also the way out, newly smooth with that fresh black well-marked tarmac and slick circumnavigable speed bumps, road of revelation and reincarnation, self-medication and the demarcation of boundaries, and or also their transgression, vain white van aggression, single-decker bus frustration, hand-me-down pushchair abuse, fast-food affliction, fashion addiction, and whatever dose you decide to take, depending on your direction and the inclination of your injuries and drive. An extraordinary street where the dead gather to clamour their cases, the mad congregate to talk to themselves, doctors, shrinks, artists, dealers, the unemployed, lost youth, and passers by passing by. A lilac purple house near the top. This straight-on only road, the immense weight on this road, the lonely waiting on this road. We have all seen each other and been along there.

They will be heard!

The more you push them down, the more they shout in different voices. There are no such things as accidents. There are things we seek to explain by not explaining them. Why forget one thing on one particular day in a particular place and context, and not another? 'Let us contemplate without fear the extent of our innocence ...' (Rimbaud). What is really extraordinary is when the glass of wine fails to be knocked over and spill onto a particular person, an example of uncommon restraint (rarely tolerance). Or if it is knocked but misses its target due to some freak positioning or quality of the table, or character of the glass. Usually, one way or another, we find a form to say and do what we want to mean. So many injuries are self inflicted - the housewife who cuts her finger preparing dinner, the husband who stubs his toe on the bed - these are the babies that cry because someone is watching, or because they want someone to watch. Little accidents happen when we are largely safe. Always be suspicious of people who discount interpretations. Car accidents are the result of a calculated carelessness, just as non-accidents are the product of concentrated care. Misfortunes feed into themselves, because the misfortunate are prone to misfortune, as they seek to prove their unfortunateness and snowball into the safe realm of the undeniably deserving of sympathy. What a coincidence! That we are least able to look at what means most. The relationship of anger and pain. We cannot look round our own corner, but we can catch ourselves turning it. And examine that step. We know how to make ourselves heard, and hurt.

On Hampstead Heath

There is a certain kind of light on the Heath, washed out, always, whatever the weather. It's what the sky looks like when the city has been taken out of the way, cloudy or clear. Still chalky with the dusty trace of metropolis. Sunday millions of people who wish for immortality but don't know what to do with themselves go to walk, crossing expanses of grass, with twisted trees. The Dwarf Birches and the Birch Clearing, Esenin and Iwaszkiewicz, benches 'in memory', and swimming ponds sometimes. Even magnolia explosion muffled by our looking on. Can we take the Heath seriously? Ourselves?! What a joke! Better take a dog and a ball, a tool to launch it, an extendable lead for holding. The terrestrial aviator flying kites. The runner, or jogging. Maybe even sports-walking with sticks, and those ring shaped liquid bottles like shackles upon each arm. Lycra telling the elastic truth about bodies, and the onus of their owners. Their noses and arses. A beautiful light on the Heath; perfection in the realm of the imperfect. Fills the head at least.

Collection Messager

The problem of seeking to protect yourself by adornment with the debris of your persecution. Formulating the self from its anti-matter - what else is there...? Repetition, reformulation. The febrile minutia of of stimula; trauma. Gender composition, genital exhibition. In contrast to Rothko's binary genital repetition. This was reproductive, at least. Fertile too, in an apocalyptic copulative way. Prolifically femenine. A mesmerising red silk blood surge from the bird baby, leaving deposits of respiring cells. Against the clock, in time. And the scale and quantity of it, so voraciously composite, a demonstration of the impossibility of accident, and the eloquence of the most mute intent. Toys multiplied into nightmares; delirium of a thousand crayons.