Thompson's Bank of Communicable Desire

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2012-01-01T13:00:00.000Z

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Season's greeblings; and another year over

2011-12-30T16:08:00.000Z

The trouble is, nothing is irrelevant.

One of the things one learns from psychoanalytic therapy -- not that I've done a lot of it, or at least, not as much as some -- is that the casual aside, the throwaway remark, the odd scrap of detail, the glib wisecrack, these are where the real juice is. Even in this last post (proper), it seems I can't ignore the impulse to pounce on those tiny fragments that start off feeling barely purposive but end up containing the whole world.

Perhaps it's a bit like greebles -- the textural patches of synthetic complexity that are applied to digitally rendered objects to make them more lifelike. Greebles are the most explicit manifestation yet of a paradox I've always enjoyed and been fascinated by, and used a great deal in my own work: they are a kind of noise, and, by extension, supposedly not-information -- and yet they're generative of a significant strand of associative meaning. Greebling has a close association with a lot of urban and electronic music from the early 90s onwards, when surface noise (such as samples of vinyl playback crackle) would be added to pristine digital tracks to lend them that most indicatively paradoxical feature: simulated authenticity. No doubt I've written here before about my own similar practice of 'scuffing': an extra pass or two over a staged sequence in order to make it less choreographically smooth -- taking the edge of unreality off by putting more edges on.

So perhaps it's for that reason that I can't just cheerily chuck something in to the mix without also dismantling and analysing it. Today's example? Purely for the almost homeopathic dose of fun, the nano-shits and pico-giggles of it all, I thought I'd start this post with whatever was the most amusing or unusual or piquant version of 'My Way' that I could find on The You Tube. ("And now the end is here / And so I face the final curtain..." &c.) A pale one-liner, in other words. But rewatching for the first time in ages the far-from-obscure Sid Vicious version from The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle, I found it really got under my skin. (In a good way.)

Notoriously, when the Vicious track -- plainly intended as an out-and-out cash cow novelty single, for all that the great Simon Jeffes graced it with his string arranging skills -- was recorded, Sid didn't know many of the lyrics, and improvised some incorrigible replacements during the session: famously, the third line becomes "You cunt, I'm not a queer", which hangs weirdly over the whole rendition, via its episodes of cat-killing and hat-wearing (a sardonic reference to Lydon, apparently), until its theme is recapitulated in unexpected inversion at the very end: "The record shows / I fucked a bloke / and did it my way." It's all pretty curious, and exceedingly queer in the present construction of that word, and perhaps what makes it so compelling, at least in the film version, is -- as even the song's godfather, Paul Anka, has suggested -- that Vicious seems sort of nakedly sincere. I guess beneath -- or actually within -- the strenuous pisstaking, Sid only reasserts the queer/punk credentials of the song itself: screw you all, I did it my way.

Revisiting the Sid Vicious version reminded me of a video project I conceived a few years ago in response to it. I hoped to rope in a bunch of unprepared volunteers who I'd film individually performing their own version of 'My Way', to a shop-bought karaoke backing, not supplying them with the correct lyrics but asking them to extemporise their own to fill in whatever lacunae there might be in their own remembrance of the song -- which I dare say might well include people who didn't really know it at all. I then intended to stack all these versions together: one backing track and a grid of maybe two dozen simultaneous performances, probably subtitled for ease of comparison. I thought that might be a fun project, and a revealing one. But it stayed on the drawing board: and anyway, apparently one ought to be a little wary of inexpert karaoke renderings of this particular song...

The reason I'm unpacking this a bit is because it's the best route in to describing how my working practice has changed in the past few years -- or, more importantly, how the commitments underscoring it have changed -- and why this blog is now a minor casualty of those otherwise highly positive changes. My never-realized video project is an early manifestation of what's gradually become the central motivation in my work: I mean my work as a director, above all, but more generally as a maker, which is what I increasingly would wish to call myself anyway -- an appellation that seems to contain within it all the strands of directing, writing, devising and performing that I do to differing degrees from project to project, and also to be plumped up by a sense that much if not most of the work is not about any of those roles or disciplines in particular but about a constant movement between them. That core commitment can be simply expressed (for once): I want to hear other people's voices. This is not to say that I am irrecuperably sick of the sound of my own, but rather that the peculiar textures of my work (and I think I was wanting precisely these textures right from the start, for example in undergraduate pieces that often employed multiple languages) are best served by the particular signal-to-noise ratio that's associated with polyvocality. What I want to do, in other words -- and what I want to do in order to be a distinctive artist in my own right and associated with certain kinds of aesthetic and political fingerprints -- is create spaces in which other voices than my own are heard. I might be in the mix too, at some level, but what really interests me is how my voice, my story, my testimony, lives among many, is always crosshatched and complicated by others. More and more my work is asking: what is an individual voice? What is a collective voice? And how is the imaginative and political life of the individual expressed and enhanced and extended by the collective, and how does the collective voice speak in the complex and partial distinction of the individual? How do we share our radical singleness with others, while harbouring our collectivity within ourselves ? (This is where Bataille's erotics first came in to my thinking to help save the day.) And where in all this is our own polyphony, the potentially liberating pressure of the contradictions we live, the dialectics that shape what we find to be liveable now and imaginable beyond us?

A call has just gone out from West Yorkshire Playhouse, with whom Chris Goode & Company will be making a piece from early next year. We're going to work with nine volunteers, most or all of whom we're expecting to be people with little or no performance experience; in collaboration with those individuals we'll make a short performance portrait for each of them to do on the stage of the Courtyard at WYP. It's one of a number of responses that have started to bubble up for me in the second half of this year to the incredible challenge that our earlier WYP piece, Open House, detonated beneath my practice. In that piece, the company (five of us) more-or-less lived for a week in a rehearsal room at the Playhouse, saying that we'd make a completely new piece from scratch in that week, and that the door would be (at least metaphorically) open so that anyone who wanted to could simply rock up and join in with the making. I remember with a little smirk now writing the copy in advance of that project, saying "Who knows, you might even end up in the final piece!", but feeling absolutely certain that nobody would engage to that extent. The retrospective smirk, of course, because the piece we showed on the Friday had a cast of 16. In that show, more than two thirds of the company were people we'd only met that week, and who were only there because they'd had the courage and the curiosity to show up in response to our invitation and say: Can I join in? And it was the most exciting week of the year, for me, artistically, and I left thinking, Well, now there needs to be a really good reason for not always working like that, because otherwise why would you not?

Open House at West Yorkshire Playhouse

There has so far turned out to be only one dependable answer to that question, and it's this: the work that we showed on the last day of Open House was fun and exciting but also chaotic and inchoate and kind of a mess: which was perfect for that context, but it also made me want to be honest -- with myself, not least -- and say that I'd miss not being able to apply to that sort of collaborative framework the few bits and bobs that I know about crafting things, making them beautiful and elegant and (in a not too snooty way) refined. So the task since then has been to imagine different kinds of project that would allow for, if not compel, a reconciliation between, on the one hand, the openness of the system and the process and the room and the offer, and on the other, the (hopefully lightly-worn) authority of craft and a modicum of expertise born of the experience of fifteen years' back-to-back stuffmaking.

So, last week, I was in Bradford with two old-hand collaborators, the brilliant and beautiful Wendy Hubbard and the beautiful and brilliant Jamie Wood, embarking on the process of making a new piece, GOD/HEAD, for Ovalhouse in February. And all of the questions kept looping round to that one. How can we make this piece as open, as polyvocal, as horizontally authored, as unpredictable as possible, while at the same time being able to take the audience on a shaped and crafted journey, and to see through the trajectory of a particular and quite nuanced argument? It's a fascinating question, a challenging one certainly, and, given the content of GOD/HEAD, and the ideas and issues it seeks to animate (more on which below), a thoroughly entangled and exhausting one. I came away from our three days at Theatre in the Mill feeling like I'd mostly been wrestling with bears. (Which in actual fact hardly happened at all. I did spend some time rough-housing with an excellent vegetable bhuna, but that's not quite the same thing.)

Anyway: this, if we can crack it, and/or however else we find we can make models that square those particularly interesting and confounding circles, is what Chris Goode & Co as a company venture will have at its heart. It's been very interesting feeling the existing threads and pulls in my work coming together to create a language that already feels (to me) both familiar in its aspirations and quite new in its comprehension of what those aspirations are and how they all feed in to each other. Many, many paragraphs in this blog over the past five years have fretted, either overtly or implicitly, about what felt like an unmanageably (and unhelpfully) various and uncohesive array of ongoing projects, and the tension of wanting to continue to make work in a very broad range of formats and contexts while at the same time feeling like the offer I made as an artist to the different audiences and stakeholders in that picture needed to be more cohesive. I needed to be able to tell that story. And now I think I can, or at least I can begin to. The thing about hearing other people's voices is absolutely central. Sometimes I might be the mouthpiece; sometimes other actors will lend their own voices to the task and sometimes they'll also be the originators of those messages as well as their interpreters; sometimes we'll hear strangers: maybe the audience, right there and then in the moment of our meeting, or maybe people from way outside the room, people we'll never meet and never really know but whose connection to us we might wish to consider together in an imaginative and focused way.

These commitments feel like they might sit differently in the culture now than they did eighteen months ago, and perhaps in another eighteen months I'll be reframing them again, and that's fine, that's how it should be. For now there are two things that feel profoundly important. One is to keep remaking and rethinking theatre as a polyvocal space, a social space, a space that's scrupulously hospitable to difference but also in itself a place we can hold in common. The other is to refuse -- and to offer a welcoming alternative to -- what we seem to see more and more, all over, which is the simulation of participation: whether that's about theatre that presents itself as interactive but actually has no room within itself for a consequential or causative interactivity, or about the free-reign multivoice playgrounds of below-the-line territories in blogs, on news sites and so on, in which contributors are reduced to one-person mobs, bullies enraged by their own impotence and by the apparent impossibility of being part of a virtual discourse that can ever, ever amount to anything, or would even wish to.

The kind of work that I'm now wanting to concentrate on making (not exclusively, but I do think there are interesting questions about how more standard text-driven models, or processes in which I might direct others' scripts say, might also respond to these ideas) certainly still includes a measure of solo performance -- Keep Breathing, for example, where I do most of the talking but quite a lot of what I'm saying has been written or spoken by others in advance of the performance and I've just gathered those other documents together; or Hippo World Guest Book, which it was lovely to give another outing on the Monday before Christmas, and which is nothing but a recital of other voices, in different degrees of legibility and personal sincerity. I'm not sure any solo performance can really work that doesn't begin and end in an acknowledgement and a respectiful enaction of the plurality of the "individual" voice.

In those solo spaces, though, I feel much more like, say, the host of a dinner party, whose role is not to be the centre of attention, but perhaps merely, in a suggestive way, the centre of gravity, helping to set the tone and securing everyone's safety and their sense of being welcome, but other than that simply holding the space open for a fruitful exchange, a meaningful encounter, in which an audience sees itself, or themselves, or a perpetual reinscribing of those individual distinctions and speculative (or indicative) group formations reflected in terms of each other.

I can't, though, quite, make the same case for this blog, and as I said in the post where I kind of handed in my notice, right now (and for the past few months, to be honest) I'm really not sufficiently interested in what I, personally and individually, think about things, except as a fuzzy interior monologue that keeps me company at all hours; nor am I very interested in making myself known to others through such statements. I'm at a place where I want a properly dialogic space, not a podium for my own grandstanding. Some blogs I guess can come close to that condition, but they're few, and they've always operated in that way.

Actually the most fun I had on a blog all year was the Queer Eye Enquiry blog I curated for LADA's DIY8. In each of those four weekly posts, I tried to trace an argument or proposition about queerness as a political lens, by pulling together texts and images and sound and video clips from a wide range of sources but not explicitly commenting on how all these elements might be seen to relate. In other words, there was a set of positions, opinions, commitments, framing my acts as a curator (as is always the case), but those became a jumping-off point for assembling some quite complex structures, and, crucially, any of the participants in the Queer Eye Enquiry workshop (and, now that the blog's gone public, anyone else who happens to drop by), might see completely different things in those assemblages, different contours and isobars, different narratives and rhythms: and in doing so, not only would they have not missed the point, but in an important way they'd have got it. It wasn't about me, it was about creating the conditions for there to be an us.

This ties in so closely with what is for me (and I know for many others) among the most important commitments at the moment in relation to the theatre work: a disavowal of pedagogy as a top-down expression of authority or prestige based in knowledge. The space we now need -- as I know I've said before here, but this is the last chance I'll get to repeat myself! -- is not a space in which to tell audiences what they don't already know, but a constructed place in which it's possible for us all to acknowledge what we do already know, but have no space to admit, or recognize, or allow ourselves to feel in all its complexity. A space in which those things can be confronted truthfully and without fear, or more precisely without the suppression of fear. There's an awful lot that we're up against right now and a full acknowledgement of that is bound to give rise to fear, it probably ought to. But theatre -- and theatrical space (in which category I would also place the Queer DIY blog, for example) -- allows us to step into an experience of knowing what we know, and feeling what we must feel about what we know, without it immediately being threatening. Where we can just name the questions, without feeling that we have instantly to answer them or reject them or somehow defuse them. Whatever else it's been, and whatever its merits, this blog is not that kind of space, and never will be now: and as such, it feels to me, right now, irrelevant -- in the way that much poetry, for example, feels irrelevant, for all that it might be intelligent or penetrating or even useful in its way.

I wonder how much this is a response to what I thought was the hardest part of a really hard year: the summer riots, in London and elsewhere (though of course my experience of them was very local, dauntingly so). I wrote a post at the time which actually ended up being the most read and discussed thing I've ever published here; I have a feeling it was sort of useful to some people in its way at the time, and I'm glad of that. I personally felt better for writing it, that's for sure. But it's also true that it did little more than underline a lot of feelings of doubt and confusion -- particularly in terms of what it might mean to be an artist, a theatre maker, in that moment. It felt as if what was happening in those few days was a surge of the energy that many of us as writers and makers had been trying to describe and feed into and even incite for months, years: but that when the irruption came, we were caught -- not napping exactly, but on the wrong foot. Suddenly, we were in the middle of events that, particularly in their immediate aftermath, badly needed the kind of constructed social spaces opened up in them that for a long time we've been hankering for, describing to ourselves, beginning to invent in our minds. And some artists did try to open up that kind of space, I know. But I felt powerless in that moment, and jarringly unready. I think partly that may have had to do with what, as I said in my piece at the time, was the most difficult part of the experience of those few awful days: hearing some terrible, disastrous, profoundly dismaying things said and expressed (especially on Twitter, which went nuts) by people I thought I was counting on as allies. There was the most atrocious reactionary lurch, fixing on a 'them' who were responsible, and insisting that it was they who were stupid for being so inarticulate in their apparently opportunistic rage, rather than it being our problem that we didn't know who our neighbours were and what they were expressing in a language -- a dialect, more like -- in which we had too little vocabulary to get by. I think I felt in those days that we were all letting each other down: those with whom I thought I was shoulder to shoulder but with whom I was suddenly locked in a shouting (or un-following) match from either side of a ravine; those who were out on the streets and whose loudly insistent 'no' should have been a call to more general action, but whose means and modes felt almost totally discontinuous from the kinds of anarcho-utopian fantasies (however rigorously imagined) and conceptual spaces that I and my comrades have been giving so much of our attention. That's not to say I think we're wrong to do that, nor did I even feel that from the outskirts of the thick of it at the time; and maybe the price we pay for the privilege of living as we do is that sometimes we will be blown away and, worse, baffled by the ways in which the day-to-day lived realities of social injustice and class relations can confound us and suddenly re-present us with the most glaring image of how necessary our work is and also, at that same moment, how impossible, or at least how unfit for purpose when stuff is literally on fire. Maybe all we can do is learn how to dance on the wrong foot, on the offbeat, the ungainly but insistent thump of anarchist syncopation.

And, I must say, turning back, in that light, to the work that I've done since the summer, I do feel like it can do something that is about those riots. It maybe can't do it while everything is kicking off and awash with adrenalin and testosterone. It needs a place where people can let their fear go, and be quiet and thoughtful and kind to each other. (Not that there wasn't kindness in the midst of those riots -- and I don't just mean, in fact I don't at all mean, in the media-friendly clean-up operations that got most of us so speedily back to a cosmetically enhanced version of 'normal'.) The spaces that I've been making, and which I'll carry on making, are so much about who does and doesn't get heard. And yes, as it goes, my audience is overwhelmingly white and middle-class, by comparison with the streets I walk down to get the train every morning; but those whom we most need to be able to feel both the urgency and the feasibility of radical change are those overwhelmingly white middle-class folks who hold so much of the power and consequently carry (and experience, perhaps constantly, perhaps only in intermittent glimmering) the fear of that change, the dread of letting go.

For my part, my year's been weirdly and very unexpectedly dominated by not dissimilar questions of transition and radical change. I've been reticent about discussing or even mentioning this, but now that I've embarked on making a piece about it it seems daft not to address it. The whole of my adult life I've basically been an atheist -- and some serious-minded spells of going to Quaker meetings, and the experience of engaging to some extent with the life of St Paul's Covent Garden while I was working there as a charity administrator ten years ago, didn't do much to dent that, though it made me basically respectful of those who do have some belief, especially those for whom that belief is complicated by thought and study and tempered by doubt rather than amplified by righteous certitude; and it also left me profoundly suspicious of the hectoring or sneering tendencies within atheism. I think partly I have always wanted to distinguish between the question of God and the practice of organized religion (though having seen behind the scenes, as it were, at St Paul's, I do think there's much that's admirable in the church as well as much, perhaps much more, that is deplorable). I've never consciously set out to dig down into these ideas in my work, except for a period in our collaborative work when Jonny Liron and I were thinking quite searchingly-- and not at all facetiously -- about the qualities of Jesus Christ as an actor or performer; but they've been in the air this year: in Keep Breathing, for example, where I've frequently ended up talking to interviewees about the religious faith or spiritual practices that are an ongoing part of their basic encounter with the world, especially in the experience of loss and bereavement; and then in 66 Books for the Bush, my involvement in which required me to return (with some trepidation) to the King James Bible, for the first time since I studied it as an undergraduate in English literature. I've written here about how turbulent I found that confrontation earlier in the year, but I didn't spell it out. Now, it's time to.

One morning in April, while I was coming back from the supermarket, God spoke to me.

When I say 'God', and of course when I say 'spoke', and in fact when I say almost every word in that sentence apart from 'supermarket', I'm reporting back from a hopelessly subjective experience, and from my immediate interpretation of it. What actually happened was an abrupt sequence of physical sensations, and the instantaneous location of the source of those sensations in some idea of God that I obviously still carry without ever really examining it very closely. And of course there was a huge emotional rush too, and I honestly don't know -- I've spent a lot of time trying to think through it -- in what order these things happened, the physical and the emotional and the (for want of a better word -- and I really do want a better word) spiritual. All I can honestly say is that a bunch of very intense stuff happened very quickly and at the point that it all happened I did not doubt for a moment that it was God. Not necessarily God intervening, in a pointy-finger lighting-bolt sort of way, but God being revealed as fundamentally present and as needing something from me: which is only to say, if there is a God, the God that became real to me in that strange sudden public orgasm of sensations so strong I had to put my shopping down and lean against a wall for steadiness, then the reality of that God immediately seemed to imply to me a whole raft of responsibilities to which I would surely have to face up.

Once that rush was over, and I was back to picking up my shopping bags and heading home, albeit feeling physically shaken and panicky, the next sequence was of course a series of framing actions through which to try and reconcile the enormity of the experience with the need to continue to hold my life together in some recognizable version. One might question that need, but in that moment, I figured that was the task. I had a script to write, to an immovable deadline; this was Keep Breathing, which didn't feel too ungodly a project anyway: so I could park all this for a while and focus on the work and it wasn't like I was going out of my way to refuse the presence of God). I would put all this weird and potentially life-reconfiguring stuff to one side, and get on with my writing, and deal with the repercussions later.

Only then of course I started to notice how similar in some senses my epiphany had been to my experience in my mid-20s of paranoid delusions, and the whole fabric of what happened to me became inevitably dubious. And just as I remember spending a whole day in 1999 looping between thinking that the entire surgery of my then GP was a stage-set replica filled with cult followers who were being instructed to stab me by the scrolling LED display in the waiting room, and then thinking that that was obviously preposterous nonsense, and then thinking that it wasn't all obviously preposterous, and so on round in ever decreasing circles, so I spent several days this spring lurching between different degrees of acceptance and resistance, between dismissal and the brink of submission. I couldn't get past an uncloseable hypothetical chink: if there really were a God whose presence was the very definition of an article of faith to so many people, how else should it feel than exactly how it had felt? What more did I want, to quash my doubt? Perhaps in a way I was thinking about my recent distrust of the medicalization of sadness, the idea that being very unhappy within a social and cultural system that couldn't deal with unhappiness has produced a treatable condition called depression which makes some large industrial-pharmaceutical companies very rich. Did my God experience really have to be medicalized into a neurochemical incident, an episode with a clear (and rational) psychopharmacological cause? And then again, what was it exactly that made me want to kick against that? Why, after a fleeting encounter with something that felt like God, should I want to cling to it against almost all rational evidence to the contrary?

What gradually did become clear was that the time was never going to be right for me to 'deal with' these questions in the normal run of my day-to-day life. Theatre, in the end, is what I think with. And so when Ovalhouse asked me in for a chat, to see if there might be anything I'd like to make with them, these questions were still at the top of my mind. (And they also seemed to sit very interestingly and productively alongside the artistic questions that felt most urgent at that time, the ones I describe above which arose out of Open House and the will to reduce the tension between craft and not-knowing, between the object and the event.) And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how I come to be making GOD/HEAD. Had we got the Wellcome Trust funding we applied for (they knocked us back for fear that the emergent piece was too "spiritual" -- their scare quotes, but I don't disagree with them exactly), it would have been a piece with a strong focus on this question around how neuroscience and religion (or more precisely the experience of God, which I keep wanting to maintain is quite a different thing) can play nicely together, or not, and whether God is just a squirt of chemicals, an accidental titillation of 5-HT receptors, and what changes if that's so. Without that funding and the particular perspective it would have compelled, it's easier to concentrate on the bit that fascinates me more, which is approaching a relatively familiar trope -- the crisis of faith -- from its much less familiar flipside: not the once-confident man of God who begins to struggle to sustain his belief, but the complacent atheist who is suddenly made to rethink everything, and how the universe shifts in relation to that rethinking and the fifteen seconds of intense physical and emotional overload that triggered it in the first place. Why am I, a previously comfortable atheist and committed materialist, so reluctant simply to give up the idea of the presence of God when the only sensible considered view is that for cultural reasons I have brought a deeply embedded superstitious complex to bear on my interpretation of a briefly disorienting moment of neurotransmitter naughtiness?

I suppose in a way what I trust -- and I think this comes through in quite a lot of my work, and a lot of my experience of the world -- has to do with the 'My Way' questions I outlined near the top of this post, about how we as individuals deal with our most personal experiences, in such a way as to be able to share them with others rather than struggle with them alone. A lot of the conversation in Bradford was about privacy. I don't reject privacy but I think it is a default for us in ways that are (by now) wholly ideological and utterly inseparable from the capitalist lodestone of private ownership -- itself a superstition easily as suspect as what Richard Dawkins calls the 'God delusion'. Making things -- not necessarily, but not least, in an artistic context -- is for me always a way of destroying, or at least suspending, a privacy that I think places too much of us -- certainly too much of me for my comfort -- out of the sight and out of the mind of others, and keeps those others (and our responsibilities towards them) too hidden from us. Of course the question immediately becomes one of that same signal-to-noise ratio I invoked at the very start: how can we find a way of conveying, sharing, analysing together our experiences, in a way that is as faithful as possible to the distinction of our experience? How do we do that as writers, say, when not only do many of our most intense and enlivened experiences evade the capacity of language fully to grasp them, but more than that, they have those qualities of intensity and excess partly because language cannot reach them? This is a very good answer, I suppose, at least, as to why I'm not only a writer, and why I had to venture beyond being "a playwright" in order to get done the work that seemed most necessary. I suspect it's also why I keep trying to push at what what theatre can do with sex, and with the emotional and psychic experiences of desire and grief and physical pain, and with the haecceity of the naked body (and, increasingly, the body of the animal); and maybe ultimately it's why I'm still a modernist, and my principal interest is in form rather than content, albeit suffused (perhaps sentimentally) with a close acknowledgement of the depth of the will to gesture rather than the semiology just below the surface, which is, for me, close to greebling.

But I feel like I'm writing my own obituary, which was not the point of all this... Er, what was the point of all this again? Oh, I guess a sort of year's end (and blog's end) state-0f-the-nation address or Queen's speech or something.

Well, darlings, all things considered it's been a really good year, really productive, frequently really difficult, and full of intensity: and probably if I could describe my perfect year it would be a mix of all those things in roughly the balance I got them: so, I guess that's a nice thing to be able to say, even if I do feel like I'm nursing a bruise or two over Christmas. The decisive factor, in so many ways, has been the new (or newly formalised) partnership with my extraordinary producer Ric Watts; as well as being quietly brilliant at what he does, Ric is a thoroughly good guy in a pretty wicked bit of the world, and I've been appreciating very much the unaccustomed pleasure of having my work represented by someone who not only instinctively gets it, but who has also taken the trouble to engage with it closely and is building a really dimensionalised sense of it and of me as an artist. It's the carefulness and energy of Ric's attention, as well as a bum of a lot of hard work, that have made it possible for us to line up what looks like a fun year ahead.

CG&Co started this year in the spring with an R&D project supported by CPT, picking up the threads of a devised piece based on the writings of Blaise Cendrars which I'd started looking into a few years ago at New Greenham Arts; in three weeks we made a 25-minute trailer for a show called The End of the World Filmed by the Angel of Notre-Dame that I think I'm resigned to us probably never making, or at least not for a while (it's incredibly hard to see where else it can fit other than the international festival circuit, which is not quite where we're at yet) -- but the collaboration with Mervyn Millar's gorgeous live animation and the sharp, bold performances of Clive Mendus (as God, a role he was manifestly born to play), Gemma Brockis and Jamie Wood made for a really lovely working atmosphere and a vivid and sort of pungent piece of work which I was proud of and, more importantly, surprised by. And I got to squirt honey-scented shampoo up the wall from a kitchen syringe, in a momentary eruption that (as far as I can tell) absolutely nobody noticed, and which took an hour with some kitchen roll to clear up. That's the sort of moment that my theatre work lives and dies by, if anybody asks.

Clive Mendus in rehearsal for The End Of The World...

From there we went straight into an R&D week at the NT Studio, beginning a process that hopefully will bear fruit this summer (if we can make the logistics work), on a verbatim piece that I'm hugely excited about. It was a pretty joyful week, not least because I got to work for the first time with two actors I hugely admire, Stephen Boxer (a great and underrated presenter of children's tv back when I was a children) and the lovely Angela Clerkin. And that took us straight into Open House for WYP, which, as I've already said, was a real game-changer for me, and at several points the happiest I've been on the inside of my work in ages.

Jumping from Open House more or less straight into the making of a prototype of Where We Meet was a really happy transition, carrying across (I hope) some of the openness of the Leeds project but also working at a level of aesthetic detail and intellectual and compositional precision that felt like a really neat and appealing corrective to some of the mad jamming of the Open House week. Again, I'm not sure that Where We Meet has any future life, for similar reasons to the Cendrars piece: it's not that the idea isn't excitingly fertile, it's just hard to see how to make it viable, given that it's a show with a cast of four, for an audience of two, that could only reasonably be performed once in an evening. There's no way that's anyone's idea of "public benefit"... But I was so moved by the care and the application of the four performers, Lucy Ellinson, Jonny Liron, Theron Schmidt and Tomas Weber -- grateful for their tremendous skill and generosity (and not least their willingness to get naked and stay naked) -- and by the many kind folks who lent us their homes to rehearse in; and above all, perhaps, hugely touched by the ten people who came to see the scratch performances in Edinburgh, almost all of whom stayed behind afterwards, sometimes for longer than the duration of the show itself, to have tea and talk about the work, what they'd seen in it, what they'd felt, what they thought could be pursued further. There was something about those post-show conversations -- which, I guess, had after all been conceived as part of the work rather than an adjunct to it -- that felt even more exemplary than the pieces themselves. Being ready to sit with and be part of those conversations took great generosity on the part of the actors too and more than once I just sat there and allowed my mind to be gently blown by the four of them: Lucy, who's been my fellow traveller on so many projects over the past six years, and who was just about holding it together under the incredible physical and emotional strain of commuting between Edinburgh and Newcastle (where she was rehearsing a show for Northern Stage) and making work for Forest Fringe, as well as occupying perhaps the most intense of the four roles in Where We Meet with great intrepidity -- including a hitherto undiscovered (by me, at least) talent for improvising stream-of-consciousness text bordering sometimes on glossolalia -- and a gorgeous (and crucial) whack of self-deprecating physical comedy; Tomas, by some way the least experienced performer of the four, and the only one I hadn't worked with before, but who gave himself to the work with great grace and diligence; Jonny, whose unique and idiosyncratic expertise and whose wild signature wholeheartedness and companionship and courage and beauty are what makes it possible for me to think of making these unlikely shows in the first place; and perhaps most hearteningly for me, Theron, given the ups and downs that this blog has charted over the years in our working relationship: coming back together after three years for Open House was thrilling but difficult (I think we'd both say), but, for me at least, Where We Meet was the perfect place for us to, er, meet again, with none of the complicated and dissonant pressures that made the temporary end of our association in 2008 so painful and so impossible to avoid. Theron is just simply an exceptionally good person to have in the room: kind and funny and caring but also fiercely rigorous and always ready to ask the right question, even (or especially) when it's a question that no one feels ready to answer. I'm intending the year feeling really really thankful that that's a working relationship that's come back into my life in such a strong and expansive way.

Edinburgh was actually, mostly, of course, about the downscaled revival of The Adventures of Wound Man and Shirley -- and much kudos to Ric for talking me into doing those ten shows at the Pleasance, as, reluctant though I was, I think they've been incredibly helpful in establishing CG&Co as an idea with its own distinctive tone. Of course I worry that Wound Man and Shirley is a misleading calling card -- not everything I do is so out-and-out accessible, and the fictional storytelling thing is a fairly small part of my repertoire and an even smaller part of my plans for the future; there are storytelling elements in GOD/HEAD, for example, but anybody expecting it to feel like Wound Man is likely to have a bit of a problem with it. Nonetheless, it's opened up some lovely new conversations (as has the subsquent BAC run), and I'm thrilled to have had heroes like Daniel Kitson and Stewart Lee come to see it, and if it's done anything to help some key people in the sector see that (a) I don't make the weird stuff I sometimes make because I don't know how to write a good crafted story, and (b) I don't only make irrecuperably weird and intransigently highbrow stuff anyway, then that's great, not just in terms of that show being seen but with regard to the plans that CG&Co might be able to make in the future. Everything that supports the sense that I have any kind of sustainable future at all is still quite a relief!

CG&Co also had its name on Keep Breathing, though strictly speaking the project predated the existence of the company. It had a first outing at STK in April under the aegis of London Word Festival, and that was a very lovely occasion, massively enhanced by LWF's having double-billed it with Debbie Pearson's utterly radiant (and wonderfully sympathetic) Like You Were Before. The Plymouth run was a mixed time for me -- everyone at the Theatre Royal was terrific as ever, and I was thrilled (as audiences were too) with the transformation that Naomi Dawson and Kristina Hjelm were able to effect in the Drum, finding in it a much more embracing, immersive space than I'd seen it be before. Audience response to the piece was as good as I could possibly have hoped -- I've never had so many people write to me after a show to share their own experiences, often very movingly. (To be fair, I've never so explicitly solicited those responses: that seems to be a good thing to do.) Only in one or two performances did I feel like I was failing to make the kind of connection on which the whole piece completely depended -- and then it was horrible. But the audience-facing stuff was basically great. I was also really pleased to meet as part of that project Sarah Elvin, who generously spoke to me at length about the campaign, in which she's been deeply involved, to try and put a stop to the building of a waste incinerator at Devonport; it felt important as well as personally satisfying to be able to highlight a local issue like that as part of the show. Sadly the last couple of days have brought the news that the project is going ahead despite the strength of local objection (and the admission by the council that those objections are fully justified by the available evidence; the only argument in favour, by their own admission, is that there is money to be made, and this of course overrules even the consideration of health risks to local residents); I hope the campaign will be able to find the resources it needs to keep going, but whatever happens, I was really inspired by Sarah and I hope others were too when I passed on her story. So all of that was good; frustratingly, I had a very difficult time personally in Plymouth, running into a brick wall of depression that threatened a few times to tip over into something seriously uncontainable -- and being on my own there (and so far from home) made it very hard to find the support I needed: so, sadly, I'm still looking back on that whole experience with more of a shudder than a glow. The learnings -- that I'm still vulnerable to a species of depression that hasn't disrupted my life that significantly since 2002 and which I'd begun to think was all in the past; and that I shouldn't ever again let myself get into a position where I'm on tour and totally on my own without anyone having an eye on me -- will hopefully be valuable enough in themselves that eventually I'll feel less sore about those few weeks.

Keep Breathing at the Drum, Plymouth

And then the Monday before Christmas I did Hippo World Guest Book at STK, getting it out of storage for the first time since my Lean Upstream mini-retrospective in 2009: and it was the most fun I've ever had performing that piece (due to a brilliant audience -- just the right combination of smart and drunk -- and the perfect venue, notwithstanding it was so cold in there that I could see my breath in front of my face). I don't know if HWGB has a future -- I really like doing it, at least in front of audiences who are able to tune in to what I'm doing, and it's pretty easy to install and to take on the road; on the other hand, the passage of time has a big effect on how the piece comes across (to my mind, anyway) -- I think our sense of what online community formation and exchange actually means has shifted a lot in the nearly five years since the piece was made, and I certainly find that overfamiliarity has made the below-the-line abuses and snarkery less gleefully amusing than they were at the time. But I guess the piece will be part of CG&Co's portfolio -- the one-off performance at STK was mostly in order to show it to Ric so that he knows what it is and does and where it might sit -- and on the whole I'm quite glad of that. Glad too of the support of STK and especially the mighty Greg McLaren.

And then I guess there were all the things that weren't CG&Co projects. Back at the start of the year, the Pinter double-bill, Landscape / Monologue, at the Ustinov, which gave me the opportunity of working with three phenomenal actors I've long admired: Maggie Henderson again (after her heartbreaking Ann in King Pelican), George Irving (who's been on my wishlist ever since I saw him in an emotionally scarring episode of Juliet Bravo when I was ten!), and Clive Mendus (who was in the cast of The Street of Crocodiles, the Complicite show which the Thompson's calendar takes as Year Zero); that project was intended partly to flag up to the world that I'm really keen to direct other people's work, and I'm not sure it achieved that objective: but on its own terms I was very proud of it, and not least the extraordinary lighting cadenza which Katharine Williams so beautifully created for the transition between the two plays. And I went straight from Bath to Los Angeles (as one does) for the last leg of The Author -- which I think I've covered in sufficient depth, but which I look back on with a shake of the head at our (and above all at Tim Crouch's) audacity -- in a good way, mostly; the launch of Tim's Plays One from Oberon and the new Contemporary Theatre Review number dedicated to his work a couple of weeks ago was a terrific vantage from which to ponder the whole Author journey, and I'm pleased to report that I have even less idea what to make of it all now than I ever did. Probably that goes especially for that last Los Angeles leg -- as it probably should. But I'm remembering chatting about Ken Campbell with the brilliant Stacie Chaiken over the best grilled cheese sandwich I've ever tasted, and catching a glimpse of dolphins as we beetled down the coast road towards Santa Barbara, and nearly dying in Vic Llewellyn's passenger seat as we headed home one night, and being courted by the senior vice president of casting at Sony who thought I should be in sitcoms (the eccentric British next door neighbour kind of thing), and eating recherche flavours of Ben & Jerry's while watching RuPaul's Drag Race back at the apartment, and... well, there's much there to feel fondly about.

Then there were my adventures in being a proper writer -- The Extremists for the Royal Court and The Loss of All Things for the Bush as part of their extraordinary 66 Books. What do we make of all that, on reflection? I'm not quite sure, to be honest. I was very pleased with, and a little startled by, both pieces; neither is perfect but both are, I think, interesting and provocative and ambitious. That the Royal Court ended up not wanting The Extremists after what felt like a really ecstatically successful public reading in March has inevitably slightly distorted my relationship with it, but I think I mostly feel as I did at the time that the breakdown of that project was more to do with a mismatch of expectations around process than a direct reflection on the script; it didn't go forward because they felt it didn't quite work yet, and the frustrating thing is, I agreed that it didn't -- but it seems they wanted me to fix those problems by continuing to work on the piece as a lonely playwright in a little room, while I felt that only a rehearsal process would iron those wrinkles out, while further time alone in my writer's cell would only produce rewrites of increasingly antisocial weirdness. The Bush's attitude likewise was initially wary -- encouraging to a degree but anxious about where my half-hour piece ended up, and wanting me to consider cutting the whole last scene (which still seems to me to be an extraordinary thing to say to a writer, at least to one you profess to have any faith in or respect for); perhaps that bit of the conversation would have felt more supportive and less censorious had we been able to have it in detail rather than as one discussion alongside 65 others that they were attempting to have at the same time. At any rate, once the finished script had been signed off, I have to say the Bush were both consistently supportive and extraordinarily impressive -- especially Tamara Harvey, who drove the extremely condensed get-in/tech rehearsals for both my pieces (I was also directing Harold Finley in Michael Rosen's piece from Amos) with tremendous facility and lightness. I'm not sure many of the grown-ups really liked or felt attuned with The Loss of All Things (though Josie Rourke was nice about it once she'd seen it a few times and its movements became a little clearer to her), but it got good mentions in dispatches and seems to have excited some of the younger directors and writers around the project: thanks not least to the gobsmacking work of my three actors: Christian Roe, who I first met at the NT Studio a couple of years ago and who's loomed large this year one way and another, which is a delightful turn; Rick Warden, who was something of an idol when I was in the year below him at Cambridge and watching him turn out performances of such astounding intensity and daring that it's taken me until now to pluck up the courage to ask him if we could work together -- he was amazing (not least in the way he dealt with becoming a father for the second time on the day of our tech for heaven's sake) and I hope we'll go round that particular block again before too long; and Gareth Kieran Jones, the perfect Paul, to whom I was introduced quite by chance on the train home from Edinburgh and who stuck in my mind straight away as someone with exactly the right combination of hard edges and soft centre (and frankly blaring sexual charisma), and whom I'd love to get in a room with again very soon. Maybe even a rehearsal room, ha ha. If there's one thing 66 Books brought home to me with great clarity, it's that what we call "new writing" is actually a very particular and rather a narrow sort of thing, and to that extent rather a peculiar territory. I don't dislike it -- in fact I'd love to be spending more time there, especially at the incredibly dynamic new Bush space, and conceivably in a post-Dominic Cooke Royal Court too -- but I can understand why they think I'm as weird as I sort of think they are... ;)

And then there was the huge fun and fascination of the Queer Eye Enquiry DIY project, which ate much more of the autumn than I intended it to (or than it paid for) but was a brilliantly heartening experience, not least because in assembling those big blog posts and the pieces of correspondence that accompanied them I realised I was telling a huge story back to myself, a kind of mind-map (plus heart-map plus -- sorry, but -- cock-map) of a huge region of the artistic universe in which I've worked over the past fifteen years and slowly put together my own creative and political identity; if they still did This Is Your Life, my Big Red Book would have looked a lot like that blog. And I was thrilled to see what the participating artists did, and made, and thought, in response to that stimulus; and it reminded me of how much I want to continue to find space for a curatorial practice as part of what I do both within and outside CG&Co. I suppose that impulse to curation was also driving Better Than Language, the poetry anthology I edited and which came out this year through my own Ganzfeld imprint. I was ever so proud of the book (which I have to say represented a lot of voluntary labour), and of everyone in it, and the two launch events (at STK and as part of Hi Zero in Brighton) were lively and memorable, and there's been a very small amount of positive critical response (compared with, to the best of my knowledge, next to no negative critical response), and I'm only a little sorry that we've sold rather fewer copies than I expected. But they continue to trickle out so maybe it's just a slow-burner.

And now we're down to the sundries but I do want to say how much I liked having a couple of extended public conversations this year: with Chris Johnston as part of The Argument Room at QMUL (you can still watch the archived stream here) and with Theron Schmidt at the excellent Edgelands conference in Edinburgh. It seems to me there's finally a bit of a turn against what was becoming an entrenched soundbite-driven culture in theatre and allied trades: an underachieving reductiveness which is certainly not vanquished but is at least beginning to look like one option among many, and one driven by ideological rather than economic constraints. There was an admirable thoughtfulness in evidence at the D&D on queer theatre that I hosted for Improbable; and at a small gathering of theatre-making friends in Lancaster in the summer (an assemblage much enhanced by the contributions of those who couldn't make it in person but had given a lot of thought to how they might be able to be present anyway: a nice synthesis of face-to-face and virtual mind-to-mind); and at the Birkbeck seminar on provisional poetic communities that Carol Watts organized for the visiting cris cheek (whom I had a lot of fun talking to in the run-up); and in the one-off classes I taught at CSSD and RHUL. Even on Twitter, there was thoughtfulness, often. Not always, but often.

Add to all of the above the readings that I did at the Other Room in Manchester (half-cocked but quite enjoyable) and the Situation Room in London (ditto, probably); the video I made for 'Kenilworth Castle...', in response to zero public demand and garnering even less interest; a couple of new poems, both exactly half-decent, and a piece called 'Divine Principles in the End Times' i.m. Antonio Urdiales which was probably the only worthwhile piece of standalone experimental writing I did this year; and the various little scraps of journalism and online interviews and radio stuff that all these foregoing projects have thrown up (with all the fullest redolences of the phrase "thrown up"); and this blog, of course, in so far as it's held anything like it's own this year (which to be fair I think it has, intermittently): it feels like a satisfyingly full year, crammed with good conversations and the beginnings of lots of things I can look forward to. I'm pretty sad that there's been so little room for Action one19, my ongoing collaborative partnership with Jonny Liron, which was such an important thread running through previous years: we started the year with great plans, and in fact made some good things happen on a couple of occasions, but mostly circumstances and perhaps the passage of time have worked against us. I hope we can find a way of protecting our work together, and the relationship that has produced that work, in the coming year: as far as I'm concerned, we've only just begun, and I'd be really sad to think we couldn't make the space for that work to continue. (I also can't help wondering whether the intensity of that work hasn't up till now been what's kept God at bay -- which is certainly how I'd rather it was.) But I think that's the only real downside to the year that's gone. Which is not a bad state of affairs, all told.

And now, the end is not only near but pretty much here: and so before I face the final curtain -- or, rather, lower the Bank's security shutters and steal away -- I figured I'd leave you with a survey of some of the excellent things that have happened this year that I (mostly) wasn't involved in. Quite a lot of these things are internetly flotsams and bobtails which you'll probably know by heart already, especially if you follow me on Twitter. But there'll be some brief accounts of things that actually happened in the actual world, too: for, ah, I am of that generation, poor soul. I'll be tossing in a few interludes too, to break up the monotony of my going on about cool things and trying to find words other than "brilliant" and "wonderful" with which to encapsulate their, er, brilliance and wonderfulness. -- All right, well, off we go. You might want a cup of tea and a biscuit. (Don't worry, you won't have to put up with this sort of micromanaging much longer.) I should add that these are in Strictly Come Banking-style no particular order; and also that some of what follows may be considered NSFW, if you're unlucky enough to W with Cs. (Though what are you doing at W anyway? It's holidays innit!)

* * *

1 To begin with: this. Because: everything.

2 I'm going to name as my Writer of the Year (do these ridiculous non-prizes really merit capital letters? I can't tell yet...) the quite remarkable Chris Kraus. Although I vaguely knew Kraus from her editorial work with Semiotext(e), and especially the hit-and-miss but reliably place-holding compendium Hatred of Capitalism, I'd never made a sustained engagement with her own writing until this year. Kraus's Where Art Belongs, a little orange volume in Semiotext(e)'s 'Intervention' series, and an elatingly appealing book to look at and to hold, didn't immediately seem likely to be the beginning of a full-on crush: it was at first glance modest, conversational, an easy read between tube stops. But gradually and without a single misstep the book builds into an exceptionally high-resolution picture of what art now is in our culture, and through which circuits it travels. The writing is grounded in a candid, almost flirtatious subjectivity, tellingly feeding off the complex privileges of proximity and the intimate vantage: which is to say it is a book just as much about where criticism belongs, and what kind of a participant in the dissemination of aesthetic and political ideas a "professional" critic might now be. The pieces on the Tiny Creatures gallery project and on the fascinating and infuriating Bernadette Corporation were particularly invigorating to me, but it was the relief map of Kraus herself that the book slowly yields that sent me scuttling across to her novel I Love Dick, which I was aware of on its first release in 1997 but which I've only now read, in the light of Where Art Belongs, and which is gobstoppingly thrilling in the risks it takes with disclosure and specificity and the game of the self -- a game which fifteen years later seems both reckless and underachieving, but which also contains within itself the seeds of a more continuously radical and pertinent engagement with the core question that fiction and critical theory hold in common: what else can we be? An absolute delight, and, better yet, a daunting one.

3 It feels as though it might somehow be indicative of a particular kind of importance if you can spend only a few fleeting moments with an artist's work, and still come away from the encounter feeling bowled over yet again by what you thought you already knew and had comes to terms with about that artist's project. It will be absolutely no surprise to any longterm reader of this blog, or anyone who knows me personally, that Ryan McGinley's end of year show at Alison Jacques, Wandering Comma, took my legs out from under me. McGinley's made a lot of terrific work since he was last in town, at the same gallery in 2009 with his stunning Moonmilk show: in particular, a large number of unexpected but consistently superb monochrome studio portraits, including several which place his familiar nude young pals in the frame with a bird or animal -- partly, he says, a tactic for helping his models take their attention off the camera, or off the camera's attention on them, though I also read in that conjunction something more profound that comes through Wandering Comma in teeming abundance. That imposing something is McGinley's courageous and crucial confrontation with the idea of the sublime -- an idea that in itself feels vulnerable now that the familiar downscaling reconfigurations of the sublime under postmodernism are so stressed-out and frankly incredible. Here, McGinley gives us back a version of the old-skool Kantian sublime partly through working with scale: there are only seven pictures here but each is not far off 3m x 2m: in other words, about as big as it gets for photographs. In all but one of the pictures, the human figure is present as our yardstick, and in some nature diminutizes the person -- perhaps most tellingly in 'Taylor (Rushing River)', a yelping head and leg (like Bruegel's Icarus) sticking out of a body of water so turbulently foamy it almost looks like the fuzz of a giant Sesame Street monster; while in the two black-and-white portraits that initially greet the visitor, the female body itself is huge, in a way that recalls the commercial exploitation of undressed women on every Western billboard but somehow manages to spirit away the distortions of the advertising transaction to present us with very large collaborative compositions: women who are seeing themselves being seen, and who see us seeing, in standing room only behind McGinley's shoulder. Perhaps the key to the whole show is the gorgeously coloured 'Night Sky Pine', which eliminates the human altogether (except the implied viewer, of whom this is the tenderest portrait) and seems almost single-handedly to re-present us with a natural sublime we might have thought was lost forever -- towering trees, distant stars, and the difficult poetry of our own looking-up; these pictures, unabashedly, are out-and-out fictions, but like all the best fictions they are to be trusted, and loved for their trustworthiness. I find the erotic kick of McGinley's best work still deeply present, and it's exciting to see it as much in the pine trees as in the naked bodies. For me, the show's pinnacle, perhaps McGinley's most important piece so far, is 'Brandee (Midnight Flight)', in which the manifestly literal and the reverberantly metaphorical are locked in deep conversation: the falling motif which McGinley's been exploring for some time now, but also the depiction of wonder at what is fallen through, at where that flight begins and ends, feels as complete and as extensive as any single visual presentation could ever hope to be at this time and in these places. Dizzying and yet emphatically steady, McGinley's is, to my racing mind, the fullest and most richly participatory artwork currently being shown.

Ryan McGinley, 'Brandee (Midnight Flight)' (2011)

4 If there's one thing I like more than smart cool people, it's cool smart people. Not necessarily theatre people, but people who are thinking elegantly -- and in ways that can shine helpful lights on theatre practice -- about how we live together. This is probably where I'd mention Ken Robinson's School of Life sermon on passion, if I hadn't already made a fuss of it back in July. I've also been really struck this year by the amazing Rob Hopkins; if you don't know his Transition Culture blog, bookmark it now and check it hourly. I really do think transition communities are going to be among the most vital sources of learning and insight for theatre and performance makers over the next few years: they're already grappling with what it means to imagine living differently, in a really hands-on way, while a lot of more overtly politically oriented groups are still alphabetizing the doilies. Listen here to an admirably lucid conversation between Rob Hopkins and Carolyne Stayton for Transition US. But mostly I want in this paragraph to celebrate my dear friend and sometime co-worker Karl James, of The Dialogue Project: and in particular to ask you to watch, if you haven't already, a version of the presentation that Karl gave to The Story 2011 conference in February. Karl made a lot of friends that day: no wonder. He's an amazing man, and what he has to share is -- has repeatedly proved itself to be -- life-changing.

5 Well so this being the year that the establishment new writing spaces like the Royal Court and the Bush started to take an interest in what I might be up to, I thought I'd better play the game: so I spent a few weeks in the spring cramming in visits to real plays. You know, the actual written-down ones. Very interesting it was too. Of Wastwater we shall speak a bit further down the page. Dan Rebellato's Chekhov in Hell confused me a bit: aside from being the Duke of Twitter, Dan's a lovely man, a brilliant critic (read his Theatre & Globalization if you haven't, it's a perfect conjunction of nail and head) and a talented writer whose My Life Is A Series of People Saying Goodbye was my favourite radio play of the year; I also suspect Chekhov in Hell is heavily dependent on an exoskeleton of ironies that the audience I was sitting with at the Soho hadn't quite tuned into, but what came across to me via the distorting chamber of their hysterical response around me was a muddled compendium of sub-Walliams & Lucas skits on foreignness and apparently sincere expressions of misanthropic fatigue, terminating in a curious stub of gun-wielding melodrama, all played out on a mystifyingly drab and enervating set. Bit harsh, probably, but while recognizing the patterns of its wit and the line of its trajectory, I felt totally estranged from its "modern life is rubbish" sulks and from pretty much everything it wanted, especially everything it appeared to want from me -- unless it wanted exactly the recation it got from me, and secretly hated everyone else for lapping it up: in which case I still don't like it. I also found myself out of step with the audience for Philip Ridley's Tender Napalm -- perhaps his fullest and most energetically potent play since Mercury Fur, but a tricky one to pitch. David Mercatali's approach -- and I think in a way this was the bravest possible choice -- was to have the heroically committed Jack Gordon and Vinette Robinson amped up to 11 from the start, and only in the closing minutes to admit any kind of cadence, nuance or ambiguity into the mix. You can't fault the attempt to meet Ridley's writing head-on, at its own register -- and I bet Phil absolutely loved the production as a result; but I found it quickly outstayed its welcome, and became overbearing, strident (particularly in its adamant refusal of any trace of queerness), and occasionally cringemaking in its yoofy physical theatre platitudes. But again I am out of step with pretty much every critical response I've read to the production. Fair enough: I just think Phil's potentially more interesting than that -- more interesting, I think, than even he knows he is. So, of that little clutch of plays I saw, the only one I found myself really excited by -- and therefore hereby name Proper Actual Play of the Year -- was David Eldridge's The Knot of the Heart at the Almeida. Again, the pitch of the thing was initially really hard to tune in to: but once I managed that alignment, I found Eldridge's project terrifically exciting. Perhaps the closest analogue I can think of to it might be Almodovar -- not the first name one thinks of as adjacent in tone and ambition to Mr Eldridge, perhaps, but I absolutely loved seeing such an emotionally full-on middle-class melodrama, driven by women (especially terrific performances by Lisa Dillon and Margot Leicester) and by the terrible inadequacies of language: "I love you", Lucy and her mother keep saying to each other at the end, and the words bounce and ricochet between them as though in an infinite hall of mirrors: but there's nothing beyond the last visible dog but us. The Knot of the Heart is a long play and a good deal less explicitly leftfield than most of what I lap up, but I was engrossed by the whole thing, and greatly cheered by its ambition, its scope and its achievement. This blog was in its earlier days home to a fair amount of misunderstanding and argy-bargy between myself and David Eldridge, and I dare say we're still not quite eye-to-eye, but I have to hand it to him: he knows what he's about: his control of The Knot of the Heart is masterly and I bet actors love to play his dialogue: it immediately rewards saying aloud with your whole mouth and your whole heart.

6 I've seen the wondrous Sam Amidon live more often than any other singer except Dick Gaughan, and I was looking forward hugely to his October appearance at Cecil Sharp House, one of London's loveliest acoustic music venues. Looking forward to it so much, in fact, that I was slightly resenting having to sit through his support act, some unknown-to-me personage called Rachael Dadd. In fact I almost suggested we miss her out and sit in the bar till Sam came on. But the great thing about the bar at Cecil Sharp is, absolutely nothing about it makes you want to stay there. So we went up to listen to Ms Dadd: and 45 minutes later, I was a changed man. Utterly, utterly changed: I mean really changed for the rest of that night, and I guess a little bit for ever, because I'll always have sat through her exquisite set, almost holding my breath for fear of exhaling too loudly and causing the music to crumple away. Starting out just with banjo and the frailest of vocals, and gradually opening up to uke (very nicely wielded) and guitar and piano, and a couple of other musicians covering harp and clarinet and percussion and all-sorts between them, she astounded me with the wonky meticulousness of her songs, the scalene lyrics half-obscure half-mundane, the melodies loopy and wilful and immediately tickling the ear, the arrangements poised but playful and perfectly lively, the tone of the whole thing as close as your closest friend but as distant as a kite at the seaside in your faded memory of childhood seaside kites. It was really just very, very fetching, and I fell more than a little in love, and at half-time we had to go and find a cash machine so that I could return to the merch stall and buy one of everything. Well, the CDs are very lovely and everything and I'm ever so glad of them, but glad in part because they remind me of how incredibly special the live experience was. I can't wait to see her again. In the meantime, here's a clip from a 2010 gig at the Union Chapel, which will give you the beginnings of an idea of just how astonishing she is.

7 OK, now, for a full directory of cute / funny animal sites, look no further than shootingcutefishinafunnybarrel.com -- but I have to admit nothing all year has quite gladdened my poor slow Bible-black heart like 50 Photos of Basset Hounds Running. When you consider the military origins of the internet, it's hard not to feel that things are basically getting better.

from 50 Photos of Basset Hounds Running

8 I probably only saw about a dozen films this year so bestowing end-of-term commendations on three of them in three different paragraphs may seem perhaps a little de trop. On the other hand, all three are, in different ways, notable for their reticence, so maybe my own excesses won't feel so unbalanced. Anyway, I'm going to begin by thanking all the parties concerned for what was I think my favourite film of 2011: Mike Mills's incredibly delightful Beginners. I was looking forward to Beginners, having quite liked Mills's low-key debut Thumbsucker (and some of his other previous work in music video and his graphic output from the midst of the Beautiful Losers milieu) and feeling anyway like everybody in it would be watchable. On a rainy afternoon at the Cameo in Edinburgh it was exactly what I felt like seeing. But maybe because my expectations weren't stratospherically high, Beginners absolutely bowled me over. It's so, so beautiful: partly because of the great performances (a reminder of actually how good Ewan McGregor can be; gourmet stuff from a game Christopher Plummer; and I adored the warmth and subtlety of Goran Višnjić in the smallish role of Plummer's younger boyfriend, sweetly baffled by grief); but mostly because, brilliantly, Mike Mills managed to find in the rhythms of his direction and visual style a perfect match for the tone and cadence of his own writing -- something that writer-directors don't always achieve, Lord knows. It's obviously such a personal film to Mills and the rendering of his conception just feels like it's been achieved with a sort of off-kilter purity of vision. Increasingly, this sort of sweet-and-sour American indie stuff seems to come across like it's been written by a committee according to some filmschool template for aspiring heroes of Sundance, but the distinctive vision of Mills's film makes it feel way more universal, and kinder, and more truthful, and, in the best way, more sneaky: as in, sooner or later this film's going to sneak up on you and give you the sweetest kiss, and pretend to not notice you're crying, but hold your hand anyway, just lightly, till it's over. ...Oh, and the dog is amazing.

9 After a couple of years where it felt like the benefit of the doubt was being extended on all sides, I have once again found myself a bit out of sync with the poetry scene this year, notwithstanding the intense pleasure and pride of having managed to get Better Than Language into the world, and actually sincerely liking very much all thirteen of the poets represented in that book (I mean them and their work!). Perhaps the making of that anthology brought me into a slightly shifted relation with the poem as object (rather than as event or open proposition). Probably I was also just repelled by watching, basically as an outsider these days, as any number of young, smart, politically engaged poets took their pristinely furious, ironically self-implicating (thus self-exonerating) positions on the summer riots and the Occupy movement and so on. Of course many of them were also much more hands-on in those contexts than I was -- especially in relation to Occupy Cambridge -- and I wouldn't anyway claim any high ground: except that the widely practised manoeuvre of both insisting on and simultaneously disavowing a kind of hypomanic ideological purity -- each contradictory gesture endorsing the next -- has become a kind of incandescent gymnastics that, as an earlier poet put it, says nothing to me about my life. The book-as-event seemed as though it might produce some interesting effects: J.H. Prynne's Kazoo Dreamboats, or On What There Is, recently out from Critical Documents, is as fluently present in a fully public sense as anything in the whole of Prynne's oeuvre, and pretty exciting in the (surprisingly long, smooth) moves it makes, though I've only had it a week and I can't pretend to have made much study of it at depth yet; Simon Jarvis's Dionysus Crucified, given a quite astonishing production by Grasp, is remarkable for its ambition and nearly as much for its achievement, though it still cannot quite put its finger on what it is doing in its public life, retaining some tendencies towards narcissism slightly in excess of its charisma (especially when viewed, as I suppose I must do, in a loosely Marcusian sort of way). There is a great deal to admire and, at least incidentally, to relish in both these much-discussed books, but I wouldn't say either seems to me as cogent and as fully realised as, say, John Hall and Peter Hughes's Interscriptions, in an elegantly assured edition from Knives Forks and Spoons. The social repertory of Hall and Hughes's painstaking collaboration is both expansive and detailed, and the distribution of its textual and graphical weight is utterly secure and rather deft; it occupies a literary and visual space that to me feels considerably more advanced in its way than either of the aforementioned (if there were any point at all in drawing such a comparison): it's interesting, what gets hailed as important, when rigour is perceived only in the key-scratch marks of strain and unrelenting. However: partly because it points beyond these tensions, and partly because its braw compendiousness is in itself a measure of the inclusivity that is in this moment probably just the ticket, I'm saying the poetry book I'm hailing above all others this year is Francis Crot's invaluable HAX, (Punch P.), a novel-length (and -shaped) poem in which Crot's scanner-like mythopoetic convulsions reach their first apotheosis. The seething energy of this book, of its collaged Londony smuts and broken contingencies, means it pisses thrillingly and from a great height on the remains of the once-significant Iain Sinclair: remains that will now only be of interest to Iain Sinclair himself reincarnated as his own avenging vulture. No other book has touched it this year for quickness of thought, multiplicity or issue: though the fifth in Grasp's excellent Folds series, a mini-anthology collecting writings from the end of last year by four of BTL's finest -- Francesca Lisette, Jonny Liron, Joe Luna and Timothy Thornton, runs it close and brings an entirely different order of visual lucidity to not dissimilar ends. One might also mention three exceptionally helpful critical works: Keston Sutherland's long-awaited and beautifully turned Stupefaction: A Radical Anatomy of Phantoms (incidentally also remarkably good value for money, a bloody lovely hardback for not much more than a tenner, which I hope will help it secure the wide readership, not least outside the academy, that it deserves and can do something fruitful with); Scott Thurston's Talking Poetics: Dialogues in Innovative Poetry from Shearsman, which is a really gripping collection of extended interviews with four exemplary poets (Karen Mac Cormack, Jennifer Moxley, Caroline Bergvall and Andrea Brady); and in a neck of the woods that I refuse to imagine being somewhere else, Raphael Zarka's On A Day With No Waves: A Chronicle Of Skateboarding 1779-2009, which came out last year but didn't cross my path till this year, and which provides a wonderfully detailed survey of a species of poetic imagination that I'm afraid I begin to doubt I'll ever actually encounter (except in tantalising glimpses) in even the most imaginative of poets.

10 You'll be astounded forever to know that I'm not much of a game-player, except in the very least competitive circumstances (and save the occasional fiendish Mastermind tournament with Jonny: I grind algorithmically, he intuits like a big Puck). This is the kind of thing I love, though: Mitoza is a very simple A-or-B toy whose inventiveness and refined playfulness is -- as far as I can tell -- really inexhaustibly appealing, as is its gorgeously crafty aesthetic. If you don't already know it, give it a click: I promise it'll make you smile as soon as you start to play.

Interlude #1

In August, the lovely folks of the Birdsong Collective asked me to complete their 'Five On It' questionnaire, which has been answered over the years by many famouser persons than me, including such luminous paragons as Jessica Yatrofsky, Slava Mogutin and Patrick deWitt. So I duly sent back my thoughts thereon: but it seems they've suddenly slowed right down and the Five On It pages haven't been updated since the end of August. So I don't know if my contribution, which they never acknowledged anyway, will ever be seen there; even if it is, I don't suppose it matters much if I share my responses with you first, thereby rescuing the exercise from having been an (admittedly not very onerous) waste of time.

1) What’s the last song you listened to?
"Velocity Bird" - Peter Murphy

2) What did you want to be when you were ten?
Naked.

3) What’s the best advice you've ever been given?
If you're trying to do something difficult, override your natural tendency to hold your breath. Keep breathing.

4) What’s the last thing you were obsessed with?
I'm pretty much totally obsessed with my work, and with the political agenda on which it's premised and the ethical questions that are churning inside it. This is consuming enough that any other obsessions I may experience - artistic, sexual, whatever - are quickly absorbed into the work, which tends both to alleviate and to intensify them. Right now I am particularly obsessed with Book I of Euclid's Elements.

5) What are you afraid of?
Falling. Drowning. Team sports. Cocaine. Great poetry. Boring art. Heterosexuality.

11 I wrote earlier in the month about Lisa Jeschke + Lucy Beynon's starkly fascinating, suggestive, frequently wrong-footing work in response to the Queer DIY workshop, and as part of this survey I really wanted to mention one piece in particular that has snagged on some sticky-out bit of my imagination:

Lisa Jeschke + Lucy Beynon, 'Self-Portrait' (2011)

I don't think I want to say too much about this piece -- as most people will recognize, this is a National Insurance number, produced as a work on paper on a large scale (I don't know exact dimensions but it took both of them to hold the version they brought along to the closing DIY session); they presented it by way of response to one of the tasks in that workshop, which requested a text to be made containing an element of personal disclosure and designed specifically for public circulation; it also seems to refer back to an earlier task which asked participants to create some kind of naked self-portrait. I find this response by turns funny, vaguely troubling, sharply frightening and ineffably sad, in its part-ironic redramatization of the questions that lie behind those commissions, and the places within our political culture where those questions ramify most pressingly. I think it's a remarkable piece of visual theatre.

12 This one is partly here because elsewhere in the Great Big Interwebularity it is recorded in all dimensions of perpetuity that I "hate" Little Bulb. Which I'm sure was at least partly true when I announced it, some considerable time ago, on the evidence of a series of glimpses and fleeting impressions of something scratchy they did in the bar at BAC while I was not quite in the bar, which seemed a bit clunky and overbearing and winsome and lots of other things I'm not very at home to (except of course when they crop up in my own work). The thing is, I feel I want to issue a corrective -- if I were any sort of a man this would be in 36-point Impact, but I'm no sort of a man, & if you can imagine me as a man you'll thank me for knowing my limits -- to say that, because so many trusted friends (including Maddy Costa, whose blog it is that preserves my stupid hyperbolic 'hatred' for the generations) told me I must, I went to see Operation Greenfield at Soho, and I thought it absolutely rocked. In fact I think it's pretty much the best thing I've seen in its weight class all year. Its constant tack-sharp movement between the ingenious and the ingenuous (oh my dears won't you miss this clever writing when it's gone?) is not only likeable, but more likeable because it's more than likeable: the fleet performance, the blatant making chops, the rolling structure, the tonal care: it's all really really smart -- the product not least (I imagine) of them having done it a fair few times by now. At a time when truly accomplished devising with a strong company signature seems thin on the ground, I'm prepared to be among Little Bulb's bigger fans. Apart from anything else, Operation Greenfield has a good good heart, and I freely confess it made me do a Little Blub. And, you know, I feel bad about the earlier 'hating' thing, but then I remember that Andrew Haydon used to hate me a little bit -- "the fluffy-headed person's Johann Hari", i.i.r.c. -- and now look, he's on the back of my book telling everyone I'm like Tom Stoppard or something, Tom Stoppard if Mark Lawson had never heard of him. Whatever. Y'all see what I'm saying.

13 Christmas wouldn't be Christmas... no, wait, Thompson's wouldn't be Thompson's without some serious (and only partly sexual) genuflection before the genius of Dennis Cooper. In some ways there are oceans between our respective practices and styles, whole toxic oceans full of chimerical bioluminescent piscoids and variably buoyant sewage babies; but no one maker (aside from immediate peers) has had such a profound effect on my work, and my thinking around it, during the period that this blog has charted. And Dennis's activities this year continue the trend, in so far as I've been able to follow them at all. What certainly has fallen away, regretfully, is my committed attendance (and you really do have to be committed -- or, at least, that's the only way I think I can enjoy doing it, all-or-nothing as is the brand essence of my wont) at Dennis's notorious B.L.O.G., which bucks a trend by appearing healthier and heartier than ever. The short spell where I did get back into the rhythm of it, in the summer, weirdly happened to coincide with the tragically early passing of the blog's near-legendary sometime contributor Antonio Urdiales: and the way that the community there, and Dennis not least, dealt with that event and its aftermath, and were prompted to reflect on what kind of meeting-place that blog has been over the past few years, was a very moving and (if this word doesn't jar in the circumstances) impressive period. I've also just finished reading Dennis's latest novel, The Marbled Swarm, which is an almost supernaturally gripping read (given that it's in every way an art novel, a glinting mobile of conscious artifices rather than any kind of a plot-driven page-turner). Thank fuck, the book certainly resists precis -- or at least, I'd feel like a flat-footed ogre for even trying; but it is an extraordinarily sustained inquiry into the novel as a genre of performance, in which the longest and most hazardous distances are those between ontology and epistemology, between the staged ideal and the bathos of experience, and of course between any two bodies, or the body and its wearer; and, Lord knows, between all of the above and the perpetual desolating shortfall of language. As a quite diamantine study of gesture and consequentiality, and the ways in which gayness can be weirdly refracted in these, The Marbled Swarm is totally compelling; beyond, or before, that, though, it is a game of literature, which Cooper plays by now like a grandmaster. To my mind his best -- certainly his most achieved (if that's the word) -- post-George Miles Cycle novel, it reminds me above all of one of the few original visual artworks I own, which I picked up for a knockdown fifty quid because the artist had made some error with the fixing chemicals she used, meaning (she tells me) that the image will slowly disappear over the next couple of decades. Cooper's novels are often like this: certainly they are objects, rather than events; and they are closed, rather than open (or simulating openness or even woundedness). But they are changing, even while you hold them in front of your body; they are in motion; they are already leaving. -- As a postscript, I should also mention the soundtrack release of Them, Dennis's performance collaboration with choreographer Ishmael Houston-Jones and musician Chris Cochrane. The piece dates back to 1995 but was revived last year, and the audio portion was this year issued on John Zorn's Tzadik label. (Some readers will recognize the Cooper / Cochrane / Zorn axis from the fascinating if slightly misfiring Weird Little Boy project on Avant in the mid 90s.) Them as a live performance proposition looks pretty exciting and I'm sorry not to have been able to catch it (yet -- I'm thinking I might try and nip to Paris to see it in the spring): but the audio version, especially if taken on its own terms rather than heard as an element stranded on its own in relation to a whole raft of unknowable absent cues, is a rich mix, complex, unnerving and, on headphones, claustrophobically intimate. Cochrane's sense for the drama of proximity is unerringly strong, and Cooper's readings of his own texts are as scarily poised and exposed as I've ever heard him do, especially on 'Dead Friends', which in this context is almost impossible to bear with. Jonny and I intend (as far as I know) to continue working on a piece called Slaves, based on a recurring wet nightmare that Dennis's blog has had for as long as I've known it; right now I wonder if the implicit challenges of that project are at some level what's stopping me and Jonny from working together at all... Well, time will tell, I guess, but it's never felt more important to me to stay close to what Dennis is doing: he is an artist at the height of his depths.

14 If you're basically a softy queer anarcho-syndicalist in possession of a limited range of plaid shirts, like I basically am, then this has been quite a whirlwind year: ideas I've been banging on about for years and sounding like a crackpot are suddenly being discussed on telly as if there were something important and pertinent and real -- and moderate! -- about them: which of course there is. More importantly, more people than ever are living those ideas, or at least living in proximity or in conscious relation to them: and if there's a body of water between me and, say, the Occupy movement, or UK Uncut, in terms of what the agenda needs to be if we're to get the radical change we need rather than (to be much too blunt about it) making a tactical grab for breathing space through efforts of mitigation and deferral, then at least the conversations arising from those disagreements now feel more like applied political thought than cloud-8 pinhead-dancing theology. As I say above, sometimes the conversations around where we are and where we're all going have felt very difficult and scratchy and hard to control, and differences of opinion and emphasis, while totally acceptable and necessary and fruitful at a rational level, can often, and especially in tired and nearly-overwhelmed people, be emotionally very gruelling and sad and isolating. And of course the web is full of networks which are just as likely, if not more so, to incubate discord and sniping as support and understanding. So when stuff emerges that can be helpful, that can find the right balance of reassurance and disorientation, restorative soothing and provocation, I've felt incredibly grateful for it. Actually mostly for me this year that's been about returning again and again to Diane DiPrima's Revolutionary Letters, and of course to John Holloway's Crack Capitalism which has frequently been just the ticket (and which enough of our comrades have now read that, even if they disagree with its theses or its mode of presentation, we can at least talk together about it and that's almost always positive). But other, more fleeting pop-ups can really help too, as lifebuoys almost. At the start of the year I was still feeling hugely inspired by the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination's Users Guide to ~~(Demanding)~~ the Impossible, which emerged last December and, for my money (we need a new expression to go in there please), hardly puts a foot wrong from start to finish. And I was impressed too, and heartened, by this letter from members of the Solidarity Federation to members of UK Uncut following everyone's very various March 26th actions and the quickly subsequent concerted attempts by the media and certain retrograde elements on the left to force activists of different stripes to condemn or disown each other. But actually the smartest and most cheering thing I saw all year from this spot on the dial -- this time in response to Occupy Wall St -- was to be found, as smart and cheering things so often are, in an unexpected space: the Toronto Globe and Mail's 'Celebrity Photos of the Week' from mid-October. The dry-as-a-bone sardonic twinkling of the photo captions gradually opens up an extraordinarily reverberant space (and a manifestly serious one) between the twin-track realities of how we (mostly) are now living, without all the histrionic and strenuous gestures of, for example, Emily Maitlis playing comic-book tough and looking nothing but ridiculous (especially by comparison with the composure and painstaking intelligence of her interviewee) on Newsnight.

15 For someone who doesn't own a tv and doesn't watch tv, I seem to watch a surprising amount of tv. You surely know already how devoted I am to Masterchef -- especially the Professionals version, which was extraordinary this year and at which I wept like a little girl on a scary rollercoaster more than once. (By "little girl on a scary rollercoaster" of course I mean "me on a really tame rollercoaster".) And I am peculiarly fond of the languid repartee that bounces between Alexander Armstrong and Richard Thingy on Pointless. But if I were to pick a single show to nominate as Outstanding TV Whatever Of The Year, then it's neck and neck between two sitcoms. Series 2 of Rev has been remarkable, as the writing grows in confidence and the characters pick up further nuances and greebles (I've particularly enjoyed watching Simon McBurney flesh out the previously slightly over-broad Archdeacon); the ends of both episodes five and six were jaw-dropping, and you don't often say that about a sitcom -- which Rev hardly is any more. But I feel like a bit of a middle-class Guardianista twit going on about Rev so I'm going to award the gong* [*there is no gong] instead to Him & Her, which seems to have gone somewhere quite a lot darker this series in a way that I initially found hard to like: but Sarah Solemani and Russell Tovey portray the central relationship so exquisitely that you keep getting drawn back -- and Joe Wilkinson as Dan is a gift that keeps on giving. I hugely admire Stefan Golaszewski's writing, too -- I don't know (though I'm sure I could probably find out) how much the dialogue comes out of improvisation, if at all -- however much, he does a fantastic job, and I'm already excited about series 3 and where else the characters and the format can go. (And, to save you the bother, I may as well point out that if you take the initial letter of each sentence in the foregoing paragraph, and rearrange them, it more or less spells out: "me want to do sexytime with Russell Tovey". Just putting that out there, subliminally.)

16 When it comes to the year's bigger theatre/dance/performance shows, it's hard to think of anything I've really enjoyed that I haven't also felt conflicted about. (Maybe by this point in the cosmic proceedings a response of unreserved adoration could only apply to underachieving work, anyway; maybe it's not cleanliness that's next to godliness now, but smeariness?) The 30th anniversary restaging of Lucinda Childs's DANCE at the Barbican was enthrallingly joyous, technically prodigious and in every way captivating: but it was also very pointedly keeping its distance (and Philip Glass's gorgeous teeming score likewise), in a way that marked it out as a product of pre-contemporary intelligences. Dave St Pierre's Un peu de tendresse bordel de merde! at Sadler's Wells ended up the very model of kindness, its achingly beautiful final sequence alleviating and more than counterbalancing the anxieties the company teasingly educes earlier in the show -- anxieties which are not just those around nudity and the reckless obliteration of the fourth wall; but for all that, the clowning gender-play never stopped feeling blandly misogynistic to me, so that the experience of the evening as a whole was of sharing a space with bullies who turned out to have hearts of gold and who only wanted to play and who never meant to hurt you: yes, well, misogynists never do, and anyway, what's more, they always want to tell you how much they love women; so, some blissful stuff (albeit too much of the heavy lifting was left to Arvo Bloody Part), but too much fly and too little ointment, maybe. Shall we then salute above all The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic at the Lowry for Manchester International Festival, for much of the opening hour of which (having got past the pre-show tableau of sleek black dogs patrolling a sumptuous mortuary, which I'd contentedly have watched for much longer) I quite wanted to beat Robert Wilson to death with a wooden spoon, very very slowly. The desperately unamusing caricaturish recounting of Abramovic's early years in Wilson's exhausted (and exhausting) cartoon expressionist style -- aided and abetted by Willem Dafoe in heart-sinking whiteface -- nearly killed the whole evening for me. But once that backstory was out of the way, and its abject smugness had been punctured -- mostly by the breathtaking presence of Antony Hegarty (about whom I've never particularly cared, but who abundantly reveals in this live setting the penetrating charisma that his avid fans kept telling me about) -- then it was all, wondrously, about images that stood only for themselves and the matter of their own duration, and bodies that both fulfilled and thankfully failed to map perfectly onto the matrices that were designed for them: in other words, theatre excellently surviving a botched attempt on its life. (For further discussion of which, see this post, and its Parable of Kira O'Reilly's Arsehole: soon to be a major motion picture, in my dreams.)

17 For the first time in years, I happened to be in town during the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival. It was a quietish year for LLGFF -- the programme had shrunk considerably following budget cuts -- but I was really glad of almost everything I saw. We Were Here was stunning, a desperately sad but profoundly affirmative documentary on the early days of the AIDS crisis in San Fransisco: a film everyone should see; another excellent doc, Making the Boys, told the story of Mart Crowley's pioneering The Boys in the Band, and inevitably ended up being an AIDS documentary too, though what was really shocking was a vox pop montage of Pride-marching twinks who had never heard of The Boys in the Band -- depressing in itself but alarming too if gay communities really are failing to pass on what's salient in their cultural and political heritage: that short memories can be lethal is an observation that applies to much more than just sexual health. Another interesting documentary in the main feature strand, Mutantes (Punk Porn Feminism) followed some intriguing and provoking tendencies in queer self-staging and group formation, and checked in with a few artists and activists who've been important to me (above all the mighty Del La Grace Volcano); but -- I mean, it doesn't really matter a cahoot what I think, but -- I was slightly downcast to see so much queer/feminist activity that was so in thrall to (even an ironic) phallocentrism and the aping, but hardly detournement exactly, of pretty standard heteronormative power play: those things don't seem to me to become liberating or productive simply by dint of their occurring in a queer-identifying context. Among the fiction features, I truly enjoyed Xavier Dolan's coolly stylish Heartbeats and I felt very fondly about Gregg Araki's Kaboom, though there was something odd about the mix of relatively expensive (post-Mysterious Skin) visuals with Araki's samo sophomoric writing: I really like both elements but they don't always sit together all that happily. Still, two very breezily sexy films, and really interesting to feel the gayness of Heartbeats and the queerness of Kaboom not merely overlapping but kind of 69-ing. The huge surprise at LLGFF, though, and my nomination for epic art fag film of the year, was Bruce LaBruce's L.A. Zombie. Except actually the award goes to L.A. Zombie Hardcore, which the BFI were sadly unable to show. The heavily shredded softcore version -- still fairly eyeopening in places -- is pretty incoherent in terms of continuity; but then, so is the uncut version, so I think we have to assume it's deliberate. (In which case it's pretty cool.) What's really remarkable (and admirable) about L.A. Zombie, in both its versions, is how profoundly serious it is, and how critically acute. More than you might expect from a film in which, essentially, a sad zombie wanders an L.A. wasteland, fucking a series of fresh male corpses back to life. It will be a movie that's written about a lot in years to come, I should think, and a set text on queer film courses, and so on. LaBruce has consistently been the most politically interesting -- not to say provocative -- queer filmmaker on the block, but what's fascinating here is that in taking a step back from the overt sloganeering and emphatic iconography of, say, The Raspberry Reich (and its pornier version The Revolution Is My Boyfriend), a much more developed political sensibility seems to come through, with room for ambiguity and contradiction and a kind of melancholy that actually comes very close to how I feel the idea of the erotic might be working now on the left. Apart from anything else, L.A. Zombie Hardcore is a very odd offering indeed approached as porn: which I kind of think queer porn ought to be. After the screening of the cut version at the BFI, the movie stayed with me for a long time, subtly changing the look and smell and taste of everything: and it was impossible to say how, or why: and that's why I think it's a very considerable work of art -- especially in the hardcore version, if for no other reason than that there's nothing in the movie, or in its aftereffects, that isn't amplified by zombified François Sagat having an unsimulated hard-on, and a culture in which the opportunity to see that is curtailed has definitely got itself into a weird pickle. -- Worth saying also that it's also visually rather an accomplished film, often beautiful if dystopically bleak. Los Angeles has never looked so fucked.

18 While we're dealing in rudenesses, let us recall the strange and faintly nauseous joy of the baroque excesses to be found in the copy editor's style sheet for Nicholson Baker's novel House of Holes. This is mostly a list of all the dictionary-defeatingly obscure and confected sexual terminology with which Baker festoons his story: and as such the article unites two of my dearest predelictions: obscenity and alphabetical order. Could be worth adapting for the stage when everyone's bored of Hippo World Guest Book again.

19 Absolutely no doubt as to the pre-eminent art show of the year: Gerhard Richter: Panorama at Tate Modern was so great as to be deeply humbling. I was prepared for Richter's quiet seriousness and his breathtaking technical resources; I certainly wasn't prepared for the effects produced by the stylistic and formal breadth of his work -- a strong impression finally not of dissonance (or a kind of heavy dilettantism) but of consonance, the cohesion of a lifelong project to comprehend the nature of appearance and apparentness and apparition and artifice. For Richter, the act of seeing is so strongly an act of making, somewhere between promise and proposition, that even his most reduced or abstracted pieces urge on the viewer some admittance of human complicity: by which I suppose I mean I've seldom met work in which the use of colour, for example, seems to have such a sussuration of ethical concern buzzing within it. There was overwhelming work in every room of the show, but it's the October 18, 1977 paintings around Ulrike Meinhof and the Rote Armee Fraktion that stayed scored on my mind and implanted somewhere unreachable in my body for weeks afterwards: a sober but tenderizing reckoning with the mundanities of the outrageous.

Gerhard Richter, 'Festnahme 1' ('Arrest 1'), oil on canvas, 1988

20 And the Andy Field Memorial Rosette for the Best Theatre I Didn't Actually See But That Nonetheless Captured My Imagination By Other (Not Necessarily Ancillary) Means Thereby Still Qualifying As An Artistic Experience Of Some Merit goes to... BAAL by Melbourne's Malthouse Theatre and Sydney Theatre Company. The YouTube trailer for BAAL is a wildly enticing glimpse into a stage world that's more familiar from dreams than from stuff I've seen elsewhere. Dreams, I mean, of what a contemporary classical theatre could, and should be -- not just dreams of beardy barechested rock stars in rain storms who later go on to transmogrify into unicycle-riding deer. Only maybe Gisele Vienne's work exerts as strong a pull at the point when it's no more than an idea and an image or two; maybe also Societas Rafaello Sanzio, at least back before R. Castellucci jumped the shark, turned round, went back to the shark, climbed up onto its back, did a poo on its head, took a photograph of the poo, and sold the photograph to the Barbican for a million pounds. I think had BAAL been playing even a couple of minutes nearer London than its Antipodes, I'd have made an expedition of it, I'm sure -- and not necessarily been rewarded for my efforts, according to some reviews. But in a year when I've thought quite a bit about the value -- the virtue, even -- of the glimpse as a political event, this minute-and-a-bit of BAAL achieves way more than its trailer function of making me want to see the show. Specifically I suppose it makes me want to make the show that brings this other unseeable show into a closer relationship with everything I am as an artist. Which is more than you can say for the entire career of Trevor Nunn, laid end to end until it reaches the Circle Bar. Anyway, see for yourself -- bearing in mind I may have built it up a tad now:

Interlude #2

Longterm readers will perhaps miss above all the relentlessly upbeat tone here at Thompson's, where seldom is heard a discouraging word and what have you. Nonetheless, this being Christmas and all, let's get into the swing of things by bitching about some stuff that missed the mark (or worse) this year.

I think the film I disliked most this year -- and this might also win the Grand Prize for Most Obnoxious Cultural Artefact -- was Terence Malick's The Tree of Life. I had every expectation of loving it, as a longstanding admirer of Malick, or at least of everything I've ever seen of his; furthermore I was inclined to trust some of the ecstatic reviews that were coming out, which seemed to be defending the film against charges that I instinctively distrust (self-indulgence, pretentiousness, too-slow-ness, etc.). And I happily admit that there's lots in the film to admire, if not much to like (apart from the splendidly lame-ass CGI dinosaurs). But politically it's very hard not to see it as a not-too-distant cousin of The Birth of a Nation: essentially it's a half-day-long infomercial, modelled perhaps on the discarded draft storyboard for a hair conditioner advert, and designed to inculcate in an audience that it first renders hypnotically suggestible an unambiguous message to the effect that the last 13.7 billion years (approx.) have been one long triumphant sweep leading inexorably and righteously to the untouchable supremacy of white-American patriarchy and heteronormativity, iconically represented in brutal but well-meaning Brad Pitt clenching and unclenching his jaw, and Jessica Chastain strolling winsomely along a numinous beach in a wafty frock, while a voiceover inexplicably doesn't keep warning you about the possible side effects of the antidepressants they're subliminally trying to make you want to be addicted to. This, my dears, this Ocean Breeze-scented fascism, is, we are invited to accept without further ado, the apotheosis of humanity, beyond which heaven is only a dainty footstep away. ...Well, excuse me while I kick the sky, but The Tree of Life basically made me want to watch Paris is Burning on a loop for the rest of my life, occasionally interspersed with random frames from Gunter Brus and Kurt Kren's 20. September and an assortment of the homemade videoclips uploaded to whichever is the world's least blatantly racist web site for aficionados of dry fistfucking.

Which brings me neatly to Simon Stephens's Wastwater at the Royal Court. ...Actually, I'm not going to be comically mean about Wastwater, because it made me frustrated rather than angry, and just a bit forlorn because there is nothing quite as disconsoling as the loneliness that comes from being the only one in your gang who really doesn't get something that is apparently self-evident to everybody else. I'm a fan of Stephens's work, and a fan too of Katie Mitchell: but for me, this first meeting brought out the absolute worst in both of them. In Stephens, that means a sort of ponderous restraint, of the variety that "serious" mainstream British poets like to throw down to show they're being serious; a kind of cliqueyness in the conceptual universe, in which everything points to and leans on everything else, but the circuit is so self-supporting and so associatively meagre that nothing in it can really be critically interrogated from outside. In Mitchell, it means getting everyone to fidget a lot. That's because real people fidget when they're thinking about things; unless they don't, in which case they don't look like real people are supposed to look according to Katie Mitchell because Katie Mitchell thinks real people fidget a lot when they're thinking about things. I wonder if Katie Mitchell has ever considered the possibility that there's something about her presence specifically that makes people fidget a lot when she's around -- you know, like the Queen thinks everything smells like fresh paint. Anyway, Katie Mitchell has been through Wastwater with her set of four Ryman's coloured highlighter pens and has methodically colour-coded the fidgeting, and then at the end she's going to get Angus Wright to do an absolutely fucking huge fidget, an unprecedentedly massive expressive-dance fidget, like the Bob Beamon of fidgeting, way bigger than Stephens has asked for in the script, because Angus Wright is a marvellous actor who it's a shame to waste on mimsy nuance and anyway who knows what might happen to the scale of people's fidgeting when they're in extremis e.g. stuck on stage for twenty minutes with Amanda Hale. Oh maybe I am going to be comically mean after all, if this passes for comically mean that is. So in other words Simon Stephens is a fine writer and Katie Mitchell is a great director and Wastwater may even be an excellent play but also Leopold and Loeb were probably kind to their mothers, innit, and sometimes something awful just happens because two people bring out the worst in each other: and what, after all, is the cold-blooded murder of a teenage boy if it's not just a big colour-coded fidget gone terribly, terribly wrong.

And for my final choice... Well, I'm afraid (or happy) to say I can't quite bring myself to castigate Kate Bush, even though I was peeved by her mischievous attempt to downplay expectations for her end-of-year 50 Words for Snow album by releasing Director's Cut in the spring, on which she cunningly re-recorded eleven tracks from The Sensual World and The Red Shoes to make them all at least 30% worse. (Though I suppose she was right to attempt this subterfuge if by doing so she helped anyone to stomach more easily the tremulously revolting title track of 50 Words for Snow, on which her muted call-and-response with Stephen Fry is a bit like watching your fat middle-aged naked next-door neighbours through a gap in their curtains while they indulge in extremely light sexual fetish-play involving squirty cream and a plastic fish-slice.) But I'd feel happier drawing a veil, really. And so let us instead recall the televisual syrup of ipecac that was BBC4's Agony & Ecstasy, the tsetse-fly-on-the-wall documentary in which, over the course of three hour-long episodes, English National Ballet, the well-known National Portfolio Organisation, sort-of metaphorically but sort-of almost literally rolled back on the floor, with its little betightsed legs waving in the air, and fucked itself ceaselessly, furiously and ruinously up the institutional wazoo with an unbelievably giant dildo of its own devising and manufacture. Let me help out those of you who missed the series by offering a brief summary of each of the three episodes. In episode 1, preparations for Swan Lake were going tits-up and celebrated choreographer Derek Deane was revealed to be an absolutely gargantuan douchebag. In episode 2, preparations for Romeo & Juliet were going tits-up and several of the corps sadly had to be put down after becoming injured in the fray. In episode 3, preparations for The Nutcracker were going tits-up and acclaimed artistic director Wayne Eagling was revealed to be the most unbelievably pathetic and ludicrous wanknugget. If only Simone "The BNP Ballerina" Clarke had still been, as she was until 2007, one of the company's principal dancers, then maybe this PR disaster could have been averted: she surely would have presented a more sympathetic public face. As it was, one could only look on in an admixture of sorrow, fear, and a profound sense of double incontinence, as the company pursued with such singleness of purpose its mission to make apparent to the nation exactly why it deserved to continue to be subsidised to the tune of well over £6m a year. Giant dildos don't grow on trees, do they. (No, Chris, they don't.)

N.B. In the interests of transparency I should say that all of the above is specifically designed to stop you thinking about this fucking picture of me looking like a freshly lobotomized Hasidic lumberjack. Easily the worst thing that's ever happened, not just this year but ever, in the last 13.7 billion years (approx). There you go: fair and balanced.

21 Probably everyone -- but perhaps especially the queers in the house -- can remember their teenage experiences of getting intensely hot and bothered when reading what the book clubs on the back page of the TV Times used to call 'Caution: Erotica - for adults only'. The books you have to put down because you can't breathe any more. (Frank Moorhouse's The Everlasting Secret Family springs to mind. Even the thought of that book can still give me an attack of proper Edwardian vapours.) The publications that seem to be emitting a Ready-Brek glow from inside your bag. It's a sensation that seems to dissipate with age and experience -- particularly now one no longer has to take books and magazines to a cash desk and more-or-less announce in public that one wants them -- and now I'm remembering the mortifying to-do in Waterstone's when my chosen copy of The Best Gay Superstars 1998 turned out not to have a barcode on it -- but instead can go from one year to the next only ever disclosing one's deepest desires to Amazon or whoever. And I miss it, sometimes, I miss that feeling of hotness and jeopardy. Thank heaven, then, for the lovely Frank Jaffe and Luke Munson, two naughty boys in Florida who this summer released issue 1 of their splendidly named queer zine Please, You Will Sodomize Me?!? Not since I picked up my first issue of the legendary Holy Titclamps at Tower Records Piccadilly in about 1996 have I held in my hands a slim volume with such an incendiary feel. The morning my copy was delivered I took it with me to read on the train but then found that I really couldn't bring myself to take it out of my work bag for fear that, like phosphorus, it (or I) might actually catch fire were it exposed to the air. This is already, I think, a brilliant achievement on the part of Jaffe and Munson. How does this thing get to be such a hot potato? No secret, really: it's just that perfect combination of smart, porny, creative, uncompromising, and radically blaringly queer. (And that subtle little trickle of cum running down the chin of our cover star certainly plays its part.) As the editors say in their splendid introduction: "Please, You Will Sodomize Me?!? wants to stick out like a sore erection..." Well boys, mission accomplished. This first issue has interviews with the brilliant Gio Black Peter and the inspirational Koes Staassen; there's a featurette on Gregg Araki's Nowhere; there's some great writing by Munson including a bravura prose work called Extreme Unction; and there are a bunch of pictures ranging from the cheerfully explicit outwards. Nothing I've held in my hands this year -- at least nothing that didn't actually have a pulse -- has throbbed harder. Apparently issue 2 is in the pipeline. Lord have mercy.

22 Abrupt change of pace! This is one of those breathtaking videos that make me not after all want to throw away the whole internet and start over: Murmuration by Sophie Windsor Clive does what the web does best by capturing something real and personal and local and serendipitous and then sharing that record with anyone and everyone who wants it. It's interesting, too, how strong the political import of this clip is for its makers.

With thanks to @deldridgewriter for tweeting it in the first place.

23 At one point -- on the occasion of the fourth or fifth deferral notice from Amazon -- I began to wonder if Violette's much-delayed Michael Clark would ever actually be published. In September, after the best part of two years, it finally was, and ever since it's been a shoo-in for Big Sexy Coffeetable Book of the Year. It's a fantastic compendium of images (and some patchily worthwhile accompanying texts) from across the history of Clark's work, and I particularly like it for doing both the things I kind of wanted it to do: it makes sense of the trajectory of the work over time, and it also makes it (to my mind) surpassingly clear that the best of Clark's work was done before the end of the 80s. I imagine this is exactly as it should be: if his present work and aesthetic were still hanging on to the tone and gestures of the post-punk stuff, it might now look (unintentionally) ridiculous, and maybe the trading of youthful ebullience for mature refinement is anyway in itself important or has produced work that is important to some people (even if it's not so much to me). Whatever, it's right that young, dizzyingly talented, gleefully unorthodox talents should burst on to the scene and shake everything up, and right that that's the period of their work that we might most cherish, and I suppose I just wonder if it's right that a theatre maker not far off 40 should feel, perhaps self-deludingly, that their early, youthful, ebullient work might still be ahead of them.

A spread from Michael Clark (Violette Editions)

24 Without wishing, in the midst of this already plenty-long post, to produce after all the Furtive 50 that in a pissy huff I earlier announced I wasn't going to do, perhaps we might forgive ourselves for taking a last gambol through the headlines. The #1 record of the 2011 intake would have been the James Blake album, which probably on balance I did think was the best release of the year, though not perhaps the most interesting to write about or the most surprising to mention, given that for a while there it seemed to be so universally acclaimed and ubiquitous as to recall past supercool epoch-owners like Portishead's Dummy or whatever. So let's talk about some other things. I liked how many of the records in the higher reaches of the 50 were solo women or female-fronted bands: Jenny Hval's stunning Viscera at #2, Rachael Dadd at #3, Tune-Yards at #4, Austra at #6 (their Feel It Break was probably the album I played most all year, and the one which stuck most insistently in my head). Perhaps my favourite record of the year for just putting on and having fun listening to (which is apparently something that the kids still do, after all this time and despite their Snoopy Tennis Game 'n' Watches and their Pez thingummies) was the joyous racket of Ma Vie Banale Avant-Garde by AIDS Wolf, which I placed at #11. I could have filled several spaces on the chart with the year's releases from Another Timbre, the Sheffield-based improv/new composition label -- I chose Michael Pisaro's Fields Have Ears to stand in for all of them; for slightly more mainstream jazz my top picks were the ebullient live set The Coimbra Concert from Mostly Other People Do The Killing (featuring the consistently astounding trumpeter Peter Evans) and Austin (son of Stacy) Peralta's variable but intermittently exhilarating Endless Planets. Among the year's Interesting Men, I rated highly John Maus at #14, Tom Vek at #20, the adorable Connan Mockasin at #35 and the even more adorable Bigott at #50. As usual I was out of my depth with the year's hip hop releases, and by liking Childish Gambino's Camp as much as I did I surely showed myself up yet againas a sucker for yucky inauthentic stuff with a depressing appeal to cosy middle-class boys like myself -- see also (to a lesser extent) Das Racist, Shabazz Palaces, Beans etc., all of whom also popped up on the chart; but then again, is Kanye really 'authentic' either? There were some old-timers up there worth thanking our stars for, especially the valedictorian Glen Campbell, but also the still up-for-it Peter Murphy, the never-really-up-for-it-but-cool-anyway Harold Budd, and the still-crazy-after-all-these-years Van Der Graaf Generator, who returned with a concept album about maths. I'm also struck by how many records I was impressed by this year that I also found quite irritating, especially Seth Horvitz's brilliant but sporadically unbelievably annoying Eight Studies for Automatic Piano, and Tupolev's strange and hard-to-love but impossible-to-dismiss Towers of Sparks. But I guess if I had to recommend just one album from the year on the basis that you might not have come across it and you won't have heard anything quite like it before, I'd strongly urge you to seek out a fascinating record called As A Hovering Insect Mass Breaks Your Fall by James Brewster. Actually you might have heard stuff that sounds a bit like a bit of it before -- Múm, Richard Youngs, David Sylvian, Jónsi, Claire Hamill, Eyeless in Gaza, Pet Shop Boys, Robin Williamson, The Ecstasy of St Theresa, Durutti Column, Schlammpeitziger, Cody, Hafler Trio... -- but I bet you've never heard someone trying to push all those buttons in one go, let alone basically succeeding. It's a formidably eccentric album, sometimes difficult but never inaccessible -- in fact you never really feel like you've strayed too far from a vision of a kind of leftfield pop. There's also something curiously English about it, given that it apparently draws on or folds in ideas from Scandinavia and Eastern Europe. Actually it conjures a place that seems vividly familiar but also totally fictional: you don't feel uncomfortable there, but nor do you (and nor does Brewster) ever get settled. I'm not even sure it's a successful record, in a sense, but in another sense it clearly is because I keep going back to it, and I've given it a lot of close listens without ever feeling that I was really getting to know it. So, let that be my recommendation above all, and if you give it a try, let me know how you get on.

p.s. Directly below this post -- but you'll probably have to click on 'Older posts' (or alternatively you could just click here) you'll find the 2011 Thompson's Wall Of Sound -- tracks from some of the above-mentioned albums, and some other favourite music from the past year. Not all of it will suit all palates, but there should be something for everyone. By which I mostly mean, there's a Duran Duran cover by William Shatner, and if that's not good enough then frankly, fish fiddle de dee.

25 You could easily spend fifty years trawling the world and its environs in search of Things And Stuff, and never once come across any Thing as lovely, any Stuff so delightful, as Draw A Stickman. Oh, you've probably played with it already -- and, fair enough, it doesn't repay particularly extended or repeated engagement, it's too constrained and controlling for that -- but I do remember my first meeting with it, and the genuine childlike glee I experienced as a result: particularly when (SPOILER ALERT) its analysis of my drawing was acute enough that when I drew a stickman with a big body and tiny little legs, it took absolutely ages for my guy to walk anywhere. Doing a drawing that comes to life must be one of those archetypal childhood fantasies that never goes away -- it just gets forgotten about, until it's reactivated. Much clapping and cheering to all concerned.

26 The work of Rajni Shah -- here I'm thinking particularly of the stage-based performance work, I guess, rather than the less constructed and matrixed interventions -- often attempts to do something quite particular and distinctive and to my mind rather admirable: which is to effect a synthesis between the vocabulary and syntax and, one might say, 'manners' of live art, and the direct, unironic personal emotivity of truly mainstream pop-cultural formats, in the service of a relational practice that is both accessible and challenging -- often most challenging to those cultural gatekeepers who are most used to being 'challenged' by 'challenging' work -- and adaptable to the special tasks of provisional community-making and grassroots activism. On paper this sounds like a hybrid that it's obviously worth pursuing, and yet the clashes of register and the cross-currents of authority are so tricky to negotiate that the effect can sometimes be like mixing orange juice and milk. It seems that's how some audience members found Rajni's Glorious, a piece that's both self-evidently a musical and also, at least to begin with, not-a-musical, in just the same way that the brain and eye will emphatically reject what's actually there in an encounter with an optical illusion, even after the literal truth has been pointed out a hundred times. It's even a musical "in three acts"! Not even three-act plays have three acts any more! In the end I was truly grateful to Rajni and her many collaborators for Glorious because it needed so much from me and also so little. It just needed me to meet it. It had no use for my baggage, my critical armoury, my metropolitanism, my defences, my ideological apparatus, my learned scepticism. It needed me to meet it without all that stuff, but with open arms and no malice aforethought. And, man, that took a while to tune into. (Maddy Costa beautifully describes a similar trajectory of response.) I thought I wanted more, wanted faster, wanted more obviously complex... But I didn't. I just needed a bit of time to let go of my fear of the radiant goodness of the piece -- the generosity of its conception, the flair of its execution, the elan of its openness. It's so rare to see a theatre work that's this radically disarming. And as we lay down our arms, the last thing we cling to, possibly -- I mean I suspect this is so -- is a slight distaste at the self-appointment of the lead artist, the fact that this process begins with someone standing up in front of us and being willing -- or actively wishing -- to be the element in the mix around which everything else orbits. (I suspect we find this particularly hard when it's a young woman.) It is brave to want things in the way Rajni wants them, and to hold the line when through your own agency they start to happen. Recalling her, immobile, centre stage, the focus of all these people's attention and fear and anxiety and some of these people's goodwill, I am once again reminded of my favourite Edward Lear limerick, which concerns an Old Man of Deeside, who wears such an enormous hat that, as with all Lear's hat-wearers (see also the Quangle-Wangle) everyone surely thinks he's a freak, a weirdo, a creature of the fringes. And then it starts to hail, and everyone huddles under the brim of his hat. And suddenly he's at the centre of it all, bringing the gift of shelter. This Old Man, I think, is an artist after Rajni Shah's heart.

Rajni Shah

27 For at least the third year running, I think most of the really great live music events I've attended this year have been at Cafe Oto in Dalston, one of my favourite venues anywhere. (Wish they'd revert to programming a bit more poetry, but why would they, I guess.) Shoji Haino split opinions (i.e. got on some nerves -- but not mine, or at least, not in a bad way) in the company of Paul Dunmall and John Edwards; Christian Marclay tore up the place in skittish consort with Steve Beresford and Phil Minton; Stephan Mathieu did that overwhelming thing he does which is a bit like getting stuck in an astral lift; and my dear chum Susanna Ferrar essayed a quite ravishing extempore violin concerto with the London Improvisers Orchestra, with the warm and witty conduction of Alison Blunt guiding and supporting her all the way; and Steve Roden blew my mind, and Jonny's too, with the patient and expansive materialist detail of his domestic minimalism: revelation after revelation, like having just arrived on a new planet where all the weather's strange. Certainly the most nakedly exciting thing I heard there -- or pretty much anywhere -- all year, though, was Mark Fell, whose recent flurry of albums had tickled me enough to make me want to go along, but had nowhere near prepared me for the casual enormity of what Fell does live. As the set went on, it gradually yielded -- as if under interrogation at customs -- more and more of its initially obscured origins in a kind of multilated house music. It retains the logics of house, its builds and drops and sustained horizontality, as well as some of its local colour (the synthetic handclap, hooray!, rehabilitated at last for the armchair boffin), but twists them into confounding patterns that appear at their lower reaches to be insisting you're in a perfectly foursquare environment while at every moment further up the image asymmetric beats chop and lope and push and pull your brain into weird Mobius balloon animals. All this being done by a dude in a cap who looks like he's just come downstairs on a Sunday morning to find himself in a strange house, with no recollection of how he got there, and is passing the time playing Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing until his memory comes back. This track from last year's Multistability on Raster-Noton gives you some idea, if you play it loud enough, but it seems possible that, for now, it's in live contexts that Fell really hits home.

28 While I was doing research (I know that's immediately going to look like "doing research, ha ha", but I really was doing research) for the Queer DIY blog, I came across -- I think via Frank Jaffe's blog -- the Tumblr of an anonymous young guy who called his space n00dzblog. He was posting a series of erotic/pornographic (individual sand-lines will vary) self-portraits, using different kinds of personas or references to queer types and tropes; and they were really great, let's say that to begin with, they were really fucking amazing in fact. But there was an additional and fascinating paradox at work in them too, in that they were pretty full-on in terms of what was shown, but the maker had lightly pixellated his face, supposedly in response to being recognized by someone at his school. So they were great pictures but they also captured an interesting problem, an essentially political problem about the will to self-disclosure and self-identification and the borders of the permission we give ourselves in pursuing those aims. On first encountering n00dzblog, I grabbed a couple of images that I thought might be useful for my own project blog, and figured I'd go back the following day and download everything else on the site. Which I did: only, a couple of the images that I thought I'd remembered didn't seem to be there any more; and then I hit refresh and, rather than those lost images returning, even more disappeared: and I realised with a kind of jolt of horror that the owner-operator of n00dzblog was deleting all the images, right now in this moment, while I was trying to download them all. So, essentially, we raced each other (and I later managed to find a few fills where his images had been reposted on other blogs). By the end of the day, all that was left at n00dzblog -- and even this, now, is gone -- was a note that I found genuinely sad: "im tired of being slutty and posting explicit pictures of myself. thats not me and i don't want anyone to think of me like that . . . i am not an object and this is me taking a stand against that...". It was hard to think through the statement partly because it was difficult to accept its face value: only the previous day, he'd been posting incredible (and incredibly popular) pictures of himself, that were conceived with great generosity and executed with enormous skill and flair, and so, for all that one could understand his not wanting to be seen only as a maker of explicit self-pics, it clearly wasn't wholly true either that "thats not me": he'd obviously been expressing at least an aspect of himself, and doing so with such great courage and with such a reliable eye for his own beauty that I was genuinely upset about whatever had happened to make him change his mind. Maybe he got busted again, I thought -- someone close to him found out what he was doing and gave him a talking to (it certainly sounds to me like someone else's language being parroted). But mostly I dearly wanted to be able to talk back to him about what it means to be, and to choose to be, an object (sometimes) -- in the way that actors are objects: not reduced to the status of inanimate junk without human feelings and capacities, but released into the profoundly beautiful state of being willing to be seen, being open to the readings, the interpretations, the distortions maybe, of other people's desirous subjective projections on to you. It's not an easy state to enter, and there are plenty of successful actors who will never, ever fully achieve it; in those who do, it instils a kind of grace that I think is among the most exact and most powerful expressions of presence within art. ...But that's not the kind of comment that generally gets traded around online spaces like n00dzblog. Whatever -- I hope he knows how great he is, and, "slutty" or not, how exemplary was the refinement of his self-staging performances, the record of which he was so kind, even briefly, to share. -- I've thought pretty hard about including one of the pictures with this paragraph, as an illustration, and in the end I decided I would indeed use one, though probably the least explicit image out of everything I harvested. This might be seen as a grossly disrespectful overriding of his obvious wishes not to have these pictures circulate any more; but given that they're still so multiply present in the public domain anyway, I can't see it being additionally harmful, and anyway I slightly want to hope that in doing so I might manage to summon him here, and maybe he'll read this paragraph, and be reassured that his first instinct was right: that his pictures were beautiful, and generous, and true to themselves: and whoever told him otherwise was speaking -- sincerely, no doubt -- from an unreliable position of private fear.

29 Well so you'll be wanting to know what's the best room I've been in all year. (As if it were any of your damn business.) I guess the obvious, and in some respects the correct, answer is The Situation Room, which even on a relatively quiet year -- quiet at least in terms of public events and productive work -- still seethes with a sense of possibilities waiting to be explored. Also, the new Bush theatre auditorium is I think an absolute triumph and I felt very lucky to be walking around it and working in it, especially at the even more exciting stage where the last of it was still being built. But actually this category's slipped in simply so that I can mention, mostly for the benefit of my own memory, the upstairs room at the awesome Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City, Los Angeles, containing the display called The Lives of Perfect Creatures: The Dogs of the Soviet Space Program. Inside is a small collection of specially-commissioned portraits in oils of five of the dogs who were sent into space by the Russians between 1957 (Laika, the most famous of the doggy cosmonauts, on Sputnik 2) and 1966 (Ugolyok, who spent 22 days in space and came back apparently unharmed). It's an extraordinarily beautiful display, and deeply moving -- perhaps all the more so because I only got to spend a few very brief moments in there -- and fascinating in the tone it sets: it seems so hearteningly serious not despite but in part because of its being slightly kitsch -- bestowing these portraits on the dogs is in a way a perfect mirror of what it meant to send those animals into space in the first place, a category error ennabled by the speechlessness of the para-erotic gap between two discontinuous species. Seeing these portraits tells us so much about ourselves, and so terribly little about the experiences of the dogs.

Portrait of Laika, by M.A. Peers

30 A quick run-through of the best small-scale performance I saw this year might sensibly begin with the very smallest (and quickest) -- and also perhaps the biggest in terms of immediate impact and the decay time of its reverberations: a fleeting one-to-one, not much more than a turbulent constructed act of seeing, this was Laura Lima's 'Men = flesh / Women = flesh - FLAT', as part of 11 Rooms at the Manchester International Festival, and much the most successful of the pieces in that show, I thought, though genuinely troubling both in concept and in practice. A far more benignly unsettling experience was to be had at Edgelands, where Alex Kelly set up his Inspiration Exchange, a project I'd heard about and seen documentation of but never directly experienced in action; I love the shapes of Alex's work and thinking, and one of the new bits of information I came away with (regarding a 6B pencil) has already passed through me to several new carriers. Edgelands of course also presented the opportunity, which I was delighted to take, to see Kieran Hurley's Hitch again: but I think I've probably said enough on that topic already. Elsewhere in Edinburgh, Greg McLaren's Doris Day Can Fuck Off was a full-blooded gift of a show, loving and reckless and imploring and bracingly odd; while In Short Productions made a nifty job of David Greig's terrific Yellow Moon, thanks not least to a brace of incredible performances from Helen Cooper and Kyle Major in the central roles of Leila and Lee. But I think my Smallish Piece Of The Year would have to be Melanie Wilson's beautifully conceived, stunningly realized Autobiographer. I saw a very early showing, at QMUL, and I dare say it's grown even futher since then, but I was blown away, as I always am, by Melanie's compositional skills, her flawless creation of structures (physical, textual and especially sonic) one can walk around in thought, bringing the fullness -- and sometimes the sparseness -- of one's own experience to the work, and finding a sympathetic space for it there. What could have been a heavy, sombre piece -- tracing as it did the taking-hold of Alzheimers -- was light, witty and deeply affecting; and the show contains also the most astonishing coup de theatre I've witnessed in ages, a moment that was genuinely gaspingly strange and almost chilling, but at the same time serenely and expansively beautiful.

Interlude #3: "I SEE DEAD PEOPLE"

Here are some fine folks who left us in 2011, in some cases with little reverse-fanfare, having endeared themselves to us by (a) distinguishing themselves superlatively in their respective fields of endeavour, and by (b) not being Christopher Hitchens, that neocon pin-up rapscallion and fuckspanner.

Milton Babbitt

Composition for Synthesizer (1961)

Lena Nyman

Trailer for I Am Curious - Yellow (dir. NAME, 1967)

Andrew Gold

'Lonely Boy' (1977)

Michael Gough

as Bertrand Russell in Wittgenstein (dir. Derek Jarman, 1993)

Johnny Pearson

'Heavy Action' (1974)

Dennis Oppenheim

extract from Uncontrolled Unstoppable Motion (documentary on Dennis Oppenheim) (dir. Barbara Andriano, 2005)

Billy Bang

Billy Bang Trio at Tokyo Jazz Circuit, 2010

Russell Hoban

from interview with Dee Palmer, ICA London, 1987

Darryl Pandy

Farley 'Jackmaster' Funk feat. Darryl Pandy, 'Love Can't Turn Around' (1986)

Gill Clarke

Gill teaching

David Bedford

'Sad And Lonely Faces' (1972)

Samuel Menashe

'Samuel, the Concise Poet', episode of Know Your Neighbor (2009)

Smiley Culture

'Shan a Shan' (1985)

N.F. Simpson

excerpt from N.F. Simpson's One Way Pendulum (dir. Peter Yates, 1964)

Gilbert Adair

Trailer for The Dreamers (dir. Bernardo Bertolucci, 2003), screenplay by Gilbert Adair

Cy Twombly

The Lepanto Cycle (2001) at Museum Brandhorst, Munich

Fran Landesman

Ed Ames, 'Ballad of the Sad Young Men' (1966) lyrics: Fran Landesman

31 As post after post on this blog can be seen to attest, I properly properly *heart* Robert Popper and Peter Serafinowicz, the geniuses behind Look Around You and much besides. So here's something by each of them that made me smile this year: firstly, Popper as his wincingly funny wind-up alter ego Robin Cooper putting in a call to 118 118 (the clip is a few years old but I only came across it recently so I'm going to stick it in here, and hang the rules!); and then, from Serafinowicz, a proposed advert for KFC. When Michael Billington recently opined that absurdism had no claim to contemporary relevance, I thought immediately of Popper and Serafinowicz, who so frequently and with such laboratory care nudge the mundane and familiar just enough to tilt it into a strange and often out-and-out disturbing light; as absurd (and quintessentially absurdist) as anything in Ionesco or N.F. Simpson, it is work that titters on the edge of an abyss.

32    At the risk of sounding sucky-uppy, I wanted quickly to say something about Ovalhouse. When I went down to Oval House (back in the day when it was two words) in March for the queer D&D satellite, I was very struck by how different it felt from the last time I'd been there. There was a palpable sense of energy and engagement and of the blinds suddenly being open. And when I wrote to thank the new joint artistic directors, Rachel Briscoe and Rebecca Atkinson-Lord, for their hospitality to that event, they invited me in for a chat, and eight months later, I've just started making a show for them that will open in February. I feel very fortunate that I seem to have been (for once) ahead of the curve in terms of people figuring out how exceptionally good Atkinson-Lord and Briscoe are, and how refreshed and optimistic the venue now feels (to an outsider like me, anyway), and how rapidly the place is going to shift both in the ecology of London (and national) theatre and in the estimation of those who are paying attention. The season of queer work that my piece will be a part of looks like a terrific selection box of voices and styles; Ovalhouse hasn't junked any of its valuable and longstanding commitments, but it has rebooted them in a spirit of expanded vision, renewed confidence and more fun. At the end of 2011 things look more interesting across the London fringe than they have in a while: the Stoke Newington International Airport collective are beautifully in their stride; Brian Logan and Jenny Paton are just the right helmspersons for the next chapter in the continuing shaggy dog story of Camden People's Theatre; and a little further downstream it will be fascinating to watch Chris Haydon and Madani Younis put their respective stamps on the Gate and the Bush. I'm only sorry (in a thwarted sort of way, let's be honest) that rather than transferring into new hands on the departure of the present leadership, the Drill Hall is being subsumed into RADA. What a waste. I started my conversation with Ovalhouse by saying that I, like so many indie theatre makers, have no obvious home in London, no sustained relationship with a single small/midscale venue whose express remit is presenting, developing, and being an advocate for, work of that stripe, and whose energies, critical insights and governance (and, I suppose, funding) are equal to such a programme. For myself -- as various short-falling job applications over the past eighteen months appear to indicate -- I seem to be too old now to be considered for the interesting smaller spaces, and when I'm old enough for the bigger institutions (any minute now) I won't have anything like the experience most Boards of Trustees will be looking for. People ask me all the time if I'd like to run a building again, and the answer is always yes; but I begin to wonder if the only way this will ever happen is if I bite the far-from-soft-centred bullet and start something from scratch. Which is, actually, realistic considerations aside, a fun thought: but for the moment, CG&Co is plenty to be working (and playing) with.

33    In this year of what one collaborator has already started referring to as my "prod from God", perhaps it's appropriate that I should have seen not one but two live performances of the St Matthew Passion. I thought Jonathan Miller's staging at the NT was interesting, though a little underpowered: his thoughtful naturalism just doesn't reach the excesses of the story of Christ -- people pottering about with their hands in their pockets, like a melancholic Gap advert, can't make sense of anything: which is perhaps exactly the point, and I can see the problem Miller's trying to solve but I suspect the answer is not to give the piece a makeover in smart-casual beige so as to bring it closer to the everyday, but rather to raise the audience up so that we have no choice but to look God in the eye, or to avert our gaze and to live out the drama and the social meaning of that aversion; really, the Passion should be so daunting, so demanding as to dwarf King Lear -- let alone the pastel normalities (and whose normalities are they, anyway?) of Miller's production. So I guess I'd say I was more taken with the extremely fine Bach Choir performance at the RFH, an annual Easter fixture there. One could have wished for a sexier, more radically compelling Jesus, than Jeremy White; but otherwise the soloists were excellent, above all the extraordinary Iestyn Davies. And above all, this St Matthew Passion had a surprise in store: sudden illness forced James Gilchrist, who up to that point had been a remarkably committed and engaging Evangelist, to leave the stage three-quarters of the way through, and with no one in a position to step in for him, the remainder of the piece could only be presented in excerpts -- with the exceptionally curious outcome that Jesus cheated death. And not in the usual close-your-eyes-and-count-to-three-days way. I mean he simply didn't die on the cross. It was a peculiar turn of events, a bit like watching the thousandth replay of a famous goal and the ball suddenly going wide: but I must say, I was not unpleased that, just this once, Christ got off scot-free. Narrow Escape Of The Year, by a mile. Run, Jesus, run!

34    Let's round up some more art, shall we? The year's highlights for me included two hugely stimulating major shows at the Barbican: Laurie Anderson, Trisha Brown, Gordon Matta-Clark: Pioneers of the Downtown Scene, New York 1970s, which offered a wonderful, richly contextualised opportunity to come closer to two artists (Brown and Matta-Clark) who are too often relegated to lists of (basically) 'people who used to be important', and also to see a good range of Anderson's pre-United States work -- in the case of all three artists, there was lots here that had retained its freshness (especially Brown's still thrillingly cogent 'Man Walking Down the Side of a Building' from 1970), and tellingly it wasn't the originals but the slightly pious best-behaviour recreations of Brown's live works which made the passage of time feel as if it was looming large; and the current show OMA/Progress, which I visited once and loved but found almost immediately exhausting, so I hope to go back in the new year, not least as a way of setting up a subsequent visit to the V&A's Postmodernism: Style & Subversion, 1970-1990. Equally lively, though inevitably rather less consistently successful, was the touring British Art Show 7: In The Days Of The Comet, which I caught twice at the Hayward and again in the pleasingly different spaces of its Plymouth leg. It was Christian Marclay's The Clock and Roger Hiorns's untitled installation (park bench, sometimes on fire, sometimes watched by a naked young man, sometimes not -- you might have seen it on the BAS7 poster) that caught most of the popular attention -- and why not?, they're two beautifully accomplished pieces; but there was plenty more to enjoy and to think about, including some coolly involving paintings by Maaike Shoorel and Milena Dragicevic, Haroon Mirza's complex and poignant Ian Curtis-related installation Regaining a Degree of Control, and Elizabeth Price's strange and mesmerising video New Ruined Institute. For me though it was Hiorns's several pieces, considered as a whole, and Wolfgang Tillmans's Truth Study Center and Freischwimmer 155 taken together (or in relation to each other), that continued to reverberate long after the gallery visits. Among the smaller shows, Charles Atlas at Vilma Gold, and especially the new digital video piece No Safety In Numbers, drew you into a smart imaginative dialogue with an abundant queerness just beginning to tend towards abstraction; Larry Clark at Simon Lee was, as ever, brilliant, repulsive, funny, obnoxious, sexy, boring, a queer hero, a homophobic misogynistic creep, and frequently kind of blah: and the perpetual movement between these states made the work turn like a mobile in the heat of your confused critical attention; Fred Sandback at the Whitechapel was just an out-and-out joy (my only grumble being that there wasn't more of it -- hopefully we'll see a major retrospective somewhere in the UK before too long); the group show The Weaklings, curated by Dennis Cooper for Five Years gallery in Hackney, was a blast -- I've written about it already; and Giuseppe Penone and Richard Long made for a suggestive pairing at Haunch of Venison, though the scale of the gallery and the works on display suited Long's quiet monumentalism better, and I like Penone more, so the balance was for me a little wonky and the impositions (not least acoustic) of the location came close to being suffocating, as did the sense that it and I were on opposing sides of a class war in which the artwork was being forced into a peacekeeping role. But for the best of the smaller shows this year I'm taking us back to the Barbican for Cory Arcangel's Beat the Champ. This extraordinary installation -- a time-line of home videogame consoles all hacked to play ten-pin bowling games on an endless loop of dismal nul points failure -- covered itself in oodles of win for the following reasons: unlike almost everything I've ever seen there, it made sense of the Curve's odd and usually annoying space; as a wall of sound and image it was perfectly scaled, more than lifesize but less than sublime and so sitting in a nimbly ambiguous relation to ideas about culture, progress, noise and the repetitiousness of wanting; most importantly it worked as a one-liner but continued to yield more and more as you stayed with it, accumulating eventually an emotional weight and a critical depth, like a slow flood of recognition. Perhaps it was my favourite single new artwork of the year because it was the one that was most like the year I was having.

35    More than one person noted that the demise of this blog seemed to coincide with a waning in general of the appetite for blogging and especially for reading other people's blogs: and I must admit that does, to some degree, reflect my own experience as a reader as well as, obviously, as a writer. But there are still some people out there who are making the blog thing work, not only for themselves but for their grateful readers too. I guess the blogs I admire above all, especially these days, are those which recognize the power of spaces where the personal -- sometimes the deeply personal -- can meet some kind of public, and a kind of conversation or cross-pollination or even some social model can stand in and grow out of that space. My dear friend Julia Lee Barclay's blog Somewhere In Transition is exactly and exemplarily that: its candour -- sometimes gentle, sometimes fierce, often both -- is exactly its raison d'etre, or at least its reason to be a public space rather than a private journal: it is, among many other things, a record of a life lived in the full and sometimes unforgiving glare of a political and ethical consciousness that won't let go. For some doubtless it will sometimes read like the most uncomfortable overshare; if you're among them, you should know that the world in which that kind of pusillanimous etiquette is favoured as an invsible overlay for keeping everyone in their place is going to come under sustained attack over the next few years, and artists as brave and humane as Julia will be in the vanguard of that movement, and -- I'm saying this fondly -- you're going to end up feeling like a dick, and with good reason. For similar reasons I've greatly valued CN Lester's blog A Gentleman and a Scholar for keeping me on my toes in relation to trans issues while at the same time remaining stylish, entertaining, thoughtful and superbly well-written; and it's nice keeping an eye on what's going on in my pal Chris Rowlands's head via the medium of his big-fun Tumblr. And finally I wouldn't want this survey to omit ...Supervalent Thought, the blog of Lauren Berlant, an intoxicatingly smart American academic to whose work I was introduced this year by Theron Schmidt (no dumbkopf himself). She's posted only nine entries this year (so far) but you could live off any of them for several months, so densely nutritious are they, like intellectual astronaut food. I'm hoping sooner or later if I keep my head down I'll figure out what 'supervalent' means, and then, oh dude, we're off to the races.

36    No hesitation about my 'You Just Had To Be There' Moment Of The Year. At the Sit Room launch of Timothy Thornton's very remarkable -- possibly someday seminal -- Jocund Day (from the excellent Mountain P., whose Certain Prose Works of the English Intelligencer looks sure to be a highlight of 2012), Joe Luna, who was there (as was I) to read in acclamation of Thornton (a bit like the "coloured girls" who go do-do-do whilst bearing down on Lou Reed in all the lubricious pomp of his feral peregrinations), unexpectedly and marvellously concluded his set by reading "The Windhover" by Gerard Manley Hopkins, which is one of the greatest short poems in the English language, and anyone who says different quite frankly smells of bobbins; and not only was this surprising and titillating in itself, but he also read it blindingly well, as Luna so often will: and suddenly there was music and sex and modernity in it, Tom of Finland graffiti and E.T. flying with Elliott across the lit face of the moon: which is good, because there were all of those things in Gerard Manley Doodah, too, which is why he had to wear his bicycle clips so tight: and so not only were we listening to Luna, and doing proper obeisances to Thornton, and trying to catch the eye of Jonny Liron, but we were also briefly summoning Gerard Manley Whatnot and throwing him a long-overdue coming out party, and I think I may have ended the evening being sucked off in the warehouse lavatory by a ghost who smelled of violet creams.

37    I've spent a lot of this year reading with some relish the old dudes, the pantheon of Meerikan honky cats who spent the fifties and early sixties being definitely on to something that the bitter end of the sixties stupidly forgot in the narcissistic pall of its purple haze. First there was The Paul Goodman Reader, which omits much I wish it'd found room for but is still a pretty impressive entry-level anthology for those new to Goodman's work and life and thought; then on a trip to Bristol I happened to pick up, in a bargain bookstore, the utterly delightful Fuller's Earth: A Day With Buckminster Fuller and the Kids, a transcript of an extended conversation between Bucky Fuller, late in life, and three children, one of whom, Monkee / Liquid Paper heir Michael Nesmith's son Jonathan, comes across as so bright and appealing it's a wonder Paul Goodman wasn't waiting for him in the garden with a butterfly net; then I re-read Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man, which remains a really key text for me and an exciting one in many ways; and most recently I was pleased to pick up Marshall McLuhan's The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects, both in the recentish Penguin Modern Classics edition and, via Ubuweb, a late 60s audio adaptation -- though it's the book, more than the LP, that's most lucid in its explorations of the nonlinearity of the aural, an argument that chimes resonantly with some of what Drew Daniel's been saying in various places lately about the queerness of sound (precisely because it resists, or can resist, hierarchy, taxonomy, and linear ordering). All of this has been great: but if one Book By An Old Geezer has turned me on this year above all others, it's Euclid's Elements -- especially in the stunning Taschen reprint of Oliver Byrne's 1847 edition, which replaces the algebraic equations of Euclid's original with bold four-colour diagrams. I haven't worked through it methodically yet -- it was a Christmas present to myself, so I'm still at the boggling stage -- but simply as a sensual entertainment, it's transcendent; and the bits of Euclid proper that I read earlier in the year, and that made me want to investigate editions of the Elements that I might like, were vertiginously beautiful and strangely touching. There is something about the basic propositions from which Euclid proceeds that is a bit like looking at a clutch of bird's-eggs: something objectively profound, I suppose.

from Oliver Byrne's Six Books of Euclid (1847; Taschen facsimile, 2010)

38 It seemed like pretty much everyone was excited about Weekend by the time it got its general release: the advance word was so good, the trailer so promising. And I, falling in line for once, was looking forward to it also -- it looked like it might be a confident, uncliched, restrained, basically realistic telling of a gay love story: and there aren't many of those to write home about. So of course one went in with a little anxiety: that it wasn't going to live up to the hype, that it wasn't going to be as honest and unvarnished and care-taking as we wanted (or even needed) it to be: and sure enough that's the slightly grumpy place in which I spent the first half hour. The real problem I had with it was that neither of the lead characters -- who, as you probably know, meet on a Friday night and become surprisingly emotionally entangled over the course of the weekend, only for it to be revealed (and this is I think hardly a spoiler) that one of the pair is leaving for the US on Sunday afternoon, and won't be back for a couple of years -- was all that likeable. In fact I thought they were both ever-so-slightly kind of annoying: which made it hard to invest very fully in the plot and in the predicament it was heading towards. Only slowly did I realise that this was the power of the film: that it was refusing yet another of the received ideas that attend most gay movies, and in fact most movies period: that a film, especially a talky character-driven film, is obliged to be in part an advert, selling us the likeability of its outlook and its leads (in that curious flickery-matrixed place where you see both the actor and the character overlaid in a kind of stereoscopic picture which looks and feels a lot like the three dimensions of 'roundedness') and needing us to fall in love with them in order that we may find it credible that they are loveable to each other. Weekend does not seem to need or want you to love, or even like, the people it's about; it asks that you empathize with them, with their situation and (to some extent) with what they represent. As soon as I realised that my role was simply to witness, to watch and listen with care and to sit with the film as a fiction and with the idea of the film as a proposition, I quickly found that I was very moved and very heartened by its self-possession and its elegance. The performances, especially by leads Chris New and Tom Cullen, actually are really great; the writing is sensitive and intelligent; and the shape of the thing is almost perfectly judged. It's an extremely grown-up film -- and there's a scene, two thirds through, where they're in bed together very early on the Sunday morning, that made me bite back sobs. I guess I should say that I think I remained a little disappointed -- and gosh, won't this sound shallow -- that it wasn't as sexually explicit as I'd heard and anticipated (though certainly it's not coy either); I wish it had gone a bit further only because the project is clearly motivated by a passion, maybe an anger even, about what we see and don't see gay men as being, or being able to be -- and in fact Cullen's character even makes exactly this point, about the visibility of queer sex in mainstream spaces. But I dare say there was some entirely proper discussion about how far you could go before the reception of the depiction of sex would overbalance the ability of audiences to see the rest of the drama. At any rate, I think Weekend is a beautiful film because of its integrity, its grown-upness; because its humanity rests not in its showing us radiant people doing things of cinematic loveliness, but in its allowing us to watch regular people figuring stuff out over coffee (and other recreational drugs). By not going out of its way to make that disclosure consistently palatable, it lets us see instead that it trusts us, trusts our own grown-upness and all the mess and confusion that goes along with it.

39 I guess it was maybe eight in the morning, something like that; I, along with most of the people in the room (probably not the stage managers though), had given up trying to keep track of the time. The point is, it had been night-time for a while, and we'd all stayed up together. There in the new Bush, keeping each other company through the first 24-hour performance of the whole of 66 Books. There had been food breaks, and great chats with friends and strangers, and mooching in the library and the garden; and there had been plays and monologues, and plays and monologues, and an amazing gospel band, and plays and monologues -- and at some point, somewhere in the woozy hour between four and five in the morning, there had been Harold Finley's exquisite and commanding three-minute performance of Michael Rosen's Amos the Shepherd Curses the Rulers of Ancient Israel, which I directed and which he delivers -- as I knew he would -- with a cool imperiousness, dressed in an outfit (made by Tori Jennings) we pretty much cribbed off Maya Angelou. There had been, in total, 41 plays and monologues and other sorts of things -- but mostly plays and monologues -- by this point. And then... And then, o best beloved, there was Billy Bragg. Sitting on the stage, just him and his guitar, not even a microphone to keep him from us. And there was sunlight: suddenly, amazingly, coming in through the opened shutters like a message that just couldn't be kept in, there was sunlight flooding the space. And Billy Bragg sung us a song called 'Do Unto Others', which was... All right. An all-right song. And I loved that. The great Billy Bragg, a hero of mine for 25 years but someone I'd never seen live before; the amazing sunlight; a room full of woozy or post-woozy people who'd stayed up all night to keep watch together; and the beautiful adequacy, in that moment, of an all-right song. There are not many moments I've had in a theatre that I'll remember for ever, but I can't imagine forgetting that one.

40 And this last one comes even closer to breaking my self-imposed ordinance about not picking anything in which I was directly involved -- but it's here precisely because I really wasn't directly involved, that's what made it probably the Happiest Thing Of The Year. I can't remember where it began. Well, I know it was the rehearsal room at West Yorkshire Playhouse where I and four others -- Tom Frankland, James Lewis, Jonny Liron and Thero Schmidt -- spent a week making Open House with whoever walked through the door and said they'd like to join in. I think it was sometime on a Monday -- and maybe Gloria Lindh had something to do with it...? -- it's all a bit fuzzy I'm afraid. But at some point early in that week, somebody started making a dance. We wanted to make a dance that anybody could learn, that anyone could walk into the room and just pick up the moves, in ten minutes flat. Even a terpsichorean doofus like me. So maybe it started then. What I do remember is that when the amazing Pauline Mayers showed up on Wednesday morning -- thinking she'd stay for an hour or so; actually she was with us for the next three days and we couldn't have done half of what we did without her -- the beginnings of a dance that were knocking aroud the room suddenly started coming together into a dance. A learnable, teachable, danceable dance. It went at the end of our first showing, that Wednesday evening, and it seemed to work; so we did it again, a little refined perhaps and with new music (or maybe the music had already changed?), on the Thursday; and by the end of our proper full-on Friday evening performance, I reckon thirty people were up on their feet, doing the dance that anyone could learn, and you really couldn't tell by that point who was the core company and who was passing through and who was front of house staff and who'd never set foot in the room before: and I was very very happy. The kind of happy where you can't really imagine being happier. And then...! And then we had to go home, so we missed the party on the last night. None of us who'd hosted and facilitated the project were there any more. But the dance... Ah, the dance was still there. And the next day Jon Spooner tweeted this video, of our dance erupting in the middle of something completely different. Nothing to do with us; and everything; and nothing again. Because theatre belongs to everyone, and ideas belong to no one, and the great thing about the dance that anyone can easily learn is that anyone can learn it. Just like that.

(Thank you so much to Simon Wainwright from Hope&Social for creating the space for that to happen in.)

* * *

And that, my friends, is that. Like, really that.

It's taken me ten days (on and off) to make this post; I'm not sure if it's the longest ever to grace these pages -- I suppose it would be fitting to go out on a long, if not on a high, but I'm not too bothered. The more important thing is, doing it has been a nice reminder of what's been enjoyable here over the past five and a half years. It's made me wonder whether I'll miss this space more than I currently think; and maybe I will.

I suppose one measure of the period of my life that this blog has covered since its diffident beginnings in May 2006 is that, down here at the close of 2011, my life is oriented around the presence and collaboration of two people more than any others (and among many): Jonny Liron and Ric Watts. At the point that the blog started, Ric was just a name I vaguely knew from the footer of occasional promotional emails, and Jonny and I knew nothing about each other's existence -- he was still a teenager, in fact. (*heart breaks*) Which is not just to say "oooh isn't five years a long time, you could get a Mars bar for 55p" etc., but more than that, it's about how, very often, the day before your life changes, you really have no idea who's going to step into the frame and turn everything upside down: and I suppose part of what I want to do at this point is make more space in my life for those game-changing things to happen in. And it doesn't happen so much when you're spending too much time sitting at a desk keeping a blog fed: especially a hungry blog like this.

Thankfully, and perhaps appropriately (it's nearly always been a bit like this), I can't just ramble on and on through a sort of K-Tel album of valedictory platitudes: I need to be out of the house in thirty minutes and there's lots to do before I go. Most immediately, I'm off to BAC to do the final London performance of The Adventures of Wound Man and Shirley. (Nearly lost my voice last night so I'm a bit anxious, but I'm doing honey and lemon linctus and camomile tea and lots of water and aspirin and I'm hoping all that might do the trick.) And then next week I'm at the Jerwood Space, working on GOD/HEAD with a beautiful young actor I hardly know and have never worked with before, and I suspect it's going to be an intense and revelatory week, and I can't wait to get in there. And somewhere between now and then, there's another New Year's Eve, and some time just to live in, I hope, and be thankful, and love the people I'm with when the clocks go bong.

As I promised in a previous post, Chris Goode & Company will have a proper-bo (though probably not too fancypants) web site up and running before long, and I'll keep the sidebar here updated with news of that, as well as upcoming performances and stuff. And hopefully before long there'll be a Thompson's book. So keep an eye out, won't you, and if you want to be on CG&Co's mailing list you can email me here. For now, do feel free to leave any comments here. And, may I say, it's been a pleasure to have your company over the past few years, and a privilege to have had so many smart and engaged and feisty and appreciative readers. I hope you'll stay in touch.

Wishing you all the best in 2012 and beyond.

Chris
xx

p.s. Don't forget the year-end Thompson's Wall of Sound -- it's the next post down -- click on 'Older posts' or on this link here.

2011-12-30T16:03:00.000Z

THOMPSON'S WALL OF SOUND
Year ending 31/12/2011

1 Anne-James Chaton, 'Le Printemps de Teheran' from Evenements 09 [Raster-Noton]
2 Wagon Christ, 'Toomorrow' from Toomorrow [Ninja Tune]
3   Jookabox, 'Man-Tra' from The Eyes of the Fly [Asthmatic Kitty / Joyful Noise]
4 Austra, 'Lose It' from Feel It Break [Domino]
5   John Maus, 'Hey Moon' from We Must Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves [Upset! The Rhythm]
6 Peter Murphy, 'Velocity Bird' from Ninth [Nettwerk]
7   Ron Sexsmith, 'Michael and his Dad' from Long Player Late Bloomer [WEA]
8 Das Racist, 'Punjabi Song (feat. Bikram Singh)' from Relax [Greedhead Entertainment]
9   Harold Budd, 'The Foundry (for Mika Vainio)' from In The Mist [Darla]
10 Daedelus, 'Penny Loafers (feat. Inara George)' from Bespoke [Ninja Tune]
11 Bigott, 'God is Gay' from The Orinal Soundtrack [Grabaciones En El Mar]
12 Puzzle Muteson, 'I Was Once A Horse' from En Garde [Bedroom Community]
13 Beardyman, 'Game Over (Latex Quim)' from I Done A Album [Sunday Best]
14 Aids Wolf, 'London#s Not Like Back Home' from Ma Vie Banale Avant-Garde [Lovepump United]
15 Wiggy, 'Rattle' from Gonk [Gasman]
16 Ford + Lopatin, 'Joey Rogers' from Channel Pressure [Software]
17 Austin Peralta, 'Capricornus' from Endless Planets [Brainfeeder]
18 Cut Hands, 'Shut Up And Bleed' from Afro Noise vol. 1 [Very Friendly / Susan Lawly]
19 Frank Ocean, 'Novacane' from Nostalgia/ultra [self-released]
20 Tune-Yards, 'Gangsta' from W H O K I L L [4AD]
21 The Muppets Barbershop Quartet, 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' from The Muppets OST [Disney]
22 Rachael Dadd, 'Claw and Tooth' from Bite The Mountain [Broken Sound]
23 Kenneth otto Carney, 'Colors Change' from Colors Change [self-released via Bandcamp]
24 Chris Cochrane / Dennis Cooper / Ishmael Houston-Jones, 'I Met Julian Andes, 19, In Line' from Them [Tzadik]
25 Dan Michaelson, 'Knots' from Sudden Fiction [Editions]
26 Seefeel, 'Dead Guitars' from Seefeel [Warp]
27 Son Lux, 'Flickers' from We Are Rising [anticon.]
28 Container, 'Application' from LP [Spectrum Spools]
29 Swede Mason, 'Masterchef Synesthesia (Buttery Biscuit Bass)' [ShineTV / Dental Records]
30 Zee Avi, 'The Book of Morris Johnson' from Ghostbird [Brushfire]
31 Marianne Morris, 'Solace Poem (Atticus - Haunted Mix)' from Solace Poem [Tusk]
32 Balam Acab, 'Under' from Wander/Wonder (Bonus CD) [Tri Angle]
33 Lullatone, 'A Picture of Your Grandparents When They Were Young' from Soundtracks for Everyday Adventures [self-released]
34 Tinariwen, 'Tenere Taqqim Tossam (feat. Tunde Adebimpe + Kyp Malone) from Tassili [V2]
35 Rafael Toral, 'III.1' from Space Elements vol. 3 [Staubgold]
36 Seth Horvitz, 'Study no. 29: Tentacles' from Eight Studies for Automatic Piano [Line]
37 Jenny Hval, 'Portrait of the Young Girl as an Artist' from Viscera [Rune Grammofon]
38 William Shatner, 'Planet Earth' from Seeking Major Tom [Cleopatra Records]
39 Colin Stetson, 'All The Colors Bleached to White' from New History Warfare vol.2 - Judges [Constellation]
40 Justin Vivian Bond, 'In The End' from Dendrophile [Weatherbox]

SMALL PRINT: If you own the copyright in any of these tracks and wish it to be removed from this playlist, please email the Bank Manager.

Revising downwards

2011-12-09T10:48:00.001Z

Just quickly :)

There's a scene in my play Weepie where, for reasons I won't go into -- actually, there are no reasons, what reasons do you need to be shown?, one of the boys, named Petrel, is trying to prove to the other, named Edsel, his dedication to their cause and their friendship by accurately recalling the sequence of ingredients on a particular shish kebab skewer. Time and again, increasingly panicked, he tries to get the order right, working faster and faster through the possible permutations of meat and vegetables, until finally, in a sudden moment of clarity, he interrupts himself: "What the fuck am I doing? What am I doing, Edsel?" It was always one of my favourite moments in the original production -- Finlay Robertson as Petrel had a quite unerring sense of the complex rhythms of that sequence so as to make the scene as funny and scary as it needed to be.

I'm telling you that because I myself had a Petrel Shish Kebab moment yesterday afternoon, and it was really horrible. I was working on album review number five or six out of the promised Furtive 50. I'd enjoyed none of it to this point. Certainly not the writing; not even, very much, the process of choosing the fifty records I'd write about. The least annoying part of it so far had been the chore of setting up the skeleton posts, uploading all the album covers, filling in label names, the mindless bit. But now there I was trying to write -- not that the specifics matter, but... -- about Son Lux's We Are Rising: and it's a brilliant album, but it had taken me twenty minutes to write thirty words. The trouble was, though I genuinely wanted to share the brilliance of the music with you, I found I had no interest whatsoever in what I thought about it. It doesn't matter. Right now, it really couldn't matter less. The process of trying to write imaginatively about Son Lux seems sort of transcendentally irrelevant. I don't believe it is, actually, irrelevant: but for whatever reason I couldn't securely feel that there was any good reason to be engaged in that task.

Maybe it was the sudden settling of inertia that happens after you've handed your notice in. I'm sure that's part of it. Also -- no reason not to go for full disclosure on this -- I've been really struggling with depression in the past few weeks, not for the first time but for the first time in a long time and in a sharper and more debilitating way than for a decade. It's not (currently) constant but it's always lurking, and a twenty minute spiral can helter-skelter me with remarkable rapidity from an evenish keel to the blackest existential sump. Having to keep showing up to work -- I mean, the public bits of my work, first Keep Breathing last month and presently Wound Man and Shirley -- has been really hard and draining. Hopefully none of that comes through in those performances. It doesn't seem to, thanks to the warmth and generosity of most audiences. And from the moment I arrive at the venue till the moment I'm on my own again at the end of the evening, I'm OK. And then, after that, I might still be OK, or I might not be.

I think part of what made me not OK yesterday was the first comment on my last post. I have no idea -- I mean I honestly can't tell -- whether it's meant to be fun-snarky or properly cruel (and presumably the author neither knows I'm depressed nor cares that I might be), but in my present depleted state those two things are hardly different, particularly on a day like yesterday when it's gloomy and stormy out. I've also been proud about how little of that there's been on this blog over the past few years, the kind of pseudonymous below-the-line carping that now makes large swathes of the online media -- for me, at least -- untouchably toxic. If that's how it is now, even here, at a time when I'm not particularly enjoying myself or finding being here very rewarding, then, frankly, pepper lamb sweetcorn mushroom what the fuck am I doing.

Last night, in the few hours between leaving BAC and finally managing to go to bed, I spoke at length to two old friends. One of them, who has good reason to relate to my what the fuck moment, helped me to see that if I wasn't going to relish spending almost every spare minute of the next ten days writing album reviews, or at least feel sure of the value of doing it if I didn't enjoy it, then there wasn't much reason to do it. The other one, in a Skype window I dearly wished I could have put my hand through like Morten Harket, made me realise that I don't take enough care of fun. You know me, my dears, I'm not that good at fun. I sort of distrust it. But the aversion is self-destructive. Fun is play space. Fun is remembering how to be light. My work is nothing, is actually impossible, if I can't be light there. But I'm so focused on work, so caught up in it -- partly because my experience of it is not of focus in a narrow sense but of incalculable breadth and variety and excess such that it includes everything -- that I sometimes need reminding that, even if everything under the sun can be pressed into the service of my working vision, there still has to be room for lightness and fun and goofiness and kicking back. Sometimes in my life I know this. Sometimes I don't. Last night I didn't, till I did. Thanks, old friends.

So, there we are. The sky is blue this morning and next week I'm in Bradford starting work on a new show which needs to feel like a light and clear and blue-skied beginning, and the week after that it's the week that has Christmas at the end of it and sorry look I don't want to write any more record reviews. I want to go to the pub with people I love and have the sort of fun that I'll still remember when the utter, thoroughgoing, ineffable technicolor irrelevance of my opinion of the new Son Lux album has long since fully revealed itself.

I'm revising my intentions downwards. (There'd have been a song of that name had Lionel Bart ever got it together to collaborate with Alistair Darling.) I'll write one last post for this place sometime between now and December 31st. It might end up being more than one, but I doubt it. I'll say what I think I might enjoy saying about the past year, and maybe a little about the blog. And then we'll all set off into a new year, in search of lightness and new beginnings and a little fun. There is always quite a lot of this, whatever this is; but there's always a lot more of everything else.

A rest

2011-12-07T19:58:00.001Z

from Lisa Jeschke & Lucy Beynon, 'Public Performance of a Sound Piece [live, in 60 movements]' (2011)

Well, my friends, this is not the post I thought it was going to be.

On October 24th, I wrote nearly all of a long post called "Beyond an art of refusal", which was an attempt to think through a number of questions about what it means, as an artist, to make a statement. Not a statement as in a manifesto or a 'mission statement', particularly: just any kind of intervention that puts something into the world that was not exactly there before in exactly that form, and which is not (or not only) a question or a game-space or open system or merely the casting of a shadow of a doubt on some pre-existing mark, but is first and foremost an assertion in its own right, an indicative statement of what we actually think or see or feel or want, or what we wish to draw to the concerted attention of an audience. (Needless to say I am describing here -- and was trying to describe in the groundwork to that post -- something that for many makers will feel almost comically rudimentary, and for others will feel horribly suspect and maybe even passé, right from the get-go.)

Really I wanted to write about some remarkable recent work by Lisa Jeschke and Lucy Beynon, which they made as part of a decentred workshop I've mentioned here before called Queer Eye Enquiry, which I ran this autumn for the Live Art Development Agency's DIY programme, with the support of Fierce. (That's a frame from one of their pieces above.) Lisa and Lucy are exciting and unsettling because they combine an extremely focused rigour with a willingness to play. What sometimes happens, though, for me, or what at least was coming through in the workshop, is that their playfulness becomes a way of getting off a hook onto which their rigour and their ethical self-consciousness has more or less impaled them, with effects that can sometimes hobble the political robustness that I think drives their practice. My experience of the work is of being challenged, frustrated, tantalised, inspired, let down sometimes, but always more than intrigued to see what's next.

The route of the post was going to take us between two works of my own -- Keep Breathing, which I was then just getting ready to do at the Drum in Plymouth (and which I've now done there); and King Pelican, my last major show for the Drum. (It's a play about Edward Lear, who I think -- in the play, at least -- shares with Beynon and Jeschke a nearly immobilizing abhorrence of the violence, the violating irruption, of the artistic statement as an enacted and forcible gesture.) The journey from point to point took us through Stella Duffy on improvisation, Jonny Liron on Jeremy Hardingham, Radu Malfatti on reductionist improvised music and the Wandelweiser collective, and then a long passage reflecting on my responses (over time) to Lucinda Childs's stunning DANCE at the Barbican, and finally to Lisa Jeschke and Lucy Beynon (and out via Edward Lear and Occupy LSX).

The reason you're reading this post and not that one is, I'm afraid, all too banal. I didn't quite get the post finished (though I was probably not more than an hour from hitting 'Publish') before going to Plymouth; I then went to Plymouth and had a busy and in some ways really difficult time (though the show went pretty well) and couldn't make the necessary hour and requisite headspace coincide while I was there; then I came back from Plymouth and went right into doing Wound Man and Shirley at BAC (which also is going well): and with one thing and another, today's the first day I've had properly back at my desk and not gibbering my way through a vast backlog of emails and requests for marketing copy and interviews. The rest of today was clear for finishing the post on refusal. So I opened up the draft, and found that almost all of it had disappeared. There's five paragraphs of it, that's all, the first five paragraphs, by the end of which -- as you'll imagine if you've read this blog much -- I've barely got the cap off my pen.

So, I have no idea what became of the probably 3000 words that followed. This blog autosaves every thirty seconds. So it's a mystery. At any rate, the alternatives were clear: rewrite, or abandon.

The purpose of this post, though, is not merely to rehearse a contemporary version of Sullivan's 'Lost Chord' for my young, hip, metropolitan readership (that's you!), but to go a little further. The chief reason I feel reconstructing the missing post is impossible is that, as my regular followers here will know (if I have any left), my posting rate has dropped quite sharply in recent months, and the thought of it taking another six weeks to get something up here along the lines I'd imagined is simply too disheartening. But also, more significantly, it prompts, or re-prompts, a bit of a reality check.

I've floated thoughts of this nature before, a few months ago, but I think I've now let those floaters cohere into a single, essentially reliable decision: Thompson's Bank will cease its communications -- of desire, of everything -- at the end of the month.

It's not just a problem of time, though that's increasingly the factor that keeps me from being here with anything like the frequency of previous years. I used to argue very stridently -- as I've argued all sorts of things pretty stridently here over the years -- that doing this blog was inseparably part and parcel of doing my theatre work: and so it was. However, happily, at the moment and for the forseeable future (and even the forseeable future has got a bit longer lately), the work of making shows, with people, for audiences, is going to be pretty much back-to-back, and that's certainly the bit I want to prioritise, begging your pardons. This happy upsurge is mostly because of my brilliant producer Ric Watts, the better if less eponymous half of Chris Goode & Company, who is doing unbelievably great work in helping make the things happen that I want to happen, with the people that I want them to happen with. CG & Co will be making three brand new shows between now and next summer, starting with GOD/HEAD at Ovalhouse in February; I'll also be touring Wound Man and Shirley in the spring, and a few other bits and bobs will be biting and bobbing in the gaps. I also want to keep working away from CG & Co, both as a solo writer and director, and in my ongoing partnership with Jonny Liron as Action one19 -- a collaboration which remains absolutely and fiercely at the heart of my practice but which has got squeezed out, for both of us, so much this year that the great plans we were forming last Christmas have hardly come to anything: and I really hate the thought of the same happening in the coming twelve months.

I've also found lately -- and I think, ironically, I may have said this before -- that almost everything I want to write about in these pages (even if I never get around to it anyway) I sooner or later remember I've already written about. I hate repeating myself, in any context, but especially here where there's no one whose job or fixed intent it is to prevent me being an unholy bore. Perhaps I'm at a stage in my life and in the development of my work where the challenge, such as it is, is not so much about developing new nodes of thought as about refreshing and refining the connections between them. As I've been saying for at least a couple of years now, what I really want to be doing is turning The Forest and the Field, which was first an academic paper and then a performance lecture, into a book (intended mostly, but not only, for fellow practitioners). And it's both weird and inevitable that this blog is one of the things that's stopping me: and I don't imagine even my keenest readers (hello, you two!) want that. I already slightly resent the amount of writing that's gone into this blog over the past five-and-a-half years; I've never resented it at the time of writing, but once it starts adding up as it does -- over 600,000 words the last time I counted, last summer, so a few thousand more now -- one naturally begins to imagine those words taking other forms, as you might with all the money you've spent on cigarettes, say, or -- to borrow Rory McLeod's trenchant phrase (again, not for the first time on this blog) -- "all the spunk that was shot for nothing".

I do also still want, perhaps as a charm against that particular toothache, to publish some of the better (or more indicative) writing from these pages in book form, probably via Ganzfeld, hopefully before too long. If and when that happens, I'll obviously announce it here -- the whole blog will stay put, at least for the time being, and I'll continue to update the side bar (maybe even more frequently!) with performance dates, publications etc., until all of that stuff migrates to a new CG & Co web site, as Ric and I have been promising each other it will for some months now. I wouldn't even be surprised if there weren't a blog element to that web site -- not least because most of the projects I do now seem to have some kind of blog attached to them as a way of trying to hold the process open a bit -- but I hope I might not immediately fall back into the Thompson's habits of garrulousness, overextension and tubthumping.

For now, I think I can guarantee only one last gasp: I'm going to do, as planned, a Furtive 50 of album reviews, which has generally been a popular regular feature at this time of year. That will start going up on Monday 19th. Before then, I might conceivably get it together to rewrite, or reconceive in such a way as to make it irresistible again, a post on refusal; I might find it helpful to do something on privacy and the idea of the closed door, which is very much on my mind at the moment; and I still owe Sam Ladkin a post on sincerity and the body -- which I'd love to write anyway, no matter the sense of obligation. But perhaps these are all things that could go in the book instead... -- And I'm also half-intending, maybe after Christmas, to do a bit of a best-of-the-year trawl because, more even than in previous years, there's so much I've seen and read and done this year that's never been mentioned here.

In the meantime, it's too soon for goodbyes, obviously, but I can at least say with an anticipatory twinkle of imminent demise (vide Dennis Potter and the Blossomest Blossom, coming soon to a multiplex near you) that I hope you'll stick around and see December out with me, so that Thompson's can at least finish on a relative high, rather than dwindling into nothingness without anyone even noticing it's slipped away.

Thanks, everyone xx

Arrangement in red, green and orange

2011-10-05T00:53:00.000+01:00

I'll spare us all the customary strenuous gesturing of apology for the quiet times hereabouts: for the moment, at least, I'm afraid that such absence may be an exception in the late stages of transmogrifying into a rule.

Thing is I'm really super-busy with work (which is good); more pertinently, quite a lot of what I'm busy with at the moment requires keeping another blog, elsewhere, and so all of my posting energies --which are anyway not quite what they were -- are currently focused on that. But that project's given rise to an interesting thought this evening which I thought I'd share here. I feel bad because I owe a lot of people in the world a lot of emails and documents and images (and money) (and apologies) and I could be using this time to clear some of those filthy decks; but actually I'm going to allow myself a few minutes to do this, because I've been feeling really physically below-par today and had decided I'd give myself the evening off to doze in front of a DVD or two -- and then I had this thought that I wanted to write down somewhere -- and now I feel like I'm being virtuous by writing this, rather than dilatory and lead-swinging. I feel pretty virtuous just for sitting up, tbh.

So the thing I've been blogging for is my DIY project, which I guess I must have mentioned in a previous post. The Live Art Development Agency runs this fantastic scheme whereby artists get to devise and offer training / professional development projects, workshops etc., to fellow artists. In my case, I wanted to respond to what I felt was a recent kind of climate change around the premises and currents of queer art and activism, and so I offered a series of workshops under the dismally shopworn title of Queer Eye Enquiry: the idea behind which was to create a series of experiences and encounters for willing fellow-travellers which might help them to reframe the parameters of what queer might now be, especially in the present political climate. (I started the preparatory work for the project in the week of the riots in London and elsewhere in England, and the experience of that time and its baleful fallout has inevitably informed a lot of my thinking around what this project might hope to do.) An interesting twist occurred early on, though, in that, in consultation with Fierce -- who have been wonderful partners in helping this all to happen -- it was decided not to run the project in London, as had been my original intention, but rather in a sort of de-centred way, with artists from all over the country (and further afield, even) engaging from their own locales and psychogeographic headspaces. So the format I've ended up using has been a (fairly mammoth) weekly blog post -- without all my usual verbiage, but compiling quite large amounts of text / image / film / sound material, around a loosely described or implied topic each week; each post ends with an assignment to be carried out, and each is preceded a day or two in advance by a kind of preparatory piece of postal correspondence (letters, CDs, postcards, that sort of thing: you can see the first week's red envelopeful above, including a 6x4in rendering of Ken Friedman's Center Piece which regular readers will know I revere; -- lots of Arts Council money blown at Paperchase, in other words, which is greatly complicating my masturbatory fantasies about Quentin Letts: what do we think, ladies, would his foaming disapproval be hot or not?).

Assembling these big blog posts has been a really interesting exercise (in a narcissistic way, perhaps; but then, I did get a bit drunk last week and start poking the pub table with my finger while asserting loudly that narcissism is a great virtue in artists -- and I do think there's some truth in that). Particularly as the weeks have gone by -- I'm now assembling the post for the fourth and final week -- what's emerged before my eyes is actually a pretty comprehensive map of almost everything, or at least a lot, a lot, that's been formative for me as a queer artist and, in most cases, has remained very presently valuable. A quick skim of the posts so far would reveal works and writings by the likes of Francesca Woodman, Ryan McGinley, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Robert Wilson, John Wieners, William Forsythe, Cy Twombly, Bas Jan Ader, Frank O'Hara, Derek Jarman, Alaric Sumner, John Cage, Bill T. Jones, Tim Miller, Tom Spanbauer, Kathy Acker, Neil Bartlett, Dennis Cooper, Ed Templeton, Harmony Korine, Luigi y Luca, Will McBride, Kenji Siratori, Caroline Bergvall, and John Berger; plus lashings of Viennese Aktionism, skateboarding, and any amount of cheerful young dudes with their cocks out. I mean it's not totally exhaustive but, in the event of apocalypse, I could probably be re-engineered from scratch out of DNA-spattered scraps of these artists' works, thoughts, attitudes and self-stagings. It's been reminding me a bit of something my therapist told me back when I was walking wounded aged 21: go home, she said, and look at your room, at the pictures on your walls and the books on your shelves, and see what you're telling yourself about yourself. Boy, that was a sock in the jaw when I tried it...

I've also, tonight, been thinking a bit about how inextricable my work (mostly as a theatre personage; somewhat as a poet, too) and my queerness are: which is something I've been attesting to for years without ever having thought it all the way back, as it were -- like, when I think back to the very first things I "staged", as a kid of 7 or 8. Not just the little variety shows that me and my friends would perform for our mums and dads (I say "little"; I have a feeling they were probably longer than Peer Gynt, some of them), but the things I'd make happen -- or, to deploy the phrase I find myself using more and more frequently these days to describe what I make as an artist: "constructed events". So: the sports day I organized the summer I was 7; the "judo parties" where the other neighbourhood boys and I would vaguely wrestle in our living room, in tightly organized tournaments, while the local girls were invited to come along and serve squash and biscuits (I know, I know, I was the worst eight-year-old chauvinist, what can I say, it was 1981 and I didn't know any better and I still wake up shuddering and I'm sorry, I'm truly sorry); the little turns I'd do in school assembly (one of which involved blacking up to portray the footballer Pele; please see previous apology, mutatis mutandis); the role-playing games my best friend and I would act out, which for him were surely no more than pretend sci-fi play but for me were semi-prepared episodes of an imaginary tv series.

Behind all these activities there were these two impulses, side by side. One was about wanting to make things happen that caused the grown-ups in my life -- mostly, but not only, my parents -- to be delighted and impressed. The other was about wanting things, wanting to see and feel things that I couldn't otherwise experience except in books and on t.v.; partly wanting to make things that didn't and wouldn't otherwise exist, but also wanting things that I simply couldn't ask for. I talk a lot these days, to students particularly, about theatre -- perhaps more than any other art form, though I think it's probably somewhat true of all arts -- being principally an art of wanting, and of being prepared to want out loud. (I've probably written about it here before, too.) But in saying that I don't always make the connection back to -- for example -- the first nude scene I ever wrote as a playwright, which was when I was eight and, on my first typewriter, I was bashing out a cursory adaptation of a children's book called Albert and the Dragonettes and introducing into it a gratuitous beach scene purely because there was a younger boy down the road who I didn't know very well and I was longing, longing, to the point of sleeplessness and shortness of breath, to see what he looked like without any clothes on. But one couldn't just ask (or at least, so I thought; it'd be another couple of years before I found out it was sometimes just worth chancing that approach!); what one could do was script it -- which gave the desire a kind of spurious, abstracted authority in relation to which I suppose I had some degree of deniability. -- And thirty years on, for all that I may (arguably) have a slightly more developed practice now, that same basically erotic pulse still keeps time with my artistic desires.

But I think I've only really noticed for the first time this evening how those two things -- wanting to delight and entertain others, and wanting to legitimize my own desire and create safe spaces for the things I lacked in the world to become visible -- are actually about each other. They're about making my queerness -- of which I was already perfectly aware at the age of seven: and I don't just mean in terms of fancying boys (which only became inconvenient later on) but in terms of feeling like there was a kind of renegade alter ego living inside me who might emerge at any moment like the Hulk and betray my bright-green weirdness and abnormality -- acceptable. Not just acceptable but indispensible, in fact. Which in turn helps me to see why so much of my preoccupation as an adult theatre artist has been about the extent to which performance events register as real -- or don't. If I ask, as I often have: does the subjunctivity of the constructed event impede its political consequentiality?, at another level I'm really asking: is it possible for me to come here and speak honestly about myself? -- Which in turn triggers memories of a whole bunch of short plays I wrote as a teenager, in sixth form in particular, in which the central characters, invariably played by me, were endlessly coming out as gay. A way of saying something while at the same time not having risked saying it.

Obviously these days, what I want -- the array of acts of wanting that together make up a theatre practice -- is very much more about political questions, about kinds of social relations that it might be possible both to imagine and to realise in a theatrical frame. (Though of course there's still nothing more suggestive to me of the radicalism of those relational matrices than seeing people get naked within them, and/or being willing to be sexually desired by an audience of strangers.) And what I think a more conscious engagement of late with queerness as a lived-out strain of anticapitalist dissidence has enabled me to see is that I was wrong, at least to a degree, in my anxiety about those shifts of register when we move out of the theatre back into the real world. (Sprinkle ye scare quotes where ye may.) To travel from theatrical space into a real-life place is not, ultimately, an intrinsically quasi-transdiegetic movement of the kind that we feel most jarringly when the 'dead' stand up and bow at the end of a Shakespeare tragedy, say -- or, for that matter, when we wake up from a dream. I had thought that there was a problem with the political efficacy of theatre as a host site for hypothetical reconfigurations of the structures and forms of social relationships because it involved a movement from a constructed event back out into a real world beyond. What thinking more searchingly about queerness (as an anticapitalist commitment) has helped me to understand is that the transition is not one that takes us across immiscible degrees or pitches of reality. If an instance of theatre is a constructed event, then so too is liberal-democratic late capitalist society a network of constructed events. We -- I -- have perhaps been guilty of accepting the unspoken assumption that the way we live now is somehow the product of naturally occurring forces, working themselves inexorably out. The truth is that almost everything we do -- especially everything we do together (and queerness is something that can only be present in a place of togetherness) -- is shaped by underlying systematic and ideological forces that are every bit as artificial, as synthetic, as constructed as theatre is, or any other kind of fiction; in fact, more so, because capitalism masks its source code beneath so many other layers of text. I always thought my sense that I lived mostly (and best) "within" theatre was partly a metaphor, or at any rate partly fanciful, a sort of luvvie exaggeration to be announced in a loud voice over risotto at the Jerwood Space; but queerness so abundantly and fluidly exceeds the limits of that metaphor that I now think I can be braver than ever about attesting to the conscious concerted inhabitability of theatre practice as a sustainable way of refusing the lies that capitalism tells about itself.

I suppose the only other thing I want to say about all that, by way of a postscript, is that the DIY project is called Queer Eye Enquiry because I wanted to work not only with comfortably self-identifying queer artists, but also with others who wouldn't necessarily call themselves (or their work) 'queer' but who could see that there might be something interesting or productive in spending some time looking at the world with a queered gaze -- and letting the world look back in the same spirit. I've been involved in an interesting ongoing conversation recently with John Armstrong, over at his excellent Bebrowed blog, about the Better Than Language anthology (still available for a tenner -- "pre-publication offer" indeed!, ho ho -- over here), about the ways in which identifying work as queer may or may not be a stumbling block for those who don't identify as queer themselves, or who see 'queer' as a reductive category lens to try and view the work through. If there is something in that, then there's a task here: queer, like anticapitalist, is not a prescription but an invitation, one that's open to all who will dare to accept it. I must admit I struggle with the notion of a truly queer heterosexuality, but that doesn't mean I'm not interested in that struggle: and certainly those artists whose work graces the Queer Eye Enquiry blog are of every conceivable sexual orientation (though I must confess there's much too great a preponderance of cisgender artists as it stands; I suppose I was always bound to end up reflecting my own species of queerness rather than trying to represent everyone under the LGBTQWERTYUIOP sun) -- they're represented because I think their work lends itself to queer readings: and queerness, finally, is a property of readings and relationships, not of individuals. So, I hope you know -- whoever you are, and especially whoever you fuck, everything I just wrote is about you. If you want it, that is.

OK, well, lots more to say -- not least about what I'm up to work-wise, which most imminently includes the extraordinary Sixty-Six Books project at the Bush (where I'm directing Michael Rosen's very striking piece from Amos, with the wonderful Harold Finley, as well as my own play, The Loss Of All Things, which on the back of just three days' rehearsal is being performed extraordinarily (I reckon) by Gareth Kieran Jones, Christian Roe and Rick Warden); and after that, Keep Breathing, at the Drum in Plymouth, and nearer Christmas (but not quite signed-and-sealed yet) a short London run of The Adventures of Wound Man and Shirley (the script of which has now been published, rather gorgeously, by Oberon, and can be purchased either via them or by sending an inquisitive email to Ganzfeld). Proper updates about all that stuff soon (ish), I hope -- though I hardly dare promise. And then of course there are so many things I've seen and read and so on that I really ought to have written about here, and haven't, and plainly won't now; probably if you really want to know what I've been up to and what I think about it then the likeliest way of getting to hear about it is to drop me a line and we'll go for a drink ;)

What I can just finally stick up here is a short review of an exhibition, The Weaklings, which I saw at Five Years in Hackney earlier in the summer. I wrote this piece as a submission for a prize that I very emphatically have. not. won. -- so now I can share it with you, huzzah.

Meanwhile, I hope you're doing great, wherever you are, and perhaps we'll say hello again soon, one way or another.

* * *

Joel Westendorf, Goatmouth (2005)

‘TheWeaklings’

Curatedby Dennis Cooper

FiveYears, Hackney, 11-26 June 2011

Like most great contemporary buildings,the prodigious blog of writer Dennis Cooper is an exciting space to visitbecause its structure has been invented from the inside by its users, notimposed from above by its nominal owner. It’s learned its shape from the needsand desires of the people who hang out there—an ad hoc community of authors, artists and fans who gather to discussCooper’s daily posts and their own experiments in creative living. Here, thesocial promise of online collaboration—a promise that elsewhere has oftenappeared broken—is restlessly renewed.

That blog has now given rise—and lent itsname, The Weaklings—to an art show,at Five Years in Hackney, which draws together work in various media by fifteenof the blog’s denizens, representing a range of relationships with the world ofprofessional art practice. You’d expect lurches, gaucheness maybe, and to anextent you get them, but they’re smoothed into a fun ride by Cooper’s curatorialelan and a remarkable consistency of poise and self-assurance.

What comes through first is not thematic buttonal: a complicated, reflexive melancholy, familiar perhaps from Cooper’s ownwork. People here are half-grasped ideas, waiting for a moment of clarity thatmay never come, a desire that arrives ready-thwarted in the imagination. There’sa kind of intimacy, but the closer the object comes, the more comprehensionrecedes—out of kindness, maybe. These artists abundantly belie Tom Lehrer’sloveless wisecrack that if a person has a communication problem, the least hecan do is shut up about it.

The show’s key text might be JoelWestendorf’s four untitled animal portraits: glossy photographs of anopen-mouthed (screaming?; startled?; yawning?) goat and giraffe, a contortedlysprawling alpaca, a deeply self-involved kangaroo. I’m reminded of PeterHujar’s ‘Goat, Westown, 1978’, who’ll stare you out forever; the barrier—is itspecies difference, or language discontinuity?—becomes infused with a pressurethat feels both numinous and disorientingly erotic. Westendorf’s animalpictures, especially the goat against its solid orange background, work likesemi-staged celebrity candids: vivacious, unreliable.

There are real(ish) celebrities in JaredPappas-Kelley’s video, ‘just cant get you out of my head’, in which astuttering synthetic female voice endlessly restates the lyrics of Kylie’ssong, while familiar low-grade snapshots of the likes of Stephen Dorff andChristopher Atkins, sourced from online repositories of male nude celeb images,rotate on-screen, pivoting on their fathomlessly disappointing cocks. What eventuallystarts to throb in the mind, though, is the luridly busy domestic wallpaperPappas-Kelley sets behind them: invoking perhaps our propensity for recognizinghuman faces in almost any pattern, holding ourselves in a claustrophobic loopof fixated titillation and disappointment: “boy it’s more than I dare to thinkabout.”

Fittingly, this tendency in the Weaklings artists finds its apotheosison the gallery floor, in a brace of low-key but powerfully intrepid works byAlex Rose. First, a tied bundle of damaged-looking magazines and papers: onlythe top picture—a very young model in underwear and socks, just shy of being legallyproblematic—is readable; in the other room, a composite places a spider’s web,in a dream thought-bubble maybe, beside a near-naked, bandaged, sleeping child,unglossed but recognizable as Ruben van Assouw, nine-year-old sole survivor of lastyear’s Airbus crash in Tripoli. The image of the hospitalized boy distils withdiscomfiting efficiency the suggestiveness of the whole show. Pain and sleepare two irrecuperably private states which can only leave the spectatorwondering. Were this encounter more public, we’d be enrolled as witnesses: butin this little gallery, no one will help validate or care for our speculativeprojections. We’re left with doubt, configured as a particular strain oftenderness which is not unlike desire: wanting to dare to know.

That dumb old theatrical adage about notworking with children and animals is actually of course a proposition aboutcontrol and authority. The Weaklings—theshow, like the blog—is a space in which gestures towards control becomespurious. Cooper’s vision, like that of the artists he attracts, is anarchic;productively so. Not only animals and children but celebrities too are ourexiles, painfully stranded outside the language constructs of desire andconsent. But our tyrannic power over them is unwelcome here; only a radical,liberatory weakness will change us.

Strive for perfection in the hope of

2011-08-28T19:54:00.004+01:00

Sorry to disappoint those who asked if there'd be an Edinburgh diary this year; or -- let's look on the bright side -- happy to oblige those who asked if there'd be an Edinburgh diary this year in the secret hope that there wouldn't.

I will write a tiny bit about Edinburgh in a few days, when it's all properly over and I've slept a little and I'm back at my desk.

In the meantime, I thought I'd post here a couple of things that may be of interest to some readers:

Firstly, the texts from the bathroom section of Where We Meet, the home-performance piece we've been trying out this past week. These five texts are heard issuing, barely decipherably, from a little dictaphone by the side of the bath. They're developed from a variety of sources including Book I of Euclid's Elements (with which I'm becoming a little obsessed at the moment) in #2, and the journals of Donald Crowhurst in #4.

Secondly, I thought I'd post here something I wrote for an event that's been taking place at Dennis Cooper's blog this weekend in memory of an incredibly talented artist and provocateur, our friend and comrade Antonio Urdiales, who died very recently at the age of 26. Just one of the million bizarre and beautiful things I associate with Antonio (Tony to those who knew him better than I) was a curious eruption some years ago of comments from Antonio convulsively expressing his strange obsessive love/hate/hate/hate fixation on Shirley Bassey, and it was that which prompted my text. I wrote it pretty quickly in the middle of distracting Edinburgh chaos, so it's not the greatest thing I've ever done and it's too full of the things I do too much or too often when I'm writing in this mode. But I liked it anyway and I'm sad about Antonio and I thought I might as well put the piece here too in remembrance of an amazing young man.

Please enjoy one or both if you can, and I'll check in again as soon as I'm able.

* * *

FIVE ETUDES FOR BAS JAN ADER (from Where We Meet)

1. Day 7

A.
A life.
A life on.
A life on the.
A life on the adjunct noun.
A life on the adjunct noun, noun.

A.
A home.
A home on.
A home on the.
A home on the adjective from present participle.
A home on the adjective from present participle, adjectival noun.

Where.
Where the.
Where the adjective from past participle.
Where the adjective from past participle, plural noun.
Where the adjective from past participle, plural noun, rave.

And.
And the.
And the plural noun.
And the plural noun their.
And the plural noun their plural noun.
And the plural noun their plural noun keep.

The plural noun the plural noun the plural noun their plural noun keep.

The plural noun the plural noun the plural noun their plural noun keep.

2. Day 10

(i) A bird is that which has no part.

(ii) A question is breadthless length.

(iii) The ends of a question are birds.

(iv) A heroic question is a question which lies evenly with the birds on itself.

(v) A sky is that which has length and breadth only.

(vi) The edges of a sky are questions.

(vii) A night sky is a sky which lies evenly with the heroic questions on itself.

(viii) A night dream is the inclination to one another of two questions in a night which meet one another and do not lie in a heroic question.

(ix) And when the questions containing the dream are heroic, the dream is called beautiful.

(x) When a heroic question standing on a heroic question makes the adjacent dreams equal to one another, each of the equal dreams is right, and the heroic question standing on the other is called beloved to that on which it stands.

(xiii) A horizon is that which is an extremity of anything.

(xiv) A naked man is that which is contained by any horizon or horizons.

(xv) A memory is a naked man at night contained by one question such that all the heroic questions falling upon it from one bird among those lying within the naked man equal one another.

(xvi) And the bird is called the center of the memory.

3. Day 15

The sadness ate the words.

The sadness that the man felt ate the words.

The sadness that the man that the great sky taunted felt ate the words.

The sadness that the man that the great sky that the clouds darkened taunted felt ate the words.

The sadness that the man that the great sky that the clouds that the winds blew darkened taunted felt ate the words.

The sadness that the man that the great sky that the clouds that the winds that the voyage required blew darkened taunted felt ate the words.

The sadness that the man that the great sky that the clouds that the winds that the voyage that the work compelled required blew darkened taunted felt ate the words.

The sadness that the man that the great sky that the clouds that the winds that the voyage that the work that the same sadness threatened compelled required blew darkened taunted felt ate the words.

The sadness that the man that the great sky that the clouds that the winds that the voyage that the work that the same sadness that the same man needed threatened compelled required blew darkened taunted felt ate the words.

The sadness of the memory.

if if if if if if if if if

4. Day 17

He says reason for system to minimise error.
He says system of books reorganising perfectly.
He says hermits force unnecessary conditions on themselves.
He says wrong decision not perfect time.
He says clocks think no need worry.
He says about time plus or minus but only elapsed time.

He says very difficult not impossible.
He says strive for perfection in the hope of.
He says if game to put everything back where is back?
He says cannot see any purpose in game.
He says must resign position.
He says if set myself impossible task then nothing achieved by game.

He says understand exact position of concept of balance of power.
He says it is the only one way of expressing hope.
He says only requirement for have new set of rules is that there is some.
He says no game can devise is harmless.
He says no man may do more than all that he is capable of doing.
He says I am what I am and I see the nature of my offence.

He says I will resign the game there is no reason for harmful.

5.

[fading out]

Day 22 bird by shadow

Day 23 shaped by yellow

Day 24 shadow yes

Day 25 no now

Day 26 seaweed yes

Day 27 blue fly

Day 28 elope

Day 29 follow sky

Day 30 yellow feel

Day 31 keel slices

Day 32 no yellow

Day 33 blades

Day 34 birds yes

Day 35 fly now

Day 36 dare yes

Day 37 shade shaped

Day 38 blue sear

Day 39 swallow no

Day 40 ices

Day 41 vis follow

Day 42 is blue eye

Day 43 scissor

Day 44 rid sky

Day 45 fluke

Day 46 shard

Day 47 ask

Day 48 ado

Day 49 swollen

Day 50 was

Day 51 as

Day 52 sea

Day 53 as

Day 54 a

Day 55 is

Day 56 o

* * *

PRINCIPLES OF DIVINE RHYTHM IN THE END TIMES
for Antonio

“i just slit my wrists in SO MANY DIFFERENT FANTASTICAL DESIGNS”

1.

BASSEY is the first irrecuperable ghost metropolis, evacuated hurriedly at the signs of late peril. Its skins are an albino fabric and its eyes are literally cobalt. To dare to labour here is an adventure in self-cloaking. BASSEY moans in the disconsolate wind; its arteries open out to the gaping sky. How will we live now in BASSEY with the industrial blossom of its name so ridiculously failed.

2.

BASSEY is a thread or floss that trembles above a ravine of parlous acoustic. Which are the birds and which the glyphs that alight. Shrieking with blast-agitation, BASSEY submits (as it must) to the alternative currents of militant tendresse. It is teased out of itself in the promise of a precarious love. Its principal likeness is to the last remaining sexual imperatives beyond reason.

3.

BASSEY in remix is an instance of telegraphy in excess of its stations, like semen produced spontaneously in nature. The relays are of palomino horses disappearing out of range, maybe, or the lavish curlicues of a projected fan-dance committing itself to the dilated imagination. Deep down, everybody knows that this part of the transaction is flawed. How can a fact be more like a faggot.

4.

BASSEY laid end to end is code for whatever is not yet sufficiently lavish in the task. Its characters and sudden scratches may be mistaken for a kind of fitting entertainer in the abrupt commission of her (or his; but, in fact, always her) apotheosis. More informally, it follows, the syntagmata of gossip or spasm. BASSEY is an episode of weather that remains unaired at the end of a cancelled season.

5.

From BASSEY itself it may be inferred that in the end times, skin is the least mendacious disguise through which an experimental process may be advanced. e.g. Love letters written on parchment are automatically tautologous. BASSEY is a gauge to manual transparency and will rebalance the abundant deficits of sleekness; everybody upstream of here will be shirtless when we get there.

6.

BASSEY persistently functions as a temporary window ledge, suspended out of context many storeys above the base liquid. Here, a loose colloquium of feral majorettes and slut savants can be seen to hunker, pondering approximately zero like remote ungulates stranded in an untended metropolitan labyrinth of artificial foliage. You do not get out without lip service. “Hey big suspended cadence.”

7.

BASSEY having thrown up down itself turns left at the top of the stairs. There are snacks and movies and you can ask to see the dog’s hole. Ext., the vapour trails are perceived to spell out illegibly and posthumously a street artist’s tag in a font called Cilla Extended. In this image you are the wall. You are the plan B that there is no, and the arc’s end is world-submission, and the map is crawling with ginger ants.

8.

BASSEY is a black box recorder finished in vellum with male secondary sexual characteristics. In setting one, the captured voices tremulate obligingly; residues of operetta may be distinguished. In two, the voices exist at the threshold of legibility, immersed all-of-a-sudden in a surging milk of additive white Gaussian noise. Come in, says a boy placed elsewhere, come in, come in.

9.

Tied to a fence and pelted with sharpened entities [species redacted], BASSEY’s intense identification with the perpetrator excites suspicion. Much later there are ambiguous signs of rectal interference, and a new crowd is drawn to the site. An outlet is quickly devised for the purchase of memento foam fingers, branded ducts, a digitalis smoothie if you want. Show yourselves bitches.

10.

There is an immense BASSEY, a soft mannequin, at the brow of a green hill. The nearest man-made object is a space artefact. The uncontested territory of its ambience affords a valuable opportunity to use the word ‘zephyr’. Such a BASSEY is the logo for a commercial freight of used corneas in a dirty heap. Those who trip over themselves to arrive in a rush on occasion fall limitlessly upwards.

11.

We can only wonder at the unhappiness of BASSEY, stripped deracinated hollow mendicant, time-pummelled. Ragged children tug BASSEY’s beard, thieve its buckles, its numbers. Goldfingered dawn splits along its axis and immediately perishes; and synthetic night is a viscous preservative, a glue for life-enhancement. Face it: the etiology of BASSEY is a tranquiliser dart to the naked eye.

12.

Yes BASSEY deplores hurt, but also is deplored by it. Beyond this point lie only unrendered splines and articles of dissociation. Rivulets of lymph in one part. The task ahead concerns discretion and blatancy in circuit. To know better the face of god by spitting in it, spitting your bad self out through your own loaded mouth. To scream viscera. To kiss and unleash, and to keep unleashing.

Language teaching (for Hannah Nicklin)

2011-08-09T17:24:00.000+01:00

I'm writing this not to convince anyone of anything, but only to give myself some space to think through what I'm feeling and to hear some words said that keep getting immediately crowded out at the moment and shouted down whenever they're uttered by others. (And because I can't concentrate on the work that I ought to be doing, until I get some of this ordered in my head.) For that reason -- and for adjacent reasons that I imagine I'll touch on in the post -- I'm turning off comments on this one. Anyone who knows me well enough to have my email address is welcome to write to me.

* * *

You taught me language, and my profit on't
Is, I know how to curse.
The Tempest, Act I sc 2

If you ask me point-blank whether I'm racist -- or homophobic, for that matter -- there'll be a tiny pause before I say "Of course not." This post is about that tiny pause, and the panic that lives there; and it's about feeling that same panic, in a long, drawn-out, almost soothing version, as I drifted off to sleep on Saturday night, with my window a little open and the sounds coming in of summer rain and, behind it, an almost constant stream of police and fire sirens.

I was born in 1973 and grew up in a little village in the suburbs of Bristol, in a safe little cul-de-sac shaped like a hockey stick. Not wealthy families by any means, but getting by, and proud of their gardens, and squabbling about parking spaces. There's a photo of me dressed up as a Womble (a poor effort, frankly, home-made and half-arsed) at a Silver Jubilee street party, and sometimes when I think of that street I picture it as that jubilee party, in constant low-level swing. Union flag bunting from lamppost to lamppost, and jelly and icecream for the kids.

I don't think I really understood that it wasn't like this for everybody until the spring of 1980 when the local news suddenly filled up with gritty, scary reportage about a riot that was taking place in an area of Bristol called St Paul's. It was a part of town that I'd never been to -- that I've still never been to, actually -- and so in a way, what was happening there felt weirdly close -- how can this be happening in Bristol? -- and in another way, it might as well have been on another planet. All I picked up from my parents was that this race riot was only to be expected: not because the people who lived in St Paul's were experiencing a degree of deprivation and despair that would inevitably erupt into violence in the early days of a brash new right-wing government, but because the people who lived in St Paul's were not like us. And by extension, even on a calm sunny day with the birdies singing, we would no more drive through St Paul's than go swimming with sharks.

I don't think I've ever heard either of my parents express a directly, explicitly racist thought. They just had certain assumptions, with which they in their turn had been brought up. The encapsulating anecdote, I suppose, would be the time -- I think this would have been about 1984 or so -- when my mother returned from shopping one day in a state of considerable dudgeon and fluster, having asked an assistant in John Lewis for material in a colour that she was accustomed to referring to as "n----r brown", and been told pretty emphatically that this was no longer an acceptable formulation. What upset her about the episode was not that she felt this was an instance of what would much later be described by the Daily Mail (which she read every day) and suchlike as "political correctness gone mad", but she was aghast at the imputation that her intention had been racist, when to her mind it was nothing of the sort. She simply hadn't thought about it that way. I suspect underneath it all she was mortified at having given offence. (She was my mum so I'm prepared to give her the benefit of the doubt; she was not an unkind person. She was complicated -- like all of us.)

At the time of the St Paul's riot I'm pretty sure -- coming up to seven years old -- I had seen exactly three black people in real life. Two were girls -- sisters, maybe twins, I can't remember -- at my primary school, who were sort of cherished by us all in much the same way that my mother, as a child, had specifically asked for and cherished a black doll, and kept it carefully as an adult, tissue-papered and shoeboxed in her wardrobe; it was rare, she told me, which meant it was valuable. The other was a stranger. I would have been six, I guess. As I waited in the car for my mother to come back from the post office, I sat merrily playing my descant recorder; an elderly black man approached the car, peered in through the windscreen, beamed at me, and conducted my playing. I was terrified. When my mother came back, I told her what had happened, and cried. She comforted me, as shocked as if I had been mugged in the street. I can hear myself saying it now: "A black man looked at me." And sobbing.

In this context it will perhaps sound absurd to suggest that my upbringing was anything other than racist -- and that's part of that flicker of doubt in the tiny pause before I tell you that I'm not -- but I was at secondary school, I think, before I ever heard anyone give voice to a sentiment that black people, or non-white people, were inferior or inherently flawed. As a child, two of my favourite tv presenters were black -- Derek Griffiths and Carmen Monroe -- and there was never any anxiety about that at home. Because they were in my home, I suppose. They were in our home, and on tv, which I suppose meant we knew that a nice white person somewhere had vetted them and decided they were polite enough to get into our home. In a sense, in almost every sense, this is plainly, thoroughly, irrecuperably racist. But it was part of a continuum on which were placed not only non-white people, but also effeminate men, French people, working-class northerners, people who swore, people with a lot of money, punks, evangelical Christians, topless women on beaches, people suspected of voting Labour, people with tattoos, people with bad table manners... The environment in which I grew up -- and in which many people grow up even now, of course -- was not so much racist, or not so much only racist, as characterised by an intense, fixated discomfort around otherness, in its 57 varieties. I wasn't brought up as a racist, exactly. I was brought up to be afraid. I was raised breathing fear.

Of course by the time I was eight or nine I knew I had otherness in me, and as a consequence I was afraid of myself. I was ten when I gathered some friends around me in the playground and announced I was gay (and was astounded and frustrated by their lack of interest in the topic!) and although I didn't really realize the full implications of what that meant until I was slightly older, I certainly knew enough to know that this had to be secret at home. I had to continue to pass as a perfect fit for the cul-de-sac. I'll spare you the gory and yet cliche-obvious details, but: cue twenty-odd years of fear, weirdness, furtiveness, sadness, panic attacks, a suicide attempt, therapy, depression, eating disorder, more therapy, and only in my 30s something approaching happiness and almost-comfortableness in my own skin. Je suis un autre and pass the salt please. Still, I learned to be homophobic before I knew I was gay, and that's still flickering away in the tiny pause; and if you think my insistence on describing myself -- for most intents and purposes -- as "queer" rather than "gay" isn't partly a trace of unresolved internalised homophobia, then you're madder than I am.

The fortunate thing for me was that my professional interests more or less compelled me (as I saw it) to relocate to London after graduating. Fortunate because I think London saved my life -- by which I mean, I suppose, my life as I now live it. It has been possible to live here the kind of life that I want and need to live, and I don't know how many places there are of which that could be said. I love and relish the teeming otherness of London, even though I'm still a-buzz all day every day with the reflexes of my upbringing, even though I'm often (but in no more than a second or two) talking myself rationally down off a ledge of panic because there's a gang of kids in hoodies outside the newsagents or two bad trannies at the next table in the caff. My dad loves it too, funnily enough, when he comes to visit. I guess he's mellowed. Given the slightest prompt, he'll wax pretty lyrical about the 'melting pot' as we trundle around on the bus. Damn right, I think. Atta dad.

But for all the reflex twinges of an early life I'm still trying to shed, and I guess the occasional slightly heart-racing moment that you'd get in any urban environment after dark, I've only ever been genuinely scared by London three times.

Once, of course, was on 7/7, trying to get across London to meet colleagues, quite early in the morning, just as the disruption and rumour were starting to spread. The strangeness of the city that day was what scared me. Like seeing a familiar face with a sudden disfiguring mark or shadow. Phone networks coming in and out of service as we, thirty strangers, sat in unmoving traffic by Marble Arch, on the top deck of a bus, and I couldn't get through to anyone, and someone else sitting close by received a text that said Canary Wharf had been bombed. (Which -- for those who don't know the story -- it hadn't.) And then walking home from Paddington back to Stoke Newington. The streets full of people trudging on foot through neighbourhoods they'd only ever travelled beneath before. Getting back home and suddenly crying with fear and tiredness and no longer needing to keep a brave face in place. So sad that anyone would assault London, the great melting pot, the great city of people rubbing along together. So amazed that anyone wouldn't love the idea of people rubbing along together.

Another time I was scared was last night. We were coming back from the book launch in Brighton, due to arrive into London Bridge about quarter past midnight, and it was only once we were on the train that it dawned on me I might not be able to get my usual bus home from the station, because texts and tweets were coming through that things were kicking off again on Kingsland Road. And it was fine of course -- because we got in a cab -- because cash is still coming out of the ATM -- but for a few minutes I was shaken. Between where I was, in that moment, and my home, the city was burning. And of course I'm one of the incredibly lucky ones, I live in one of the safest, calmest neighbourhoods in north London; for plenty of people a mile or two either side, in Dalston and Hackney and Tottenham, what's happening now is happening on their doorsteps, not picturesquely in the distance or live on the BBC news channel (where I spent a few uncomfortable minutes watching a standoff unfold on Mare Street). If I were them, I'd be sick of people like me pontificating on this topic; I'm pretty sick of it anyway. In fact in a way the scariest thing about my experience of last night wasn't the disruption to my travel arrangements and the fear of what might be happening; it was getting home and skimming back through 500-odd tweets, and seeing so many people whose political instincts and personal capacities I'd trusted suddenly using language and expressing ideas that felt to me more abhorrent and estranging than anything that's happened so far on the streets.

And then the third time I can think of that scared me was not long after I moved to London, and after a brief, abortive spell in a houseful of Australian dentists in NW6, I relocated to a gay flatshare in King's Cross. (If there's one thing that's unlikely to soothe your internalised homophobia, let me tell you, it's a gay flatshare in King's Cross.) It was a tense neighbourhood, and there was weirdness afoot in the flat, and so I was in a constant state of slightly pressurized vigilance. Until one day, a few weeks in, I suddenly thought, I'm not going to live in this freaked-out state any more. I bet this area is basically fine, I thought, I'm going to go for a stroll and check it out and say hello to some people I don't know and it'll start to feel more like home. And it all worked out pretty well until, as I started to walk back towards the flat, I came to a junction, a car pulled up at traffic lights, and then another car alongside it. And two men got out of the second car, went over to the first, kicked the door in, dragged the driver out into the road and beat him with a wooden plank. I watched all of this, stupidly paralysed, but I don't know how it ended, because I guess I finally produced enough adrenalin that it became possible to walk away.

I've thought about that incident a lot in the past couple of days. I see me staring like a frightened bunny; I see the two men with the plank of wood; I see the guy in the car. There must have been other witnesses, though I don't see them in the picture. I think of how scared I was, and then I think about how much more scared the victim must have been. And then I think: who, in that picture, is the most frightened? It's the guys with the plank of wood. Right? It's them. Maybe they're not experiencing in that moment the sensation of heart-pumping terror that the driver experiences; maybe they won't have the flashbacks that he'll have, assuming he survived. But those two people are living in a state, in a day-to-day condition whose fearfulness is so unremitting, so degrading, that it's taken them to a place where they feel like the best course of action available to them, on that February afternoon, is to drag another guy out of his car and beat him with a plank of wood.

I suppose there are some workings I need to show. I need to say that I don't believe in "evil", at least as a kind of supernatural force, and I don't believe in innate wickedness. I think this, because it seems to me to be the only way of working from a basic premise of equality between human beings (and if we don't believe that then I have no idea where else to begin and where else to draw the line): that people are born into and live their lives in different contexts and conditions, but that everyone is doing the best they can with the information and resources and opportunities available to them. That no one acts deliberately against their own interests, and that all actions are produced out of specific circumstances. Whether you spend your fortieth birthday taking your kids to a petting zoo or running amok on a killing spree (or, I suppose, exactly half way between the two, flipping burgers at Burger King), you do this because a hard-to-decipher complex of past actions and present circumstances has led you to believe this is the best available option today: even when those behaviours may be superficially self-defeating or self-harming. People do what works. Those with few resources, few opportunities and scant information at their disposal may act in ways that are inexplicable and devastating to others -- not only to others who have more of those things, but to others who may have as little or even less but who for whatever reason find they're in a position to not act so harmfully.

This should make me more tolerant, of course -- of everybody, in general, but I'm thinking especially about people I'm feeling angry with today because their response to the present situation in London has been so much less than I think it could have been. Those people are doing, and saying, what works for them, just as I am. But what I can at least do is say some stuff about what I disagree with, and why, and what I'd like to propose instead, and this, in its incredibly small way, changes the context in which some of us put the next foot forward (or choose not to).

The language of intense, desperate otherness has been, for me, the most difficult aspect of this series of disturbances (and let me say, it's now a little after 2pm and I'm hearing sirens again, so this is not a reflection on past events, but an attempt to make some calmer space in the midst of chaos). I know one shouldn't turn to Twitter for nuanced debate -- or tv, for that matter, or pretty much anywhere -- but I'm so sad and ashamed to hear rioters described as "scum", for example, or as "vermin": both words that friends have used, shockingly, in the past few hours. Emotions are high, of course, but if it's in these moments that you see what people are actually carrying around with them, then this has already been a jarring revelation. Our compulsion to distance ourselves from acts with which we do not wish to be associated (no matter how complicit we may be in their occasioning, and no matter how aware we are, at a deep and perhaps profoundly suppressed level, of that complicity) makes us want to insert this spurious discontinuity into our rhetoric, but it makes meaningful further engagement impossible if we say that the people who've been rioting and looting the past few days are anything other than people. They're just people; and I suspect, scary though these times are for all of us, those "scumbag" perpetrators are the most frightened people on the block. This, partly, is what makes us reach for the animal metaphors: the media's absurd condemn/condone binary -- which a large number of people seem to have absorbed as if it were a natural order -- is as useless for thinking about frightened people as it would be for thinking about frightened animals; and moreover, of course, we want our fear to be distinct from their fear, we want our fear to be more elevated than theirs, so we want to reclassify them as less human than us.

The frequent reference to rioters as "animals", though, is at least suggestive. Think of Martin Luther King's famous 1968 speech 'The Other America':

I’m still convinced that nonviolence is the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom and justice. I feel that violence will only create more social problems than they will solve. That in a real sense it is impractical for the Negro to even think of mounting a violent revolution in the United States. So I will continue to condemn riots, and continue to say to my brothers and sisters that this is not the way. And continue to affirm that there is another way.

But at the same time, it is as necessary for me to be as vigorous in condemning the conditions which cause persons to feel that they must engage in riotous activities as it is for me to condemn riots. I think America must see that riots do not develop out of thin air. Certain conditions continue to exist in our society which must be condemned as vigorously as we condemn riots. But in the final analysis, a riot is the language of the unheard. [my emphasis]

What I take King to be saying here -- not that this is an original thought, plenty of other commentators have said the same -- is not simply that if people feel they are not being heard, they will have recourse to rioting and spectacular violence. (I'm reluctant to just say 'violence' because violence exists in this picture at so many levels, and the ways in which it's so embedded and familiar as to have become practically invisible need continually to show up in the accounts, if our civic concern is to mean anything at all.)

No, more than that I think he means to suggest is that rioters are unheard even in the midst of rioting. What is expressed in spontaneous riots (to the degree that these third- and fourth-day disturbances count as spontaneous) is so inarticulate in itself that we cannot really hear anything other than the chaos and mayhem and the boiling of our own angry fear and defensiveness. And so in this sense, rioters quite precisely assume the status of animals. We cannot understand what it is that they are trying to tell us. ("What is it, Lassie?") We know that they are in a state of excitation, but we do not truly comprehend what it is they are saying. When I went out this morning to get a few groceries, a young woman was standing in the street shouting at her very young child, who had started to whimper as he waited to be let into their car. "I don't know why you're crying!" she yelled. "What's wrong with you?" She was absolutely livid. It could hardly have felt more horribly apropos.

Of course it may be -- in many cases I'm sure it is -- that those who are out on the streets chucking missiles and setting fires don't know what's "wrong with them", either. They were just going along in one way, not rioting, and then something happened, and then they were rioting. This is not to say that there is no cause: but if a single cause could be expressed in words, say, and if those same people felt that words were among the resources they had at their disposal, then perhaps they'd be making speeches and printing leaflets. But in the midst of material deprivation many also live in a state of linguistic poverty. Words fail them.

My wonderful friend Karl James has recently posted a remarkable podcast on his blog, an interview with a guy called Anjelo, discussing experiences of pain. As Karl notes -- and as others have observed, most brilliantly perhaps Elaine Scarry in her extraordinary The Body In Pain, one of maybe a dozen books that have absolutely changed the way I look at the world -- part of the difficulty with pain is that it's desperately hard to communicate. The experience of "indescribable pain" is compounded by the loneliness of exactly that, its being so hard to describe in such a way that others will comprehend your pain. Karl talks about the importance and the generosity of making the effort to describe your experience carefully. I particularly like what Karl says in his introduction to the podcast:

I often talk with people about putting energy and effort and commitment into the way you describe something, because in that way we can share experiences, we can help others to get a feel and an idea of what it was to be somewhere that [they] weren't.

I'm not sure that Karl will be totally comfortable with me quoting this passage in this context and as part of this argument, but I know he'll respect the nature of the thought-process. Because what strikes me is this: the energy of these riots could hardly seem further removed from the commitment to carefulness and generosity that he's describing. But I wonder if, in a sense, this is not what we're seeing: an outburst of energy -- albeit uncontrolled, unfocused, convulsive -- that's simply giving us a rare and horrifyingly accurate description of pain that cannot be described any other way.

There's a great video doing the rounds of an angry woman remonstrating with rioters in Hackney: "If we're fighting for a cause, let's fight for a fucking cause!" -- but there is no cause that she can see and no cause that the rioters can articulate for themselves: and on the same grounds elsewhere we see those who have been involved in legitimate organized street protest distancing themselves from the actions of these violent mixed-up kids.

Except that there is a cause, isn't there? -- it's the cause of not wanting to live like this any more: and some of us are privileged enough (though these are surely rights rather than privileges) that we've been given enough information and sufficient resources to have been able to conduct our own independent inquiries into the way the world turns, and as a result we're in a position to be able to name that cause as capitalism. And though I know I have to keep rejecting the condone/condemn arcade game that we're all incessantly offered, I do at some level see that, at the apex of their translatability into human language, these riots are an extraordinarily emphatic 'no'. And this post is also a 'no', and almost all of the work I do is trying, one way or another, to voice that same 'no'. And what I hear from those friends and colleagues who are so appalled and affronted that their getting-by has been disrupted by these incidents is something other than 'No' to capitalism. It is 'yes, but...'. The 'yes, but...' of mitigated capitalism, in which there is just enough social justice and economic parity for them to continue to be comfortable but feel less guilty about it and less weary living within it: the weariness that comes from knowing that we all (but some of us ever so much more than others) make capitalism, every day, by participating in it; for every inch by which we mitigate it through our charitable efforts and online petitions and community spirit, we take a mile of its unequally distributed benefits. And it is the knowledge that we currently depend so irrecuperably on our own participation in capitalism that makes us fearful and angry at moments like this. I heard plenty of people describing the rioters as "stupid" yesterday, as if, again, stupidity were innate in people. But stupidity, like its opposites, is a property of relationships, and we participate in its construction. If they are stupid it's because they are stupefied: most of the year round, that's how it suits us. And so we hold up as an index of their "stupidity" the fact that some of the early targets were shoe shops and sports shops from which trainers could be looted: as if this in itself shows up the vacuity at the heart of the trouble. But we know, surely, that we taught them this language. We taught them its syntax and its symbology and now it is spat back at us in a weird vituperative parody of itself. The scramble for cool trainers is an ugly, pitiful power grab -- but it was ugly last week when they were queueing to pay, just as much as it is now that they're helping themselves.

Fear underscores all our lives under capitalism. For those who have, the fear of what we have to lose; for those who don't, the fear that we will always be subjugated by those who do. And by "have", I don't simply refer to material standards of living, but to capital more generally, to power. Those who are most afraid today are those with the most power, because they have the most to lose. The rioters have grabbed some temporary power and I bet they're truly disoriented by it. David Cameron and his rioting nemeses are, maybe just for today, truly and genuinely all in this together, frightened rabbits, and between themselves and their home (which in Cameron's case, of course, he's just flown back to from holiday), the city is burning.

But those of us caught in the middle need -- in the words of that woman on the video -- to "get real" too. I'm genuinely disturbed by all the variants I've heard in the past couple of days on that famous, almost uniquely deplorable phrase that John Major balefully uttered in February 1993 in the wake of the murder of James Bulger: "Society needs to condemn a little more and understand a little less." (Any thoughts that we should at least be grateful for the acknowledgement, pace his predecessor, that there is such a thing as society, might be tempered by Cameron's hopeless "Big Society": it's a straight line graph, going up, sure, but the y-axis is labelled entirely with zeros.) Stop excusing this behaviour, came the message from left right and centre yesterday, just condemn it.

Of course we have enough to lose ourselves that it's little wonder we'd rather not pursue the line of "understanding" any further. But this just seems to bring me back to something I've said here (and elsewhere) several times in the past few weeks. It's not that we don't understand what the riots are "telling" us. (These riots need analysis, not interpretation, but on we go.) It's not that we don't know. We've known it all along, but most of us don't live in a place -- physically or psychically -- where we're actually compelled to confront what we know; nor do we have a safe place in which to voluntarily acknowledge what we know, in an effort of carefulness and generosity. -- I very much don't want this to turn into a theatre-related post, let alone a 'theatre to the rescue' post. I've felt absolutely impotent as an artist in the past few days because the kind of space that I need to start from is not the kind of space that feels as though it has any cultural validity at the moment: we just need to be preparing these spaces, one way and another, for when the present crisis passes (assuming it does; if it does, it clearly won't for long), and the exhausted combatants on all sides are ready to make acknowledgements and reparations of their own.

I don't know, or can't say, whether these riots are, finally, justified or defensible. If I say I think they are, I'm projecting. Certainly I don't think they're inexplicable, or wanton; and above all, I think they're information, and they need treating as such. We need to step outside the meagre reactionary game-playing of condone/condemn and face both an unpalatable truth and a task. The truth is, we're seeing clear signals absolutely everywhere, not just in London and throughout the UK -- where, let's remember, these disturbances are still relatively minor stuff compared with the aggression we've unleashed on other countries and the unrest that has been precipitated in our names -- that our addiction to the behaviours and relationships that capitalism engenders and fixes has now come to a point where it's hurting us badly and unsustainably; and I think we know this. I don't think anyone doesn't, at some level, beneath however-many layers of fear and defensiveness. And so our task is to acknowledge that we know it and proceed from there.

I've dealt with an addiction or two myself and what we know -- again, I'm sure everybody basically knows this -- is that you won't necessarily kick it just because you know you should, and you won't necessarily stop it just because other people tell you that you must. You have to get to the point where you wake up one morning and say: "I cannot live like this any more. I cannot do this one more day."

You may disagree with my sense that that's what we're being told by these gangs of young people, in this violent, desperate, outraged language they picked up from overhearing the secrets we were muttering behind our hands. But actually, it's not them that I'm talking about.

We won't get the change we need until the people who live in safe neighbourhoods like mine, and in the hockey-shaped cul-de-sacs up and down the country where well-meaning people incubate their fear of others who aren't exactly like them, wake up one morning and say: I know what I know, and I'm so tired, and I need someone to understand the pain I'm in, and I cannot live like this any more. I cannot do this one more day.

As artists, we can hasten that day; as people with language skills, we can hasten that day; as people who are [tick] Other, we can hasten that day, and make it a day of celebration rather than mourning. And there will be rioting and looting and that too, I hope, will hasten that day, even though it may initially seem counterproductive -- unfortunately, we won't get to that point on tea and biscuits alone. There will be rioting, there is rioting, and, because of the information and resources and opportunities that I've got in my life, I hate the fear that that rioting gives rise to, as much as I hate the fear from which it arises; and thankfully I have other tools than fire and missiles with which to add my own voice to the big and necessary "no". But I will not condone, I will unreservedly condemn, any effort to dehumanize the people who are fighting on the streets, or to say that they are lesser people for it. What they're doing is sad, and ugly, and terrible, and it's exactly what we ask for by dint of our reluctance to acknowledge what we know, and to act accordingly.

As the saying goes, we can all be better teachers.

"Why don't we just do it with our voices?": a moment in time with cris cheek

2011-08-07T00:52:00.002+01:00

cris cheek at the Poetry Project, St Mark's Church, NY, November 2008
Photo: Charles Bernstein

cris cheek is, to the best of my recollection, the only poet on whom I've ever cut my lip.

It happened at a performance I did with Jamie Wood in Cambridge in 2005. This was the first of the portmanteau recitals I've been doing in recent years: Jamie did Fluxus pieces while I simultaneously read bits of Christopher Knowles and Jackson Mac Low and Bruce Nauman and Erik Belgum and suchlike, and a very special attendee stepped out of the audience to intervene in Jamie's rendering of Alison Knowles's Proposition #1 (the result: not so much a salad, more a pissaladière).

It felt to me important and reassuring that cris was present for that event, as it was in one sense unthinkable without him. Those outside the experimental (or scare-quotesy label of your choice) poetry scene might be surprised at how "queasy" (to borrow John Wilkinson's apposite word) some regions of it still are when it comes to certain kinds of performance, and to the kinds of hybridities and cross-pollinations to which a performative project -- especially in relation to multiple or contested textualities -- is apt to give rise. Fabulous irritant Kent Johnson's fantastic recent interview with Christopher Higgs (h/t Dennis Cooper for the link) gives some hints as to why: the private and unitary author function still underwrites so much of our self-perception as poets, and the embrace of the performative threatens everywhere to disrupt that privacy.

Anyway, when I was coming out onto the scene as a poetry ingenue, a little over a decade ago, picking my unsteady way through my own cat's cradle of intertangled interests -- in theatre, in live art, in poetry, in visual art, in sound, in film, and in every spur and pseudopodium of nonstandard writing practice -- I knew nothing about this state of affairs, and figured everyone would feel as I did about the intimate adjacency of interesting poetry to every other interesting thing; and it was amazing to see instead that there was just this pretty small clutch of poets, mostly undervalued in their field (especially by a clunking-fisted phalanx of straight white middle-class postgraduate males who fancied themselves robustly installed as -- impossibly -- both gatekeepers to and epicentrists within this irretrievably marginal territory), who were seeking to hold open, and defend against hostility and strenuous embarrassed inhospitality, a space where performance (as opposed to "reading", as if reading weren't a genre of performance in itself) and the present body and the contingencies of liveness and the choreographic valency of text-as-mark and glyph-as-gesture could go to work without occlusion, could display their vital signs without immediately falling foul of a British Bulldog pile-on from those who were most heavily invested, professionally and personally, in the maintenance of stable scholarly normativities.

Alongside key figures in this little tribe, such as Caroline Bergvall, Lawrence Upton and the late Alaric Sumner (with all of whom I quickly made fruitful contact, for which in every case I'm still grateful, and increasingly so), cris cheek was always right there in the thick of it: showing up not only in the real-world places where the least boring things were likely to happen, but also, as an inveterate early adopter, in a multiverse of online spaces -- discussion lists and the like -- where all manner of toss was forever being argued, often histrionically and with ill temper: in which contexts he always retained a distinctive voice: fluent, playful (perhaps sometimes to a fault, or anyway beyond the elastic limit of some colleagues' tolerance), generous, informed, questioning, annoying, quick to laughter. No loose thread would escape his tug, and much that was held dear by the prefects could be watched easily unravelling as a result of his sometimes mischievous talent for enquiry and provocation.

And so a performance collage such as Mixed Ape -- which stacked up poems, performance texts, instruction pieces, artists' writings, Fluxus compositions, computer-generated prose, queer burbles and transcribed vocal improvisations cheek-if-you'll-pardon-the-expression-by-jowl -- felt viable at all, let alone plausible or productive, only because restlessly inventive figures such as cris had for years been putting their bodies on the gears and wheels. If this was misunderstood by the prefecture (for whom only Brian Catling, for some reason, ever really had a dispensation), perhaps it was partly because the project of cheek and his allies was misperceived as an attempt to create a freakish mutant poetry, covered in absurd and irrelevant prostheses and ungainly and stumbling as a result; I suspect cris might feel, as I do, more, and more simply, that the movement between forms and modes is not frictionless, but that much that is indicative and alive with information is generated by that friction.

Well, so, anyway, cris, as he's inclined to do, gave me a pre-show good-luck bearhug, in the commission of which the zip of his fleece lacerated my lip, and I started the performance a few minutes late and still bleeding slightly. This may or may not be a good anecdote in itself, but it's certainly The Little Metaphor That Could. cris cheek, it could be argued, is to "cut lip" as the genius queer novelist Tom Spanbauer is to "burnt tongue". Here, Spanbauer's protégé Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club et al) defines the "burnt tongue" technique as it's taught in Spanbauer's famous 'Dangerous Writing' workshops:

A way of saying something, but saying it wrong, twisting it to slow down the reader. Forcing the reader to read close, maybe read twice, not just skim along a surface of abstract images...
from an L.A. Weekly article on Amy Hempel

Actually, though the "saying it wrong" part fits nicely, cheek might also be rather at home with abstract images and surface-skimming: without Spanbauer's devotion to narrative to service, a kind of omnidirectional mobility becomes not only possible but desirable. cheek's work often records the patterns and instants of real liveness, the extemporised, the dependent: but the pressures of time and space are repeatedly folded, spindled, mutilated, into a multiplicity that granulates, often finally liquefying altogether. Again, this is often mistaken for a pomo (porno?) inattentivity, an unwillingness to engage with historic conditions and named names: whereas in fact cheek is actually seeking new surfaces, new multidimensional jotters, on which to capture at a radical level of decentred fidelity the movements of voice across social distances, as they happen now, and as they may or may not continue to happen in the panoply of potential futures that every furiously heterogeneous 'now' contains.

We don't see much of cris these days: he's installed as Associate Professor in the Department of English at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio -- an environment in which the promiscuity of his interdisciplinary speculation obviously doesn't cause the kind of wig-outs that it too often has in poor old riven Blighty. We met and chatted in the foyer of the Royal Festival Hall (a suitably demotic venue, I felt) the day before a special event hosted at Birkbeck, University of London, and comprising two complementary units: a talk from cheek, entitled "Before I Am Anything Else: provisional transatlantic communities in polyvocal poetic performance"; and then "Friendly Amendments", a very informal, experimental gathering of performers (including cheek, Holly Pester, Lawrence Upton, Jonny Liron and myself, among others) around a number of texts -- by Jackson Mac Low, bpnichol, Bob Cobbing and Michael Basinski -- composed with polyvocal rendering in mind (or, in the case of Basinski, not with polyvocal rendering not in mind). The notion of "provisional community" has cheek's at once rigorous and super-permissive politics and poetics pent up inside it like all the yet-to-be-written tags that quietly seethe inside a can of neon spraypaint.

But before we got around to talking about poetry and polyvocality, there was a whole other body of work to discuss (and no other poet comes so close to encapsulating the phase "body of work"), ranging across poetry both written and unwritten, dance and sound and participatory art and all cheek's other activities that, taken together, seem to endorse beyond even the most hidebound Cantabridgian doubt the view sometimes attributed to William Forsythe that everything is choreography. Two long, wildly productive personal/artistic relationships -- with Sianed Jones, in and out of projects like their band Slant, with legendary turntablist Philip Jeck; and with Kirsten Lavers, cheek's partner in the radiantly interstitial Things Not Worth Keeping -- fall into place in a timeline that is abundantly crosshatched with what seem like a hundred thousand meetings and conversations with almost everyone who's done anything worthwhile in the past fifty years.

I, meanwhile, was just back from doing Open House in Leeds, and feeling more energised than ever at the possibilities -- indeed, the present realities -- of "provisional community" in theatre: and so, a little unexpectedly, that's where the conversation began...

cris cheek at Writing for their Lives, University of Washington-Bothell, 1o February 2010

* * *

CG: I wasn’t going to start here, but seeing as we’re here...

cc: Yes, go on. Go on, do whatever you want to do!

Do you have much use for theatre?

Ha ha! Mmm... dear... [laughs] Now I know we’re going to have a funny conversation about it because I know that when you start talking about what you think theatre is, I think yeah that sounds great!

Yeah, that’s all right – let’s have your conversation first!

...I go sometimes to see – in Cincinatti there’s a Shakespeare..., it’s a kind of indie Shakespeare... There’s a bunch of us that go down and see Shakespeare productions every now and again. And since I was a kid I’ve seen Shakespeare productions so I’m revisiting some of these things. And I go with a bunch of early modernists, early modern scholars, and most of them are way over-excited about Shakespeare in every possible way. Although I can understand why they’re interested historically, as literary critics and so forth.

Um, I have, and always have, with very very few exceptions, had real trouble with the conventional pros arch play. ...Now, why don’t I like it?

Yeah, why don’t you?

Because if I go to the Barbican for example, and I go and I walk and I sit in a seat and then those gates close at the end of the aisles, there’s... To me it symbolizes that I’ve just been trapped.

Yeah.

So that’s one reason why I don’t like it, is because I feel, er, trapped into... a communal experience of artifice. Which I suppose will be another way of talking about all the stuff that gets into The Society of the Spectacle.

Yeah, OK.

I do have that problem and I particularly don’t like, generally, seeing people pretending to be other people on stage. I would really rather watch the cleaner sweeping the stage, or the stagehands changing the set.

Now, there are exceptions to this. So what are they?

Well, sometimes I’ve experienced seeing that format taken to what I saw as a kind of logical extreme. Under Kantor, for example. Watching The Dead Class and just feeling that the presence of the totalitarian director as the mediating afficionado between the audience and the performers – who are all literally playing dead, and being controlled by the puppet-master – took the critique into a place that I felt comfortable. It became so grim as an experience that I found it utterly compelling.

I’ve never seen Grotowski live, but I have seen Grotowski on film and I find that laughable. I can’t get into that at all. Kantor really had some sense of... stillness at the heart of his work that I found really interesting. And it became closer to performance art.

Now if we’re talking about performance art – which I know could be put into a theatrical frame – I’d say I’m very interested in performance art, of all kinds: whether it be Ron Athey having a full-blown enema on stage right in front of you, or...

...or not! [laughs]

...or Stelarc – or not! And... things that are more kind of... what you’d call site-specific theatre. Um... I’m trying to think about big grand things that I saw, like Station House Opera, and even earlier on, The Ting: Theatre of Mistakes—

Yeah, yeah.

The kind of thing that Anthony Howell used to do with Fiona Templeton, and... These sort of more task-based things, I found those very interesting. And I also got an edge of that when – and we’re going back a long time – I saw a Robert Wilson production at the... Woo! What’s the name of the theatre in Sloane Square?

The Royal Court.

The Royal Court. Um... And I saw some Beckett at the Royal Court, I saw Billie Whitelaw doing Not I which I thought was fantastic. And I saw... I did see Glenda Jackson in a Eugene O’Neill play, and I thought she was incredible.

Is that about there being a kind of force of will or personality or charisma or something that breaks through that sort of matrix that you don’t like?

What I liked about her was that I could see layers of the thinking going on inside her performance. It felt more interesting to me.

OK, so that’s a kind of degree of reality in a way, if you’re seeing a real thinking process...?

I guess. I guess.

I totally agree with you, I love seeing people think on stage.

I guess, yeah, I guess there is something to do with that. There’s something to do with just the kind of... more what I would think of as jobbing acting, that I don’t find so interesting. Just as I find mimes... you know, tough to chew.

[laughs] Yeah! So we were just talking a little bit about... We were touching in with some work I suppose in a... if we’re going to be coarse about it, a sort of poetry frame, that does play with, um..., artifice and possibly with kind of confected voices...

Yeah. Good word. Did you say ‘cathected’ or ‘confected’?

Confected.

You did say ‘confected’.

...And [poetic] work that seems in some ways anyway energised by some of the things that, when you see them in a theatre context, you feel a bit allergic to. So is it about what you’re asked to do in a theatre as a kind of a... So I know Charles Bernstein, for example, made this distinction – I don’t know whether it was specifically in relation to you and your work, but – making a distinction between an active audience and a consuming audience... [1] So is there a thing about being asked in a theatre to be a consumer, who has nothing less to do? There’s that thing you quoted from James Yarker... [2]

Um... Well maybe what you’re saying is what I think. But I’m going to try and come at it another way. Which is that when I see, for example, the poet holding – not always, but mostly – something, or in some relation to a sense that there’s a text that they’re looking at, and that they’re navigating live for me, I feel much more compelled into the moment than I do, generally, when somebody has memorized a bunch of lines and is pretending to be somebody else. If it’s the poet on stage I feel that they’re doing something that has a... Yeah, maybe we’re going to get to the nature of the definition of task. There’s a certain kind of task going on, which is, they’re trying to bring that text to me. And so there’s all the stuff, that you get with a musician too, of the edges of improvisation. There’s always these micro-edges of improvisation. Whereas what I tend to feel with somebody who’s learned something by rote, and maybe is not so brilliant at what they’re doing, they don’t particularly embody it, they don’t really give you very much... I mean I’m not into the whole sort of, er, problem of somebody not having a clear idea of what their motivation is on stage. I don’t mean to go there. But there’s no sense of them just being there.

OK, so Jackson Mac Low, one of the wonderful conversations I had with him was about The Marrying Maiden, which was a text that he wrote for the Living Theatre in, I don’t know, ’65 or so. [3] I think they performed it every night for something like six months in New York. When you look at the text, it’s a mania of instruction. So there’s almost a different instruction after every single word. That you’re supposed to say this word as if you’ve just been goosed, and you’re supposed to say that word as if, er..., you’ve just seen a goose, and you’re supposed to say the following word as if you are a goose, or whatever. It’s not that funny, actually! But it’s that kind of thing. Now I said to Jackson, that’s impossible! And he just started to cackle. And he said, Yeah, you know, what I found is that I could arrive at indeterminacy through overdetermination.

Mmm. Yeah.

So maybe – to come back to what you were saying earlier – maybe I do like some semblance of the fact that there’s something real being grappled with. Rather than that I’m watching the outcome of an enormous amount of... A rehearsal in which there’s no longer a struggle. If there’s a struggle as the result, at the end of the rehearsal, then I think it’s pretty interesting. And then for me it gets closer to performance, performance art: something is “happening” on the stage, there’s some “event” going on or whatever – I’m using all those kinds of words! – but if it’s a bunch of people who’ve basically just learned their lines and that’s their job, and that’s all they do is to move from one play to the next, I think I’m not so interested.

It’s one of the reasons why I like, or used to like, Ballets C de la B, and things like that, is because there would be non-dancers in it, for example. So you get these tensions opening up, rather than it being a seamless artifice that’s delivered with skill and virtuosity by people who’ve had the right training and so forth. I like it when it gets a bit more gritty than that. So that kind of theatre experience, I have to say, yeah, particularly in those kinds of environments, particularly at those kinds of ticket prices, particularly with those kinds of audiences that can regularly afford those ticket prices, and are looking for that form of, um... lily-livered catharsis delivered to them at a distance in a theatre, I don’t find so interesting.

But I love going to the movies, so pick the bones out of that!

You see with the movies you get really close up on things. You see inside Brad Pitt’s ear or something.

Exactly, yes! Where else would you want to look?

That’s got its vicarious thrills, yeah. I mean, even if everything else that’s going on isn’t very interesting, there’s generally something I can concentrate on that’s fun.

So this makes me want to ask you about hybridity.

[laughs]

Is that all right?

That’s fine, yeah. Whatever!

Because I’m thinking that... I love film as well, I don’t see as much as I wish I did, but it’s an experience I love. I feel very like you about theatre, actually, that I want the signs of liveness to be strong and engaging, and so for that reason – and this has been on my mind in relation to Robert Lepage’s new show, which I haven’t seen... He’s arguing more and more for the idea that in order for theatre to survive it needs to become more cinematic. And I feel very...

Dubious about that.

Yeah, very dubious.

I have to say I did see an incredible Robert Lepage piece in Quebec.

Yeah, I think he’s amazing. He’s been a real hero for me.

He’s been playing with film for a long while, though.

He has, but I think there’s a kind of a drift... So, for example, Complicite, a company I love very much, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen them – and their early work very much coming partly out of that tradition of Kantor and the kind of grotesque, and very fluid...

Yeah yeah. Simon [McBurney]’s getting some interesting work in film these days.

Yeah, well, I think he’s always been very interested particularly in screens; the work for a while has been very much about moving screens around...

Mm-hmm.

And I’ve started to find their work really unsatisfying at a theatrical level partly because the amount of work that they’re doing with screens and with video and incorporating that kind of stuff means that their work is very timecoded.

Right. Ah!

So the room for it to be genuinely live in, and responsive to my presence there as an active member of an audience, is very limited. So I kind of... You know, if we were to have a very brief and reductive conversation about this, I would say that I wanted theatre to be more like theatre and film to be more like film, and the idea of a cinematic theatre bothers me because I think where those things meet, um... I think exciting things might come out but also I think a lot of problematic things might come out. I suppose I have a question... because you’re someone who, I think, when I was first encountering your work, there was a big exciting rush for me about the possibilities of hybridity.

Yeah. Still doing that!

So I wonder...

Well I’ll come to the hybridity. There’s one other thing I wanted to say about the theatre thing, then, I think, which is... A couple of other examples of things I have found interesting in theatre.

I’ve mentioned the site-specific thing, I know it was a bit of a craze and I don’t even know if it’s happening very much any more, I don’t get a chance to see it, although over the past couple of years I’ve seen Mark Jeffery and Judd Morrissey do really exciting pieces that are quite specifically tailored.

But no I’m thinking about other things that I like, that I’ve liked, that would be much more specifically within a theatrical frame; why do I like them?

The Wooster Group, L.S.D. was an incredible experience for me – of theatre – because they were grappling with simultaneity and, um..., multiple frames of activity, but without putting themselves into a timeline, other than struggling with the hilarity of some of the things they had to do to extricate themselves from legal prosecution. So, for example, asking Arthur Miller if they could do the chunks of The Crucible and him saying no leads them to compacting The Crucible and doing it incredibly fast and it just becomes hysterically funny.

Or arguably something like Speak Bitterness, the Forced Entertainment piece [4], where the focus of the piece is diffused, so that everybody in the audience is getting a different experience of the piece. That interests me too.

Or – and this is slightly more old hat – but I’m trying to think, and I can’t think what they were called... They were a French group, and it had the word ‘magic’ in it, and that’s useless... Jerome... something? [5] And he staged big theatrical spectacles at the Lyceum, and they were often in the audience – a little bit like Pina Bausch was, you know? So there would be things happening up the aisles and things happening in the balconies, and things happening on the stage. And you had a sense of – so where am I putting my attention? I’m... maybe it’s just ADD, but I liked that kind of approach more because I felt like, again, I was able to make choices about what I saw, what I watched, and I was able to get a different... Not that I was seeking a differentiated experience from everybody else in the room, but that there was a sense that that was on offer, rather than that we were all being forced to witness the same thing.

So those kinds of other things I find more interesting in terms of theatre because they somehow energise the making of what is the shared experience, and make that a more complex and I think [more] rewarding thing to grasp for, to reach out for. Whereas the smugness of: “I’m going to see As You Like It, are they going to do it a la Alice in Wonderland, or are they going to do it set in Benin in the eighteenth century?” You know, I mean it’s like, that’s about all there is interesting about it, and then people just have their As You Like It experience and walk out and go to the pub, and there’s no sense of something having been made. There’s something to do with the audience experience that I think is really important for me too. So anyway...

That’s useful. So it’s kind of... I suppose in a way then, more even than it’s about liveness and the signs of liveness, it’s a thing about stability: it’s about being presented with something that is or isn’t stable. When the idea is that everything in the piece is pre-resolved and all you have to do is have the patience to witness it; versus a situation where something is open – or everything is open.

Yeah, yeah. I mean I used to have the same problem going to see a Steve Reich concert. I remember – I think I saw Drumming, and two thirds of the way... – and I remember having had conversations with several people at the time and they were agreeing with me – I just wanted – now, I wouldn’t, but at the time – I wanted somebody to get up drunk from the audience and stand on the stage and join in and for the rhythm to just go all to pot. Just for a moment, could we have a kind of a crack in the edifice of perfection that’s being offered up here?

But, no, you’re talking about hybridity. Well... what about it?

So I suppose there’s an interesting paradox for me because my principal focus is theatre.

Mm-hmm.

In that theatre’s such a – for want of a better word – such a mongrel art.

It is, yeah.

It will just pull on anything that it can find, and that’s one of the things that I most value about it. But at the same time I feel very suspicious about people saying – it’s not necessarily just the thing about ‘theatre should be more like cinema’ or... Actually, usually it’s an economic argument, come to think of it. It’s usually about: theatre should be more like something that’s more popular at the moment than theatre is.

Right.

Theatre should be more like going to a club. Or it should be more like...

A concert.

Or a hypertextual experience, or, you know... So maybe it’s that, it’s just about where the will to hybridtiy comes from, and when it’s asking formal questions or aesthetic questions, or when it’s about a kind of emptily resonant innovation, that’s about keeping people’s attention in a “crowded cultural marketplace”.

Interesting.

But those two things kind of point in the same direction quite often, don’t they?

Yeah, they do. So now you’ve got me worried!

See, now, you’re coming at it from a point of view of somebody, as you say, who feels that their base frame is theatre. And I still end up coming at everything as somebody whose base frame is in poetry. And so then I start saying things like: OK, poetry always has been a... – I don’t know what the term’s going to be now, I’m going to say something stupid like multimedia or mixed media or interdisciplinary art form.

And I’m going to give examples of Greek epic. We don’t really know because none of us was there, but it seems like there’s a fairly consistent sense that Greek epic was delivered in a pretty complicated way. There would be the person who’s got the text as their job. And given the nature of Greek epic it could well be that there was a bunch of people who were on shifts with the text as their job. And there was probably a chorus, at least at times, who would maybe be echoing certain of the phrases, or there might be some kind of unison recitation. There would be a mixture of singing and speaking. Sometimes it might go completely over into song: there would be the person who was playing the lyre, who might be the same person as the person who’s talking – so then we’ve kind of got, you know: welcome Bob Dylan! And then there would be the rhythmic movements of the people that you’re looking at: even if they’re just standing there with their various tics there’d still be rhythmic movement, but you have the rhythms of the involuntary movements that come from speaking, and particularly public speaking; but we also, by all accounts, have people whose job might have been to amplify certain aspects of the texts through their movements. And then you know that they built buildings, that were amphitheatres designed as acoustic environments to amplify the human voice. And this for a poem!

Now of course you could say: that’s theatre! And I’d say it’s a fair cop, guv. And I’m not really interested in that as a model, I’m not interested in replicating that kind of thing at all. But I am interested in the places where poetry talks in intimate ways with other art forms. Song being one of them. Um... I think embodied physical performance and the histories of performance art and the, you know, the business of putting somebody under a microscope on a stage... I mean, Brian Catling always used to laugh with me about it, he’d say, you know: What you’re really about is kind of trying to point out to us how trapped the performer is! ...Yeah, that’s... I feel more comfortable with that than I do being trapped as the audience.

So, yeah, if we’re talking about the hybrid overlaps between poetry and other art forms, I am interested in the fact – and this is what I’ve been doing quite a lot over the last few years – that... Basically, I project things that I read. But I don’t project texts; I project things that might include textual elements. They’re not really... They’re kind of movies, but they’re actually often made up of static images that just move through each other... So I read them live. And then I’m in those projections, too. I don’t stand to the side and say, Oh look at that, you can see that... So, they’re projected on me. And so then my physical presence obscures and erases some things that I might be trying to read, and also things that the audience might be trying to see. But then they can see things on me that I can’t see. So that, for me, in my own kind of weird logic, moves the authority position in the sense that you normally have with an author: which is that they can see a lot of what’s happening compared to the audience, they can see the whole text. I can’t. I become part of a text as I’m also trying to give voice to it and talk about it. And then I can be facing it and I can be facing away from it and commenting on it. And then I get off into using a lot of things which are theatrical devices: asides, footnotes, interludes...

And it’s totally improvised. ...Almost. Except that I’ve always got pieces of paper in my hand. Because I like that link to the sense of the live poetry reading. And because the pieces of paper in my hand act as another screen which catch other details, very beautifully I think, and sometimes I play with that.

cris cheek at Sound Poetry Explosion, Northwest Film Forum, Seattle, WA, 11 February 2010

So there’s an example of a hybrid which is not trying to make a poem more like a film, but is certainly trying to make the experience of... let’s say engaging with a poet trying to chase down moments of grappling with the processes of the production, of producing a poem and circulating it in a kind of a micro/macro set of interrelationships, as live and as decentred as I can – at the moment... I know I could go a lot further with it. I really love the idea that the audience is writing stuff and I’m trying to grab it. Maybe that too. I’ve talked with John Cayley about the idea of having sort of, like, a hundred keyboards and, you know, then people could be writing anything, and I would be attempting to read it... But that’s... Yeah, there aren’t that many venues that are set up that way.

So I like something that’s a little bit low-tech, that’s kind of simple, but that’s got some... It allows people not to feel utterly like they have to fetishize looking at me or listening to me, the author; there’s a sound/image interrelationship in terms of what they’re reading and what they’re seeing me trying to interpret and produce meanings from. And that they are witnesses to the emergence of the poem, and that they’re contributing to that. Much in the way that I think I did at a particular period in time really love free improvised music: where sometimes I would feel that the audience pretty much made the music happen, because the musicians were so attentive to the possibility of everything that could occur that there was a... I don’t know, a commune. ...[I’m] interested in the word ‘commune’.

Did you ever collaborate with musicians in that sort of context?

Yeah. Yeah, a lot.

It’s something in your work that I don’t know much about.

Yeah, I was at the LMC [6], ’76, ’77, ’78...

Oh I know you were around, yeah...

Yeah I worked with Paul Burwell, and Sylvia Hallett and Clive Bell and that lot. And sometimes we had, you know, street bands together so I used to just play with them.

But..., so you’re playing as a musician...

Playing as a musician. And then sometimes I was, er... Talking, live.

Yeah. And that was, I guess, at around the same time that you were quite heavily involved in dance stuff as well.

Yeah, I was talking with dancers too. I improvised talks for Michael Clark, and Miranda Tufnell and Dennis Greenwood. That was actually my favourite experience, I think, that, and we went on quite a big tour... They worked out a bunch of... Well, we rehearsed for about three or four weeks, worked every day all day, and I was hired to be the composer. But actually I produced a bunch of texts. And so I had a whole mishmash of texts. Every day I’d record – I’d have a tape recorder there and I’d record what I was saying, and they’d be moving around and I’d do some more recording, and then I’d go home and I’d transcribe that, and then I’d go back in the following day and I’d try some of that out, and we’d try it with different movement materials, and we were changing lights to change spaces in relation to the body and the floor, kind of sizes of rooms... It was called Night Pieces. And we ended up with... I had reams and reams of text and they had lots of movement material, and then basically what we’d do would be to go out on stage and play the material in completely different combinations and completely different orders every night. So it was a kind of improvised talk/movement piece that was about an hour long.

And then I got the point where I would kind of rehearse the feel of the talking, so I’d then just be sat on the stage, with my back to the audience, just talking. I mean, I’ve got the text, I find it pretty interesting, I’ve just never been clear how to publish it, because I liked the recombinant nature of it, and I don’t particularly want to produce a text that repeats and recombines – there’s so much of that around anyway. This was 1980, ’81.

And I did some talk-based work with Lisa Nelson, the dancer with Steve Paxton; and with Mary Prestidge. ...And I worked on a version of Allen Fisher’s Place with Sue MacLennan.

Really?! Wow! I didn’t know that!

Yeah. She did a solo version of Allen’s Place! [laughs]

Gosh! ...OK, that’s blown my mind! I had no idea about that.

Um... And I did also some different talking performances with Kirstie Simson, who’s a contact improviser. And then these slightly more set pieces with Michael Clark. — Yeah, the thing of talking being an instrument. Very interesting.

Mmm. And so... I mean, you’re a trained musician, yeah? Kind of...?

Er... Yeah, I studied... I learned how to put the right end of the clarinet in my mouth, and take a few grades, and that kind of thing.

Yeah.

Played drums, played guitar, bass...

So... that’s part of your compositional sense? A kind of...

Yeah.

That would be a route into text?

Yeah.

And that came first? Or was happening in parallel...? Or everything was converging...?

Um... No, they all happened pretty much at the same time. The same time as I was hearing and experiencing the sound poetry world... The Fylkingen festivals, and the sound poetry festival in Amsterdam, and in Toronto, and the jgjgjgjgjg... stuff [7] with Lawrence Upton and P.C. Fencott, and then we also had Bill Griffiths who would join us sometimes, and...

And Jeremy...

...Jeremy Adler would join us sometimes. And sometimes there was also the electroacoustic thing happening... There would be a real interest in what you can do with tape manipulation... Sometimes there was a: Oh fuck it, do we really have to program these parameters into this Buchla synthesizer and wait twenty minutes for a sound to come out?! Why don’t we just do it with our voices? There’s that kind of, you know... I think ‘paleotechnic’ was the word that [Steve] McCaffery used... So sometimes there was that.

And, yeah, these were all happening kind of within a period of probably five or six years.

Not quite jgjgjgjgjg... but not far off:
L to R: cris cheek, Bob Cobbing, Bill Griffiths, Jeremy Adler; Canada, 1977?
Photo: Steven Ross Smith

There was also [work] with Philip Jeck... Phil and I used to sit for hours and hours and hours and hours at his house and my house just with turntables and Dansettes and cassette recorders and I think reel-to-reel recorders, and just push sound around, get records stuck in grooves and play with little sound fragments and little voice fragments in the grooves and so forth. All of that kind of stuff.

And then playing as a... Not as hardcore and attuned an improviser as some of the people from the LMC that I really admired – I mean many of the people from the LMC at that point, I really loved what they were doing. But I would play with them, you know, Max Eastley and Paul [Burwell] and a little bit with Chris Cutler... And Steve Cripps, a really incredible guy – have you heard of Steve Cripps?

No, that’s a name I don’t know.

He was a pyrotechnic sculptor who did some of the more beautiful pieces of that period of time. He would do solos with a clarinet in one hand and a blowtorch in the other. [laughs] So you’d get... the blowtorch would go on, or an arclight or something, and he’d be drawing in the air with this torch, it would leave incredible light drawings in the air, and he would play in the dark. And then the blowtorch would go off, and then there’d be this incredible screeching on the clarinet, and then the blowtorch would come back on. Really lovely, er, very hybrid ideas about performance: sound/visual; sound/physical... You know, simple stuff: light on / light off; noise / light / noise / light... or whatever. Just [a] very... material sense of working time. That Circadian Rhythm piece that they produced at the LMC that David Toop set up... [8] Yeah, and seeing people like Derek [Bailey] and Evan Parker and people play regularly was extraordinary. I mean deeply influential.

Yeah.

There’s something about time, and something very important about improvisation... And one of the things that would happen... – I’m just rabbiting a lot now!—

No, this is good!

—One of the things that would happen, for example, in poetry readings of the period – I’m thinking about Gilbert Adair’s Sub Voicive series [9] when it first started in Crouch End or something like that, I can’t remember the name of the café that we used to meet in – people would read for an hour and a half! Sometimes they’d do two one-hour sets – you know, one person would do two one-hour sets with a fifteen minute interval.

Wow!

Um... And it would pretty much be a similar audience. And lots of guys – but, hey, that was the nature of the scene at that time, and it’s a very difficult thing to explain away or... You know, there’s nothing you can do about it, it just was. [10] But you’d be sat there in a room and you’d be reading to Allen Fisher and Eric Mottram and Pierre Joris and Bill Griffiths and Bob Cobbing and Lawrence Upton or whatever, and maybe every now and again there’d be a Maggie [O’ Sullivan], or there’d be a Maggie and a Geraldine [Monk], or there’d be a Paige Mitchell or a Virginia Firnberg or somebody like that in the mix. But – incredible, that you’d read for an hour and then stop and then read for another hour!

Yeah! How amazing!

So people were really trying their work out. They were reading, kind of, you know, the notes they’d written on the bus on the way there. Not [like] now, when it’s five minutes or maybe fifteen.

So I was writing long things. You’re writing things that sort of explored... going on a bit! Rightly or wrongly, but a lot of people were doing that. And it’s a very different sensibility, if you’re thinking about stretching lyric out over a protracted period of time, and watching how these things moved. And they moved much more – in my experience – much more like a Steve Lacy saxophone solo. Some introductory moves; a lot of space; then maybe some, you know... the duck whirling in the sky or something, bleeping and blurting and farting and flapping and... You know, a real kind of musical sense of composition. Different moods and different shifts.

I think we felt that. I don’t know that anybody else could even get that from the texts now. If you looked at the texts could you really see that that was there? I don’t know. I would like to think that over time you could.

Or people composing things in little sections, like Bill Griffiths’s Cycles and so forth. You know, really dense, like John Zorn blowing his duck whistles into a bucket of water. [laughs] And you get that for four minutes and then he stops and stands up and, you know, somebody comes on and starts to bash a gong for ten minutes, and then that stops and then someone comes on and whirls a firework; and then Annabel Nicolson’s there and she’s got fireflies in a small cage. And all the lights are out and you just see the fireflies lighting up and going dark. And then, you know, Paul Burwell throws a firework at his drumset or something. I mean I’m being silly, but... very interesting explosive sensibilities. Not explosive. Well actually in some ways, yes, explosive. Explosive doesn’t have to be big, it can be little... [voices some little explosions]

And then one other thing to say about this in terms of the influence, I think, in terms of hybridity, were – in that period of time, too, ’78, ’79 I’m thinking – at the Acme Gallery in Covent Garden.

Mmm.

Which was an incredible place. Which had some of the most astonishing sculptural / durational / performative works going on in it. I’m thinking of pieces like Kerry Trengove’s Passage [11], where he dug his way out of the gallery. He dug down through the floor of the gallery and out across the road, under the road, outside the gallery, and popped up in Covent Garden gardens (as was at that point). Or Stuart Brisley. Stuart took the roof of the gallery, and built a staircase up one more flight. [12] Or Steve Cripps again, who made machines that would literally be digging holes in the gallery walls.

There would be regular – fairly regular; I may be thinking more regular than they [actually] were, but let’s say once a month or so – evenings at the Acme Gallery where you’d have filmmakers, choreographers, improv musicians, maybe sound artists, maybe sound sculptors, er, maybe a poet... Like, you know, Rose English would do a brief monologue; Sally Potter would show a film; Rosemary Butcher would show a new bit of choreography; and Paul Burwell and David Toop would play a duet; and maybe a poet would read a bit – Jackson Mac Low would perform a Vocabulary Gatha or something like that. That would be an evening. Astonishing!

Yeah!

And so the film audience and the music audience and the poetry audience and the dance audience would all be there. And they’d all be experiencing each other’s stuff. And then suddenly within the space of about three or four years—

Yeah...

—it had just all gone off into separate...—

And what were the forces behind that? Because, you know, I don’t... Ah, well, it looks like you don’t understand either!

[laughs] No, I really don’t. I mean, yes... So this is something that I’m trying to write a book about. Not that aspect of the moment, but actually the... The Film-Makers’ Collective [13], the [London] Musicians’ Collective, the X6 Dance Collective, the Four Corners photo collective, Camerawork... and the different magazines that they each had, Readings and Musics and New Dance and so forth, I mean... So I can’t give you an exact date on this, but I’m thinking ’81, ’82, ’83, where, for example, we’d moved past the initial stages at Chisenhale [Dance Space], which was from X6. So there’s an example of how things began to move.

X6 was in Butler’s Wharf. And there used to be fantastic parties down there at Butler’s Wharf, where you’d have Siouxsie and the Banshees playing and free musicians playing and fire sculptures all happening in the same kinds of spaces. The landlords thought: Actually these are pretty interesting buildings, why don’t we move in and turn them into some luxury apartments? So that’s one of the things that happened, is that the venues got put under pressure. Acme Gallery closed, they moved.

Another thing that happened was that arts funding began to change in its tactics. For example, there never used to be a dance department at the Arts Council. It came under theatre, I think. But there was a sufficient lobby from within the Arts Council to create a dance department. So then you suddenly begin to get these things hived off into separate art forms. And the nature of funding (as I’m sure you’re all too horribly aware), at least at times, is to be somewhat protective about how its money is being apportioned. So the dance department would be interested in putting money into dancers and choreographers and dance events; they weren’t particularly interested in having dance events mixed up with other art forms. They wanted to develop and build a dance audience, and develop and build the dance critics for the papers, and, you know, if a dance critic is coming along and they’re having to put up with a fire sculptor who could just come in and set fire to a three-piece suite and everybody would have to evacuate the building and then the fire brigade would come and then you couldn’t even begin to get back in for the last performance which was the thing they’d come to review...! You know, I mean you can see how that stuff started to happen. Just a little bit. Something to do with spaces changing, something to do with – dare I say it? – the shift from the utter ballsed-up ineptitude and corruption of the old Labour muck-up in the end of the 70s, and then the Lady with her new ideas. I’m not saying that one is better and one is worse, I’m just saying that one made the space possible for the other. Although in fact, you know, the ballsed-up corrupt Labour London enabled the splendour and the fury of punk and post-punk and so...

But something to do with the shift in politics, changing regimes, changing pressures within arts funding criteria, and... Maybe things just have their moment.

mr cheek having a moment

Mm. Yeah. But what this does sort of reframe really interestingly for me is something I think I sort of became aware of as I was first getting to know you, which was a real dissatisfaction with certain of the conventions around poetry readings. And I suppose the kind of meagreness of some of those events, and the expectations around them, expectations around the dialogue that might or might not come out of them.

Yeah, I was very abject! [laughs]

You made a couple of quite prominent interventions, ten or twelve years ago, about this as a question. And when you came to CPT the first time, which I think must have been about 2003, something like that, to do – was it a Sub Voicive? Did Lawrence [Upton] invite you to do a Sub Voicive?

Yeah, there was a Total Writing [14] and then there was a Sub Voicive.

Yeah, I remember you doing quite a big kind of solo...

Like four hours!

No, but you were quite reluctant, I think, to do it—

I was. I was.

—and quite anxious about it in some ways.

I was. That was [the] one when I wrote to a number of people – you were one of them – and asked you for material—

Yeah...

—and said: Send me stuff and I’ll make it part of it. And I did. But yes. Yeah, I’d got really hacked off with it all. [laughs]

And did you work through that? Or is that still...

[big sigh] Well it’s complicated.

Okay.

I’m happy to talk about aspects of the complications. Um... All right.

A number of things came together. One was that... I had got a bit... I mean, CPT was one of the bright stars in the firmament for me, in the sense that finally someone was making it possible – and indeed in some ways invoking the necessity – for poetry to begin to rethink itself out of the ‘upstairs [at the] pub’ reading mode. Sometimes that [mode] can be great, but it just didn’t particularly do it for me, and I felt that poetry in terms of its audience and in terms of its... I don’t mean numbers, but I mean... There was a lot of conversation about the fact that upstairs rooms in pubs, particularly at that time, weren’t the places that women would rather go to, shall we say. Or weren’t necessarily the kinds of places that people who weren’t of a straight male gender orientation would rather go to. Especially if it’s, you know, a room that nobody else wants to use, that they’re very happy to hire out to the poets because nobody else wants to rent it. Kind of, you know, chintz wallpaper and pictures of Churchill on the wall, or whatever, Battle of Trafalgar or something. That can be funny, and in some ways there are moments at which I’ve wanted to make a very pointed piece and call it ‘The Poetry Reading’ and do all of these clichés.

So that was one aspect of it. And then another aspect of it was that, um, I got frustrated about the fact that it felt more and more difficult to do some of the things – and it still does – that I wanted to do technologically within the poetry context. I didn’t want to do anything really dramatic. I just wanted to be able to do something a bit. Like I wanted to maybe do something with sound, but maybe there wasn’t a mic. Or you had to carry it there yourself. Plus I’d moved out of London and it was getting more and more difficult to carry everything around.

Even those aren’t really the key things. One of the most critical things was that I’d finished – I have to be careful how I say all of this stuff... The work that I’d been doing, that I’d been really enjoying, about the interface between poetry and song, and gesture and calligraphic marking, and breath and instrument, and composition and improvisation in and around the text, with Sianed Jones, ...didn’t quite come to an end, it just went into a segue for me. And I got very engaged with ideas about – what shall I call it? More participatory forms of making work.

And I also felt a little bit – although I don’t think anybody else would agree with me – that I’d got to the point where I thought I could kind of do it. And so I got bored with the fact that I thought I could kind of do it. And I wanted to either take a rest or a back seat, or stop for a while, until I felt that I could challenge myself again. I didn’t want to get bored with my own repetitions, or my own schticks. Even though I still have them, of course.

So the work that I started doing – and it came out of mass observation, and a genuine interest in what mass observation had tried to get going, but also the real problems in what mass observation was up to – led me to do this little piece for their sixtieth anniversary, which was – you probably don’t remember... – It was called ‘Mayday’ and I tried to get as many people as I possibly could... – it was a bit short notice – it was early days of the internet. Relatively early days of the internet – I mean, if you think that I was online at the end of ’94, and there wasn’t really a browser even at that point – then we got into kind of Mosaic and then we got to Netscape... It was the early days of e-lists, I think British Poetry [15] had just started in ’96, and was one of the things that encouraged me to do this. And so I did this homage to mass observation where I wrote to a bunch of people – hard copy and sent some stuff out to lists – and said, look I’m doing this thing, I want to investigate a little bit more what mass observation was up to, and I’m going to use the election of May 1st 1997 to do that – this was the Tony Blair... um... what do they call it? Not seascape... Wasn’t seasick, although it kind of was... Um... Sea-change! [laughs]

So I got interested in that work and that’s how I started working with Kirsten [Lavers], because Kirsten was very taken by that project; and then the following year we did a revisitation of it, and we did it live on the web, and we did a 24-hour online performance, putting up this web site – and it’s still up, and it’s an interesting piece, I think, a very early, very clunky hypertext piece. But there’s a lot of work there. And a lot of poets and a lot of visual artists and a lot of ordinary people and friends and relatives and all kinds of things were involved in that project.

So I got bitten – and it wasn’t the first time, because I’d done a lot of work in the community arts movement in the mid-1980s, which I’m sure you don’t know about either, down in Salisbury, for Mobile Arts [16] and with the Friends and Allies conference. A lot of – for me – very interesting work with oral history and reminiscence and photo-text projects and stuff.

Anyway, so, yes, the idea had shifted away from me – me the poet-creator who’s got something to say – to thinking that I wanted to... not orchestrate other people’s things, but set up frames within which a diversity of points of view could be seen. Kind of that simple, really. And I was very interested in inclusivity, very interested in non-censorship, very interested in rupturing across generations, age groups, cultural perspectives, all that kind of thing. And that’s what really became the nub of the Things Not Worth Keeping project. I mean although Kirsten and I made a lot of work as two artists, the idea was that it wasn’t me who was coming up with everything any more. And that had been growing through the work with Sianed – you know, I was continually being mediated by / interrupted by / (quite delightfully) / messed with / being required to (literally sometimes) change up what I was doing in order for it to stay as interesting as the kinds of elements that she was bringing to it, and so forth. It was a very good conversation, but it made me realise that I wanted to have... another kind of form of collaboration. And not just that form of collaboration where you’re working closely with somebody else and you’re maybe each taking responsibility for your stuff or you’re co-creating something intensely together: but really opening out what the idea of collaboration was.

So when I came to do that thing at Sub Voicive I was in a pretty abject relationship to the poetry world because I felt that when I came to do a poetry reading or I was asked to do a poetry reading I was put back in the position of: Oh here’s cris doing his poet bit. And I wanted to try to struggle with that.

And that struggle stayed. Um... It’s gone again now.

Hm!

Now that’s partly because that collaboration went to such a... I mean in some ways such a fulsome place, but also in some ways such a terrifying and messy place. And I’m happy to talk about all of that but... Let me just try and answer your question a little bit!

So... Participation and community and diffraction of power and... Thinking more of being a creative curator... Allowing other people to speak. I wanted to make work that allowed other people to speak. So hence the Coleridge piece [TNWK's Rime of the Ancient Mariner] which is, you know, I can’t remember, something like 425 different voices in the poem. Hence the Millennium Collection and all of those ideas about value. And to a certain extent, even when Kirsten and I were making those (I think) very beautiful and detailed and complex weavings, the whole book-mania project [the pieces Retrospective Scree(n)d and The Books], there was still a lot of porosity to it. When we were making those things the computer would be there and the books that were the residual recombinant books from the shredding of the 101 books, and all of that gubbins: they would be there and people could come in and they could type into the texts that were emerging. So even the writing that emerged wasn’t ours and it wasn’t mine and it wasn’t hers. And in fact I showed some of this in New York after that relationship ended, and it was kind of my way of trying to make contact with it and move on. Because I did this final showing in a gallery in New York and an old friend of mine – Marshall Reese from Co-Accident [17]; I’d done some work with Co-Accident in Baltimore a long while ago – asked me to go and give a reading. And I read this thing and afterwards he said to me, Well you know I really liked the sound stuff you were doing, and these other texts you were reading, but I didn’t like that piece. And I said: Well why didn’t you like it? He said: Well I think the writing’s bad! And it really kind of cut in all sorts of ways, because I thought: Yeah, I know what you mean... And it’s not mine! But that’s the point.

And so, you know, all of those different veils were falling away and being plastered up to my head and falling away at the same time. Because I’m very fascinated by that, the edge, the problematic edge of control and failure in relation to work that involves a large number of contributors. And I’m totally committed politically to inclusiveness, but it really has its painful side! In fact I had a conversation with John Wilkinson in Paris [18], where I was saying to John, you know: John you have to consider the possibility of talking to Sarah Palin. And he got really angry, and said: No! She wants to do harm to me! And I said, well, maybe she thinks you want to do harm to her. Maybe you need to have a conversation.

Meet the author: in media res for the church - the school - the beer (Plantarchy 3, 2007)
Photo: Sianed Jones

So, yes, that’s the crazy edge. It does get like that very quickly, I know, setting frames that try to be inclusive – that’s fascinating – and of course they never are, because you’re always excluding by the nature of the grounds that you’re choosing to operate on [in] the first place, and the language that you use to describe it. I mean you know this, you do that kind of stuff, that’s where we started this conversation. [. . .] It’s a hugely demanding line to be on, because you always have this struggle with yourself and your own preferences and [what] you’re expecting to happen or what you’re hoping other people are going to get out of it. In fact [it’s] everything good and bad about a relationship, all put under an intense microscope, with people you don’t know.

So the fascination for me, somehow... [or] the allure at least – although I think I’m playing with the allure at the moment rather than fully grasping it, and I might be trying to seduce potential collaborators in the enterprise – is to try to look at ways of writing what I think of as a social poem. I want to try and get it to the point where it’s porous enough and open enough that people want to be part of it. Now why on earth would they want to be part of it if there isn’t something interesting there? And so, you know, sometimes I feel like a snake oil salesman, and then at other times I feel that there’s a willingness to begin to try to discuss more openly than I’ve felt for a long while. Because there is more uncertainty around than there has been for such a long while, and I feel the arts overlapping in terms of some of their philosophical / aesthetic / social / conceptual ambitions, more than I have for a while. So I’m optimistic that that can happen. And I like the idea that poetry once again can find a way of being part of that conversation.

So is that the impulse behind what we’re doing tomorrow [at the Birkbeck event], partly?

No. [laughs]

Something completely else! Well maybe you should tell me, but it’s interesting to me that you’ve been doing kind of polyvocal stuff longer than you’ve been in print, for example...?

Yes.

So I’m wondering what the impulse is in right now wanting to visit that with some people and talk about it again and reinstigate that.

Yeah, I wondered what that work was. [. . .] I started thinking a couple of years ago about why it seemed that that was a particular moment when there was lots of that kind of thing going on. ...And then of course as soon as I said it, I realised particularly that when I say that kind of thing, everyone goes hang on what do you mean?, you don’t mean this, and you don’t mean that... and then I start thinking, OK, forget it, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said anything in the first place. Because of course there are still things like that going on.

And maybe it was my own experience, but I do have a sense that there was a certain, utterly utopian moment being reached for, in terms of thinking that one could produce texts – that could be performed by many many people – that were poems. Beyond that model of the Greek chorus – although it could just be unison, although unison’s incredibly difficult, and actually mostly boring and stilted.

I was just thinking, OK, so, is the poem – let’s say more generally – is the poem – OK, you’re going to say theatre, I know! – is it a place where... (I was thinking about it in terms of poetry because it’s not the way that people normally think about poetry.) ...Is the poem a place where some form of community is being modelled? Albeit utterly provisional. Maybe just in the moment of one reader reading that thing in a book, you know, under their pillow with a torch. Is there a provisional moment of community there?

And so I just was interested in that question, and I thought, OK, well if it could be staged as a question – it’s not normally how people think about the experience of poetry, particularly if we’re looking at polyvocal poems, poems which were deliberately written to be performed by at least more than one voice, but I think it gets more interesting once you get beyond two, actually – is there some kind of instantiation of community there? And of course there’s an instantiation of community in the event of that being witnessed by other people. Because you have that community of the witnesses; you have the community of them if you enlarge them out in terms of the effect of the observers on the observed – from anthropology you have that community of kind of witness-participants they become, in a way; and then you have the community of the people who are experiencing being the foregrounded community... (You get the stupidity of the complexity of these kinds of formulations!) And then the whole event.

And I was thinking, OK, so lots of people I know, in all sorts of different walks of life, and [of] all sorts of different political persuasions, are talking about group formation, community formation, ideas about neighbourhoods – but particularly about what community is. Because it’s been such a nebulously used word, really. “I’m going back to my community.” “I live in a community.”

And so I was interested in revisiting those texts – both looking at them and talking about them, and doing them, and also thinking, particularly, is that dead? Was that a moment that was an utterly utopian moment that’s connected up to the liberatory politics of the 1960s, broadly speaking – dialectics of liberation and all that stuff; or, is it something that’s worth another go? And if it is worth another go, then maybe it does begin to become very much more connected with theatre. In which case I’d be very interested in theatre again!

...And the sense that something gets carried from that, by word of mouth and reportage on the events, into other moments of community formation, and blogs and lists and other kinds of community, these mixed realities that we’re all living in; and then also that people would make works in response to that experience, and so forth. So I just wondered if there was something there. ...I have no idea, actually.

And then I was also very interested in highly scripted things like Hannah Weiner’s Clairvoyant Journal. I mean it’s highly scripted and highly rehearsed. What kind of community is that? That poses a very awkward question, and a very interesting question in relation to theatre too, which is something that we were harping on earlier, which is that if the community that’s being modelled on the stage is highly scripted, highly controlled, highly rehearsed, then how does anybody else jump in and take part in it? Does it exclude by nature of all sorts of skill bases, for example – let alone anything else?

Yeah. I mean this really makes me think about... There’s been something very weird for me in the past few years about trying to come into a less browbeaten relationship with the idea of being a director, the ‘rectitude’ of directing, and I think I feel more and more like what I do when I go to work, what my job is – and I like this because it feels like it’s applicable to a practice in poetry even though I think I go to poetry for quite different reasons than I go to theatre, it feels like there’s a plausible crossover here – it’s about creating spaces in which other acts of creativity can be hosted. So this past week for me [on Open House] has been so much about creating the space that someone can enter into and not immediately feel unproductively disoriented by.

Right. Good phrase!

So we had someone come in to join us, who stayed with us all week – came in on Monday morning and stayed, I thought rather against the odds, and she got more and more into it, and had expected to come through the doors and see a play being rehearsed, and that wasn’t what was going on. And there was something very heartening for me about the idea that although her expectations weren’t met when she came through the door, she found a way of being able to at least sit with what was happening, until she came to start recognizing what some parts of that were. So she wasn’t thrown through a loop by that, she could find a place to be in that space.

So what was the quality of the linguistic content that she was experiencing?

Well that’s interesting, isn’t it? I mean I think the place she was able to attach to was the conversational mode that was kind of threading through everything. And it was at its best when it was conversational rather than presentational. Really early on in the week we found ourselves trying to present our process in a way that would open it out to people. But actually that I think inadvertently sort of... We ratcheted up some sense of our ownership or our expertise or whatever, which was totally specious.

“Trust us!”

Yeah, yeah! Whereas actually I think the best moments were the ones where people were drawn in by conversation and stayed because they were interested to see where the conversation goed. ...Goed? Went! Would go. ...Goed?!

G-O-A-D.

Nice. Thanks for recuperating that! [laughs] So... But the thing I was trying to get to with that was about the idea of the score, actually. Because one thing that was really helpful for us – and part of being able to make that very open, accessible space – was about there being a score that was helping to hold that space open: without which I think we would have struggled because we would have endlessly been looking for something to substitute for it.

Right. So what’s the difference between a score and a frame?

Yeah. ...So I suppose what I’m thinking about in this particular instance was a kind of a structure that everybody was able to understand. In the end it didn’t play actually a very formative role in what happened. It just...

It was there.

It had our backs!

Yeah.

And it meant that when it came to putting something together on Friday,it was there and we could use it in so far as it was useful and let it go in so far as it wasn’t. But knowing that it was there, it made the rest of the space more permissive.

And by that time everybody was aware of what that was?

Yeah.

You see the reason why I asked about linguistic content is because one of the things that fascinates me about the proposal of the polylingual / polyvocal / provisional community is that if you talk about that... I mean I completely understand what you’re saying about the sense of the conversational. It seems like there’s lots of space for everybody to come in. But as soon as you start saying the P-word, the ‘poetry’ word, the sense that poetry tends to... well, everybody’s prejudices about poetry: that it uses exclusive language, or that the language is put under too much pressure there, that it’s no longer demotic speech, that it’s exorcised the curse of the vernacular or whatever you want to say about it... That somehow it feels more difficult to enter.

There were times – just to take it back to the improv music scene... There were times in the improv music scene when I think pretty much anybody could enter, and bash something. And then there were clearly moments when not everybody could. So there’s something about the terms that one establishes. You’re talking about a structure – I’m just being playful really when I’m saying what’s the difference between a frame and a structure and a score or whatever, I think they’re all very interesting in terms of how they operate and they overlap... Yeah, there’s something about the idea of the aspirational dystopia – the insane utopian aspiration of the community that could be modelled on poesis, the poetic – that really fascinates me. Because it seems to be that it’s the opposite from Plato saying that poets are dangerous and don’t have a place in the Republic. It’s like saying: We are the Republic, we’re going to make it out of poetry. ...Which of course is complete..., you know... It’s insanity! I think. But it’s a kind of insanity that really intrigues me.

And so, you know, I start to wonder about other places within theatre from that moment in time – broadly speaking. I mean I talked about the Living Theatre earlier. I guess you could go to a maybe more well-known British example, which would be Marat-Sade, or something like that: where as you get this eruption of multiple voices, it’s basically bedlam. Or Babel.

Mmm.

So it’s a very profound enquiry for me at the nub of it, is to say: is it possible to do something with this? And for it not to appear immediately to be a bunch of blokes making weird noises, who need to be locked up? ...For example.

[laughs]

I think that’s a good place to stop!

cris cheek at Writing for their Lives, University of Washington-Bothell, 1o February 2010

Notes:

Coco props to Joe Milutis, the uploader of the three YouTube clips with which this post is crucially enlivened.

[1] This is a reference to a transcribed discussion (which I haven't read) in Charles Bernstein's essay 'On Theatricality'; it's mentioned in Robert Hampson's excellent and invaluable piece 'cris cheek in Manhattan', which at points covers similar ground to some regions of the present conversation. Hampson's essay would be a good jump-to point for those seeking to deepen and/or extend their engagement with cris's work. [^]

[2] In his influential critique of the poetry reading, 'Implicit' -- framed as an email to critic / poet / friend Keith Tuma, and collected in Tuma and David Kennedy's mostly useful Additional Apparitions: Poetry, Performance & Site Specificity (The Paper / The Cherry On The Top Press, 2002) -- cheek quotes approvingly from a 2001 paper given at a New Work Network conference at the Arnolfini, Bristol by James Yarker (referred to throughout, unhappily, as James Harker) of Stan's Cafe. Yarker's excellent paper, 'Audiences as Collaborators', can be read here. [^]

[3] The Marrying Maiden was written in 1958-59 and performed by the Living Theatre during 1960-61. [^]

[4] Portions of the text of Speak Bitterness were first published, alongside works by Fiona Templeton and Fiona Wright, in issue 1 of Language Alive, edited by cheek and published via his own Sound and Language imprint. If my own copy of this publication hadn't vanished down the back of a cosmic sofa, I might venture to say more confidently here how much I preferred the presentation of the Forced Entertainment text in this version than in the later, cleaner rendition in Certain Fragments. And, come to think of it, where is my copy of issue 1 of the similarly sized The Fred magazine? That was brilliant. Damn you, cosmic sofa. [^]

[5] We concluded that this was the Grand Magic Circus, under the direction of Jérome Savary. cheek's approval of Savary eventually prompts a whoosh of esprit d'escalier (pour homme) while I'm transcribing: I wish I'd thought to ask cris about his experience of working with one of my theatrical heroes, John Fox, on Welfare State International's Raising of the Titanic as part of LIFT in 1983. Possibly for cris this isn't even theatre, or anyway not what he hears when I say "theatre". These categorical divisions are infinitely self-reinforcing. [^]

[6] The London Musicians' Collective started in 1975 and was still busily promoting concerts and other activities, including its often remarkable annual festival, when I arrived in London in 1997; at that time it was an invaluable entry-point and resource base, and I eagerly and gratefully became a member. In 2002, following an earlier pilot scheme, the LMC launched Resonance FM, the experimental radio station, which survived the demise of the LMC itself in 2009 after its funding was brutally and unsupportably cut in the notorious Arts Council bloodbath of the previous year. [^]

[7] jgjgjgjgjg... (as long as you can say it that's our name) formed at the London Sound Poetry Festival in June 1976; reconvened the following spring at Battersea Arts Centre (!) and expired a year later at a gig at Kings College London; in the interim there had been a number of official performances in the UK and Europe, as well as "events of which no prior warning was given". A jgjgjgjgjg book containing "recipe section, write ups of events, details of death poetry, sheep poetry and wood poetry . . . and . . . hints for further reading" sadly never emerged. These details are taken from Lawrence Upton's one-sheet "DOCUMENTING jgjgjgjgjgjgjgjg (as long as you can say it, that's our name)", available as a pdf from his web site. This seems like a good moment to drop in a general note of acknowledgement regarding Lawrence's assiduous documentation, at his site, of so many of the important collaborative projects in which he's been involved; future historians of these lives and times will have much for which to thank him. [^]

[8] Paul Lytton, David Toop, Max Eastley, Paul Burwell, Annabel Nicolson, Evan Parker, Hugh Davies, Paul Lovens: Circadian Rhythm (Incus, 1980) [^]

[9] Sub Voicive Poetry was mostly a reading series (there were occasional pamphlets, too, and latterly a number of useful colloquia), begun in 1980 by Gilbert Adair, who ought not to be confused with the other Gilbert Adair. (The contemporaneous existence of two separate literary Gilbert Adairs has been cited on either side of the intelligent design controversy.) Ulli Freer curated the series from 1992 and Lawrence Upton from 1994. For a long while in the 80s and 90s it was probably the most significant sustained reading series in the UK for experimental poetries. In 2001 when I took over Camden People's Theatre, I invited Sub Voicive to relocate to the theatre, and the association continued throughout my tenure, though attendances tailed off quite markedly. The reasons for this are probably multiple but there was certainly a constituency for whom the theatre ambience would never be as congenial as the pub back-rooms to which the series had accustomed itself: on which topic, see cris's remarks later in this interview. The series was formally discontinued in 2005, though I still like to think of it, indulgently, as being somehow in hiatus. [^]

[10] On "nothing you can do about it", we might respectfully disagree, perhaps, though equally I doubt cris would disagree with my disagreement. [^]

[11] Actually 1977, to be annoyingly precise. Here's a nice article on Trengove's piece, coming from a perspective that might usefully moderate -- or better yet, complicate -- any emerging picture of a blithely anarchic utopia of an art-scene. [^]

[12] I think this must have been: Stuart Brisley, Touching Class (with Iain Robertson: Acme Gallery, 1981). If anyone knows better, please set me straight. [^]

[13] The London Film-Makers' Co-Op (1966-99), which evolved into LUX. [^]

[14] Total Writing London was my own attempt to use CPT to create a space in which experimental poetry could be programmed right up against free improvised music (and allied leftfield trades) and live art, in which a meaningful hospitality could be extended to artists working in the crossover areas between these disciplines, and the absurdly separate audiences for each could meet and encounter each other. Specifically there were two long-weekend events in 2003 (reviewed here) and 2004; thereafter, I left CPT and that was that, though I think the second year anyway felt like a bit of a misfire and I wouldn't have tried again in the same format. But the first of the TWL events was probably the best thing I did during my tenure.

Completists might like to know that cheek had in fact already presented work at CPT, with Things Not Worth Keeping, in March 2003, before both these events. It was a one-off mixed bill called Paper Cuts, for which participants were invited to make work in response to that day's newspaper. TNWK presented the first in what was to become a series of beautiful text/projection actions, with marks made in oil on newspaper sheets acting as a projection screen; the title of this sequence of works was "we are taking these steps because words must mean what they say jack straw", and the documentary photograph they sent me (below) became the cover image of the programme for Total Writing London. The list of Paper Cuts participants as documented on the TNWK site omits a couple of names, one of whom may be of particular interest to those whose minds are disposed towards boggling: yes, reader, I am (I shall confidently presume to suppose) the only person ever to present cris cheek on the same bill as Russell Brand. [^]

Things Not Worth Keeping, "we are taking these steps..."
as part of Paper Cuts at Camden People's Theatre, London, March 2003
image by TNWK

[15] The BRITISH-IRISH-POETS listserv at JISCMail. The public archives reach back as far as February 1997, at which point the conversation is already in full flow. I was an over-eager participant in that list for a while, starting in December 1999, and dropping off the twig the following autumn, but making an incessant blaring nuisance of myself during the intervening period. Interestingly, this period exactly coincides with the months after my bipolar diagnosis. [^]

[16] 'Mobile Arts, an Industrial and Provident Society delivering community arts projects in a range of media throughout Wiltshire, 1984-88.' (description from cheek's own resumé, 2002) [^]

[17] "Co-Accident, which consisted of Alec Bernstein, Kirby Malone, Chris Mason, and Marshall Reese, was a poetry music collective founded in 1977. They worked with the interplay of live and taped voice, percussion and instrumentation. They used voices, texts, scores, traditional and homemade instruments, electronics, videotape, computers and improvisation to present, in performance, a variety of texts and sounds simultaneously." (lifted from Robert Hampson, 'cris cheek in Manhattan') [^]

[18] When we talked, cris had recently been at a conference, 'Legacies of Modernism: the state of British poetry today', hosted by the Université Paris-Diderot, and attended by a large number of poets and critics working either within or in spitting distance of the academy. The panel on the second afternoon entitled 'Poetry and Performativity' -- Will Montgomery on E. E. Vonna-Michell's 'Balsam Flex' cassettes (to which cheek was a contributor); Vincent Broqua on Caroline Bergvall; and cheek's "provisional transatlantic communities" paper -- was, I'm told, notably sparsely attended by the contingent of delegates more closely involved with Cambridge and its legacies. Notwithstanding my optimistic remarks in the introduction to Better Than Language, the water remains boringly wide. [^]

L to R: J.H. Prynne enjoys the sunshine; a thousand miles of psychic no-man's-land (not pictured); TNWK foyer/window installation as part of Total Writing London, Camden People's Theatre, June 2003
image by TNWK

* * *

Finally, a little cris cheek jukebox -- a cheekbox, if you will -- so those who are unfamiliar with his work can get an ear-handle on it at least.

The tracks are:

1. cris cheek w/ Sianed Jones: opening of "Stranger"
from the Sound & Language album skin upon skin (1996)

2. Slant (cheek / Jones / Jeck et al): "Litter"
from the These Records album Hive (1989)

3. cris cheek: "Public Announcement" (plus interview snippet)
from Radio Radio program 4 (presenter/producer Martin Spinelli) (2003)

4. cris cheek: "and fluff" (1981/82); text included in part: short life housing (The Gig, 2009)
from a reading at Alan Golding's house, Louisville, KY, 20 February 2010

5. Slant: "Sex"
from the Sound & Language album the canning town chronicle... (1994)

6. cris cheek: extract from "Bamboo"
recorded at SoundEye, Cork, Ireland, 9 July 2005

7. Things Not Worth Keeping / Coleridge Community College: "Neighbourhood Is"
from the TNWK / Taxi Gallery album Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner (2005)

8. Slant: "Tenement Courtyard"
from the Sound & Language album Slant (1993)

Goodbye to the circus

2011-08-01T07:30:00.007+01:00

I made a short series of these text/image pieces for the collaborative blog Transductions, early last year, and always meant to do more. Perhaps I will, sometime. This one seemed like the most successful, anyway, so I thought I'd post it here in case anyone missed it first time around.

Thanks to David Rylance for his hospitality over at Transductions, and to Tom and Kier and Paul for their enthusiasm for this post on its initial outing.

I used to believe that the blank pages at the end of the book were for writing a different ending if you didn’t like the original ending.

We used to believe that windfalls should be shared.

We used to believe our sins were transformed unto the chicken, and then we killed it.

We used to believe in innocence until guilt was proved by a court. Not any longer.

I used to believe that a mile is a mile.

We used to believe that people living with HIV and AIDS were someone else.

We used to believe that gingival tissue destruction indicated that the bacteria were releasing acids that severed the fibrous gingival attachment apparatus.

I used to believe that I would go crazy, and it was just a matter of time and circumstance to set off the powder keg of unreason.

We used to believe in the good old days.

I used to believe a little penguin lived in my refrigerator and his job was to turn the interior light on and off.

We used to believe that music was a sacred place and not some fucking bank machine.

We used to believe that a fair shot, i.e., non- discriminatory treatment, was equality.

We used to believe that chocolate milk came from brown cows because our Daddy told us it did.

I used to believe that my penis was a shit and a woman’s vagina was a toilet.

I used to believe that marriage would diminish me, reduce my options.

I used to believe that Kleck’s estimate of DGU’s was correct, but overwhelming evidence to the contrary has convinced me otherwise.

We used to believe that forests could be managed only as a one-harvest crop.

We used to believe that God personally held each of the stars in place in the sky.

I used to believe in forever, but forever is too good to be true.

We used to believe in [Incomprehensible]

* * *

Sources:

Texts: among top Google search returns (6th February 2010) for sentences beginning “I used to believe…” or “We used to believe…”

Images: among top Google image search returns (6th February 2010) for “hopeless circus performers”, “jaded circus performers”, “disappointing circus”, “desolate circus”, “pointlessness of circus”, “the circus is depressing”, “circus performers self-harm”, “circus suicide”, “circus of shit” and “circus I gave you everything.”

The finger and the moon

2011-07-31T09:30:00.000+01:00

This was going to be the introduction to a much bigger post that I don't now think I'm ever going to write, so rather than let it languish in Drafts Purgatory I thought I'd post this little bit on its own :)

Look! Come quickly! Wallace Shawn is pointing at the moon!

Oh, all right, it's not really Wallace Shawn. (So they say.) It's Budai (or Hotei), the Laughing Buddha. He's pointing at the moon to remind us about a story from the Shurangama Sutra:

The Buddha told Ánanda, "You and others like you still listen to the Dharma with the conditioned mind, and so the Dharma becomes conditioned as well, and you do not obtain the Dharma-nature. This is similar to a person pointing his finger at the moon to show it to someone else. Guided by the finger, the other person should see the moon. If he looks at the finger instead and mistakes it for the moon, he loses not only the moon but the finger also. Why, because he mistakes the pointing finger for the bright moon.

This is a big moment for The Buddha because he's making a point that's going to end up in Enter the Dragon:

(How much more fun the Shurangama Sutra would be if that story began: 'The Buddha told Ánanda, "Kick me!"')

We've started, a little unexpectedly perhaps, in the world of Buddhist teaching and martial arts, because I was interested to try and discover the origins of a proposition contained in remarks made during a recent talk by Ken Robinson: a sermon on 'passion', as part of the popular series of secular sermons at the Conway Hall in London, organized by the excellent School of Life. Robinson is someone who keeps popping up lately, though I only really started paying attention when a few people on Twitter made a fuss, rightly, about this gorgeous animated film based on a recent Robinson talk on the premises and structures of education: it's startlingly cogent and ultimately rather moving.

I really recommend watching the whole of Robinson's sermon, too, not least for his easy, charismatic way with "public speaking", to which he is clearly (quietly) virtuosically accustomed. Getting everyone to sing along with 'Eye of the Tiger' may have more than a touch of David Brent about it, but once Robinson simply starts to make contact with his congregation, his easy, laconic, anecdotal style is very easy to warm to and the whole talk is a pleasure. Anyway, the bit that particularly leapt out at me (it starts at about 25 minutes in to the video, if you want to skip straight there) was this:

I'm convinced that the most distinctive feature of human life is [the] power of imagination. ... If you take a small baby into the garden ... at night, and point at the moon, the baby will look at the moon. If you take your dog into the garden and point at the moon, the dog will look at your finger. ... Human beings are born with expansive imaginations, and a sense of reference and possibility.

Those who know me too well will already have guessed where this is going. Much though I take Robinson's point about the significance of expansive imagination, I'd have to say I'm basically on the side of the dog in this.

I don't know whether Robinson's source here is the teaching of the Buddha, or Bruce Lee, or direct personal experience with a set of babies and dogs under laboratory conditions, or what; but I do think it's important to look again at that Buddhist parable: in which it is not simply that we are encouraged, as Lee suggests to his hapless protégé, to look at the moon rather than missing the point (so to speak) by fixating on the finger; rather, we are told not to mistake the finger for the moon. Other renditions, particularly in Zen teaching, make this more explicit: the words of the teaching are not the point of the teaching, and understanding the teaching and understanding the words from which it is composed are not at all the same thing.

But the lack of expansive (or, we might say, extrapolatory) imagination in the dog, who does not in this instance comprehend the sign of the pointing finger, is not a mistake -- in fact, it is more or less the opposite of the mistake we are warned against. Whereas the baby interprets the pointing finger as a sign, a metaphor, the dog sees the finger as a finger, no more no less.

In a recent post I set up a binary -- slightly specious, like most binaries, but a workable distinction for thinking with -- opposing 'the window' and 'the wall' as two tendencies in poetic language-use. The window approach asks us to look through and beyond language, to treat it as transparent (or maybe, in poetry, translucent, or a little textured perhaps), a technology offering the empathetic spectator access to something beyond; the chicken, I guess, crossing the road in order to get to the other side. Others meanwhile ask us to look at the wall, to confront language as a material in itself, as a stuff in its own right, which does not refer to some remote picture, but presents pattern, texture, substance, colour, temperature. Most of these elements require us to get up close, to touch, to feel, to make contact. If we are looking for the window in the wall and cannot find it, we may initially think that there is nothing here to be seen, that we have come to a dead end with which no communication is possible. But actually, an intense experience of material presence, here and now and occurring wholly in reference to the range of creative means we have at our disposal for coming into relation with an object, is immediately and totally accessible to us.

I don't know that "the window and the wall" is quite sophisticated enough a model to have much use except as a provocation: but I think "the finger and the moon" does something similar, and to more nuanced effect. We shouldn't take it as read that the dog, or the student, who sees the finger and not the moon, has missed out on the chance of beauty.

For reasons I won't go into right now, I've been thinking a lot lately about haecceity, about how art can bring us into a relationship not only with metaphor, with the exercise of expansive or speculative imagination, but also with the 'thisness' of stuff: and this is not a constrained or stupefied reaction to a material encounter or event but rather an invitation to apprehend in the highest fidelity what it is that we meet in meeting the world. Nor is the secularism of this materialist task so militant that it can't yield its own reflective and even devotional pleasures -- think for example of Gerard Manley Hopkins riffing on Scotus in 'As kingfishers catch fire':

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I do is me: for that I came.

(Yes, I'm afraid I too wonder whether the Speak & Spell was named after Hopkins's poem...)

In other words, even if Bruce Lee's advice -- "Don't think, feel!" -- were at all to be trusted, it's not as if "seeing the finger" is wholly cerebral in its promise (or perceiving the beauty of the moon, for that matter, a sub-rational act).

Moreover, even if we accept and value Robinson's fairly explicit premise that the expansive imagination is what separates humans from other animals, I am interested in the extension response that mines downwards rather than travelling outwards. In our example, I suppose this would be the dog that sees the finger and the sign, but does not produce out of this recognition any impulse to treat the sign as an instruction to be obeyed and (by the same extension) a catalyst, whose purpose is wholly instrumental and whose import vanishes on use, a message that will self-destruct. This dog sees the finger and understands at some level that the owner-operator of the finger is using rather than simply showing the finger, or is not merely showing the finger but is intentionally showing the finger. It is a finger that, as well as speaking and spelling itself, speaks of wanting. As Hopkins suggests, it cries with the intensity of the noun becoming a verb.

The baby that follows the finger but immediately dispenses with it except in respect of its utility value, and by extension (or expansion) sees the moon, and might or might not find the moon 'beautiful', is learning how to go to the (Hollywood) cinema, and how to read most mainstream poetry. The (admittedly slightly enhanced) dog that sees the finger, and, rather than interpreting its semiotic significance, instead appreciates and reflects on the fingerness of the finger, its connotation of gesturality at all, and the human desire out of which the technology of gesture arises, has invented theatre. (But of course in saying 'cinema' and 'theatre' here I am describing kinds or qualities of relationship that may have nothing to do with particular instances of the events that might take place in buildings bearing those names.)

And so, after the Cat Test, the Dog Test. The dog does not fail to see the performance matrix (in Michael Kirby's terms), and does not require that the matrix is eliminated or disavowed. All it asks in return is that it be allowed to establish its principal (and perhaps only) line of relation with actualities. The object is not dependent on its place in a system that requires it always to signal beyond itself to an ulterior meaning. The object suffices in itself. This allows the dog, too, to suffice, and to exist on the same plane as the object. The Dog Test, like the Cat Test, is an experiment in acceptance; it describes an uncapitalist space, wherein our first thought is of the thing itself, not of what it can be exchanged for.

So I really want to see those fingers.

No animals were harmed in the making of this post.