Beautiful Robert Smithson drawing at the amazing Ubuweb. Also nice list-work from Bruce McLean and the John Baldessari as proto-Bart above. I am going to lose myself in there sometime when I get near a decent connection (see below).
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I am stood in the narrow part of the hotel room, right up by the door, with the laptop raised above shoulder height and turned at a slight angle in order to catch the ghost of the fucking wifi signal that haunts this annex. I have resorted to this only in desperation after the previous tactic of shifting position slightly on the bed for fifteen minute periods failed to find the tiny pocket of signal that sometimes can be found there, tangled in the sheets. If you get this message please come and get me. I am in room 133.
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From the train, coming here, days ago.
The kid I can’t see who's sat behind us says:
But you cant be scared, because it is your voice.
And then later:
Mum can’t turn her voice into your voice.
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Vlatka is getting ready for her eight-hour performance This Here and That There at HKDW in Berlin, this Friday. I am helping her prepare which means for the most part I am sitting in the sun and watching her. Sometimes, with the stop watch on my phone, I have to time how long it takes for her to shift the 50 chairs into a new arrangement. The tech guy is great but he's reluctant to believe that she wants to move the chairs all around the building on her own - he has someone that can help her. Vlatka says no; her shifting the chairs is the piece. He says OK, but he adds that there's someone scheduled to be there - so its really OK for her to change her mind.
Late last night in a hotel room at Heathrow before a very early flight this morning. The non-neighbourhood of the airport, a featureless maze of bunker-buildings, offices, and thrown-up hotels, these offering luxury as approximated by guidelines from central planning (= leather-look sofas, foyer coffee franchise, 'art on the walls', and overpriced wifi).
Outside the roads are named as if they're the residential streets of some generic suburb, although here, even more than there, the names serve more to make them seem less like real places, not more. It's a weird vibe right now in the non-area anyhow. When we arrived in the late afternoon we passed an especially non-descript building (think above-ground annex to an underground car park), ringed with the grim garland of guys bearing riot shields, their heads hidden in helmets and visors. The HQ of the BAA apparently, and near it the shrub surrounded car park, with protestors hemmed in. Tents and polythene shelters. A scale model Glastonbury but no stage. After dusk the anonymous mini-roads are haunted with stray climate change protestors spilling out from the temporary camp nearby, also vans of cops in uniforms and yellow-flouro jackets, many of the latter parked up at the drive-in McDonalds, enjoying a chat, the night, a break in the fighting and the rain. Much later in the night, when we pass the small encampment again, one lone guy at its floodlit periphery is bouncing a football, shooting baskets to a non-existent hoop against a high and security-camera-ed wall.
"It still counts, even though it happened when he was unconscious.."
Some kind of unofficial Miranda July week at my house, for no particular reason. I've been reading her short story collection No One Belongs Here More Than You (which incidentally has a very nice and much pointed-to website here), then yesterday watched Me, You and Everyone We Know, the 2005 feature film she wrote/directed/performs in. The film's not based on the book, but the tone, the broad feel of the world and the kinds of figures in it are pretty close.
Predictably the big switch from one to the other is interior to exterior - characters whose (narrating) heads we'd be totally trapped inside in the stories are more like passers-by in the film; quirky strangers, seen at some distance. The depth of the protagonists' dysfunction, their deep misapprehensions and delusions about the world, the traps they've built for themselves (in language and bad logic) are the space we live in on the page, dense, tangled and interior, where the movie (think alt-lite) is forced to show everything as external action and symptom.
I missed the first-person voices (she's great at them and it's not quite the same when rendered as mono or dialogue), though the only-just-tenable situations, caught in fragile stasis or suspension, are still there. The stories reminded me vaguely of what I was doing with Forced Entertainment in The Voices a few of the monologues from which also made their way into the videos Kent Beeson..., So Small and Erasure. July's stories are lighter touch, more complex dynamic structures though. There's a combination of comedy and darkness to the characters, as though in amongst the urban/suburban absurdity, something terrible, cruel or violent, or something disproportionately sad is always lurking. Even when the stories drift through quirky towards cute or cookie there's enough of this foreboding to make them feel much more substantial. I like the stories a lot - The Swim Team is current favourite.
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