Arrived in New York with the kids flying first class following a suprise upgrade I will write about tomorrow.
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Missing Mike/M John Harrison out here on the internet following his decision to lower the shutters over at his blog Uncle Zip's Window. Reading Mike there has been such a pleasure and an inspiration. Watching his evolving collection of writing fragments, thoughts on fiction and the process of making it, autobiographical stuff, found fragments etc was one of the things that kicked me into writing here. Mike's going out with some nice stuff here about his central theme of worldbuilding - his persistent championing of the delirious, and essentially linguistic space and possibilities of fiction as opposed to the 'thought-through' and supposed internal coherence of so much science fiction has been great to read.
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I'm liking the images of this work by Joshua Callaghan very much. Also this project by the same artist - a rather small looking collection of 'good news stories' clipped from an L.A. newspaper during the course of 2004 - everything from dog survives two weeks in a pit, to a potential cure for nicotine addiction.
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Arts Council of England has been 'cleaning-house' rather vigorously in its latest funding awards announced a week ago. DCMS/Government gave them standstill plus inflation but ACE warned that this would necessarily be passed directly (or as a matter of course) to their RFOs (regularly funded organisations). In a pretty drastic cull detailed here it looks like over 200 organizations have been given notice that they'll be 'dis-invested' come April 08. (This dis-invested is pretty abysmal ugly euphemism of a word, even in quote marks). In selfish terms Forced Entertainment got what it wanted from the latest round - an inflation linked increase over the next three years - so our own work to redifine the 'distribution of the sensible' is safe for now, but there were plenty of cuts that will undoubtedly cause questions. Organisations slated for 'disinvestment' have until next Feb to appeal, and as the Guardian noted already "petitions will be springing up all over the land". I wrote my first letter of support last weekend already - for Station House Opera - whose maverick work of reinvention at the intersection of theatre, visual arts and architecture has always been valuable to me as perceptual shift, and provocation. Station House's relatively modest grant (for core costs) has been cut to nothing - a move which, if not reversed, may prove terminal for them.
Way busy in work putting in railway sleepers on the upright to hold
a bank up after we cut a track thru a field. A hundred and thirty so
far and a shit loada concrete. Young fella owns the propert, 26 years
of age. Grandad left 25 mill to him. He gets up, smokes a rolly, has a
coffee, plans his games room, clears the ice off his range rover by
remote from his back door, and goes back in. o yeah, then the dog comes
out for a shit next to my pick up. He stayed in for a year when he
first got it and smoked weed. Brains gone a bit now I reckon, nice
enough lad, but fuck me. Been cold here. Fingers like digits of a
monkey at the mo. Smell naught but creosote from sleepers. Chainsaw has
made me deaf and blind from the shit in them. Just moanin bra, just
moanin.
This from Kate:
I have promised myself bed by by 12.30 so I'm on the clock. Things are going well here though it feels like eternal night - we spend the light hours and much more in the studio working.. it must be equinox soon from what I can see through the curtains. The studio is painted all black, with ceiling arches so that some places on stage you hear yourself in echo (discouraging when 'acting'). I am half expecting bats. The group in good spirits.For some reason in the last days I am remembering that trucker [in Now Not Moving at 1001 Nights Cast] often - the one you described scratching his family on a napkin in the middle of the forest. Something about being on the road and really not sure that any other recent life is actually current or existent. And trying to rebuild it in your imagination sort of burns it out, or flattens it into stick figures...
Ha! my father just Skyped from the garden in New Zealand! He held the computer up so I could hear a blackbird singing in sun.
Hugo (see below) also nodded me towards these short youtube clips (here for example and here) promoting Douglas Coupland's new book The Gum Thief. I've been thinking and talking to some people on what to do for my novel The Broken World when it is published by Heinmann next year; these are pretty good though it has to be said that as diverting book-promo Miranda July's site for No One Belongs Here More Than You still takes some beating - as long as you don't mind trashing your refrigerator.
"I may have been born yesterday, sir, but I stayed up all night."
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Power-cut disonnected the lights in the kitchen, while I was alway but its all restored now. Only the digital clock on the cooker remains unstable - like time has been broken somehow. Glimpsed from outside the house in the dark and the cold the kitchen is lit by its hyper manic blinking on and off - seems more random than is plausible. An unheard electrical storm is raging - the electronics are haywire but still the scene proceeds. Sheet lightening in miniature. A room filled with an incoherence of tiny blue flashes.
Yesterday we went to a small puppet theatre in the Jardinde Luxembourg where a version of Little Red Riding Hood was playing. As I sat there I realised that it was not only the same theatre that Truffaut used in 400 Coups but also exactly the same show. The first 4 rows are for children only and the call and response section threw up all those same faces and laughs and confusion that are visible in those clips we borrowed [for video-backdrops in one section of]Instructions For Forgetting.
The benches are the same too. Afterwards we asked the manager - whose father started the theatre in the thirties and made 3 or 4 and those same shows have run ever since...
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