When x tells me that Barack Obama has moved to Sunderland after a few months playing for Bolton I am not too surprised. He's shown some promise for a young player and clubs like Sunderland are probably always on the lookout for fresh talent. I don't make the mistake of confusing this particular Barack Obama with the president elect of the United States of America, and in any case I'm aware that X has a handful of quite distinct Barack's in operation right now. After all, his up and coming footballer is stored on the same hard drive as his Obama 'lone survivor of a mutant pack searching for answers and his father in the dangerous atomic wastelands of Washinton DC', in Fallout 3. And neither of these two is sensibly confused with his Barack Obama the small time pimp and drug dealer, who recently woke from a trauma-induced coma in a prison hospital in the town of Stilwater, and who following a daring escape has resurrected his gang the 3rd Street Saints, in a quest to reconquer the city and eliminate his rivals who now control the streets. Perhaps most distant and unconnected of all is his further Barack Obama who is busy seeking portals, fleeing assassins and from time to time slaying goblins and dragons left right and centre in Oblivion. Seems like the president elect Obama and his numerous alter egos have a lot of very different battles ahead of them in these next months, in many many different worlds. We'll be following Sunderland in PES 2009 with interest.

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Even stranger when you think the real Obama will have this nation to preside over. 

Barbara Campbell wrote about the performance/time entry below, quoting this part:

Or those times in performance where you think for a moment that time has stretched or slowed, or that time was somehow stopped or had been forgotten but that now, in this moment only, it has started again, remembered.

She wrote:

Best thing on Australian television when I was growing up in the 1960s was a children's program called The Magic Boomerang. I'm hoping (cause I wasn't watching out for this as a kid) that the said boomerang was owned by an Aboriginal boy but what I remember well and loved most was that the performance of the world did stop when the boomerang was thrown, spinning seemingly endlessly in the air. And boomerangs being what they are do indeed draw a magical arc in the sky, a parabola where you seem to hold your breath until you see the forces of physics? spirits? take hold and turn that spinning thing around at which point you can exhale. The world would stop for everyone except the hero boy boomerang-thrower who was able to act quickly enough to get the good guys out of danger. Long live the deus ex machina.

Just more romantic remembering.

I wrote:

That's a lovely image. Is all remembering romantic? No, I guess not. But there's something about the fixed-ness of the past that lends itself to that - the past always allows us to fetishise the particularity of what was - in its beauty, force, awfulness or other qualities. I'm not sure that that's romantic - strange the force of things we feel that we witnessed - even if it's just the trope of a children's TV show. these things have such presence in us. psychic landscape and all that.

She wrote:

Isn't it this fetishisation of our memories (a very particular version of the past), childhood ones especially, that tends towards the romantic? But only if we never allow ourselves to challenge those memories. In this case, with the Magic Boomerang, it certainly needs challenging. Since writing to you about that show I've checked the website to find out more. As I half-suspected, the boomerang-throwing hero was not a young Aboriginal boy. From the synopsis: "Tom Thumbleton, a 13-year-old boy who lives with his parents on a sheep farm near the fictitious town of Gunnaganoo, finds a boomerang among some Aboriginal relics his great-great-grandfather left in the attic of their homestead." Such a lot of brutal history barely hinted at in those simple sentences; it makes my stomach churn. The 45 episodes were aired in 1965-66, ie just months before the landmark 1966 referendum that gave Aboriginal Australians full enfranchisement. Before then, they were allowed to fight and die in our wars but had no voting rights nor were counted in any census. And this was the least severe of the injustices.

"strange the force of things we feel that we witnessed" - indeed. And the things witnessed as a child go beyond the psychic - encompassing the somatic, guiding us consciously, unconsciously, subconsciously towards what/who/where/if we will be.

Me:

Can I quote you on the boomerang? I'd love to add that text to the notebook.

She:

Yes but given what I've said above, it would be necessary to include the qualifying background don't you think? I know it rather undercuts the simple beauty of the magic boomerang but nothing is simple where Indigenous politics or history is concerned.

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Also on the time topic Jon Spooner (Unlimited Theatre) shared this link to a site apparently dedicated to documenting stopped clocks across the UK, as part of a campaign/public effort to get them all started again. Something rather English about this that only prompts the counter-fantasy of country with absolutely no functioning clocks at all.

In performance I love the big clock of the now bent double, forced to a limit, cranked up or condensed to hell. I love the strange yet somehow necessary job we seem to have in rooms like these, of getting time itself to drip, pulse, echo, loop, freeze, shimmer, explode.
 
Or those times in performance where you think for a moment that time has stretched or slowed, or that time was somehow stopped or had been forgotten but that now, in this moment only, it has started again, remembered.

Text and the first image from my Peachy Coochy in London, a while back. The first clock from my journey Dusseldorf to London to perform, the others from various stations and elsewhere in the last ten years. Seems like I am collecting these.

Kate wrote:

You would love brussels central station at the moment, it's in this long groaning overhaul which is becoming a comedy. I love spotting the frightening half-measures and in-betweens they construct to keep things tottering upright while they replace the wall/floor that was keeping it there before. It was always dismal down there but now it's shattered too. The latest new addition is a bunch of brand new clocks hanging off wires cause the ceiling hasn't been replaced yet (everything's coming in in the wrong order). Like yours these are half under wraps, taped over. But meanwhile they've turned off the older clocks that are also still hanging, so you look down the platform and there's about 6 clocks in view, some bandaged, others saying wildly different dead times. it's a clock grave down there.

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Meanwhile, in that other world, where time has not stopped, I thought these were pretty gripping.