A butterfly is loose on the stage during the second performance of That Night Follows Day in Gotenburg. The kids are all speaking in unison, just as they usually do, their eyes are steadily working the audience and they are making their way through the text and it all feels very present, very strong. And then there's this extra layer, beautiful and distracting in equal parts - the butterfly, moving here and there, with this constant, unfolding micro-narrative of where will it go and what will it do. The kids say afterwards that as they watch the audience they see them move their heads in strange choreographed unison movements, each one trying  to track/watch/follow the butterfly's path about and around the stage. And from time to time the butterfly comes to rest - on Viktor's shirt for example, or on Taja's shoe, or on Yen's shoulder or on Lina's arm where it stays for the longest time, so perfectly still and she so focused on what she is saying that and I'm not even sure if she has noticed it or not. The butterly seems to like green colours and he certainly loves the bright light of the stage. He is not the performance, but from time to time he really is the performance. I keep waiting for his story to resolve somehow. Will one of the performers panic or react when he too gets near them, or freak out when they notice that he has landed on their skin? Will one of them crush the butterfly or kill it with the swipe of a hand? or catch it? But nothing like that happens. The performance is taking place. The butterfly goes around, red and black colours, beating wings. He visits various people. He lands on one of the white lines that mark the gymnasium style floor. Then later I don't see him anymore. There's no end to the story.

Afterwards Keng Sen says that in China the arrival of the butterfly (or a moth) means there is a spirt in the room, a visitor from another realm. At a funeral especially it means that the deceased person is back - taking a look at what's going on. I guess I don't know who it was there in the theatre three nights ago, taking a look at the show, or at the building, or the audience. I guess the butterfly always seems like he's from another story, another logic, another set of understandings even in out the world in a meadow, a garden or a park. On stage it seems doubly so. Also, as I think about it now the butterfly is all about gaze, about gaze in transit - about shifts of attention and  trajectory - fluttering from place to place, landing, staying setting off again. Strangely circuitous and arbitrary but always, in fact, going somewhere, searching, looking at, or for something. I loved the way that in Gotenburg he slipped out of my story.

Writing now though I'm suddenly thinking of the end of Herzog's documentary/memorial to his friend, sometime-adversary and life-time collaborator Klaus Kinski, My Best Friend. In the final scene of the film Kinski faces Herzog's camera while a large Amazonian butterfly flies around him - resting from time to time on his face, his shoulder, his outstretched hands. Kinski smiling in the brilliant sunshine, his movements patient, delighted and calm, in love with the moment and with its recording. Herzog on voiceover talking about how, perhaps against his better judgement, this scene and not the tempestuous and confrontational ego monster we've had glimpsed elsewhere in the film, is how he would most like to fix Kinski in his memory. Watching the clip again now (at youTube, here) I had to think about the double layer which was always there in it but never so explicit for me as it is now - Kinski being gentle, careful, kind to the dead spirit in the butterfly, just as Herzog, on the soundtrack is loving, and careful with the spirit of Kinski himself.

Long Richard Price interview in The Guardian on Saturday talking about his new novel Lush Life about the Lower East Side. Loved this quote from the book - a kind of machinic tracking-shot of an intro, in which both the and the characters seem to be scanning the landscape searching for a story, which is followed by a paragraph of his discussing it. The rest of the interview is here.

"Restless, they finally pull out to honeycomb the narrow streets for an hour of endless tight right turns: falafel joint, jazz joint, gyro joint, corner. Schoolyard, crêperie, realtor, corner. Tenement, tenement, tenement museum, corner. Pink Pony, Blind Tiger, muffin boutique, corner. Sex shop, tea shop, synagogue, corner. Boulangerie, bar, hat boutique, corner. Iglesia, gelateria, matzo shop, corner. Bollywood, Buddha, botanica, corner. Leather outlet, leather outlet, leather outlet, corner. Bar, school, bar, school, People's Park, corner. Tyson mural, Celia Cruz mural, Lady Di mural, corner. Bling shop, barbershop, car service, corner. And then finally, on a sooty stretch of Eldridge, something with potential: a weary-faced Fujianese in a thin Members Only windbreaker, cigarette hanging, plastic bags dangling from crooked fingers like full waterbuckets, trudging up the dark, narrow street followed by a limping black kid half a block behind."

I actually don't like to write so I have to work myself up. This was me trying to get something going about these cops riding round the Lower East Side in a bogus taxi. I wanted this quality of them making right turn after right turn for hours on end all night, so I started this incantatory chant of the properties they were passing. And reading it back it seemed to say something about what this place was and what it had once been. Sometimes you have to jump up and down on a motorcycle pedal 10 times. This was the moment when it caught and it became like an overture to the book.

*

Meanwhile I am working on my own rather different intro/tracking shot. This from a draft of a text I'm writing right now for a forthcoming catalgue/book about the National Review of Live Art.  

 It was the National Review of Live Art, in Glasgow but the exact year escapes me, but for sure a time where the entire contingent of the festival – artists, technicians and a good part of the travelling audience - were lodged in some Hotel on the Central Station itself. The row of late nights and blurred mornings we spent there, entangled with artists and otherwise were made stranger still by the fact that the hotels’ other large (probably largest) contingent of guests were the massed and often fully-costumed delegates of a Star Trek convention taking place right there, in the unlikely environs of the ballroom and other conference facilities. The combination of the Star Treks and the contemporary performance crowd made for a vivid meeting ground. Klingons in the elevator. Body pierced artists and a scattering of dancers in the foyer. Uhuru, Spock, some guy from a festival in Krakow and an assortment of Kirks all drunk at the bar. I don’t know what was stranger – the confrontation I had over three days with that years NRLA art, in all of its tremendous beauty, confusion and glory, or the encounter I had in a long empty and dimly lit corridor with a lone guy in a Star Fleet uniform, head down and running zig-zag towards me, a pretty crazed look on his face and a replica Phaser strapped ready and waiting to his thigh. It was 3am more or less. I don’t know what perils he ran from, or who or what exactly he sought as went past me at speed in the corridor, then crashed the door to the service stairs heading down, but the smell and the friction from the faint wind of sweat and lager as he went past will certainly stay with me. I’m thinking worlds passing close to each other, not quite touching. It is years later now. The hotel is gone I guess, or more likely stripped, gutted re-furbed and franchised to fuck. There will be no more barefoot dancers in the elevators, that much is for sure. No more artists asleep in the bar or yelling from those windows, as loud as the trains.

Parents in Starbucks, addressing their noisy kids sternly, with a combination of vagueness and high precision.

Now then - your volume is at 6. We want your volume at 2.... or 4.

*

Graeme brought me a copy of Joe Brainard's book I Remember - a personal list catalogue of statements each beginning with the phrase 'I remember'. Shades of Perec there, who I think did a pretty simillar piece, probably pretty much the same time as the Brainard. Hints of Handke's Self Accusation, and Forced Entertainment's own (much later) Speak Bitterness here too. This ambiguous open-ended confession I liked especially:

I remember learning very early in life the art of putting everything back exactly the way it was.