Scientists are saying that the future is going to be far more futuristic than they originally predicted.

So says Sarah Michelle Gellar as porn star Krysta Now in Richard (Donnie Darko) Kelly’s new film Southland Tales. I like the world – absurdist sci-fi political conspiracy thriller meets California post-War-in-Iraq soap by way of Philip K. Dick, MTV’s The Grind and David Lynch – with some part of the styling done by Mike Kelly perhaps, and the whole thing hung on (or slung over) a preposterous rickety, comic book mash-up in place of a narrative. Plus there’s Justin Timberlake with a scarred face injecting himself in the neck with some weird drug (called Liquid Karma) that the US Military are supposedly testing on troops out in Syria, where the war in the Middle East has spread (this is all taking place in 2008, after the nuclear attacks in Texas, you understand) and later Timberlake off-his head lip-synching his way through the Killer's All These Things That I've Done in an amusement arcade, pouring Budweiser all over himself. What happened in Fallujah was… a mistake, he says. Good job some scientists have discovered a rift in space-time then. What did we do when we discovered the rift in space time? says one of them, pretty much rhetorically, to a puzzled Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, the former WWF wrestler, who here plays an amnesiac action-hero named Boxer Santaros. He does good puzzled-acting and looks at the scientist who spells things out nice and clearly; What did we do when we discovered the rift in space time? We sent monkeys through it. Very funny.

Kelly apparently had to chop the film down and add additional explicatory voiceover (as if explanation ever helped anything) after the previews last year at Cannes resulted in walkouts and boo-ing. Shame really cos even though its fun, clunky and weird, top-knotch transcendental quantum nonsense, enjoyably baffling and transparently stupid, what it really needs is to be wilder than it is. I could have done with a version that went further down the road the movie sets forth in – the much less travelled road - less explanation, less road-map and more hard-to-follow would be good. Or just plain crazier, more chaotic, careless or libidinously creative.

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The replica Rolex watches I am being offered in spam these days are 100% real to the eye. How good is that?

I have a new story here at 1001 Nights Cast , written yesterday from the prompt paying for a bullet. Had fun with that. Many things came to mind but very content with the direction it took. I want to do more with the idea of spatializing time.

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SoMe reasons to be in a bad Mood: (a) it is raining in New York (b) the M on My keyboard is fucked which Means that every single M I type has to be pressed with extra deliberation otherwise it refuses to appear, bringing a very unhelpful eMphasis and general self-consciousness to the whole writing thing today. Cleared endless aMounts of huMan hair, skin, dust and other unidentifiable stuff froM out under M, J, K, L, N and , on the keyboard but still no joy. M's are hard right now.

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Tony White wrote me about a test-publication of six mini-ebooks he's done featuring excerpts from his fiction-in-progress working-titled Balkanising Bloomsbury. The ebooks arise from his recent residency with Proboscis, exploring the potential of their new Diffusion ebook generator.

These stories are great - I wrote about one of them here a while back - and were created by cutting up, remixing and re-narrativising fragments from different sources including E.M. Forster and the Milosevic trial. Some of these stories have appeared elsewhere already - the first of them Gobbledegook was written for the Croatian Nights anthology (Serpent's Tail, 2005), whilst others, like Hyde Park, were done for 1001 Nights Cast. This is the first time though that they're all gathered in one virtual place, along with notes from Tony on the writing process.

Assembling the ebooks can be a slightly fiddly job in my experience (I downloaded their series on Species of Space, way way back) but James at Booktwo has posted a nice video demo here which helps with the origami.

Gobbledegook is here.  Hyde Park is here. Do You Hear That? is here, and Bottle Orchestra is here . Others can be navigated to on the Diffusion site, at which the first version of the Bibliography is here.

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Tony also flagged that the John Stezaker Masks collages (one of which is above) will be at The approach W1, 74 Mortimer Street, Fitzrovia, London W1W 7RZ, 22 November - 19 January. These are amazing pieces, I wrote briefly about Stezaker here. Gallery is open: Tuesday-Saturday: 11-6pm or by appointment. I'd be happy with any of these as an Xmas gift if people want to club together.

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M John Harrison started a nice discussion about the colour of Space Travel, following a Google search that led some poor soul to his site 'what is the colour of the space travel?'. Lots of answers in the comments to the entry here. Next week - what is the taste of time travel?

At the start of The Wooster Group's Hamlet: Scott Shepherd comes alone to the stage, calling for the projection of the tape, and starting on the dialogue, Act One, Scene One, with the first appearance of the ghost. All very low key, him sitting. The volume low.

Stay! speak, speak!

He's alone aside from the screens, the usual functional-but-techy looking scenery, and the projection of the film. It's some Richard Burton Hamlet film, from a 1964 Broadway production directed by Gielgud which was recorded in live performance then shown for only two days in 2000 cinemas across the US. The film was meant to be destroyed after this simultaneous 'screening-event' but Burton kept one copy and this - found in an attic after his death - has since been widely distributed. It's this film - an unauthorized remnant of a single live action - which will ghost the whole of the night these 43 years later, as back-projection and as an immaterial imperative from the past that - like Hamlet's dead father - endlessly lays down its demands on the bodies and the materiality of the present. Demand to do something. To vengeance. To action. Demand to move things onwards. A demand to both animate and dispel the past, in fact, by action in the present. A bringing forth, and, at the same time, an exorcism.

Speak. Speak. I charge thee, speak!

says Shepherd, demanding. The tape - imperfect, flickering, pixelating, jumping. He wants the past to speak. To speak to him. To speak through him to us. It's a tough call. On the bare stage of the beginning of the piece it's almost a joke, a farcical demand, but its a joke that over a stubborn two and a half hours becomes sonic/video-mixing poetry, gets somewhat mired in its observance of theatrical-narrative, and at times gets to be a tangible theatrical achievement.

Speak. Speak. The tape is manipulated, figures are erased, partly erased, reduced to hands, eyes or fighting swords. Figures are flicked in and out of existence, figures flicker on and off, in an out of static storms that are at times reminiscent of Bill Morrison's Decasia: The State of Decay. Speak. Speak. He wants (they want, in the broader sense) to make the shell of the past re-animate, to articulate it into the present. A triple layering - a message layered over as it passes through time, from Shakespeare, to Gielgud/Burton, to the Wooster Group, with a few hundred thousand others in between. Maybe that's what theatre (that theatre especially) is always (the animation of what was, through practice, into the present), and at the struggling heart of the Woosters' Hamlet it's the layered archaeology of this transaction (tyrannous and wonderful, empowering and not infrequently crippling) that is made visible at all times. Becomes material. A kind of technologically mediated, bodily, suddenly tangible Chinese-whispers. A virtuoso ventriloquism/dance, and a clumsy fight, with the past.

And then, today, I read this fragment from M John Harrison's review of Stephen Venables' book Higher Than the Eagle Soars, about being the first Briton to climb Everest without oxygen:

To Venables climbing is "a game where history is everything". The real fascination of the Eiger North Wall, for instance, "is the accumulated sediment of human myth deposited on its ledges, ramps and infamous ice fields". He's quite contemptuous of the proclamation he heard at the 2005 Mont Blanc Bicentennial celebrations: "La montagne est un lieu où on se trouve face à face avec La Verité". Far too French. You don't climb on truth, you climb on the shoulders of giants, inside the culture - or conspiracy - of climbing.

The first sound to hit you is loud playground noise, the uninhibited racket of kids en masse. It is every bit as evocative as that old madeleine was for Proust.

Then come the kids, 16 of them aged 8-14, all shapes and sizes. They line up along the front of a school gymnasium. Silent. Calm. Disciplined. Until, that is, they open their mouths for a metronome-precise litany that lays bare how adults format children. For better, for worse. Tenderness, anxiety, intrusiveness, domination, abuse. Education, education, education. The badness of our jokes. 

The Financial Times reviews That Night Follows Day, from the recent Paris performances, here.

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My friend A. meanwhile wrote me these notes in email about the piece, after seeing it in Hamburg.

...this mixture of blankness of the kids as chorus, "channeling" the text, and at the same time being very much individuals, presenting their personalities. the flood of text. the totality of the border (or the mirror) -- this is our world (hidden), and this is yours (exposed) (or the way you try to shape our world). and no bridge, not the smallest window between stage and auditorium. a very special, very solid kind of fourth wall, rarely experienced in theatre in that way. as it wasn't a fourth wall of the stage (fiction versus reality), but of those two (real) worlds.