« 2005-11 | HomePage | 2006-01 »
Saturday, 17 December 2005
Appearance of things.
A bleary morning and I have woken late after working the night before. I have slowed things down to a diary speed recently, reducing the events in my day to clearly designated sections, moments of action. Reflection on these precedents is always a naive task. Running low on money and time in this holiday period, so no heating in the flat, the curls of breath rise above the duvets in the morning like last night’s cigarette, last night was late. Coming back from work I just sat a while, twelve hours split into two very different occupations, so I just sat a while.
Set about my new freelance work on Thursday, amidst team-meetings and role-changes – I was anonymous and unknown, had to present myself to the hierarchy as the hierarchy, but I was unsure of my title. Everybody needs a place they said, we all need to know what each other is doing. There’s even a flowchart they said, of jobs. So I was given a desk again and am told to be Projects Co-ordinator. We joked about how people with little or no importance are given long-winded titles to make up for the lack of substance to their position. I am happy here.
The result of two months on a learning curve, I am well thought of and I have things to prove. This is always a good state, appeal to my ambition behind a face of confidence. I am working on an audio-visual festival, ten days of installations, city-projections and concerts at over twenty venues throughout the North-East. The exact program is a matter of secrecy, but suffice to say some of the world’s most exciting performers have been commissioned to perform entirely new works. Ryoji Ikeda and Carsten Nicolai will perform, buildings will be transformed and biochemistry-labs will be turned into art-galleries. And a man will probably compose to an orchestra made entirely of robots.
Yesterday evening was then occupied by my other work, working behind the bar, the tiny busy hot beautiful wooden bar that you have heard me talk of a thousand times. The fires burned and people gathered in ever increasing circles. The warmth of the fire held them together, the night passed quickly and easily, without incident and with frequent laughter.
These motions of new life, progression in ambition and achievement take place in a line of sight. Moving forward once more, whilst remaining fixed, sliding whilst standing still. In three months my direction has entirely altered, an ethic of work and competence guards my days, I am no better, just being given more opportunities. Just trying to do what I do well, no more. And I still don’t need to get a haircut, which is great.
13:33 Posted in Confessional | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
Friday, 16 December 2005
Passage to India.
Calling from the train, background noise a dull static punctuated by great cracks of metal, the mile long carriages jolting against imperfections in the rail, you said it’s me, your voice an imperceptible distance, a foreignness about your tone but only in tone – your voice stayed the same. To the beach for Christmas, through hours of heat and landscape no doubt, to take stock and plot another red-line upon a map, amateur cartographer. And you know they smile, you see them smile, as you hold your guitar and become all of what you always would be, the entertainer, the wit and the music. You are for the people, sir, do it for the people and for you. And only come back if you want to.
23:25 Posted in Confessional | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
Wednesday, 14 December 2005
The fall.
The knot of a scarf, and the walk down the shallow hill into town, upon the Metro into another city. Writing becomes difficult after an absence, too many things to say and not knowing where to start, so hereby an absence explains an absence. Lethargy is self-perpetuating upon the metro into another city.
The library arches upon one wall, struts and glass overbearing towards a sharp bank of grass beginning to freeze over with a cracked top in the late afternoon. Anna was shocked by how early night falls. We were all surprised.
About to give the second of two presentations, I am wasting time. A level of disengagement underpins my days at the moment, in need of a rest, in need of time away. There is nothing to excite me about the same routes into town, trails of streets, the labours of predictable journeys. Even the unexpected meetings with friends and colleagues are stifled by the slows of monotony and routine.
And so society is party to a subjective, the social environment holds no inherent values, only those implanted by the spectator. Notions of identity are masked and merged. Stories of geographical and psychological displacement, designs of transience, the ideal hopes of the next generation lost amongst boredom and a wintry greyness.
This is our context, a forum of social inebriation and over-exposure, traumas of familiarity and fatigue. The only real situation is our own affairs, the dramas of stress and relationship, adopted plots and sequences. The structure of lives is a narration. Circumstance and memory provide an escape however, the combination of the two, the filter of the everyday adding hue and tone to recall. Condition and locations, past and past, owe their peculiarities to our daily events. The link between then and now is unavoidable, the previous remembered only through the present.
Our thoughts as representation then, a meta-language in which these thoughts are a symbol for a deeper set of thoughts, abstract signs and signifiers, labels for apparent distance. The economy of our dialogues, the conversations we parade and live within, the hardwood desk I sit at, the nauseating carpets, the magnolia walls and the intense heat thrown out by row upon row of workstation – these are your memories, these are your guides to uncertainty, the lines sketched upon blank pages.
And so I prepare to go and give my presentation, Subjective Societies in Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Pale View Of Hills, hoping that there might be a little more substance when I sit in that room full of creaking pipes and tired decoration. Time is short and coffee might be my only saviour. Time has been spent elsewhere (although certainly not here) when I should have been buried in books, but once again I shall retain a faith in a passionate reading rather than a detailed one. Academia falls away again.
18:17 Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
Tuesday, 13 December 2005
Soon as.
Just scribble this, for I have been a total laze about keeping you updated with the whys and wherefores of my blip existence. Spent long times with old girlfriend made new, been giving presentations on Poe and physiognomy, Ishiguro and subjectivity, trying to think about how to paint aggressive watercolours, been trawling though music world looking for a festival line-up, watching windows, eating salad and being inexcusably bad at keeping in touch with myself or others.
Did a little word-reading at poetry night. Stature improving all the while, just need to focus on the direction of my sentences now. Concepts are a high choice.
And so, anon.
18:27 Posted in Confessional | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
Monday, 05 December 2005
Scene.
Hide thee, canny Geordie
Hide thyself away,
Hide thee till the tender
Makes for Druid's bay;
If they catch thee Geordie
Who's to win our bread?
Me and little Jacky'd
Better off be dead.
*
Work flowed at the weekend, duties at the pub performed with enjoyment, the dynamism of the team and their respective faces carrying us through till two, three, four and more into Sunday, itself a brief morning cigarette before a fall into the back of a camo-green Citroen camper. The slight incline to the coast, the sound of laughter travelling further in the cold.
Druridge Bay, still and wintry, is a stretch of white sand peppered with fossils, ground bricks and smoothed glass. Traces of black sand lie just beneath the surface, only exposed by a dragged stick or foot. Strips of high sand dunes fall away onto the beach and rise up out of its turns and complications.
This is where pastel-grass whips at the air, clutches of papercut foliage and tears of gorse gather in the recesses upon the peaks. Two kidney-shaped lakes, quarries dug and erased, mimic the parabola of the coast and above them fluid clouds of starlings drift and ebb above the water’s surface.
We rose and fell like undulations, pebbled and laden with finds, the crook of burnt seawood held between us. No fires here, just sitting awhile, a tumble down a hill and flat-out at the transition, the cropped waves pouring in at perpendiculars, edging towards our soles.
Seven and hungry we were, a clandestine picnic appeared, revealed as we crossed the bridge over the inlet, our racing sticks halted by a bank of golden sand. A red balloon was found twined in a cluster of sticks and we chased it, breathless, along tiny shimmering paths until the first could not see the last and so we pitched down into the fields, plotting our courses around the barbed wire and groups of sleeping cows.
The wind rose and we found the path, tiers of black gravel hopping down to the lake’s edge before skipping in an arc into the car-park where van and vehicle waited impatiently for us.
Curfews had been established in response to the growing dark of winter, and rumours bustling among locals of this as a cruising area meant four o’clock was enforced by a gruff man in a coat. We were forty-five minutes late and were interrogated as to whether our leisurely preference was avian or homosexual.
Neither, we said, we just forgot the time.
12:45 Posted in Confessional | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
Sunday, 04 December 2005
Later in the day.
Anna is my obdurate absence, refusing to just be gone, she is the beautiful alarm, the curved memo sitting at the end of my bed at dawn. Four more days till her return, the dates boast. Days are nameless now, they are t-minuses, countdown obstructions to a moment outside of predilection or memory. Past experience designs future action, but my previous experiences went wrong long ago. No memory means no future means the love of a blank page.
I recall the spine, the eyelashes, the wrist, the laughter inside and out and I wait, on the edge of my hours, ever so quietly in case I change something by mistake.
Life imitating art: next academic outburst based upon Ishiguro, absence and the city.
22:55 Posted in Confessional | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
Saturday, 03 December 2005
Words worth.
Interrupted broadband access has made online access sporadic and uninteresting; hence a distance comes between me and the burning lifeboat. I have been writing though, in secret, that is to say invisible to public domain.
Relaying events must be my priority, and all are founded here with a mind full of poetry. Exploding Alphabets is next week, the last of the year, and it requires my attention. Previous outings have been concerned with event-management rather than craft – this must change.
Words and atmosphere are conjoined, the creation of one is conducive to another and so this piece is marked as an impetus, a catalyst, a reference to deeds and sentences to come.
10:10 Posted in Promotional | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this