My weekend featuring Blade and glorious surreality.
I owe lots of people emails and comments but my brain is not currently present in this locale so it'll have to wait 'til morning. Art I'm meant to be doing can wait til morning too.
I had a floor picnic with Blade yesterday. There was listening to Syd Barrett and that awful trippy sitting-alone-on-a-bench-with-you Pretty Things song which we've managed to get high to in the past just by listening to it on a loop and letting our neurons get dizzy. Then again we managed to get high on 99% proof chocolate in a cemetery one time, so possibly it's just us.
We also watched Tombstone. It has resulted in a new story that must be written - but thankfully a very rag-tag episodic one where actual plot is unimportant. 52 vignettes, ranging from a paragraph to a couple of pages. One for each card in a deck and each vaguely linked with their tarot counterpart. I think I might call it Arizona Tarot. The first two are here. Heh. Knowing us it'll all end up like a Tom Stoppard play set in a saloon once it gets going.
And yeah, the evening was exactly like that.
“I wonder who that tall drink of water is.”
“There you’ve set your gaze upon the quintessential frontier type,” the man in the velvet frockcoat explained. “Note the lean silhouette. Eyes closed by the sun though sharp as a hawk. He’s got the look of both predator - and prey.”
The actress with the horsey smile and the hennaed hair gave a foxy look a little to the left of camera. “I want one,” she pouted.
Her Byronic travelling companion looked unsurprised. “Happy hunting,” he returned.
The two girls watching the screen both quietly drew in a breath, echoing her sentiment, held it for an instant, and exhaled in twin wistful sighs. They then looked at one another in guilty amusement and laughed.
The slightly shorter of the two who looked like John William Waterhouse’s Lady of Shalott (if she’d given up pointless pining to grow a steel backbone and listen to a lot of rock music), was still smiling as she spoke. “Oh god, both of us slipped off there into our own happy little reverie.”
The other, scruffier and more crooked with a profusion of scars tattooing her arms reached for her whiskey. She was smiling, but there was a bruised look hiding in her eyes. “Tell me about it.” She drank briskly. “Fifteen years is a bloody long time to be chasing a ghost,” she muttered.
The first girl frowned. “You haven’t been doing necromancy that long.”
“No... no. Fifteen years in love with a ghost. Three years talking to him. One year chasing.” She was suddenly disgusted with herself. “Fuck. I’m pathetic. I feel like I’m moping around, not doing anything... proactive.”
Her companion snorted. “Darling, you raised him from the dead. How much more proactive do you want?”
The other grinned. “Yeah, all right. I just... I dunno. I’m out of ideas.”
Waterhouse's Muse flicked her long hair back from her shoulders in a habitual gesture of annoyance. “Seems obvious to me. We should just go there - where else does one find Raylan Givens and Doc Holliday?” She warmed to her theme. “We could be a couple of girl gunslingers - we’d be fucking legends!”
The witchy-one started to smile again, a slow-burning look of interest and wonder. “It’ll be easier than going to Russia at any rate,” she posited. “What? No, really, it is. Think about all that rubbish Sian has to go through with the visas and the signatures and the invites and permits each time. And she’s always hoping we’ll get there...”
“Ha! Sold!”
“Not to mention the fur boots and the...”
The first was intent upon her target which was far more Tuscan than Tomsk. “We need names - quirks too, everybody who was anybody had them.” A pause. “I always thought Sobriety was a lovely name...”
She nodded approval, admiring it and wishing inspiration had been so swift to visit her. “Needs another bit to balance it.” She squinted at syllables in her head. “Kincaid?”
“Perfect.” The Muse preened. “I feel five times sexier already!”
“What about quirks then?”
“Well, I don’t drink, obviously, but that’s not really the stuff upon which myths are based.”
“What d’you want to be good at?” she prompted, refilling her own glass since she shared no such virtue.
“Everything,” the Muse said airily. “We’re both good at everything. We’re gonna be Legends.”
“Apart from that.”
“Oh. Um...”
“You’re good at poi so you’ll probably be pretty flash at gun twirling,” the Witch suggested.
She was unsatisfied. “Yeah, I can figure skate too - although I don’t imagine there’s much ice in Arizona.”
“No. Might come in handy, if there was a slick floor and you were wearing new boots.”
“Shuttup,” the Muse ordered. “What are you good at?”
She chewed her lip. Writing stupid stories, drawing pictures, wasting time, being depressed and doing necromancy. No, can’t really see how any of those would be much use...
Sensing her friend’s despondency she answered her own question. “Well you’re still a witch, aren’t you? You can do that. Tarot and cursing, drumming up luck and hexing cards.” A sudden thought and her mind changed track. “Oh god, we’re gonna have to take lessons. Dialect coaching and contemporary slang for a start,” she mused, wrinkling her nose at the thought of two West-London voices out West.
“Firearms practice,” the other added.
“The right outfits - and new boots, look at theses, for fucks sake, I look like a bag lady.” Shalott pulled at a seem of her all-too-modern cowgirl boots, letting them gape between upper and sole.
“Trousers or dress?” the Witch asked.
There were a pause as they both considered.
“As much as I like corsets and as entirely fuckably-fine as she is in that dress...” she nodded to the screen once more where a different actress with a husky voice was slinking about in a jet-beaded and silk-bustled evening gown. “Gunbelts just wouldn’t go and I can’t imagine coping with that sort of bloody skirt on a horse...” Her face paled in horror. “Oh fuck. Horses! I think they scare the crap out of me - what am I gonna do?”
The Witch shook her head. “Nah, it’s like learning to drive. You need a patient teacher who knows exactly what they’re doing, a good horse that’s neither dumb nor psychotic, and a week somewhere quiet to practice.”
Put like that it seemed a lot less intimidating. “All right. Horse riding lessons then.” Her eyes unfocussed slightly. “We’re having hats, yeah?” she asked, with the suggestion that if not headgear of the Stetson variety then death and violence were the only alternative. “Big hats,” she added still in that strangely solid voice like the threat of a two by four to the back of the head.
“Yeah,” the other agreed, surprised it had even needed asking.
=======
On screen a gunfight was in full fury, but they had both long since ceased to pay attention.
“I got you now, you son of a bitch.”
“You’re a daisy if you do!”
Bang!
“Where out West though?”
Waterhouse's Muse was pragmatic. “Dunno, kinda depends on the year, doesn’t it? Eighteen seventy something and the railroad stopped cold at Dallas. What year are we aiming for?”
Her friend was still tackling the question of geography, trawling her memory for any frontier town or mining camp that boomed into a bustling dusty metropolis in miniature. “Prescott,” she said. “Deadwood. Denver. Fort Griffin. Dodge. Globe. Tombstone.”
“Hell yes.”
“But not Leadville,”the Witch added, her words suddenly flat with hate. “I fucking loathe Leadville.” She cast a look at her friend and offered hasty crumbs of explanation. “Every time Holliday went there something fucking awful happened to him - the last time it pretty much killed him.”
“So let’s go to Leadville and fetch him before it does,” she said easily.
Her expression changed, unhappiness drowned in epiphany in an instant, her eyes wide and glassy with the brilliance of it. “I could write out dates, a list of places he was known to be and when, and I could stop it all before it got to that bloody hotel in Glenwood.”
The other girl smiled. “We could. We could swoop into town, you could haul him out while I rustle up a horse.”
“He’d probably have his own horse y’know,” the Witch pointed out.
“Alright, I’ll steal his horse - then he’d have to come with us.” The smile had become a grin, an expression that widened and dissolved into madcap giggles from them both as they revelled in the delicious insanity of the idea.
“I need to call Maz,” the Muse announced, fishing for her phone. “Ask if we can use his time machine.”
“Maz has a time machine?” She was uncertain if it was a joke, it was said with such matter-of-fact conviction.
“Yeah. He worked out this formula back in Cambridge when we were doing finals. All based on pie.”
The Witch frowned. “Pi three point one four one five nine whatever the fuck or pie as in pastry?”
“Oh both. It worked, I was looping hours left right and centre. Don’t think it’s ever done anything so big before though. Might need recalibrating.” She had been typing on her phone as she spoke. “There.” The phone made a pleased chiming sound as if it expected a pat on the head. “’Can we borrow your time machine? We need to go to the wild west as we worked out it’s easier than Russia.’ Let’s see what he says to that.”
I had a floor picnic with Blade yesterday. There was listening to Syd Barrett and that awful trippy sitting-alone-on-a-bench-with-you Pretty Things song which we've managed to get high to in the past just by listening to it on a loop and letting our neurons get dizzy. Then again we managed to get high on 99% proof chocolate in a cemetery one time, so possibly it's just us.
We also watched Tombstone. It has resulted in a new story that must be written - but thankfully a very rag-tag episodic one where actual plot is unimportant. 52 vignettes, ranging from a paragraph to a couple of pages. One for each card in a deck and each vaguely linked with their tarot counterpart. I think I might call it Arizona Tarot. The first two are here. Heh. Knowing us it'll all end up like a Tom Stoppard play set in a saloon once it gets going.
And yeah, the evening was exactly like that.
“I wonder who that tall drink of water is.”
“There you’ve set your gaze upon the quintessential frontier type,” the man in the velvet frockcoat explained. “Note the lean silhouette. Eyes closed by the sun though sharp as a hawk. He’s got the look of both predator - and prey.”
The actress with the horsey smile and the hennaed hair gave a foxy look a little to the left of camera. “I want one,” she pouted.
Her Byronic travelling companion looked unsurprised. “Happy hunting,” he returned.
The two girls watching the screen both quietly drew in a breath, echoing her sentiment, held it for an instant, and exhaled in twin wistful sighs. They then looked at one another in guilty amusement and laughed.
The slightly shorter of the two who looked like John William Waterhouse’s Lady of Shalott (if she’d given up pointless pining to grow a steel backbone and listen to a lot of rock music), was still smiling as she spoke. “Oh god, both of us slipped off there into our own happy little reverie.”
The other, scruffier and more crooked with a profusion of scars tattooing her arms reached for her whiskey. She was smiling, but there was a bruised look hiding in her eyes. “Tell me about it.” She drank briskly. “Fifteen years is a bloody long time to be chasing a ghost,” she muttered.
The first girl frowned. “You haven’t been doing necromancy that long.”
“No... no. Fifteen years in love with a ghost. Three years talking to him. One year chasing.” She was suddenly disgusted with herself. “Fuck. I’m pathetic. I feel like I’m moping around, not doing anything... proactive.”
Her companion snorted. “Darling, you raised him from the dead. How much more proactive do you want?”
The other grinned. “Yeah, all right. I just... I dunno. I’m out of ideas.”
Waterhouse's Muse flicked her long hair back from her shoulders in a habitual gesture of annoyance. “Seems obvious to me. We should just go there - where else does one find Raylan Givens and Doc Holliday?” She warmed to her theme. “We could be a couple of girl gunslingers - we’d be fucking legends!”
The witchy-one started to smile again, a slow-burning look of interest and wonder. “It’ll be easier than going to Russia at any rate,” she posited. “What? No, really, it is. Think about all that rubbish Sian has to go through with the visas and the signatures and the invites and permits each time. And she’s always hoping we’ll get there...”
“Ha! Sold!”
“Not to mention the fur boots and the...”
The first was intent upon her target which was far more Tuscan than Tomsk. “We need names - quirks too, everybody who was anybody had them.” A pause. “I always thought Sobriety was a lovely name...”
She nodded approval, admiring it and wishing inspiration had been so swift to visit her. “Needs another bit to balance it.” She squinted at syllables in her head. “Kincaid?”
“Perfect.” The Muse preened. “I feel five times sexier already!”
“What about quirks then?”
“Well, I don’t drink, obviously, but that’s not really the stuff upon which myths are based.”
“What d’you want to be good at?” she prompted, refilling her own glass since she shared no such virtue.
“Everything,” the Muse said airily. “We’re both good at everything. We’re gonna be Legends.”
“Apart from that.”
“Oh. Um...”
“You’re good at poi so you’ll probably be pretty flash at gun twirling,” the Witch suggested.
She was unsatisfied. “Yeah, I can figure skate too - although I don’t imagine there’s much ice in Arizona.”
“No. Might come in handy, if there was a slick floor and you were wearing new boots.”
“Shuttup,” the Muse ordered. “What are you good at?”
She chewed her lip. Writing stupid stories, drawing pictures, wasting time, being depressed and doing necromancy. No, can’t really see how any of those would be much use...
Sensing her friend’s despondency she answered her own question. “Well you’re still a witch, aren’t you? You can do that. Tarot and cursing, drumming up luck and hexing cards.” A sudden thought and her mind changed track. “Oh god, we’re gonna have to take lessons. Dialect coaching and contemporary slang for a start,” she mused, wrinkling her nose at the thought of two West-London voices out West.
“Firearms practice,” the other added.
“The right outfits - and new boots, look at theses, for fucks sake, I look like a bag lady.” Shalott pulled at a seem of her all-too-modern cowgirl boots, letting them gape between upper and sole.
“Trousers or dress?” the Witch asked.
There were a pause as they both considered.
“As much as I like corsets and as entirely fuckably-fine as she is in that dress...” she nodded to the screen once more where a different actress with a husky voice was slinking about in a jet-beaded and silk-bustled evening gown. “Gunbelts just wouldn’t go and I can’t imagine coping with that sort of bloody skirt on a horse...” Her face paled in horror. “Oh fuck. Horses! I think they scare the crap out of me - what am I gonna do?”
The Witch shook her head. “Nah, it’s like learning to drive. You need a patient teacher who knows exactly what they’re doing, a good horse that’s neither dumb nor psychotic, and a week somewhere quiet to practice.”
Put like that it seemed a lot less intimidating. “All right. Horse riding lessons then.” Her eyes unfocussed slightly. “We’re having hats, yeah?” she asked, with the suggestion that if not headgear of the Stetson variety then death and violence were the only alternative. “Big hats,” she added still in that strangely solid voice like the threat of a two by four to the back of the head.
“Yeah,” the other agreed, surprised it had even needed asking.
=======
On screen a gunfight was in full fury, but they had both long since ceased to pay attention.
“I got you now, you son of a bitch.”
“You’re a daisy if you do!”
Bang!
“Where out West though?”
Waterhouse's Muse was pragmatic. “Dunno, kinda depends on the year, doesn’t it? Eighteen seventy something and the railroad stopped cold at Dallas. What year are we aiming for?”
Her friend was still tackling the question of geography, trawling her memory for any frontier town or mining camp that boomed into a bustling dusty metropolis in miniature. “Prescott,” she said. “Deadwood. Denver. Fort Griffin. Dodge. Globe. Tombstone.”
“Hell yes.”
“But not Leadville,”the Witch added, her words suddenly flat with hate. “I fucking loathe Leadville.” She cast a look at her friend and offered hasty crumbs of explanation. “Every time Holliday went there something fucking awful happened to him - the last time it pretty much killed him.”
“So let’s go to Leadville and fetch him before it does,” she said easily.
Her expression changed, unhappiness drowned in epiphany in an instant, her eyes wide and glassy with the brilliance of it. “I could write out dates, a list of places he was known to be and when, and I could stop it all before it got to that bloody hotel in Glenwood.”
The other girl smiled. “We could. We could swoop into town, you could haul him out while I rustle up a horse.”
“He’d probably have his own horse y’know,” the Witch pointed out.
“Alright, I’ll steal his horse - then he’d have to come with us.” The smile had become a grin, an expression that widened and dissolved into madcap giggles from them both as they revelled in the delicious insanity of the idea.
“I need to call Maz,” the Muse announced, fishing for her phone. “Ask if we can use his time machine.”
“Maz has a time machine?” She was uncertain if it was a joke, it was said with such matter-of-fact conviction.
“Yeah. He worked out this formula back in Cambridge when we were doing finals. All based on pie.”
The Witch frowned. “Pi three point one four one five nine whatever the fuck or pie as in pastry?”
“Oh both. It worked, I was looping hours left right and centre. Don’t think it’s ever done anything so big before though. Might need recalibrating.” She had been typing on her phone as she spoke. “There.” The phone made a pleased chiming sound as if it expected a pat on the head. “’Can we borrow your time machine? We need to go to the wild west as we worked out it’s easier than Russia.’ Let’s see what he says to that.”