Diary - Y r aid like a palindrome:
this was compiled for a friend's blog - but (typical me) didn't fit the brief. So.... here it is instead (and covering some familiar ground i'm afraid) seven days in the week of wytch.
Seven:
Stop Dave stop…
Windows…
My mind is going - stop Dave…
Windows…
Bloody windows.
Quite when I became one of those absentminded harassed looking types who have to lock, re-open, relock, re-open and check and counter check the situation of doors, possessions, windows, I don’t rightly know (your honour).
It seems to be a work thing. I swear I’m never that befuddled at home… maybe I have responsibility issues. Damn, I was hoping the power (over the building at least) would go to my head (see below). But no, I am obviously a child. (wails).
Hey ho, I’m sure my darting lurching scarecrow of a figure will be amusing some random observers anyway - and I like to spread a little happiness, a little mirth.
Bumped into John. He’s a sharp dressed man for sure. Reminded me about the diary/blog. Gulp!!!
…
Six:
Rocketman
extra text yer read all about it (George)
One of the kids I’m teaching has been having some success with a music Zine we cooked up, Spooky on the Moon; they texted me today with news that (on the strength of the Zine) they’ve just been asked to submit material to a professional magazine. High Five.
Kid’s into magic too - I’m hoping for some sort of musical crossover, and I’m force feeding them a diet of Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth. Here’s hoping.
I miss the urgh, I miss my wife:
My internet betroved has been sojourning in Berlin like the Bohemian I hope she is. Yesterday I heard about the tragedy at the German Love Parade music festival - 19 dead and many more injured in a crush inside some tunnel. Early reports said Berlin. I had to go some to get a message through since I have such a bad internet connection (see below). In the end I got someone else to relay the email for me. Are you alive? Let me know.
So, today; relief, she’s fine and back in the USA and suddenly the internet, cyberspace, seems shiny again, friendly and singing. (Join in Brothers and Sisters!)
The immediacy of the net can be unsettling though. Last year many of my American friends were in the Hurricane zone and posting text or voice messages. I experienced both heightened anxiety and relief as a result.
…………
Five:
If I was a TV show…
(something I am occasionally accused of) then I would say I am on hiatus; that dread no-space, no-time hintergap before cancellation or renewal (yes, life is a Carousel old chum).
This is the holidays. Even the government gets one, thank the powers! If I have to listen to the Cohabitation of the Witless blather on anymore about The Right Way - I mean The Great Society - I mean The Grateful Dead - I mean The Big Breakfast sorry The Big Society (gosh aint my memory just awful?) I shall go mad.
What’s that you say?
Well you might think that, I couldn’t possibly comment.
Anyway, yes, it’s a long break and not just from work in the real world, which actually I still am doing, a bit, but from my adventures in cyberspace.
I am an online journal junkie it’s true - but I’m taking the cure or at least cold turkey, kicking, trying anyway. The reason for this is because the community network I was part of has faded and gone. This is a real shame since it was a genuine attempt to find an alternative from the main media/telecommunication outlets, in other words, (koff!) from The Man.
Now I have to scrabble about with my dongle - in a valley with virtually no signal reception. Even the word, ‘dongle’, seems a little undignified.
STRING THEORY: On the other hand, I was getting pretty fried trying to come up with regular content. It’s like being a whole magazine editorial team - and I’m hardly a significant figure, hardly a writer or whatever, just someone who scribbles and scurries, a bit here a bit there… if dreeams were rats then my writing would the trap-baiting cheese.
Mainly I like reading what other people do and now - (gah! sobs) I can only access the net when the moon is full and the wind is favourable.
The highest price in some ways is in having to give up all my Russian Cyrillic friends since I can’t get a firm hold on the translation sites I love playing with. I can’t speak or write Russian (or Ukrainian etc) but I can gaze at the graceful Cyrillic lettering for hours, beautiful in the same manner as Japanese calligraphy.
And of course I have a 70s child’s inbuilt nostalgia for rust bucket space programmes, airplanes with ears, and the eternal delight of discovering connections to Siberia. This has been augmented by my adult discovery and delight in Soviet film and Television from Solaris to Sherlock Holmes (as readers of my lj will be well aware!). Nor is my engagement simply passive; the sheer literality of online translation (which isn’t actually translation, point of fact, it is transliteration - a significant difference) gives rise to some amazing and creativity jogging fragments. An example, a good online friend of mine from the Ukraine once worked in a filtration plant and wore a gas mask. Babblefish (or whatever) delivered this as “in the fields of filtration I carried an anti-gas box”. Poetry! I’m not kidding. I got a story out of that, yessir thank you and goodnight!
…………
Four:
Snakes and ladders…
Time can be arbitrary and control of time is ultimate power, or so said William S. Burroughs, hence calendars, Mayan priests yadda yadda. Yes, power (evil laugh) perhaps it has gone to my head after all. Example: In the shop at the weekend I heard two customers as they came up to the door.
Wife; It won’t take long.
Husband; Dunno why you want to drag me round all these bloody places, every time I come here it’s shut!
(they open the door and come in.)
Me; (blandly) I’m sorry we’re just closing.
Husband; WHAT?!!!!
At which point I cracked up - as did, luckily for me, the wife. My co-worker was naturally horrified and I hastened to reassure them. “I bet that’s the Mayor!”
I could see definite giant snake potential…
……
Three:
Talking with the Psychologists…
Today I had two synchronous conversations; one with an academic and one with a student.
I find it interesting that the British military have now followed their US counterparts in concluding that CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) does not work. They are looking instead for new approaches especially in the therapeutic treatment of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
I found being a tutor and support worker on projects involving service users in Art, Dance and Drama therapy to be very rewarding - but always wondered just how sustainable are such treatments in the long term, for both individual and organisational provider.
I’m also intrigued by the work of Jabrowsky and his concept of ‘positive disintegration’. Jabrowsky (popular in Europe and the Eastern Bloc, virtually unknown and rarely translated here, alas) considers breakdown a symptom of sensitivity and such sensitive is a marker for the type of person we normally label as ‘gifted’. Possibly his theories underlie the development of Russian ‘Hedgehog’ schools - I need to know more, but I also wonder whether such an idea, that breakdown can be embraced rather then buried or removed or blocked, is applicable to those suffering the after affects of severe trauma.
Patients would have to find ways of recognising the new person they have become from the ashes of the old - and that the very act of breakdown (or flashback, or whatever) indicates how well equipped such individuals actually are. Recognition, rebuilding and forward growth would (I imagine) require a range of treatments and methods of support, individually tailored to a large extent. Indeed a modular academy environment might work well - hmm, I’m no psychiatrist so maybe that’s just Dixie I’m whistling.
To be sentimental for a moment though, I do wonder at the eventual fate of CBT - where will it go once it’s considered passé? I suppose it will join the messy shelving in that great Borges style library of the unreal. That sprawling archive containing all those once vivid cultural preoccupations now abandoned. On my level that means The Bermuda Triangle, Stick Insects and the other diversions that never really made it past 1980 but which, in their time, had provided so much delight, fascination and innocent silliness. More recent additions (and you can compile your own list) might be Chaos Theory (just watch Jurassic Park if you don’t believe me) and the Millennium Bug. I’ve learned to have affection for all these great white elephants. Yeah ok, I say that as a mantra since I know full well that on the blessed day that IQ tests and Psychometric Job Applications are boxed away I shall be dancing with glee and gratitude. So it goes.
What’s that you say? You think Time Travel, Parallel Universes, Quantum Mechanics, and Artificial Intelligence are going in? Shutttup shuttup shuttup! La la la, I’m not listening!
…..
Two:
… Watching the Detectives
Or at least the special features on my Singing Detective dvd; Gina Bellman, whose career seems to have had the mixed fortunes of the extremely beautiful; Think of Blackeyes and its somnolently shifting tableaux, a thousand Roxy Music album covers slowly coming to life, a queasy feeling. She was also the still centre at the heart of Steven Moffat’s Jekyll serial - even as the narrative flailed wildly about her and disintegrated.
“They’re all me,” Potter supposedly said of his characters - and the echoes and reflections are striking. I’m struck by them new and fresh like light in ripples. Take the Mother in The Singing Detective, the woman whose sexual misadventure is so sorrowfully observed by her son. In Karaoke the same actress (Alison Steadman) once again plays a mother but this time a shambling and wretched Oedipus of a figure gently supported by her daughter, Saffron Burrows, as an unwitting Antigone. In Potter, Oedipus has blackeyes to see with.
Who was Blackeyes?? Potter was well known for his creative fixation with dark haired, dark eyed female characters, an apparent biographical taunt that has sent many a biographer hunting for clues and coming up with a lot of possibilities (not least from Potter himself). But I’m not convinced.
Potter was a literary man (and one who described a play of his as ‘gamey’), not for nothing is The Singing Detective named Marlow. Phillip Marlow was the creation of Raymond Chandler, a British writer living in the U.S. Chandler had his own romantic fixation, the girl with ‘eyes of cornflower blue’. So I rest my open and shut case and Blackeyes escapes from the courtroom to the sort of freedom that can only be grasped by the entirely fictional.
Or I could be wrong.
(see above, so below, throw a six or miss a go!)
………….
One:
Like Peter Sellers or Spike Milligan, I’m Walking backwards…
(Counting Backwards I count you in - as Kristin Hersh once sang) after all, time travel is easy.
(Bluebottle voice) I bet you say that to all the boys you naughty little man.
Ah, The Goons - what a wonderful parallel universe where forts are named Spong, weathermen murder their way to the top and even bloody Croydon has an airport!
Memories of the Putney bus; so gloriously wasted and sprawled across the top deck a human action painting in a wide eyed splatter. 1987? Could have been… time travel is easy.
I’m walking backwards for Christmas, across the Irish Sea!
Whaddya mean it’s the summer? I know it’s the bloody summer - what you think I live underground or summat? Hey, it was good enough for Elvis, good enough for the King. He cut his 1971 Xmas album in June, dammit, in a hot studio filled with gift wrapped boxes, lights and a tree. “Merry, merry Xmas Baby.” Genius.
Honouring him and that tradition a friend and I once decorated a house in Chrimble style (plus requisite mirror balls and toy guns) and hung a Graceland sign on the door. We enlisted the local taxi driver to play Elvis songs and carols and the post office allowed letters through to us marked Graceland. A week of joy and good will. In June.
So now in July/Aug on the Elvis memorial border (Aug 16th 1977 remember) I can walk backwards for Christmas if I want, right? Damn Straight.
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many thanks to john, chalissa, bean, julie 0 and many a patient flister! you all rule!