I am old now and so drunk on just two glasses of wine and
in the past six days I’ve had the kids on half-term and moved back into my
family home that doesn’t suit me and left London three times and right now I’m
sitting on a single bed in a twin room in a B&B in Malvern with my head
swimming and my heart racing because tonight in a stupidly big room with an
audience of not enough people tonight at Malvern Theatres I saw Uninvited
Guests’ new show This Last Tempest and my body isn’t big enough to contain it,
I can’t hold all at once everything it made me think and feel. I am trembling,
every inch of me vibrating, with how much I love this show. Two weeks ago I was
in Bristol with the company because they’ve asked me to be a board member and
anyone who thinks that in some way this invalidates my response to it can right
this minute just fuck right off, another time I’ll have a more temperate and
articulate argument but just now the idea that what a FAN thinks is somehow
less trustworthy than what a “distanced” “dispassionate” observer thinks can
take a flying fucking jump. Have you seen the Nick Cave film 20,000 Days onEarth? There’s a bit in that where Cave and Warren heart Ellis talk about Nina
Simone, about the transformational power of live performance, that reminded me
(partly because I’d been talking to Peter McMaster not long before seeing the
film about whether or how art can transform those who encounter it) of
a very specific night in an upstairs room of a pub in Camden watching Tortoise
play, I guess in 1994, and knowing that I would never need to take drugs, because
I would always have live music to recalibrate my body and take over my brain; tonight watching This Last Tempest I had a bit
of that again, heart so swollen I could hardly breathe and blood flowing with
the cadence of the stage. This Last Tempest begins where Shakespeare’s Tempest
ends – there’s a part of me that doesn’t want to go into too much detail
because I know I’m seeing it again in Colchester on November 27 and by then
already it will have changed/honed/found its rhythm, and because I want
everyone to go in with the same not-knowing, to experience the same wonder/surprise,
but also there’s a part of me that wants to sit up until 3am dissecting every
moment of it one by one – it begins with Prospero leaving the island and Arial
and Caliban needing to learn how to live for themselves; it begins with that
same speech by Gonzalo X in which he envisages a non-hierarchical society that
has no commerce or trade, no magistrates, no riches or poverty, no power to overthrow,
a speech no teacher of mine ever adequately addressed; it begins with an
awareness of climate change, our responsibility to change our intemperate
behaviour, the (im)possibility of returning the earth to itself; it begins with
the faltering attempts to love, to feel, of two creatures who have been shown
scant love or compassion, the appropriation of others’ language to express
those burgeoning emotions, the blossoming of empathy that comes with love; it
begins with a longing for change, a desire to destroy and through that to create;
it begins with the 2011 riots, with Crack Capitalism, with the fear of living
in the end of times; it begins with sound, with frequencies just slightly
beyond human hearing (how delicious to see this within a few days of Dickie
Beau’s equally testing/enrapturing Camera Lucida), with an immense love of Nick
Cave and My Bloody Valentine; it begins in my exploding fucking heart, and
weeks of not really needing to write about theatre, and knowing this show is
special because I couldn’t brush my teeth or sink into bed before vomiting words
into a computer screen (honestly, if they’d set out to make a show that would
be everything I love to distraction, they couldn’t have ticked more boxes). And
there’s something so correct and pleasing and stupidly meta in the fact that
this is me writing like Megan Vaughan writing like me, in response to Uninvited
Guests reshaping Shakespeare to think about the weight of history – oh! I haven’t
even mentioned the weight of history yet, the fear that however willingly we
attempt to shape what could be, we will always be too scarred by what was – and
the power of language to rule and ruin, divide and oppress. And all the things it reminded me of: X
and all the thinking I’ve been doing about class with/alongside Harry Giles
(Shakespeare’s Miranda will weep for princes, but not the ordinary slaves), and
the fact that from now until the end of the year women are effectively working
for free because unequal fucking pay, and oh my god the whole sequence where
gravity is destabilised, and somewhere at the heart of it, this song:
But now it’s 12.12am and my train leaves in exactly seven
hours and there are still teeth to brush and pyjamas to pull on and a bed to
climb into and I can’t write it all, all I can do now is marvel and shiver and wait for next time, impatiently and full of joy.
A quick introduction: I've been talking to Coney more or less since Dialogue began about "embedded" criticism, documentation of theatre, rethinking criticism - the whole Dialogue manifesto, basically - and last month co-director Annette Mees emailed me with an invitation: would I be interested in documenting in some way their new work, Early Days (of a Better Nation)? The invitation was an open one: come and play. As such, it was irresistible.
The war is
over and the nation lies in ruins. You and your fellow survivors must build the
beginnings of a new country. What are the rules you’re going to live by? And
can you avoid the mistakes of the past?
What interests all of us is how to document the individual experiences of participants in the show - it's interactive - but also how to trace connections and bigger shapes in those responses: what difference age makes, for instance, or voting history. After the first day in the rehearsal room, I started thinking about the Mass Observation Archive, the Appendix to Orwell's 1984, shifts in journalism as a result of social media, and what a collection of personal writings from this fictional but plausible and not-unfamiliar nation in Europe might look like. I'm interested in how the documentation might slip between fact and fiction, in
conveying truthfully how individual audience-members have acted within and
responded to Early Days, but communicating that through storytelling. In how people who have attended the show might read the documentation differently from those who haven't.
What follows is a very first scratch at how some of these ideas might translate into words. It's based on that first day in the rehearsal room (6 October,
2014), with performers Milton Lopes, Michael Cusick and Angela Clerkin, director
Annette Mees and writer Tom Bowtell. They were working on the opening dilemma of the show: whether or not to accept
military aid from a UN-like organisation called the World Council for their ravaged country, Dacia. Anything in quotation marks (apart from the very last bit) is quoted
verbatim from something spoken by the actors during an improvised debate driven
by the key question: “Freedom vs Safety?” All character names use letters scrambled from
my own. I have no idea if this works, if it gives away too much about the show,
if it encourages audience-members to take sides before they've even walked into
the performance space. Basically, it could all be a failure. But I've really
enjoyed writing it, and that at least is something.
In the spirit of scratch,
all feedback is welcome and appreciated.
DACIA
DIARIES
Collected within the Mass Observation Archive
Held in the Central Library of Dacia, The City
Date: 6
October, 2044
Nella
Coats, shop-owner, The Islands
I'M SO
ANGRY I CAN BARELY WRITE. The meeting happened today – the organisers managed
to find a room in the old Town Hall, sparse and barely furnished but with four
walls at least, the city is in ruins, I was horrified to see it – we crammed
in, people from across the entire country, and I thought: now, at last, a
chance for us to talk together, to remember who we are, the bonds of
nationality and history that bind us. I really believe in this, I really
believe in Angela when she says that we need to abandon the old ideas of
“leaders” - so patrician – and create a new society, rooted in … I don't know:
people. Each other! Sharing, looking out for each other. And I understand the
city is broken and there are riots but there has always been a strain of
selfishness there, of competition, that has made me glad to live elsewhere. And
today that selfishness just took control of everything - Milton, the man who has
returned to his homeland, war-wounded and attracting sympathy wherever he goes,
he demanded that we accept the World Council's offer of military aid and WE
SAID YES! We, we – not me, I didn't vote for this, I couldn't vote for soldiers
on our streets, pointing guns in our faces. The short-sightedness is
unbearable, it's infuriating! Can't they see that “military aid” becomes
oppression, dictatorship, we will lose all our autonomy – and it doesn't stop
the fighting, it doesn't stop people feeling frustrated at the lack of control
over their own lives, it exacerbates that. I had to write this down – I'm in a
makeshift bus, there are 20 of us crammed in here, travelling back to the Islands,
and no one can talk to each other, everyone is too depressed, surely the wrong
decision has been made. They'll see.
Len Stac,
Mine-Owner, the Plains
A difficult
but satisfying day. Pleased by the turn-out: representatives from the City, the
Plains and the Islands, men and women, a mixed group, all clearly passionate
about where the country was going. I thought Michael did well facilitating the
debate – ultimately I'm glad he was chosen for the job and not me, I have too
many interests of my own to consider. And yet, I was surprised by my own
responses to the debate. I found Milton, the City representative, and Angela,
whom I had encountered before through her writing about the Islands, equally
persuasive, although arguing from opposite sides.
For Angela,
to bring in the World Council's troops is to perpetuate the cycle of violence.
She repeatedly said things like, “If I don't feel free, I don't feel safe”, and
“You can't talk to someone who's pointing a gun at you”, and “I feel safer and
freer when there's not a gun pointing at me”: all strong arguments against
filling the streets with soldiers. But I sympathise with Milton when he says:
“We need to have stability before we can be free.” Or: “People are getting
killed and there's no one to protect them.” The City is in an appalling state:
I felt intimidated just driving to the meeting. There was an extraordinary
moment when Milton sat clicking his fingers, the sound was like the ricochet of
gunshot, and sure enough, each click, he said, represented someone who had died
while Angela was talking. I don't think we can argue with that.
I suppose
what Angela never made clear is the lesson of history: the arrival of foreign
troops in an unstable country generally causes a rise in instability and
insurgency, not less. And while I agree with her that, as a country and a
people, we need to take responsibility for our own behaviours and political
relationships if we want to prevent another outbreak of war, I also believe
Milton when he says that people in the city are starving and can't engage in
rational conversation when they are struggling to survive. I'm glad Michael
voted with Milton to accept the offer of aid and military support from the
World Council. The next step is to create a strong democratic government to
ensure that the return from occupation to independence happens smoothly.
Dan Mede,
student, The City
Fuck fuck
fuck: it's happened, they're bringing in the WC. I couldn't get into the
meeting – the doors were barricaded – that says everything, right? I don't know
what this means for us – OK it's been hard to get food but we've been living,
WE'VE BEEN ALIVE – this stupid fucking country and its conservatism, that guy
Milton getting the sympathy vote with his war wounds, I DON'T WANT TO LIVE IN A
COUNTRY THAT BELIEVES IN MILITARY RULE we were fighting to change things to make the fighting
for a future that's FAIR WHAT IS WRONG WITH THAT???
Mass
Observation Record
Writer:
Maddy Costa
Observer
Number: 114
Date: 6
October, 2044
Place: The
City, Dacia
I came here
from the Plains by bus: a difficult but not unpleasant journey. The closer we
came to the city, the more evident the signs of war. The Plains haven't been
free of problems – the influx of refugees has put an appalling strain on our
resources, and although we have space, it isn't infinite: shanty towns are
growing up on the edges of villages, an uncomfortable situation for everyone –
but the horrors of the city are of a different order entirely. Bricks and
broken glass line every pavement, one city-dweller I spoke to told me that the
streets are swept each morning to clear a path for pedestrians, but by night
are filled with rampaging youths (her description) intent on destruction. The
graffiti is lurid in colour and violent in expression: it's clear that people
here have lost all sense of what they are fighting for. They are simply
consumed by aggression.
At 2pm the
meeting to discuss the offer from the World Council opened in a small side room
in the former Town Hall. Armed guards stood at the door: a reflection of what
might be to come, reassuring for many I'm sure. The meeting was ably
facilitated by Michael, a journalist
from the Plains: as the person (and the area) with the least extreme of
viewpoints, it seems right that he should have held that central position. To
his left stood Angela, a writer from the Islands; to his right, Milton, a former teacher turned
revolution leader, who some say is responsible for the collapse of leadership after not
stepping up to the task. Key arguments can be summarised as follows:
Milton:
-The
violence needs to end, for the safety and security of the people – not just in
the City, but across the Plains, too.
-This
is only possible if Dacia accepts the invitation from the World Council of
military aid.
-He
understands the need for rational debate about the future direction of the
country and its politics, but argues: “How can you talk if there's no one to
protect your point of view.”
-He
is ready to listen to arguments for a new organisation of society and
government when, and only when, “the problem is solved”: that is, the problem
of violence on the City streets.
Angela:
-“Freedom
or safety” isn't a choice for Angela: they are not mutually exclusive. Her
sense of safety is contingent on her sense of freedom.
-It
is impossible to feel free with military troops patrolling the streets.
-“By
sharing resources, we could pacify the threat”, ie of violence. This way,
foreign aid would not be required. She refers here to the wealth of resources
in the Plains: I'm not sure how aware she is of the refugee problem there.
-“The
way forward is that we all talk.”
Given the
polarised nature of the debate, Michael's vote became key: he occupies the middle
ground. I believe he gave each argument due consideration before voting in
favour of accepting aid from the World Council. Relief was palpable among the
older generations of city-dwellers; among its youth, I feel less certain.
Islanders by and large seemed unreconciled to the decision: their sense of
autonomy is strong. The meeting disbanded with the sounds of relief and
resentment in the air. I travelled back to the Plains clear on only one thing:
the need to talk to every farmer, every miner, every refugee, even every child
in my region, and encourage them to take part in the vital debate over the
future of our country.
Before I left, I spoke to Nadia Otas, a City woman, who used to run a shop before the looting and violence made it impossible. Her response to the debate was highly emotional. I have attempted to record her words as accurately as possible.
"At last, at
last: someone has listened. We need the World Council here, we need help. I feel so
lucky to have been present at this meeting, Milton is such an inspiring speaker,
he showed up the Islanders' idealism for what it is. Hollow promises! They have
no solutions to the real concrete problems we're facing here. I don't feel
frightened any more. I'll be able
to find food for my children! We'll be a stable, normal country again. I'm so
grateful."
Another year, another summer made
fractious by the Edinburgh fringe. Even opening the programme this
year made me feel queasy: I marked performances, turned the corners
of its pages, feeling like I was wading through the Argos catalogue,
consuming consuming consuming. And although I was careful and made
sure I had lots of space for conversations and walking and a balanced
diet of cake and fruit, and although I took almost no risks and so
almost everything I saw felt meaningful, smart, exhilarating
sometimes, nourishing other times, I still ended up glutted and sick.
So since then I haven't been going to the theatre. I haven't even
been able to look at theatre listings. Instead I've had stillness.
Other doings and beings. And before I re-enter the fray – despite
all misgivings, a sense of superfluity, and the fear that writing
about theatre is no longer the thing I love – a celebration: of
things I've been able to do because I haven't been witnessing in the
dark...
1: Most of the recipes involve 150ml of
double cream. Most of the recipes display an astonishing lack of
concern about the environmental impact of eating so much meat. Most
of the recipes involve tablespoons of chilli and ginger and spice
concoctions that I haven't been able to use since starting to cook
family meals five years ago. But Nigel Slater's Eat is the most
inspiring, I-want-to-make-that-inhale-that-savour-that cookbook I've
read in aeons. And not just because it's the only cookbook I've read
in aeons. Snip-snap sentences. Unctuous language that sizzles and
simmers and glistens on the page. The first thing I cooked from it
was a chicken and farro recipe that I sold to the children as an
Italian version of chocolate rice and they ate it and didn't whinge
once. Result.
2: In my list of top 10 albums of all
time and ever that is at least 500 albums long, Father John Misty's
Fear Fun is, it's emerged, somewhere in the elastic top two. I keep
posting Now I'm Learning To Love the War on here, but there's also
this one
and this one
and this one
And still I'm startled by its country
twang, but I grew up on Dolly and Willie and Kris, and took myself
deeper backwoods, through the dark mysteries of the Appalachians, and
country feels like home. In any case, it's not the style but the
voice, so plangent, a deep seam of disappointment in which he mines
still for hope:
Before the star of the morning comes looking for me
I would like to abuse my lungs
Smoke everything in sight with every
girl I've ever loved
Ride around the wreckage on a horse knee-deep in blood
I listen to that voice and I swoon.
3: I've been getting a lot of emailing
done, sitting at the table beside my husband on the sofa watching TV,
and I haven't quite followed The Honourable Woman but Orange Is the
New Black has lesbian sex – romantic, playful, teasing, functional,
aggressive, tender lesbian sex – and it's proving very distracting.
I'm not always convinced by the glossiness of its surface, but
there's enough feminist nous and queer abrasion beneath to make me
want to down tools and just watch.
4a: I read Donald Barthelme's The School in an anthology of short stories 19 years ago and every
synapse shivered. I ran off a dozen photocopies and used it as a
secret handshake; last week I sent the link to Churlish Meg and
realised I still think of it as a soul gift. Originally it was
published in a collection called Amateurs, which I bought in the days
of scouring secondhand bookshelves for Brautigan and Barthelme and
names that don't begin with B, but only got around to reading in
August; The School remains my favourite story ever written, and
Rebecca might turn out to be the second.
4b: From the days when the chimneys of
Battersea Power Station, those crumbling columns that puncture the
sky as the children and I walk to and from school, still reconfigured
the clouds with smoke; from the days of open racism and closed
abortion and communities of women laughing in the soapsuds of
laundries; from the days when warehouses weren't apartments for the
wealthy but factories employing the poor; from that moment of transition,
between the demolition of slums and the rise of estates, Nell Dunn's
Up the Junction emerges so vivid, so raw, that reading it made me
gasp. London has moved on from there but how far I'm not sure. The
tale of the Tally Man captures an exploitation of poverty that
abusively persists; the desperation of teenagers, for a fuck, for an
approximation of freedom, that doesn't change. Dunn writes
elliptically, mostly in dialogue, rough jottings scrawled on the
hoof, in the dark; it's social realism, but compressed, made poetic,
edited with lapidarian skill. Reading her and Barthelme has not only
made me want to write again, but rethink how.
4c: Page after page of D.I.Y, the
manual for theatre-makers edited by Robert Daniels, inspires and
soothes with its generosity and common-sense. It's reminded me why I
keep saying yes to theatre instead of doing the writing that requires
me to sit on my own at a computer hour after hour. It's reminded me
to listen to the Mountain Goats more. It's reminded me to treasure my
shift away from being a “professional”, why it's important to
keep struggling in the unknown. Above all, it's reminded me that:
We are humans. We have feelings, we
have souls. Don't beat yourself up about your practice. Ever. It is
the self-loathing and doubt that delays EVERYTHING. Imagine
yourself as a baby, if you keep being mean to a baby, it will hate
you and poop out all sorts of nonsense to punish you. Take care of
yourself. Be kind. Give yourself time, chocolate, holidays and a
fucking break. Negativity breeds contempt. Happy artists make good
art.
Not for the first time this year,
reading that makes me want to give Bryony Kimmings a great big kiss.
5: This doesn't count because we went
in the daytime but the Doll Museum in Dunster is one of the strangest
places I've ever been. Arguably I write about theatre now because of
a B&B in Scarborough whose eerie parlour was crowded with dolls:
tiny dolls, foreign dolls, dolls to my thighs that lined the stairs
as if waiting to trip me up or push me down. The Doll Museum in Dunster was that room to a factor of three, all staring eyes and
twisted limbs and fraying national costume. A repository of white
colonial thinking on history, class and race. But at the same time, a
really fun place to take my daughter. Weird.
6a: And OK, there were two nights at
the theatre. The first was the Benedict Andrews/Gillian Anderson
Streetcar Named Desire at the Young Vic, which bored me to itchiness.
I couldn't unthink the Secret Theatre's version: the musicality of
its European accents; the sensual melt of ice-cream, the crack of
watermelons, the ice spill of water; Leo Bill's humble, bumbling
Mitch, with his bad jumpers and stuttering desire; the rejection of
every lurid colour that Andrews and Anderson made garish again. The
day after seeing it I hosted the Young Vic Two Boroughs Project
Theatre Club on it with Lily Einhorn and we talked for well over an
hour about how the play sits in Williams' oeuvre and how it relates
to his biography; how the play isn't misogynist but an indictment, a
really aggressive and scathing indictment, of patriarchal culture,
not just the old patriarchy of America's old south but the bullying,
entitled patriarchy of the emerging new south; women, age and
feminism; how familiar aspects of the play felt to those of us in the
group from ethnic backgrounds (including, on that particular night,
Nigerian, Spanish, Indian and my own Cypriot); witnessed accounts of
alcoholism, bipolar disorder, domestic violence; and on and on, a
rich and involved and really smart discussion that was far more
engrossing than the production itself.
6b: The second was Itai Erdal's How To Disappear Completely at BAC, seen on a night of such precarious,
panic-streaked instability that even walking into the theatre was
like punching myself in the brain. Oh well. Erdal is a lighting
designer by training and his demeanour is scuffed and gauche, in a
likeable way. He introduces his mother, his step-father, his
furiously intelligent sister and gawky best friend, the way he might
if we were sat around a pub table with him, making friends. One
story, of an overexcited dugong, made me cry with laughter; but its
overarching story just made me cry, because it traced his mother's
demise, from cancer that spread through her body with
relentless purpose, taking them all by surprise. Erdal speaks with
the dangerous honesty of a child who hasn't yet learned to self-edit,
the kind of honesty that provokes alternately alarm, disapproval and relief. And
because he is a lighting designer, he makes us think about how
stories are told in theatre, how emotions are manipulated through
luminosity. I keep talking to people about this show,
because its bravery startled me, and because its argument for
assisted suicide has a clarity that makes it unimpeachable. But I
also keep talking about it because Erdal's mother believed something
about motherhood that I emphatically reject. She told both her
children that it was vital for them to reproduce, because it's
through their children that individual humans perpetuate their
existence in the world. Such thinking is inimical to me, egotistical,
and damaging in the ways intimated by Virginia Woolf, in a book I
haven't read yet, quoted by Jacqueline Rose in a terrific essay on motherhood published in the LRB:
“In The Years, written on the eve of
fascism, Virginia Woolf [comments] on the dire consequences of
parental exclusivity, on the damage it does to the social fabric –
which was on the point of being rent beyond repair – to think it
right to put your child, your family, before everyone else. She is
also suggesting that, while England takes pride in its difference
from Nazi Germany, there might even so be a link between the
overweening egoism of the bourgeois family and the autocracy of
statehood.... At a family gathering in the mid-1930s … North, the
now grown-up grandson of Colonel Pargiter, watches as people inquire
after each other’s children:
My boy – my girl … they were
saying. But they’re not interested in other people’s children, he
observed. Only in their own; their own property; their own flesh and
blood, which they would protect with the unsheathed claws of the
primeval swamp, he thought … how then can we be civilised?”
Woolf, Rose concludes, is describing
how “the intricacy and breadth of human possibility can be
sidelined or quashed before it has even begun”. Yes, they're my
children. But they are their own people. The least I
can do is respect that. No, that's not true. The least I can do is
not resent how, having made them, they eat up time and energy,
leaving only scraps of both with which to make anything else.
7: Speaking of which:
A month of being home to tuck them
in.
Reading bedtime stories.
Learning the times tables together.
(Never quite mastered the 7s or 9s).
Sitting at the computer with earphones
on listening to Father John Misty so loudly that I can't hear their
voices.
Talking about how I could be a better
mother.
Her ideas include creative mealtimes
inspired by typical menus in different historical periods, a
designated painting space that doesn't always need tidying, and taking
her to the theatre in the night-time.
A month of being present. And sometimes
not coping with what that means.
8: Escaping not into the dark of the
theatre but the light of the kitchen. One night I made chocolate
cookies using an ounce of black treacle instead of golden syrup; they
were fudgy, smoky, much more grown-up than I'd intended when adding
most of a packet of white chocolate chips. Another night I made
pastry with 20g cocoa, 100g flour, and 60g cold butter, rubbing them
into crumbs as usual then blending in a tablespoon of golden syrup,
pouring the crumbs into a loose-bottomed, buttered, 28cm tart tin and
pressing them into the base and edges. That went into the fridge for
15 minutes then – covered with baking parchment and copper coins –
into a preheated gas 4/180C oven for about 15 minutes. Meanwhile in a
bowl 110g softened butter, 110g light muscovado, 110g ground almonds and
one egg, beaten with a fork until amalgamated. Out comes the
pastry, off come the coins and parchment; over the chocolate base
four or so tablespoons of apricot jam, spread almost but not quite to
the edges, and over that the frangipane mix, smoothing its surface to
cover not blend with the jam. That baked in the same oven for about 35
minutes, so when it came out it was still squodgy; in retrospect,
another 10 minutes wouldn't have hurt it. Still, the bitter crumble
of the chocolate crust and sweet melt of fruit and frangipane was
heavenly. And even better the next day.
9: The mother in the Dardennes
brothers' film Two Days, One Night makes a tart, too, a really
crisp-looking fruit tart that the family share after takeaway pizzas.
And then she sobs that she's invisible, irrelevant, I can't remember
the exact words but that's because approximations of them had been
ringing through my head all that day. And the day before that. And
before that. It's not an easy film to watch, and not just because she
keeps having anxiety attacks and crying and snapping at her husband
when he expresses concern at her taking Xanax. She spends a weekend traipsing around the houses and haunts of all her
co-workers, trying to persuade them to take her back at the factory
where they earn so little that many of these people need to take on
secret second jobs to get by, trying to do this knowing that if they
take her back they won't each get a thousand-euro bonus that might
relieve the pressure in their own lives. Sometimes on train journeys
through London's suburbs I feel stifled by the number of houses,
people, stories in this city; Two Days, One Night enters those
houses, talks to those people, listens to their stories, and
sympathises. And even where it doesn't sympathise, it attempts to
respect. This made it not an enjoyable film so much as a sternly
moral film whose politics I share.
10: I'm speedwriting now because it's getting late. And because I'd like to write about Cate Le Bon
and the gig at Koko (a stronger performance than the one I saw in February, but I missed being close to the stage), about the wild magic of her voice and the
angular jolt of her guitar, and how she makes me wish I could sing,
about standing on the balcony of Koko between two of my oldest
friends, the same people I've been sharing angular jolting guitars
and wild magic voices with for over 20 years now, and all the history
between us, the honesty and safety, but I've been writing this
listening obsessively to Perfume Genius, all three albums, and now
his voice is all I know of music. He was a surprise guest at Koko and
for those few minutes when he sang I thought I was levitating. I
can't get a handle on his albums: they're so intimate, and yet
something in them resists intimacy. I think
it's a problem of timing: they'll make more sense
alone in the dark. I should have been writing about the new one tonight
instead of writing this. I should have been doing all sorts of things all day instead of writing this. Seduced by the wrong words again.
