Little Dreams, Little Earthquakes

Sleep and I have long been in an abusive relationship. We need counseling. We don't communicate, we linger in separate rooms until it's rather late. Nor have affairs with cigarettes and enumerable cups of coffee helped the matter.

Often, lately, I'll awake on the verge of settling down under the sheets, on the cusp of some dream, and I feel myself shaking slightly, My heart racing, my entire body full of little tremors. Like an inability to let myself go entirely, to sink, hanging onto wakefulness with one last digit and flailing above the abyss.

Interesting that people typically reach for the same metaphor--falling--to describe both the act of sleep and those initial, reckless pangs of love. Both can have the significance of a leap of faith, a hope that you will come out the other side complete, intact.

Interestingly, I've don't think I experience these little earthquakes, these trains passing through the tunnels of sleep when I'm sleeping with someone close by (otherwise, they would have surely told me)...

Browsing for Love

The first of two new plays I've written, both of which are being produced over the next seven weeks...As I mentioned last time, this one's about two book-festishists who meet in a bookshop (she works there, he's just browsing) and then fall madly, etc, etc.

The Albion Beatnik, Walton Street, Oxford, from 31st May-2nd June. Tickets are £5.

Starbursts

There are currently two photography books I want (I'm currently rehearsing a play about people wanting books, although the books themselves are just symbols for more oceanic desires). 

The great Hatje Cantz publishers put out a book last year called Starburst: Color Photography in America 1970-1980. The above image by Mitch Epstein is on the cover. Consider it a celebration of Kodachrome that includes the likes of obvious entries like Stephen Shore and William Christenberry.

In the meantime, Hatje Cantz has come out with a new monograph of Fred Herzog's amazing work from the early Sixties, when hardly anyone was doing 'street' photography in colour.

I've been poring over these pages in the Blackwells Art and Poster shop in Broad Street, embarrassed because I can't afford them and I instead have to make due with sitting on a stoop in the photography corner and trying to absorb the imagery.

Incidentally, Starbursts were a candy I rather liked when I was young and it occurs to me now that they might not exist in their original form anymore. Which would be sad. Each cube of taffy was wrapped perfectly in its out color-themed envelope. A little parcel, or present, you could save individually. My favourite, if I remember right, was always the yellows. I wonder, now, what strange and Proustian memories would come hurtling back to me were I to taste one again. Visits to the swimming pool, most likely...Hiding on the playground...All those quiet, sacramental moments we soon forget by never really lose.