White Nights

'But how beautiful people are when they are gay and happy! How brimful of love their hearts are! It's as though they wanted to pour their hearts into the heart of another human being, as though they wanted the whole world to be gay and laugh with them.'--Dostoyevsky, 'White Nights'

The Upstairs Room

A new play.

I've been busy and, also, taking a breather at the same time (this involved, incidentally, quitting cigarettes and coffee). But I will try and start writing here again, sometime soon. As of right now, all the time I used to reserve for the odd blog post has been given to jumping in rivers, primarily at night.

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.

Lonesome Lights

An excerpt from my exhibition essay:

Lonesome Lights

When I was a boy, my father lived in a blue beach house with a long deck. Along the railing, one Christmas, he wound a long, heavily bulbed string of Christmas lights. For nearly a decade afterwards there they remained, features of the house. This always felt a little sad to me: the lights would only ever get switched on for occasions or moments my father would deem special, on summer nights or on foggy afternoons.

Each bulb was about the size of a wine cork, just big enough to grasp entirely in your hand. Their flaking green, red, and blue enamel, subject for so long to Californian weather systems, had forsaken its gleam. They were rough to the touch, I remember. A third of them, maybe, fizzled rather than burned as normal lights do, and a handful were shattered entirely. However, these lights still held for me a shoddy magic all their own. Freed from their festive purpose, they took on a paradoxical effect, a dull splendor, a crummy sacredness.

I’m still sensitive to that memory: the melancholy of those busted-up Christmas lights, redeemed somehow by their tired, hungry resilience.  I feel a pang whenever I think about them. 

The Sudden Walk

'When it seems we have finally decided to stay home of an evening, have slipped into our smoking jackets, are sitting at a lit table after supper, and have taken out some piece of work or game at the conclusion of which we customarily go to bed, when the weather outside is inclement, which makes it perfectly understandable that we are staying at home, when we have been sitting quietly at our table for so long that our going out would provoke general astonishment , when the stairwell is dark and the front gate is bolted, and when, in spite of it all, in a sudden access of restlessness, we get up, change into a jacket, and straightaway look ready to go out, and after a brief round of goodbyes actually do so, leaving behind a great or lesser amount of irritation depending on the noise we make closing the front door behind us, when we find ourselves down on the street, with limbs that respond to the unexpected freedom they have come into with particular suppleness, when by this one decision we feel all the decisiveness in us mobilized, when we recognize with uncommon clarity that we have more energy than we need to accomplish and to withstand the most abrupt changes, and when in this mood we walk down the longest streets--then for the duration of that evening we have escaped our family once and for all, so it drifts into vapourousness, whereas we ourselves, as indisputable and sharp and black as a silhouette, smacking the backs of our thighs, come into our true nature. 

And all this may even be accentuated if, at this late hour, we go to seek out some friend, to see how he is doing.' Franz Kafka 1913

This first picture, of the vase, was taken in late November, inside a Greek restaurant. The last photo was taken strolling down beside the Botanic Gardens last month, before the blossoms had come out, the wisteria bloomed.

I currently have a cold, and I'm having to soak up the first real spell of summery Oxford weather through a scarf. Yet, somehow, the idea of a sudden walk in the middle of night sounds very very appealing. All this late sunlight has been making for lilac evenings. Lonely twilight pooling with possibility.