Be not so nervous

Thanks Bill for your songs.

Monsters, retreat

I don't think London will be sleeping well tonight. Or Liverpool. Or Birmingham. Not while there is looting and burning still spreading.
Stop breeding, moron people, there are too many of you. You are not owed any of these nice things. No-one is owed expensive trainers or TVs.

Sure, it's a tough time to be young. But in the midst of other world riots, our one seems sorta dumb, it doesn't quite add up.. Kids partying amidst violence, grown up sucked into consumerism, wanting new goods, wanting them immediately, thinking they're invincible, that they've nothing to lose. And now everyone's trying to work out who's failed these kids -the government, their families, gang culture, themselves, the whole city? It's all gone a bit awry.

I've been listening to some music that might be soothing enough to send the city to sleep, although it sounds fitting for a war / apocalyptic scene.. Here's a piece by Israeli composer Oded Zehavi: A pirate love song
Tis astoundingly beautiful.

Moth-eaten hopes and dreams

I would like to make a play with this humming through the speakers, so loud that the floor hums and your knees rattle.

The audience would duck and crawl and climb through a blacked-out labyrinth of ramps and ladders, trapdoors and shrouded, cave-like rooms. Lights will glow and pulse and seep stealthy shadows through the maze. There will be apprehension and curiosity hanging about the dark corners.

Outside, beyond thick walls, is a futuristic, authoritarian state. We are treading through an illicit drinking den, sniffing at the cloying, sweaty stench of desperation and disease. The characters are mad with fear and rebellion. The play will spin above and below and all about you. It will be sordid, tumultuous, grotesque.

The actors brush past people, pin them against the walls, curse and rant and whisper. They will drag them into the story, get them lost and bewildered in the burrows and attempt to knock them senseless with whiskey.

I will never make this. I'm just pondering and stealing ideas. Seeing an inane show five times in a day leaves you itching for some imagination, and boy am I glad there are a few passionate people actually following up their daydreams and making some frighteningly different plays.

Treadmill theatre wants your money, not your heart. Don't feed it your coins. Ignore the big bucks marketing. Seek out the stuff that cares enough to want to rip your heart out.

Huff huff huff, pastry

Yesterday was a strange mixture of tension and nostalgia, and then I found a tax rebate in my post. So today I stole some time to myself.. I woke stealthily at 5am and had coffee and pastries in the park, and sunk into a new book. It was brilliant.
Then the joggers started streaming by and I began to feel shifty, sitting there eating a box of pastries and doodling like a five year old in the midst of their shining halos of exuberance.

I watch you regain your balance

  

If you head down to the Seven Sisters cliffs, after you walk up and over the Seventh Sister you'll come upon the Birling Gap. There's a cafe and a car park and it's pretty underwhelming seeing concrete and tyres again after the unspoilt green of the Sisters. But when it's windy it's one of the best places in the world! 

There's a little platform jutting out, with wooden steps leading down the cliff to the beach. At the top you can lean out into the wind, hang over the edge and fill your ears with the roar of the waves. It's like you're in the crow's nest of a ship. The waves churn below and the wind knocks the breath out of you.    

It looks like a calm tide tricking in on a sunny day, such are my photographic skills.. Those are big waves, honest. 

 Noise therapy. Wind therapy. It's good escapin the sprawl

I should be there but i'm here. Uh oh.

Sell me your fearlessness

I'll pay you a handsome price.