AlBarclay

Ten to five I woke up naturally somehow.

Twenty minutes later and the hotel alarm calls me. I’m in the foyer by half five. Too early.

It is a conference hotel, the Hyatt Regency Chicago, with an economy built around bamboozling people into running up charges on credit cards. We have had to be pretty careful. Nice views though. I refuse help from the bellhops and wait for the cars to the airport. I know nothing about Conway Arkansas. What I don’t realise at 5:30 in the morning is that, if we had just rolled into a car and started driving down the Interstate it would have taken the same amount of time as it did via the airport.

“Ice”. So we had to taxi for hours to defrost the plane before we took off. And Little Rock is southern states. They ain’t in a hurry there. The car hire was excruciating. Boiling hot airport, huge queue and they are working at a snails pace.

There’s ice on the ground here too, but allegedly it is the first time since 1918.

My whip is a great big Toyota SUV Hybrid of some sort. It runs quietly and jumps when you tell it to. We chewed up the road. But you can’t tell anything about a place from these highways. They all look the same. Billboards and tarmac, occasional cops.

Hotel is a Hampton, big rooms, I’ll be comfy. We immediately go to the university and look at where we will be performing. It’s a beautiful little wooden thrust:

You can see the whorls in the wood, the knots. It smells good in there, and feels like an intimate space. The Decio was much more performative. We can be lighter here.

The campus at Conway is beautiful – an ambitious Methodist build from the 1870’s. Lots of big open spaces to build things and learn by doing. It feels peaceful and there are loads of trees. “People always come here and take photos of themselves,” says our host. We do indeed see instafams snapping themselves and their kids with the rare snow in the background.

I think this will be a peaceful residency and a joyful one. Hopefully I’ll have time and inclination to explore tomorrow. Right now it is dark and I’m hungry. Gonna go grab something to eat and maybe take in the sights of the town. Then I’ll fall flat on my face and drool for 7 hours.

Up at half eight. Sam helped. He had some tutoring. We made a pact to wake each other. At 8:35 I walked in my pants most of the way to the lift. He had bought me a coffee. Sam and I operate a strange and arcane economy of buying each other coffee. It has deeply complicated unspoken rules and works best when it isn’t under scrutiny.

I checked everyone in for tomorrow and paid for their luggage.

Then I slowly stuck myself together and we went as a group to The Chicago Art Institute.

Good God. What a place. It reminds me of the Getty.

The five of us ran around there for hours. Again I think it is huge testament to this group that we all had thoughtfood the whole time we were there and we were there ages. There’s so much there, but it only takes one person to be going “oh come on guys can we just go do something fun” and the whole web of delight implodes. There are some really famous ones there – American Gothic, Nighthawks… There are Monets and Picassos, there are wonderful bright works from less familiar names. There is so much.

In one corner there is this figurine:

Pretty small. 5000 years old.

Nobody remembers who it represents for sure. People guess that it must be devotional because it was lovingly worked on. Let’s call that “cathedral thinking”. Sure, we have lots of examples of things that were lovingly worked on cos of worship. But it’s not the only reason. Still I like this little creature and there’s something pre-pan pan about it. What’s it up to? Expressive eyes even now. Maybe a memory of a dead God, but Gods don’t die any more than energy does so maybe still there’s something running through the funny curved feet, the horns, the arresting eyes. I thought I’d share with you, ping the energy of whoever it is out into the world a little bit.

I’m back in my high up room, near the frozen river. I’ve booked an alarm call in the morning just to take the pressure off. Taxis arrive to take us to the airport at six. I’m supposed to be coordinating, which will be fine as there are just 5 of us. I do this stuff for breakfast. So long as everyone is awake I won’t have any more work to do than the usual “be the calm guy and know what needs to go where” thing, which has been my favourite dayjob for over a decade now. Tomorrow, Arkansas. I have no idea what to expect.

Shaw’s Crab House and Andy’s Jazz Club are right next door to each other and five minutes walk from our hotel. This Chicago evening made itself – with a little help from advance booking. This young company is organised through the chaos.

My day started too early, getting up to pack and hauling into a rattling taxi across state lines. But here I am now by the frozen Chicago River. We arrived at lunchtime and priority seemed to point to a deep dish pizza. Last time I was here I went to Steppenwolf matinee. This time it was big deep caramelised dough at Pequods Pizza and then I walked with Benjy to the theatre door and he went in, while I went to pound the snowy streets. Part of me wanted the theatre but this fucked phone was important to me. 

A good man stuck a sticker on it for fifteen bucks and now I can write again. My fingertips are slightly shredded but they’ll recover. Fifteen bucks much better than $300 and the damage is cosmetic. Thank you John H! Getting a screen protector sticker was a timely suggestion by a friend who was aware of my plight through these scribblings. Once again I’m very glad I connect with the world this way. Even if I’m actually not sure any of the young whippersnappers I’m touring with have found this yet. I’m not putting it out there. But I could cos I love them so I’m not gonna be bitching about them. But they are all aged between 27 and 31. I thought Benjy was a decade older than he is, but turns out he’s just … lived.

What’s twenty years?

We are all in Andy’s. The crab shack was so completely my jam I was amazed it hadn’t been my idea. Sam booked it. He’s 31, with the same agent as me, kinda looks and sounds like the package I was selling back when I left Guildhall and had a six pack. I had more chin, he has more hair. Both clever dark haired poshywoshies. Both with the confused double standard where we know we had it good and want to have perspective on it but also actually just want to fucking work in this industry that is hard enough before we start sabotaging ourselves out of morals.

I am full of lobster and beef. There is some serious jazz going on very very close to me. All five of us are together, as it should be. We are very bonded, there’s understanding here, and I don’t feel in any way like a fish out of water despite being a frightening twenty years older than them. They are worrying out loud about little chips in their teeth, I’m quietly having entire teeth pulled out of my face and abandoned forever. “And so from hour to hour we ripe and ripe and then from hour to hour we rot and rot, and thereby hangs a tale.”

This jazz band is led by the flautist. I thought I might try to learn the flute once, but the first two lessons were just about how to bring it up and down and honestly I can’t be fucked with technique, I’m not here to be in the orchestra, I want the fastest route to making the most useful dramaturgical noise possible. It’s why I’m thrilled with my purchase of a box of blues harps for this job. I’m getting more use out of them than my accordion and they add tremendous handheld atmosphere. It’s the little things.

I’m gonna plug into this band.

Well then. I went to the basilica this afternoon. Took a bit of extra time out of my day to go and connect with the catholic powers here. Last time I broke my phone screen, it was entirely to do with Inari and my not fully understanding that particular spirit.

Today I went to the basilica. It shocked me to walk into a devotional building that is so warm, I’m very very used to cold churches. I went and prayed there. It is insanely warm. 

Then I went to the replica they have of the Lourdes grotto. I prayed and lit a candle for mum and another for Lou. Then on the way back to the theatre space it was as if an invisible hand blammed my phone to the ground. The screen is totally fucked.

The touchscreen works, so I can write this. But a million tiny bits of glass when I write. My finger is tracing patterns and getting sandpapered in the process. I’m swipe typing, as who is crazy enough to do any other form when that’s an option. Sure I’ll sandpaper my fingertips but I’ll still get things written impossibly quickly.

Japan, Osaka… I thought it would be cheap there, fixing tech. It is meant to be tech central and the exchange rate is good. It cost me over £300 for a new screen. I could buy a new handset for that, but I was in a hurry and perhaps they saw me coming. I’m gonna try for a few screen in Chicago, cos I like my fingertips. Sure, if I keep writing like this and I swap fingers enough, I’ll be able to have that career as a jewel thief again after China and America both harvested my fingers. I’m really hoping it won’t be so much. The exchange rate is decent at the moment, as America is falling, but I’ve only got a weekend in Chicago. I might get a new handset though. The camera is fucked on this one which means I can’t really share images, and it makes me sad as I often want to. Money, eh?

The last show tonight to the home crowd. Really delightful. I want to write more about it but writing actively hurts my fingers. So I’m gonna hope I can get a new phone tomorrow. Chicago has got to be a good town for that, but whatever I get has to be compatible with Vodafone.

Second show. These are actors actors and I’m still just loving being in their company and working alongside them.

After the show last night we all decanted to O’Rourkes, which is quite an open plan “Irish” bar in Eddy Street Commons, very close to our hotel. There we deprocessed adrenaline together. About halfway through the evening, a group of young American lads arrived and sat at the table next to us. They were very ostentatiously drunk. Drunk in a proud way. Very much wanting everyone to see how drunk they were. It was pitiful really. We are better at being drunk in Europe, I think. They felt like idiots. But they gave Sam and I and Cate an experience that honestly will stick with us all, to us all, for a long long time.

Almost immediately upon arrival, one of them dropped a fart right by our table.

Reader, this was not any ordinary fart. This fart had a name. It hit me in a wave from left to right, and it spoke to me as it passed into my presence, in foul forgotten ancient tongues. It growled into our noses, telling of rot and death, the decay of plague pits, the miasma of abominated civilisations galaxies away.

This little preppy baseball capped fucker full of lager and meat and very possibly coke by the look of him, dropping a bomb for us. I had to move until it went. 24 hours later and Sam says “Do you remember that fart?” and we had to share memories once more, like trauma victims in counselling. This is America. Ugh.

I’m in my hotel room, but I might go out and find a bite as I couldn’t eat before the show. I’ve got a slow morning tomorrow thank the lord. I want a lie in. My body needs to process that primal poison. And the adrenaline of the shows and the bone tiredness that this extreme cold can inflict.

Even the salads are full of cream and sugar. Likely I’ll end up with something terrible and quick, almost certainly involving chicken, nary a vegetable in sight. I saw a couple of flecks of courgette in my tortellini sauce at lunch, but they really aren’t at home to mister vegetable here. Hence that godawful stench I suppose. I am still in my outside clothes. It is an effort going out into that but I’m used to making it. I’m always happy with the audiences – they have filled the theatre twice running, giving us plenty of folk to talk to, and to share this story with. Apparently Arkansas has had snow too, but unlike here they haven’t the mechanisms to cope. Let’s see how that goes next week…

First night tonight. It coincided with Lou’s first night in Dubai, her home ground for the tour she’s on.

Lou had the billionaire writer in the audience. Our writer might have been there in spirit, but likely South Bend is too far for a ghost to go unless it’s Jesus off to see Joseph Smith and his magic hat.

We started the show at the beginning, went through all the bits in the middle and ended at the end. It was glorious.

We all work together to make this show. When we aren’t on stage we have likely directed it. As a result, every inch of it bears meaning for us now, which is what they’re selling. We know it deeply, and we play so many parts we rarely get a break. It is a unique experience to this work, to come off stage having just committed to the moment of something huge only to remember that someone is holding a piece of clothing for you that means another person and you have to go straight back on with your body aligned completely differently almost before there is time to draw a breath.

In the daytime we teach workshops about all sorts of things. Tomorrow morning first thing I’m going in to a group that is studying The Book of Job. I’m gonna workshop presentation skills, but via Shakespeare, not the Bible. They’ll be doing presentations later in the term on Job. I can help them appear less introverted, to connect to their breath, to know their vowels, to be a better vessel for text. After all its my life’s passion and somehow the world is actually letting me do it both on stage and off.

I do adore this work and this company. Good people doing things for similar reasons to why I do things – for joy and light. For connection. For energy shifting.

The fivesome we have is masterfully assembled. Nowadays it is easy to think in terms of neurodivergencies and the complement we have in this group overlaps beautifully. You need a good mix to make a complete team. We really have that, and within that we all have absolute space and care for each other. If we all feel as held as I do, and I think we do, then that is a very special place for a company to be in.

But… It is twenty past one. I’m gonna have to be enthusiastic and inspiring tomorrow somewhere a long snowy way from the place where I would normally be getting coffee and sitting peacefully in the smallest room at that time. I’m gonna turn in and turn in now so I can make certain I’m half decent for the Job kids. “I’ll take the early one after the first show, don’t worry guys, it’s fine.” DAMN YOU, PAST AL.

I remember a summer hut in Celerina as a very very small child and how wondrous it was to me that the hut was so completely buried in winter that people on the nursery slope would ski over it without even knowing it was there.

I remember the height of the snow banks up the hill in St Moritz, where dad is buried. Right through my teen years I remember the freezing cold and the blizzards, the incredible difference between summer and winter. But that was way way up high in the Swiss Alps. Dad slept with a humidifier, as the moisture was frozen or cooked out of the air. Fresh clear clean thin cold air.

Here now it makes me nostalgic. But this is lowland, it used to be a swamp. All these huddled red brick buildings. I was in one this morning getting young Americans to think about Iago and his first speech. “The politics of envy” was the module title, and the set text is Othello so it was passed to me. As these brilliant and sparky young men and women worked, I looked out the window and saw the wasteland of white across the campus. The snow keeps on coming keeps on coming. It I hadn’t been digging out the car every morning it would be an impossible task by now. As it is it is a war of attrition.

Everyone still gets up and gets out every morning. They drive as far as they can and trudge the rest of the way, wrapped up in many layers. Inside the buildings it is hot hot hot. You get there and strip. Then dress up again like a tank for your five minute walk in the real world.

It is stark and cold here. We are all working through it as best we can. Thank God for my new boots, they are worn in now and my feet would otherwise be drenched the whole time. Everything is either snow or slush and it doesn’t stop coming down. My heated gilet was an impulse buy on the offchance. It is my most treasured possession this week. Probably I’ll never wear it again but it is worth more than its weight in gold. I’m like a futuristic cowboy. My ears are the only true victims of vanity. If I had a beanie hat I wouldn’t have to do complicated things with my scarf to stop them falling off.

Three classes today and then I got a hot corned beef sandwich after tech. We open tomorrow, at last. We are ready now. This has been a long journey to getting game ready. We will still tweak things, add things, change things, play with things, make things better, make things different… This show with this company will just breathe and breathe and man I love the lot of them. It feels exceptionally safe in this group of five. I’m very very happy to be part of it, the old guy, eek, etc.

Bedtime now though. There’s not been much time to stop properly yet, but there will be. This weekend perhaps in Chicago. But with the majority of my classes today, I’m well placed for a relaxing tail end of the week despite three sold out shows.

We just got back from a pub quiz. We came second. My contribution was minimal as pretty much every question was on American pop culture or geography. Nevertheless its nice to use a free evening to share an experience.

I’ll be teaching three classes tomorrow on all sorts of different topics. The remit though is pretty clear and familiar. I go into these rooms full of clever positive forward American youth and I get them to experience embodying text. Body and breath and text stuff. We only get an hour. I could do this all day. Connecting people to their words, through their breath which is through their body. So body, breath, brain in that order and just hope that by the time brain comes back in the other two are front and centre and they aren’t monitoring and they surprise themselves.

It is still unbelievably cold here.

The car gets buried in moments. My first action most days after coffee is getting into it, getting the engine on, switching on the heated wheel and seats, scraping like an absolute motherfucker, and then sitting clinging to the warm steering wheel until I get the feeling back in my hands. My gloves are fingerless. I am okay with this choice as it makes things possible. I ski in fingerless gloves when I can. My touch is terrifically sensitive and I feel almost blinded to lose the tips of my fingers.

It feels like a powerful time to be in this country. The news is incredibly hard to palate. Not just the news but the willful misinterpretation of the trigger issues. I’ve never seen such clear examples of cognitive bias.

A friend once sent me a photo of a document that had clearly been doctored. I pointed out to them how it had been doctored. They agreed when I showed them that I was right. And then they said “but it’s worth it to get the truth out, right?” So they supported fake evidence that backed their worldview.

I see people clutching at straws regarding this guy they executed for dissent in Minneapolis. People who will go to their graves for the right to bear arms are trying to say it is on him for carrying, even though he clearly never even thought to draw it and it was taken from him while they were beating him. ‘Twas ever thus… People largely want to be told what to do. This country is desperately fighting for authoritarianism. And for xenophobia. And right now that voice is ascendant. With added hypocrisy. And a superior tone, because right now the guys in charge are atrocious human beings, buoyed up by power, feeling immune and making their thugs feel immune by proxy. It’s frightening to be a visitor here. I’m here under sufferance. I am alien.

Trying to be benign. Haven’t had much chance to phone home recently but I’ve tried to be helping with ouch. That’s my thing, generally. I’ll go to bed now and tomorrow get people into their skin a bit. Then on Wednesday we will all finally do what we came here for and we will share the work we have been percolating with a full house for the first of three nights.

It’s good work this. It is established and powerful work. I love this company and willingly will spend my time in it.

Even the antacids are dressed up like skittles.

We went for breakfast today at a diner. You can get eggs. Some tiny sausages. A baconish thing. PANCAKES.

They bring sugar syrup warm to the table. You have to ask for hot sauce or ketchup. The sugar is standard. Then they give you these pancakes made of sugar. And you put sugar on them. And that’s breakfast.

No option for beans. For mushrooms. Hell no way for broccoli. You can maybe get some guacamole with sugar in it.

To get there to breakfast I had to drive through frozen roads. Defrosting the car takes a good fifteen minutes. All the cars are automatic here so you get to watch them all sliding around when they try to start moving at lights. This is a nation of sugar addicts driving go-karts. There’s rarely even a vague comprehension of momentum with the drivers on the roads. They drive fast, hard and stupid and if something goes wrong they likely can’t diagnose it least of all fix it. “My thing ain’t working. Mend my thing.” Kids. Loads of crashes. Heavy handed traffic cops.

Snow ploughs abound, but it’s pointless when it is so constant. The roads are black ice and you can’t see the markings at all. I cranked up Michael Jackson – Off the Wall and went and got Benjy back from the station through the wilds.

It is SO COLD. A new experience. I was strangely thrilled when my beard froze. I’ve read about this stuff. Never had it happen. This is a new definition of cold and I’m up for learning it.

I’ve got my heater on right now. So noisy. I’m about to get into my vast but disappointing shower. I would give my eye teeth for a bath right now. Even a steam room or sauna but that isn’t in the culture.

So I’ll have one more antacid skittle, wash the French Onion Soup from my beard and switch down for another cold night here in Indiana. I might even have a sleepydrink. I’m back at work tomorrow. Wanna be fresh.

I’m feeling pretty chill right now. A kind of day off. We ran the show in the morning. Still some tightening to go but we are close to it. Then Benjy had to get to the station. We only have one whip this week, a big old saloon people carrier type thing. It hasn’t got winter tyres. I’m pretty used to driving in snow and ice though. And dad taught me how to spot the black ice if there’s been snow recently. Which there has. I lost traction on a couple of turns but was expecting it and driving to cater for it.

When he was dropped off I went on a little explore. It is all grids here. By rights this whole hostile area should be uninhabited. But with building after wooden building these settlers have carved out their existence on the plains and my God it is a triumph of man over nature but no wonder the people here think nature is irrelevant. Human will has carved out predictable journeys through emptiness.

We all bought cheese and had it together in the hotel foyer with wine. I don’t think the wine is up to scratch here generally. I brought the best bottle I could find by my standards and it was getting roundly dissed by Sam. It was a Californian Rioja, 2020. I know that was a good year in Europe, might not have been so good over here. But allegedly the grapes are good in California. Just … wine doesn’t travel. It is much further from the wine zone to here in Indiana. Chilean wine or American wine has still travelled a long way to get here to the cold cold Indiana flats.

But this is why the world is dying. There’s local stuff. I don’t even know what it is. Because all the outlets are trying to sell things the same the same the same. We are such a boring species.

Coming to the end though I guess. So be it. The temperature has been incredibly low here, refreshingly low, yesterday minus 25 and my beard froze with moisture from my breath. It isn’t just the kids whose mother is their sister, it is the nominal leaders saying “Global warming eh?” When the morons are driving there’s nothing can be done.

It is pretty weird being here. There’s a lawless militia who are rewriting how things are done over here. Today they decided that the right to bear arms is irrelevant. They took a gun from a peaceful protestor and then executed him for his opinions. It must be hard to be a citizen of this country knowing that the law is changing and the cost of getting left behind is a bullet. That poor lady who was shot in the side of the face because her wife talked to the gunchild like the idiot he was… I don’t really understand it but from what I can make sense of, the “proud boys” are now called “ICE” and have been set forth without training to bring as much fear and dissension as possible, with absolute immunity if they want to shoot people in the face. It’s weird to think that this is an American thing. For most of my life it is what America has been protecting people from. It’s scary. I’m not a citizen. The militia shoots citizens with impunity. Am I taking a risk writing this? Surely not… The land of the free? I think I’ll be okay as I’m not a woman and the proud boys are mostly afraid of women. The guy ICE/Proud Boys shot was interrupting their chief pleasure of beating up a woman.

I’m trying to be light about this but it is sickening. These slow useless humans hiding their faces even though they were the ones deliberately coughing on your soup in COVID because masks are against human rights. Slinging their self importance around, clueless and mean, their atrocities condoned by power even before the evidence is considered. And all the little nasty Stans supporting authoritarianism like it’s never gonna come for them…

So to bed. With extra duvets. All is well.