Month: September 2023

Just another barbeque, I guess. But with waste.

James had this smokeless BBQ thing going on. “It’s like being DJ but with no records.”

I’m flat.

I hung out with someone I think is powerful. Got two for the price of one. One of us made the single most powerful anti-capitalist gesture of the modern world. He burnt a million quid on Jura. Apparently he regrets it now? I give no fucks. He can be all the noise now. I wasn’t going to talk to him about it as I detest people who are talking to my character and not to me. Still there’s desperate poetry in the avoidance. Nobody ever pulled shit like Jimmy and I childishly worshipped him. Everyone got angry that he did his thing. “It shouldn’t have been burnt, think of this charity and that charity.” Finally, it would have gone to a nice car and house for the CEO of ‘We pretend to put your money in the right placeFAM” I totally loved that I had a CD with a load of sheep on it called “Last train to Trancentral”. I loved that I had a mess of sound about a white room. And I loved that we could find the right place to be, even down in London. We could find a friend with a car, we could get to the edge of things. Well meaning people. Wide open.

However we look at the meaning of the noise today it was fun. I got flirted with by a brilliant woman. I totally agreed with numerous childhood idols. They didn’t know Lou though, so they didn’t have full context on my mojo. You can be as famous as you like, but if you miss what Lou brings you are just making noise. There’s no place like home.

Still, it was interesting meeting people who have had to live well known. It’s hard to give a fuck about personal noise. I wanted to give this couple the space. A tough kiwi lady taking zero shit, and a calm and benign man who gives no fucks. Together they made it all easy. Not new friends yet as I’m still a little starstruck.

Bed.

I’m sharing this lovely thing with a friend. I’ll try and call him tomorrow. x

Today I took a bunch of books I’ll never miss to a charity shop in New Malden.

I was supposed to be seeing a friend of mine but he was asleep and his phone was off. So instead I kept myself busy until he got his shit together and we went for food.

New Malden is the equivalent of K-Town. but with less ping pong. You can get Korean food everywhere there. Back in the day the ambassador bought property there and then there was an influx. Last time we went to a super cheap family run place and I burnt my knee horribly on the underside “cook at table” thing. Today is was a more established place and it was quiet (and better cladded). I even got a bit annoyed that the waitress insisted on trying to cook it for us and all at the same time. Maybe I would have been happier getting burnt.

Then we walked the summer streets and observed the abundance of Catholic crosses in the doorways. I remember Han when I was on Camino. A beautiful wise Korean Catholic who thought it was absurd that I was chanting “Nam myo ho renge kyo” by the path every day. I agreed with him wholeheartedly that it WAS absurd, but followed up with my certainty that ANY framework made by humans about belief is inevitably going to be both nuts and wrong, so all we can do is make something interesting up and pursue it if it works for us. I like the deliberately anarchic simplicity with which Nichiren burnt thousands of years of men writing about how Buddhists should believe and decided “Fuck it. All you have to do is this bit. You don’t really even need to know what it means.” And thus he was excommunicated and thus SGI is a society and thus I am happy to open the little doors in my butsudan and create value by saying a few words lots of times. Vibration. I’m part of the value making! Yay? What does value mean? Fucknose. Ask yourself. I know what it means to me.

I’m home. Frank is testing his ACDC act based on starlight express and I really want to see it but I knew I’d be knackered and it’s across London. Next time, he says hopefully… Bed.

I have a door I can close again. I’m back in my old room. It’s temporary. Frank needed a safe landing point and I’m hardly home. He’s got the big bed while I make this room habitable once more. Needs a new carpet, needs a load of stuff ripped out, and plastering. Needs a lick of paint and some thought about the electrics. But on balance it’s a nice room in this happy flat and I’ve spent many odd years in it.

Last night I slept in the living room next to an open window, and I use the word “slept” advisedly. It was mostly swearing and rolling over. Occasionally having a vivid dream about leaving my bag in a pub in York. I had been drinking, which cuts my lucidity right down. Calm sober Al can navigate pretty well through Dreamland. Bottle of rioja Al is subject to the whim of the impossible dream haggis and his fiery minions. If I did get into a sleep state, it ended with a jump.

Frank is a revelation in the flat. He helps me hugely. He’s much better at seeing things through than I am and he’s being sheriff k sensitive to my resistance while we are trying to reverse the flow of stuff. Things are starting to move out of the flat. Some things are breaking in the process, and I’m beginning to notice that I’m not missing the things we throw.

I went with an early girlfriend to visit her father in Wales. Three out of six rooms were uninhabitable as they were full of boxes of clutter. One night we made home made pasta after he triumphantly produced a pasta roller from one of the boxes. “You see!” he announced, as if that was justification for clinging onto all that gubbins. On the drive back to Reading she was livid. “He could have so much more space…” At the time I agreed with her wholeheartedly. Now look what I’ve done.

“You should go on that programme,” my agent jokes. They find a hoarder and then put all their stuff on display in a warehouse. Sounds horrendous. No. But I’m gonna have to try a bit harder than I am. After a bad sleep last night, moving the mattress was about all we managed, and mostly I was just sad because I had had all that wine and delightfully poisoned myself.

This is my joyful thing. This has been my joyful thing for years and years. Sometimes it is worth looking at what we have got. I’ve worked hard for this. It has rewarded me.

Ffion and I did a thing. I provided my own costume.

The boots are the latest purchase. Last event we rented the same boots for £35 plus VAT. I went online and bought those ones. A hundred smackers. Two more events and they are paid for. They zip up the back. Easy and effective. The coat is regency. Corporate actors weren’t allowed to wear Elizabethan here at the start. That works to my advantage as Regency is what I have and a costume is a costume. I remember barking for a sideshow once, maybe a decade ago, on the south bank. In my lunch break a very carny lady from the hot dog stand came up: I’ve been listening to you. You’ve got the gab. Your vary it. You’re quick. My dad was a ringmaster. But it goes for nothing without a costume. Get something showy to wear.” “They provided nothing, I’ve got nothing. They ain’t paying me enough”. I was on tuppence an hour back then for long and exposing hours of “roll up roll up ladies and gentlemen” I didn’t have the cornucopia of regency wear I have now. I often wonder how the hell I landed with so much gorgeous stuff. Lou, in short. Magical Lou and the Opera House.

So much use. Mister Kirkaldy and the audience. Halloween ghosts. Benedick, Capulet, school reunion… Some things are yet to find their times. I’m slowly assembling it all into outfits. I wore Benedick for the first time tonight and it fits perfectly. Another rig that can be bagged and labelled.

There’s plenty that fits me like that but then there are duplicates that don’t but might fit someone else. I might have to make some sort of burlesque with it all, or open myself up as a cheap but very specific men’s regency costume hire shop.

All I had to do tonight was a bit of Benedick and then a concatenation of Shakespearesn insults. Ffion and I have it down nicely now. There’s a sense of rightness working in this building and this energy. I like to be able to see the audience while they see me… to be able to incorporate things that happen, like that pigeon in Dream last month when we were watching. Even when I’m not on the main stage, I can feel the history of craft worked into the wood here. There are pictures of my friends all down the stairs. And it is a powerful and rare place. With all my woowoo stuff I feel I’m in the right place when I’m walking through the back rooms, changing into costume in the hallways, being charming and fabulous for some of the people who provide the budget. I know from Brian’s stuff that the bar is a big part of the revenue, and even if I often find the music too loud and the rioja too pricey, it’s ok as lots of it goes back to the glorious art on the main Globe stage. And I’ll pay for that expensive rioja. It is just delightful.

Dream was rare this season and brave and strange. I need to see Maccers before it finishes as it also has a good selection of people I love being gainfully employed and I feel that the ethos in the building is aligned with the needs of the wood it is made from. There’s no other theatre building like The Globe in this country. It is the only commercial one shaped around and for the active theatre that developed in the UK and for our audience. The geek in me adores the thought and care that went into every aspect of it. And I’m lucky to be a cog in a wheel.

The management is not pompous so I no longer feel like I need to hide my corporate work for them. Once upon a time I flinched when introduced to the artistic director with “This is my friend Al, he does lots of the events at The Swan.”

Things are shifting in the world now. Rolling. I’m moving on to another fresh thing tomorrow. Lou is embarking on a long tour very soon. Movement at last. And joy with it. For many people it will start to feel very very busy.

The key will be not to get lost in it all. Christmas schedule looks punishing. Maybe it’s time to pull back on the booze again, and see what things are like without it. Likely the amount of emo blogs that I wake and regret will drop. But what will replace them?

hmm we shall see

and so to tipsy happy bed

I was so chilled. I am back in London carrying the Brighton chill. It has been hard holding the chill. Little nasties have been biting at my heels. Friends who have hidden things from me in case I react the way anyone would react if something was hidden from them.

Currently I’m involved with a status game. My i-ching last night reminded me that they are my family, these people. A valuable reminder cos I was really really angry. But it’s true. They are. It reminded me I should stick by them. Conundrum.

I was looking at a lovely strong December doing something I’m good at and is well paid, and suddenly I have my theatre family who might need me to dump my plans and focus on theirs, for a job that is closer to my heart. But they literally won’t answer the phone to me. “You’re all a bunch of schoolgirls,” said my agent to me last night, when I spoke to them hot. I was wierded out about being kept out of the loop again by a close friend.

So now I’m tender because my friends have made me look like I’m being petulant in front of this wonderful agent I’ve managed to find. By keeping me out of the loop they have started to cause damage.

Is it professional to blog about this? No of course not. But we all need to be more open so the Weinsteins can’t continue to dominate. The “professional” label can be used as a bludgeon to keep artists and makers in “their place” – (the bottom). The strike at the moment in America is on this very knife edge. In a few years, if it bears no fruit, the studios would just make everything with memories of people. Yeah, all art is theft etc etc, and yeah one of my best mates is a commercial theatre producer, but I will continue to value friendship, graft and ART over cold hard cash. If that’s a flaw then so be it, I’ll die of it as millions have before while their producer ate their caviar.

I frequently get taken advantage of but I’ve noticed it so … it has become a loud trigger. I wear everything openly. I don’t expect people to be disingenuous.

“We need to see how ticket sales go before we know what to offer, but if you’re free it would be so much easier for us and we will obviously make it worth your while”… That would make me feel a bit less sidelined. Nobody said that. I’m trying to call my guy. Maybe I can do the rewrites that will obviously be needed if they TRIPLE the audience? Just so long as I’m cut in. That would be to my strength for sure. But I can do nothing without comms and I’m inches away from just burning the whole thing and taking the alternative offer on the table.

Anyway… I’m being as vague as I can be while putting down my rage. Maybe they will come back to me with an offer that beats or even matches the work I already have in place. Then I can mull it over and I know I prefer to prioritise my straight acting over my art installation stuff so if it matches it’ll still take precedence.

Difficult without talking though. But that’s the shit part of all this being an artist stuff. Getting your art seen needs moneyheads and they like money. Look at Searching for Sugarman (the documentary). ’twas ever thus. Sit in the producer’s office and you get to eat the artist, while he thanks you for eating him.

My first and only office job was at Ambassadors Theatre Group, Turnstyle. I was receptionist. One day I had to stop Jason Donovan from talking to one of the producers, as there was a dispute about pay. I can take some small comfort from the fact that I can still remember Donovan’s name but the name of the producer is lost to me. I would stake my life on it though that that producer is three times richer at least than Jason, who has worked for decades on his craft internationally in the public eye. Acting? It’s a hiding to nothing mate. Don’t put your daughter on the stage, Mrs Worthington.

You’d be surprised to hear that I’m actually in a happy mood. I’ve just accidentally written my negative again as it flowed better. I have to stop imitating the tabloids. In the end, I know for sure that an unprecedentedly generous offer would offset this malaise. Or a three way cut including a bar cut. And of course I’m saying that in the hopes that this gets read by the right person and knowing they won’t offer that. But looking at it machine gun schedule, I would be mad not to ask. It actually looks like literal hell. The avoidance of communication really worries me. I’m gonna sit tight for now and see…

EDIT: This is clearer now and also I was very very drunk when I wrote it hence taking it down. I’m happy to put it up unedited cuz that’s how this blog works etc.

And the summer.

For how long, who knows? It’s a Monday, so I can style it out as the actor’s day off.

Lou knew I was knackered from all that Joy. She had a load of skirts that needed making, but for today she let the work get backed up so we could chill out properly.

Out in the morning and I grabbed a quick beard trim from the cash-only Turkish barbers in Kemptown. Respect. They can take bank transfer too, but I love that they keep the cash economy going in this little pocket of Brighton. I bought a Big Issue with the change. Nice guy and I’ve always had no cash before. We really do have to use cash, to take cash with us, to try to pay with cash. It is another form of freedom from these insidious bastards.

I paid for my coffee with Amex. We drove to Ovingdean and parked by the incredible St Dunstans – a home for blind veterans with good grounds and wonderful facilities. They’ve got a sensory garden. They do archery for the blind. It is known for being the most kind and wonderful place. We are so lucky in this country to have places like this that still exist. Thoughtful people of the past, governments not riddled with corruption. That was then. “Fuck it, let’s turn it into flats and put the blind up in some modern place that isn’t prime real estate. We can say that the handrails are the wrong height or some crap like that.” That was the recent decision. It’ll be empty next year, and full of IKEA furniture and hipsters by 2025.

I didn’t let myself think too much about it. I just lay on a stretch of beach nearby with Lou. I went paddling. Worked on my aesthetic skin damage. Then drove back to Brighton and went to Beachbox for a summer sauna. Dips in the sea, heat and plunge. Cucumber water. Pampering post panda.

Fika flogged me a hot sandwich and we nipped over to the fresh fish place round the back of Fatboy Slims, and bought a Gilthead Bream and the obligatory samphire and scallops. Then I wandered over to the back of Hove Lagoon to see what the hell some people were doing:

Wakeboarding. Good God. I hadn’t heard of this one. It’s absolute bobbins. I’m gonna do it. I stood and watched for a while in a mixture of delight and abomination. Take the shittest bit of snowboarding – the T bar. Add to it an aspiration towards kitesurfing but without the elemental chaos and risk that makes it look so beautiful and appealing. Now remove the freedom and force everyone to wear helmets and wetsuits and probably fucking armbands. What have you got? £120 for three starter sessions. Wakeboarding. I’m going next week. I’m gonna love it. I’m thinking of it as a gateway drug to Kite surfing. As a long term adrenaline addict I’ve been lucky to keep myself intact so far, and I’m neither as young or as fit as I used to be so fuck it, let’s go do Thomas the Tank Engine of Watersports and get dragged around in circles for a while wrapped in cotton wool. I might inadvertently get a little bit fitter in the process. Accidental fitness is where it is at.

Not today though. Today we ate buttery bream, lounged around, did the i-ching about a decision I have to make, and now it’s time to snooze. I can break my ankles and drown myself next week.

At 3pm I lifted the Panda head for the last time in this iteration. It has been hot and Panda is strangely consuming. Very hard to think wide through such a narrow gap, and masks always bring a version of insanity.

As soon as the curtain was closed the process of deconstruction began. Ava let me go off to the lido though. She had allocated time to pile it all up. Stegosauruses in a row. All the cereal boxes nearly packed. Bucket cats arranged and stowed. Balloons popped.

We had a boy we wanted to give a balloon to. He had been a regular, full of personality and play and with a great fun mum. He had told Ava that he was off to the lido, so it made sense for me to grab some balloons and take them down to the pool to give him a memento.

Panda is a friendly animal with a chainsaw and a shop where nothing is for sale. Al is a bearded dude in a flatcap in his late forties. Walking from the installation to the pool the difference between Panda and Al began to settle on me.

The pool itself was child soup. I am surprised the water wasn’t bright yellow. For a moment I stood clutching my balloons trying to work out which one we wanted to give the potato to, but I realised that I would have been better off coming down with the head on. I abandoned the idea and just had a swim instead. My relaxing fantasy of a peaceful float was absolutely dashed though. Screaming urchins everywhere. The pool is shallow throughout. There is no escape from the thrashing monsters. After about half a length I called it quits and we dried up and went and zoned out on a quiet hammock instead. Much better. Gorgeous.

I would certainly join Birch Selsdon if I lived in Croydon. The place is incredible, with 200 acres of land as well as the gym, the coworking space etc. It’ll cap before long I reckon. Then it’ll be a sought after membership. I’ve had a glorious few days of surprisingly all consuming mask work. I have no idea what I’ve said a lot of the time. I’ve been in a room that feels like an extended psychedelic experience trying to make people smile and usually managing it. Everyone has their humour in a different place. But there’s usually time to find it.

Now I must remember who I am without Panda. Life as a human beckons once again. I will miss my cockroach friend. And Dixie the rat. Qui est l’homme? Qu’est-ce que panda? Pourquoi l’homme est-il panda? Pourquoi panda est-il l’homme? Faut-il le savoir?

At least I still have Captain MushroomFace in my car.

The staff at Birch are awesome. Management allow them to have personalities, which means we, the guests, are relaxed as well. One guy keeps breaking shit while flaring. He will eventually be a NINJA. Others shine brightly in other ways. There are some really gorgeous hearts working here while they sort out their brilliant self employed careers. Great people. Some of the staff have now cottoned on that I’m mister Panda though and not just a guest. I have to ask them not to blow my cover. “Pint of IPA, Mister Panda?” “Shhhh”

The artist was here today with her small daughter who used to be scared of Panda but now comes into the store with joyful confidence.”I’m trying out a new shop assistant,” I’ll tell the punters, and she adds a brilliant sideways angle, gleefully hitting random buttons on the till while being obviously a child. If she’s next to me and someone asks me a question I’ll bat it to her and whatever she tells them I’ll augment. It might not always be the perfect answer but the delight is in seeing how much more confident she gets every time she does it. It’s nice to see her grow in that way. “She’s learning chutzpah.” I think that’s part of the draw people have to parenting. You get to watch a person realise things, and see what happens when you expose them to different stimuli. Awesome to have a mum who converts trauma into colourful mad joy. It’s a dynamic I recognise from me and my mum. “What the fuck are you doing here with your boys, Thérèse?’ “I’M MAKING MEMORIES.” She taught me freedom from convention brilliantly.

This is fun and freeing, being mister Panda, despite long hours in a constricting head. Three long shifts and Ava and I are knackered. I’ve got the playlist going round and round in my head. But I’ve had some very weird and fun chats, and I’ve had some glorious moments of spontaneous playfulness. This has felt like a healthy relationship between us and Birch despite the fact that I’ve mostly been so tired at the end of the day that all I’ve got left for the blog is bitching about rooms or some cunt that wanted an inflatable carrot. All of that was just fleeting.

Which reminds me, broccoli lady came in today and played a little bit with her nature-averse child. That felt like closure of sorts. If you don’t know who I mean by broccoli lady, don’t worry too much. On the first full day I forgot how people can be and went in unguarded and a few people were a bit weird and I wrote a long angry blog.

But it is hard to remember the details of these panda days in the evenings. For 9 hours I’m looking at people’s feet through a tiny gauzy window, while listening with every fibre of my being to loads of random stuff. I love the present moment, I love to be responsive and quick witted. It’s joyful but I can’t see people’s faces mostly. I just have to trust the mask and the fact that I’m surrounded by all of the gorgeous ridiculous stuffage that makes up this JoyBomb. I never would have put myself into this particular art if I saw it. “I’m too weird and hairy,” I would have thought. I get joy from this too, and I get to explode my own expectations and go in unexpected directions. Plus I can have all the milk I can drink. And occasionally they let me put a whisky on my tab.

Having finished my shift tonight, I plugged in to Birch. There are huge grounds. It is gorgeous to be here and feel like I have this freedom of space.

There’s something mildly perplexing about being Panda. He has a name now. A group of children decided that my name is Clive Panda. They have insisted on it to the extent that I started to like it. I ran it by the artist today and she didn’t seem to hate it. For the short term I’m Clive Panda. But he is perplexed.

Seeing anything when the head is on is hard. I have a little rectangle of gauze, but if I feel like you’re looking to disbelieve my pandaness I will look at your feet. That way you can’t see my human eyes through the gauze and it feels like the panda eyes are looking directly at yours. If I can, I’ll make you talk to Panda as Panda. It is much more fun to do that than to just talk to Al. Still, some adults just refuse to play. I’ll try to get you to play. That’s the extent of my job, really.

It has been lovely. Nasty hens: I curse them all with thrush. Everyone else since then has got it.

Tomorrow I’m gonna pack all my stuff and check out at the start of my shift, just … in the hope that now the conference is over I don’t have to be a morlock anymore and live in the basement.

The weird thing is… living here with all these fun people who I’ve played with. I go out into the bar and they all look straight through me even though I’ve had fifteen minute chats with them about value. I’m just the Panda. They haven’t been talking to a long haired beardy guy. I don’t need them to recognise me. Mostly I am happy that I can sit there and not be recognised. Sometimes they are talking about me without knowing I’m there. It’s weird.

It has been hard work the last few days, and full on. Thanks for understanding, those of you who have been expecting comms. You won’t get any sense out of me until this is done. Panda is hard work. Joyful but hard. But I’m surrounded by glorious people.

My pram has got no toys left in it after last night’s blog. Wow. Repetitive and moany.

So why was I so triggered by the hotel pushing us to the bottom of the list and giving us the worst rooms? It’s an old thing, embedded in the fact that I have chosen this alternative lifestyle. My life is absolutely brilliant, but unconventional. I’ve built up lots of strange delightful contacts and I do random shit for a living. Periodically I am reminded that the world is not pointed kindly towards the self-employed. There’s a need for predictability that we can’t meet. It’s rubbish. And from time to time I’ve felt myself being sidelined by people who have pushed their “ordinary” fantasy. It triggers me. We sacrifice a huge amount to the creative life. I guess I know that there are going to be loads of better rooms available, and feel like my contribution is being overlooked when they just conveniently put me in the basement. It signals that we are bottom of the hierarchy for them, which hits that old button. That’s all it was.

It’s a comfy bed. Airless room though down here, and the restaurant is booked for a conference tonight. I had to order a Deliveroo. I foolishly got a burger. It was huge and greasy and stinky. I sat on the loo and ate it shirtless out of the bathroom sink with a teaspoon. Halfway through, Lou rang to tell me that if I went about things the right way I could improve my room situation. She’s coming on Saturday. I don’t feel it is my place to kick off about it any more than I already have. But we had the conversation as I finished my sad half naked teaspoon sink-burger, tearing apart the bacon with my hands while the way hotels work was explained to me in detail. I ended up covered in grease and feeling a bit harried. A quick shower and almost immediately an argument with a friend over a misunderstanding.

Now I’m lying on my back in this cupboard and listening to the roar of the boiler and the weird popping sounds above me. I took the burger to reception to chuck it so the smell clears by Saturday, and I bought me an IPA. I’ve been sipping it as I write. Bed soon. An annoying evening and a long day. It has only been about three hours since I finished work and every interaction has been winding me up even further when I just wanted to switch down. God I would murder for a bath, but I wrote plenty about my room frustration yesterday. I’m gonna read my book and hopefully be snoring like a freight train in an hour.