Tag: Actor

Digging Cars

“Lovely day in Jersey”, I said. “Old friend of my grandparents”, I said. “Nice walk on the beach”, I said. “Perfect weather”, I said.

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People, you were about to get one smug bastard of a blog. You were going to get me being all sentimental about Jersey, the rock where I spent my first decade. Ahhh Jersey. The scent of the sea. The taste of the food. “Happy highways where I went.”

I went through the happy highways in a Dacia. (Don’t worry, I didn’t crash it. It’s something else.) The happy highways in Jersey are very very narrow. It’s a tiny little island. And as the old friend of my grandfather told me “There’s 50,000 more people than when you were here.” Business concluded, grave visited and flowered, and Max and I went to El Tico for “local” crab linguini. Being Max he saw a claw and said “it’s local in that it’s local to South East Asia. It’s a swimming crab.” Tasty though. We used to go to El Tico when it just sold coffee and cake and had a mynah bird out back in a cave that could swear like a sailor. The bird is long gone but they’ve made it great there. We were having so much fun. Oh such joy. But it was dark, and two hours until the flight. “May as well go to the airport early”, I said. “Then I can have a beer.”

Brmmmmmmm brmmmmmmm

“Oh. I think we’ve taken a wrong turn. Look it says ‘Private Road’”

“It’s too narrow to turn. We might as well go down and turn at the end.”

“No it’s a big Private sign – they obviously don’t like it. I’ll just turn here…”

Oh Al. Al Al Al. Oh oh oh Al. You fool. You mad fool. Reverse up the steep verge? Sure. Now turn the wheel. Roll down and … *bump*. A drop. Oh. Oh shit.

Max and I find ourselves looking at a little white Dacia utterly jammed between two steep verges, completely blocking the road, right in the mud front and back. Driving it is impossible. After burning the engine a bit we give it up as a hiding to nothing. We have no movement whatsoever. We need a crane. 1 hour 45 minutes to departure.

Thankfully there’s a breakdown service on the island. He’s still in the office, just. It’s almost 7pm. I describe the situation. He doesn’t have a crane but he knows a man that does. He’ll call me back.

Phone down. Assess the situation. 1 hour 40. The verge at the front is lower than the one at the back. Explore explore. Ok there’s loads of rocks. The front of the car is wedged up against a huge bit of shale embedded in the bank. *Dig dig dig* This job feels impossibly big. We’ve got no tools. Hands. Nails. Dig dig dig. We are digging into the side of a big mud bank with our fingers. I’m shaking with nerves. The car stinks of rubber. 1 hour 20. He hasn’t rung. We’ve made little visible progress. Both of our hands are bleeding. My shoulders hurt. I grab my phone. *Ring ring* “Oh hi – yeah I’ve got Damian’s number. He’s my boss. He’s got a crane.” “Can you text it to me?” “Um… no. Just … just take it down. It’s easy.” “Okay. Fine. I’ll remember it.” “Great. It’s 07855cvjxxxxxcthuluFTAGN0999.” “I think I’ve got it can you just repeat to be sure.” He repeats and then keeps talking. “Mate, you’ll have to give me that number again and then I’ll immediately hang up.” He does. I ring it. “Narrow lane you say? We’ll have nowhere to put the crane supports. I could come and tow you?” “You won’t be able…” “I’ll come anyway. Maybe I can tow you sideways. Where are you? … … Oh I’m the opposite side of the island. It’ll be a while “ 1 hour 10 to departure. Dig dig dig. Dig dig dig. Breaking shale with other rocks. Levering with sticks. Dig dig pant pant pant dig dig dig. 1 hour until flight time. “We’ve dug round it but it’s not moving. Let’s kick the rock.” Kick kick kick. Ow. Kick kick smash. “That knocked a little chunk out. Dig dig kick kick dig. 55 minutes. Pant pant pant kick kick FUCK pant pant pant kick kick dig dig MOVEMENT. “It moved it fucking moved it moved.” Digdigdigdigdigdigkickkickkickkick pant pant aaaargh KICK. Finally. Loose. No room to get it out past the front of the car though. We have to dig room for it. For God’s sake. I’m a mole with bleeding fingers. We both are. We are both covered in mud. We don’t care. We have to do this. Thank God it’s Max I’m with. We are both as stubborn as mules. Neither of us talking about what should have been done. Neither of us waiting for daddy-breakdown to fix it for us as daddy is long dead and the buck stops here. Dig dig try try dig dig try dig dig dig. We get the rock out! It’s HUGE. Weighs a ton. All my muscles are spent. Glad we ate that linguini. 45 minutes left. Tick tock. All that work for about an inch of room. Easier to point the car the way it was facing before. One inch forward. Handbrake. One inch back. Handbrake. Repeat ad nauseam with fear sweat and bleeding filthy hands on the wheel mumbling “nam myo ho renge kyo” to myself like a crazyman. Eventually eventually eventually we are back where we started. Hooray. Max gets in. We drive down the private road. No choice. There’s a turning space at the end. A man comes out of his house. “Sorry,” says Max. “We got lost.” “There’s a sign. It says private road.” says the man. Max keeps his cool: “Yes. Yes – we saw that.”

Brrrrmmmmm . 40 minutes to departure. Twelve minutes to the airport. We are there in ten, looking at the front. I take my shirt off, squirt the last of my water into it, wipe the mud off the hire car. “There’s scratches.” “Nothing we can do. Let’s go.”

They let us through security despite the mud. There’s nobody at the airport – we are the only visible passengers in security. We make the flight just as it’s boarding. All the staff are laughing at us. I wash my slashed hands. We made it.

I’m writing this on the plane. I just bought a £4.50 can of Punk IPA. My fingers hurt. I’m still shaking from sour adrenaline. I wonder what the car hire charges us for the scratches? Maybe they’ll be nice. Also I wonder what the mardy guy will think in the morning when he sees we’ve tunneled a huge hole out of his verge and thrown bits of shale all over the place.

They say that unexpected obstacles come just before breakthroughs. Max and I need a breakthrough. And after that experience, I reckon it’s a shoe-in. God. I feel sick, and thrilled that Max and I dug the car out. I rang Damian from the breakdown and told him we were out. I apologised for wasting his time. I said “You’ve got my number. If you feel I’ve wasted your time just message me. We’ll sort something out.” “Nah mate, you’ve given me a good laugh.” he said. Bastard.

Year One – It Never Rains in Southern California

Shakespeare tomorrow.

“Where Shakespeare’s concerned, there’s been such a wealth of scholarship over centuries that everything has already been written. The only choice you have is to refute the most recent definitive text because you don’t like the author, or come up with some outlandish theory and stick to it.”

That’s an old friend, an eminent academic, teaching me the rudiments of classical academia in the deep deep faraway time where my parents were still alive and their full on gung-ho *we must prevent him from being an actor* campaign was flying well. It didn’t work out. I became an actor – sorry, mum and dad.

I usually find when I get to a tricky bit of text that the one thing that is never going to be helpful is Charlie Farley-Buttersedge PhD in the margins. If anything, they’ve already obfuscated the practical meaning to make an academic point, scattering unhelpful commas, changing strange words into familiar versions and generally neutering creativity in a hunt for transferrable concrete meaning.

Why I find this unhelpful is that these texts were conceived at a boundary between oral tradition and printing press. In order to preserve his works, they had to be written and a decision has to be made in spelling, but he wasn’t taking that into account when he wrote these performance texts for his friends. Usually if there’s a word with multiple hearings, Shakespeare means for both to be there simultaneously. “Here/Hear” is a frequent example, mirrored in the House of Commons. In Shakespeare they had to pick a spelling. Language was pleistocene for him, all about word-clay, formless, birthing – an organic tool. And he was writing for people he knew, playing to their strengths.

Hence the incomprehensible foolery. In the original cue scripts he probably put the equivalent of “Robert comes in and does something about relative importance.” And Armin would take the stage and win the house. Sitting with the compositor years later someone says “What sort of stuff did you say here, Rob?” In the cold light of day with no audience but the company the fool attempts to remember his fooling. And 500 years later academics pore over an out of context improv done when cold.

We’ve been mining Macbeth today. It’s The Factory again. We dug into “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow”. Such a familiar piece of text. On the surface, easy to academically understand. But as a reaction to your partner’s sudden death it’s endlessly ambiguous. It’s down to the speaker. It’s down to the hearer. Is it despair, impatience, a call to presence? It’s all of these things. It’s beautiful:

“She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”

This is towards the end of a play about doomed ambition. Make of it what you will, it’s yours not mine.

Recently Alexander Waugh – the son of the son of the son of the son of the son of the son of etc has demonstrated persistence and remarkable selection bias to create and then crack a code that points to Edward de Vere the son of the son of son of etc etc as the true author of these plays. It’s a man seeking and finding patterns. And we all want the person we admire to be like us. And patterns? If you look for them, you will find them. Think William S. Burroughs and 23.

I’ve eaten a lot of Shakespeare now, over 3 decades from when I first encountered that speech. I hear one voice in his writing. It’s clear, as is the way he writes for those he loves in their best voices. “I’ve got a present for you, James.” He’s cracking wide the human condition, and he’s doing it with a wisdom about the futility of ambition. Antony and Cleopatra has a squeaking boy actor playing Cleopatra say:

“Antony
Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see
Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness
I’ th’ posture of a whore.”

Ambition towards posterity is ridiculed. Even the title Antony and Cleopatra is misleading. It’s about the triumvirate, and their union is ostentatiously damaging. It’s not their play even though it’s named for them. It’s why it frequently bombs when you cast two celebs in the title roles. But I’m geeking out.

Live now says this Shakespeare voice. Live in the present. You’re lighting the way to dusty death. You’re looking forward or backward and forgetting where you’re walking. Whoever wrote these huge mischievous works wasn’t concerned about plaudits. He was happy to drown his book.

These endless authorship debates will never be solved. But outside of perpetuation of academia what purpose can they serve? “Ahh but wouldn’t the great author wish to be remembered in posterity?” No. No, I think whoever wrote this stuff wrote it for the writing, not for points out of ten. And earl of Oxford, alienated woman, milliner’s son, space alien – whoever they were I don’t think they care if someone else, seeking the bubble reputation, either says they didn’t write it or says they did and gets some attention and publishes a thesis before the next one comes out.

The fact is this gorgeous stuff got written by someone. We have that voice and that legacy. We can all look at people a bit closer, and we have a master’s example to encourage us not to Truss up our grammar and word use.

Tomorrow morning more Macbeth. It’s nice to be back in the room. Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.

Post script

I have had to change the photo twice on this blog for reasons important enough to twice openly rebuke me. I remember sometimes in the morning my mother would emerge looking beautiful. “You look great, mum.” I’d say. “Don’t look at me,” she’d respond, and cover herself with makeup. Sorry if I caused anyone discomfort in what should be a safe space. This daily writing carries a weight which I hadn’t expected. We are so used to the written word carrying barbs. Sorry if I caused offence. The only way to remove the Facebook preview is to delete it which I’ve done.

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Planes, Trains and Audition-Ithaca

“Have you been here before?” the man at the audition asks. I think I recognise him.

“Yes. I have. I didn’t realise until I walked in, but yes. It must’ve been eight years ago. I recognise the place from back then.”

It’s a house in Kentish Town. I’m at a meeting for a stills shoot. I was going in for these before I trained, when I had a modelling agent. I’m the only person dressed in brand colours because Carol at Needham’s models taught me to do that back in the 1990’s. It helps keep my hit rate high with commercial castings. I don’t get in the room often, but I’ll usually win the director. It’s about winning the client. I’m grateful to her for the tip, even if I dumped her when I hit the 3rd year at Guildhall. Idealism over practicality. “I’m an artist now. I don’t need to do these stills shoots.” Al(ex) Barclay 2002.

This man at the casting is lovely. He must be 15 years older than me. He’s an actor too. He’s taking names and it’s like he finds an understanding with me. Then, out of nowhere, he says “Yeah, sometimes we can miss the plane.” I’ve never missed a plane in my life, says my rational brain as it feels targeted. I’m in pre-audition head. I think I might have missed the part of the conversation that led to his comment. “Yeah” I say, bewildered. He continues “I missed the plane some years ago. I had to take the train. Lots of interesting things happened to me on the train.” I’m still lost. I humour him, a little clueless but I like the guy. But I feel like there’s a layer to the conversation I’ve missed. I go in precipitately early. Apparently Tom was in front of me. Sorry Tom, I rushed up the stairs, I didn’t want to be involved in a conversation where I felt I’d missed the start, just before a casting. The casting itself was lovely.  I come out and go to my next meeting. And with a thunk, my brain clicks out of audition head and into normality and I realise he was talking in metaphor. “Sometimes you miss the plane.” To celebrity-land? To workyland? To moneyland? To whichever land he feels neither of us made it quickly. Shit. He was making friends.

I’ve been walking, though. I don’t want the train. If you walk you see what stuff actually looks like. You can touch it. You can eat interesting food, and stop to admire something beautiful. You can spend time with people who, in the train would just be flashes and in the plane would be invisible.

Train? That’s for people that are happy with being forced to eat nothing but the shit sandwiches provided by the railway. Then eventually you find yourself jettisoned in the worst part of whichever place you’re going and finally you understand that you still have a long way to go to get to wherever you think you’re going. You don’t know the buses, and everyone else on the train wants a cab too.

I’ll keep walking. I liked that dude, but I’m glad I only got his inference late. Because I refute the unspoken assumption of his metaphor. I’m not seeking to go anywhere in particular, outside of working as constantly as I can and not having to worry about this fucking boiler as the world gets colder. Where is there to go? Constant interesting work is the only aspiration to have, and on that basis I’m close to landing. My main source of hunger is the need I have to position myself so I can still work when I’m old. I shot with Sir John Mills on his last ever film. He was pretty much completely deaf and in a wheelchair, but they accommodated it because he was Sir John Mills. I need position in the industry for when I’m crazy or lame or blind etc. By then I won’t be able to rag myself stupid as a medieval king.

The guy at the audition, his chosen metaphor is transport, and he assumed I’d understand it. My chosen metaphor is the endless line of brick walls that you individually have to break with your head. I respect his optimism in thinking that there’s a destination. Although if you miss a flight or a plane, your friends can’t help. My friends and I are constantly saying “no need to bang your head on this one. I already made a hole in it. There’s a whole field on the other side. Problem is, after the field… Yep you’ve guessed it. Another wall!! And two for women!!!”

I’ll share C.P. Cavafy’s Ithaca poem about journey vs destination. Wyn Jones gave us all a copy of this when we left Guildhall. It has deepened for me over the years, particularly when I did The Odyssey with The Factory. Odysseus is just trying to get to Ithaca but his life happens on the way. He can’t get the plane, or the train. He gets the boat but it keeps sinking. Sean Connery and Jon Vangelis (who wrote the music for Blade Runner) have a version of it on YouTube. Click here if you have five minutes for something lovely. 

If not, and for those who have no sound, here’s the text. Read it out loud to yourself as if you were a lisping Scottish Rutger Hauer in the rain as Junior Indiana Han Deckard finally catches your replicant hide: 

As you set out for Ithaka
hope your road is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them:
you’ll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
wild Poseidon—you won’t encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.
Hope your road is a long one.
May there be many summer mornings when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you enter harbors you’re seeing for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind—
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to learn and go on learning from their scholars.
Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you’re destined for.
But don’t hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you’re old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.
Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you wouldn’t have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.
And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.
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Depression and biscuits

Tristan is in a show about friendship, love, depression and the human spirit. It’s on until the end of this week at the Tristan Bates, a studio theatre in the West End. Gin for Breakfast. It’s a two hander and it’s great. Stephen Fry is talking on a panel this evening after the show, so all the seats for tonight were sold on the first day. I was in the audience last night, and there were a couple of empty seats. If good studio theatre is your bag, you could fill them!

It’s good casting for Tristan, if not immediately obvious. He’s in a Stockport accent and he hates people that wear cufflinks, whereas in reality he usually wears cufflinks and sounds as posh as I do. But he’s the joker in the pack, and the embodiment of self destructive hedonism, both of which roles he understands well. The collision of Tristan and Stephen Fry in the same small room – that’s two people with a deep understanding and transcendence of self-sabotage. And his co-star, Jess, brings a poise and a deeply mined, complicated and layered humanity. I like watching both of these actors work, as they’re doing it for complicated personal reasons so there’s never any sense of smug about their power. Both of them are less “daddy look at me” and more “sod off and let me work, daddy.” My favourite type of actor.

I lost a lot of time to a depression brought on by grief so now I try to catch and derail it when I sense it rear its head. Despite watching that play, today has been one of those days. I’ve had to constantly remind myself to stay positive. After that threatening red sky day of the hurricane, the rain has blown in. My manager phoned to bring news that the job with the big buyout fell through. My bank is shouting at me. But all of this is about perspective. There’s beauty in a dark rainy night, there’s plenty of joy to be had without getting a ridiculous paycheck, and happiness is where you put it.

I’m catsitting this week. I just walked in for the first time to my friend’s home to find that Meg had pulled a jar of biscuits onto the floor, smashed it, licked the jagged bit to get to the biscuits and eventually, somehow, she’d totally broken the lid off, likely by rolling around with the jar. Then she’d spread biscuits and glass and bits of metal jar fastener all over the floor. She seems totally fine despite this. When I came in she was positioned geographically as far as possible from the evidence, as if to say it was all the fault of some other cat. I hope she didn’t swallow any bits of glass. I’ll have to keep an eye on her closely, as that’s a catsitter’s nightmare.

It’s the perfect antidote though to all these self reflective darknesses and indulgent concerns. Feeling weird about your own crap? Look after something that doesn’t think and licks broken glass to get biscuits.

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Meg and I have a lot in common. We both want biscuits. We both know the biscuits are there. We’re both willing to hurt ourselves to get the biscuits. But sometimes you get the biscuits, sometimes you just eat glass.

Bird

A bird that I think is a variety of pigeon got into our conservatory this morning. The poor thing panicked and flew full tilt into the windows repeatedly as it tried to escape. It must have cracked its skull before we got it out. Since then it has staggered in the autumn leaves outside, occasionally hopping around, seeking height, catastrophically insane. We tried to give it water and food, but it still understands that humans are danger so it is using the last of its energy to get away from us. It’s dying. There’s not a great deal we can do. When we get too close its movement sends up a cloud of flies that are probably already bedding eggs into its feathers. Its instincts are more finely honed to avoid humans than they are to shrug off flies. I suspect that it avoids us for preference because we are big, clumsy and obvious. Not because we are a destructive plague to nature. But perhaps it’s a combination of the two. Maybe the insanity has given it perspective.

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8 artists who live in London relaxing in the countryside. There are donkeys next door, flies everywhere, loads of birds, bats, bugs and bloodsuckers. I’m trying not to kill anything, which makes it hard with the mosquitoes, but thankfully they are infinitely more interested in the pale skinned members of the group. I never really get bitten if there are alternative food sources. Brian and Rebecca are dish of the day. I’m emergency rations.

I had to spend ages getting this Hindi self-tape down, which became antisocial. I tried not to let it eat the whole day, so I familiarised myself and sight-read it while filming myself in the sunshine as that pigeon glared at me. “Look at you, messing around while I’m dying.” I could hear it think. Everyone else was off having fun. I was filming myself talking to myself in a language I didn’t understand while that mad skullcracked pigeon reflected me back to myself through its little dark eyes.

Brian had tried to give it water earlier. I tried again. It still feared humans too much though. So I sat in the conservatory and it came and stared at me through the glass as I tried to upload videos of myself to the internet. Slow slow upload. So slow. I couldn’t stand the avian scrutiny. I went for a drive, leaving my phone at home to work.

We rely on technology so much. I got in the car and realised I didn’t know my address. I had no map. I know nobody’s number. If I got lost I would get very lost. But I found a wood and walked in it. I found porcini mushrooms, but didn’t have my phone with me to confirm so I left them. Even if I’d been certain I probably wouldn’t have brought them to the table as I don’t want to kill my friends from idiocy. But all my habits revolve around grabbing this phone. I write my blog on it. I play my music on it. I navigate, film self tapes, upload movies. This morning I spoke to a man in India on it. He was on a bus and he taught me how to pronounce some phrases. It’s amazing what these things can do. Impossible. Wonderful. I took a photo of a dying pigeon covered in flies on it. Here it is. It just looked at me. Four foot was its boundary for me.

Self tape is uploaded. Time to get stuck into the last night prosecco and enjoy the fact that people have come home now and the pigeon has slunk round a corner. We’re making too much noise.

I suspect I’ll wake up in the middle of the night and it’ll be sitting at the end of my bed. As I rub my eyes in disbelief it’ll keel over and die. Meantime I’m going to help cook dinner. And drink more prosecco.

 

Liberty and Trump

Day 7

“Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;

Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name

Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she

With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

130 years ago, a woman – Emma Lazarus – wrote that sonnet to help the funding of a pedestal for the new colossus that would welcome the dispossessed as they arrived at the land of the free. A colossus in the form of “la liberte”, a gift from the French, built by Eiffel. Marianne is her French name, Libertas her Roman. She stands for freedom, and for reason. She stands for the American dream. A welcoming and inspiring sight to immigrants, lighting the way with her torch, holding her book of law. Welcoming the disaffected to New York Harbour.
It seems strange that 130 years later, the same nation has sworn in a president who appears to have no concern for reason, and certainly none for immigrants. And as for his unquestioned thinking about women – to quote numerous overheard conversations today – “Just when we were getting somewhere…”

So across the nation today, and much of the world, there have been marches in peaceful protest. A chance for anyone who is concerned about the trickle down effect to mark a small statistic, while feeling a strength in numbers. If the one at the top has unexamined prejudice, will that trickle down through society and give permission for those with conscious prejudice to behave terribly? And if the one at the top has conscious prejudice, then should he be on top?
In Los Angeles, turnout was always going to be huge. I hook up with an old friend in the morning and she and I drive to Highland Park metro, knowing that driving into downtown would be a fools errand. The queue for the metro is round the block and every train that comes is packed. Which is a good sign. The atmosphere is still bright, the sun is shining, people are chatting, loads of people have brought their kids.

We queue for ages. We lose hope. We get momentarily fractious. We rejoin the queue. Eventually we decide to “London it”. There IS room in the trains, you just have to play the armpit Tetris that is played every morning across the tube network. I’m back to hapless Brit: “Goodness this is fun, it reminds me of being home in London, here if you put your elbow in my navel then I can fit the back of your head under my left knee, and if it stops suddenly just grab my beard.”
Once on the train we get to the thick of it super quickly. It’s not so much of a march by the time we’re there. More of a stand. We end up stationary at First and Broadway. Coincidentally there’s a stage right by the spot where we grind to a halt. We’ve hit the centre by mistake. A man called Charlie BeReal comes up on stage with a guitar and plays the star spangled banner. The word in the crowd is that he is one of the roadies and he built the stage. He’s just grandstanding to the biggest crowd he’s ever had. That would make sense considering he is followed by a steward making crowd control announcements too quietly, fruitlessly asking the marchers to keep moving. The crowd is not movable though. We have nowhere to move to. We have people coming towards us from 4 directions. We stay put. Chants bubble up and fade. I’m slipping in and out of American accent. Everyone is smiling. There is not a sniff of bad energy here, no impatience, no fractiousness. Lisa Marie says “That’s because it’s a women’s march,” which is a fair point. A number of speakers and activists hit the stage, as well as the mayor. There are a lot of people, and more coming all the time. It’s like being part of some huge friendly slightly geeky beast. Some of the placards are ridiculous. Lots of trumpvaginas. Lots of cultural references : “We’d prefer Joffrey” , Dumbledore quotes. A 12 year old has “I don’t want a cheeto for a president.” (Cheetos look like Wotsits.) It’s a creative, friendly, sparky, fun warm protest. And statistically there were 750,000 people in downtown LA for it.


That’s huge for such a friendly atmosphere. It felt like the Notting Hill Carnival with less beer, weed, music and stabbing. Actually, no it felt nothing like Notting Hill in the slightest. It was just lots of people. And no fighting. The poster in front of me read “Please put women in charge” and based on that protest, I’m in. If the symbol of “la republique”, the triumph of the republic, is a strong green woman that fairly welcomes the dispossessed and calls for reason and liberty, I’ll take that any day over this cruel, inward-looking, vain, entitled blustering hypocrite. With his small gropey hands and his orange sweaty face.

Augurs and Antipodeans

Day 6 and the skies open. Sheets of hard rain batter the little hostel in Venice, shorting the fuse and killing the wifi. All the people in the hostel that were sitting around the table watching the news on laptops stand up blinking, unsure of who they are, and in hushed tones talk of leaving the building. But it’s raining. When it rained hard, one of my parents – I forget which sadly – would say “The Angels are Weeping.” It happens all the time in stories, when terrible things take place there’s a storm. I keep following the inauguration on my US phone and examine that unfamiliar word. In-augur-ation. An augur is an omen. “A putting-in under omens.” Trump is being put in. And it’s pouring with rain in California… At noon I check out the window for a flock of bats.
Today I’ve started to use an American accent when talking to strangers, so now there’s no more of the hapless Brit card to be played. My first conversation at the coffee stall goes acceptably even if I probably sound like Welsh Mexican. We talk about Revelations in light of the apocalyptic weather. I’m getting away with it right up to the end when having stirred my latte I ask “Have you got a bin to put the rubbish in?” “Whut?” “Oh … gosh … I mean Is there a trash can?”. Damn.
Shortly after the inauguration speech I get a message on Facebook. “Are you still looking for a room?” Boom. I say yes before I even look to see which of the million messages I sent bore fruit. It’s an antipodean couple, one Aussie and one Kiwi. I go to meet them in Larchmont a long way from Venice, 20 bucks in an uber. Screw that. Today is the day when I finally have to accept that I am going to need a car here. I really am. An hour and a half on the bus to meet them and their dogs. They are lovely. We get on really well. I’m moving in immediately. An hour and a half back to get my stuff. An hour and a half with my stuff back to their place. 4.5 hours on buses. I almost read a whole book. But now I have a big room with a door in it. I have a bed that is mine for 2 months. The room stinks of dog but I’ve been looking for an excuse to get an essential oil diffuser and I saw one for 15 bucks in TJ Maxx. And both Laural and Mark seem lovely. And the dogs!
They have three rescue dogs, Marley, Janey and Roger. Marley is my friend immediately. He has seen things. He was a bait dog in dog fights, and was left for dead in an alley. He’s covered in lesions and scars. He’s a survivor, and has the calm of one. Janey is alert but friendly, and only Roger is wary but I know it won’t take him long. In fact he just jumped up on the bed next to me, and is sitting on my leather jacket. Perfect photo opportunity. Laural gave me the beard kit in the photo, as she had forgotten to cancel a subscription when Mark had to shave for an audition. Ahh yes. Auditions. That’s part of why I’m here. And now I have a doggy launch pad…


I have the weekend to get my freshly edited reel on Vimeo, shots are in place, Monday is my first official day in Los Angeles.

The calm before the storm?

Day 5. In Santa Monica there is a mock Tudor building on the corner of a street that sells Heinz Tomato Soup for 4 bucks. You can get a bottle of Fairy for 7 or even a Yorkie Bar for too much. It looks like most of the shops in Stratford upon Avon in that it’s trying to look Tudor but isn’t, and it’s called “ye olde” something. In this case “Kings Head Shoppe“. It’s rather lovely to behold. I walk in and it seems to be doing a roaring trade. Santa Monica is where all the expat Brits tend to settle and I can see why. It’s got everything. It calls itself The City of Santa Monica and it sits on the edge of the Pacific Ocean. If you walk to the end of the pier you find a sign marking the end of Route 66. 2448 miles from Chicago, the road out west. You’ve made it pilgrim. This is the end of the road. Sit yourself down and have yourself a Jammie Dodger. That’ll be 4 dollars.
The town itself has a huge centre full of shops. There are pedestrianised boulevards, coffee shops, the first bookshop I’ve seen since I arrived, and chain stores. It’s like Milton Keynes with vomiting stegosaurus fountains instead of concrete cows. So I go shopping. There are no yoga mats for less than 50 bucks anywhere in Venice, but of course one for 10 in T (J?!) Maxx which I snag as I’ve taken to doing yoga every morning. When in Rome. Then I book myself a ticket for the matinee of Lalaland at 3.45. I call it research. And maybe it will cheer me up with the inauguration looming. Armed with ticket and mat I wander towards the ocean to prevent a shopping spree. The sun is blazing after a night full of rain, and I want to put my hand in the water. But I get distracted. There’s a bloody great big promenade with a funfair on it where Route 66 ends. Ferris wheels, roller coasters, fortune tellers, games. I burn 2 dollars in a ball shooting machine and get 500 tickets which nets me a vile fluffy pink tiger eating someone’s heart. Clutching it by the neck as a toddler would I become fascinated by the Pacific. I love the sea. Even in London I live by water. But this ocean… I can’t even contemplate the distances. I watch a man fishing at the end of the pier. He keeps pulling them in and chucking them back. Too small. But there are plenty of fish in this sea. My thoughts sink into it. I get out my phone and track ahead on the map. Page after page of scroll and then you barely miss New Zealand. I imagine striking out into it in a canoe. Vast.


Pulling myself away I go and immerse myself in Lalaland. I can tell you now after 5 days, it’s hard hitting documentary realism. Once again I’m lost in fantastic reverie. Here’s to the ones who dream. By the time I leave the cinema I’ve cried so much my beard is soaking wet. I was going to walk home, but I’m a wreck, and uber pool is 2.99. Trump gets in tomorrow. The cold is blowing in across the desert and tomorrow it will rain. My uber driver says “I honestly keep hoping I’m about to wake up from a terrible dream.” Ugh. Back to reality. What I wouldn’t pay for a comforting can of Heinz tomato soup.

Headshots and mirrors

Day 4 and I’m beginning to miss the easy friendships I left behind. The golden people where you can simultaneously love, mock, comfort and challenge one another. Now I am surrounded by strangers and have not carved out those furrows. There ARE old friends but the weight of years apart pulls heavy. Today was admin. Photos. I dislike looking at myself in a mirror so it’s been incredibly valuable to crowdsource opinion on my headshots. Thanks anyone who helped with that. I’ve been thinking about that tendency in me not to like to look at myself, in the context of what I am doing and where I am. What the hell am I doing drinking in LA at 27? Well, I’m neither drinking nor 27 fuckit. But I’m here. I always used to say “I’m the opposite of LA.” “Oh I’m not the type of person who goes out there.” I’ve said that many times. I suddenly wondered why. And I realised that, as much as anything else, it’s been informed by my love of words. I’m the opposite of LA. Simply because I’m AL. Yep, that’s the sort of shit I do to myself. So I had to come out here. To look at myself. To see if there is anything in LA for AL.

 

Everything here costs money. It’s not very forgiving. There’s a hierarchy of deserving based on ability to pay. It drives one to want to make more money. It drives ambition. The undercurrent is “there’s a huge amount of money here. If you can’t afford it, get some of it, climb the ladder, play the game, that’s what we do. Dance bear dance.” And yet somehow it feels like people are dancing for themselves in the mirror, not for the sultan. And perhaps I need to dance in the mirror for a bit. I need to be able to look hard at myself to properly take ownership of what I am trying to achieve professionally, which is career longevity and continuous challenge. And people do that here.
I fit right in to this place spiritually, in that it is as confused as I am. What am I? A practising christianobuddhist greek pantheist. Utterly pretentious, doubly confused. It probably make my tinder profile here go bananas if I put it. There’s a hindobuddhist palmreading tarotovoodaic psychic ayurvedic astrologicoptic herbalist medium on every street corner peddling massively conflicting ideas for 10 bucks. “Do three hail shivas every morning while banging a gong with a chicken leg and chewing fennel.”
This morning 20 women of all ages with bright floral lycra went through asana to the soundtrack of one grunting man at the back wearing sheer Bikram pants and feeling like he’d somehow teleported into one of those seventies movies his mother used to watch. He hasn’t found his groove yet, nor his people, nor his area. But he’s trying to remember who he is through the prism of getting up every morning and saying yes to everything.
I’m glad I’m here, and equally glad that I am not enmeshed in the game of here. I want to play it a bit. I do want to go into a studio and have a couple of meetings and see that side of it. But I haven’t buried my expectation in it, which makes me feel like I have perspective. Today has been admin so no walking. Normal service will probably resume tomorrow.

This beautiful shot was taken by David Drew.

Day 3 – How to cross town for cheap…

Day 3 and I’m in West Hollywood. There’s a little island of expat Brits who have a regular breakfast subsidised by Air New Zealand. They all meet on Tuesday morning to have bacon and eggs, tiny little pots of baked beans, bottomless tea, and chats about the British things that British people chat about. Traffic, weather, admin, accommodation, family. It’s a big group and has been running for years. I flew Air New Zealand so perhaps the subsidy will offset the flight a little. Getting there involves two buses through rush hour. I’m worried about the expense of an uber. As it happens I travel entirely free. On the first bus I artlessly produce my wodge of twenty dollar bills and ask if there’s change. The driver laughs at me in the way of people who can operate the machine. “I’ve been using it for ages, I know there’s no change, he should know what I know.”

A friendly passenger pities my haplessness and gives me $1.75. She advises that I go to a laundromat and get a load of quarters. I thank her profusely, and walk embarrassed past grinning strangers. 20 stops later I have to get on a connecting bus and there are no laundromats in sight, so still no change. Feeling slightly ashamed of myself I duplicate my behaviour and sure enough it yields the same result. Taking my seat in another grinning bus it occurs to me that I could probably travel for free all month if I could keep the act fresh. Until I get a repeat customer and then I get shot. Best go to the laundromat. But the genial lost Englishman thing evidently has traction.
Breakfast involves a lot of talking and people trying to establish if I’m important. I hate to disappoint so I remain elusive high status and leave abruptly. They ask me to get involved in something called The Toscars, which could be amusing and fits my timing. The details are hazy. I walk lots of hot streets and settle in a coffee shop full of sunglasses and sandals. It’s springtime in Hoxton! It’s ALWAYS springtime in Hoxton here, kids. I organise to meet an old friend. He comes round in his car. For the first time in a while I have a conversation that is not informed by subtext. “This place is weird, it has no centre.” I venture. “That’s because YOU are the centre. It wouldn’t work if there was an actual centre. Wherever YOU are, that’s the centre, for everyone here.” We talk about Trump. “Do you think there’ll be a protest here on inauguration?” “This is Hollywood. There’s no politics.” We cover a lot of ground in a short space of time and he buys me a steak and blue cheese sandwich which almost makes me cry. “The medium food here is the best in the world.” It’s also 16 bucks. Last night I saw a basic loaf of sourdough in a supermarket for 7.50. I’m going to be eating a lot of sardines. My friend drops me back at the coffee shop in time to catch the falling sun. It drops early. I sit listening to people offer to send each other their resumé, meet with someone else and give them mine, and get an uber pool all the way home for $2.50. No idea how that happened. Travel money makes no sense here. There’s a lot that makes no sense. But at least I get the sunset from the uber.