Scrap

Strength Weekly likes to think that its most persistent themes are of great national importance but the longer one runs a blog the more evident it becomes that some concerns of less than pressing interest are acquiring thematic mass. Take this business of finding stuff in secondhand books, for instance. The other day, whilst conducting the trawl that averts lack of ease, I was thumbing through a copy of a book of a type which I would normally vacate a postal district to avoid. The volume, ‘The Amazing Results of Positive Thinking’, by Norman Vincent Peale, is a follow up to Peale’s 1952 ‘Christian psychology’ manual ‘The Power of Positive Thinking’, in which it is suggested that if positive thoughts can be formulated and, presumably, marshalled in such a manner that they eclipse negative thoughts then you’ll feel better.

I find that this doesn’t actually work. I have a particular negative thought along the lines of ‘This self-help garbage sucks and can only help those who are credulous to the point of inanition’ which is so deeply engrained that the notion of formulating a positive thought to counter it feels about as practicable as self-cleaning teeth. Positive thinking can only help those who have never had a negative thought about positive thinking. For those who might, if only briefly, have found themselves musing ‘The stuff I think wells up from places over which I have precisely no control so why would the assumption of other thoughts, actively concocted by myself in the name of some old-fashioned modern psychological exercise, have any greater or more enduring effect than the attempt to mount a photograph on the wall using saliva as an adhesive?’ then proto-cognitive behavioural technologies are destined to founder in the absence of an unblemished suggestibility.

So anyway, flipping through Peale in the manner of one unable to stop looking at an actor playing Ronald McDonald on a leafletting sortie, I came across an enclosure. A pale blue notelet, trapped in the tightness near the binding, read as follows (I have changed the names):

Dear Betty,
by this you will no doubt be convinced that I am quite the worst old woman you have ever known.
Oh yes I feel guilty alright for not writing to thank you for the nice soap you left for me also the very interesting letter. (Thank you dear)
So pleased to hear you had settled down and enjoying your new life in London.
Expect you will be home at Malton for Christmas so I shall post your small present there they may come in (?) or at least you can always give them away.
I would love to buy you a really expensive present if only I had enough cash, I always feel like this at Christmas but it doesn’t worry me all the year round.
Things are very much the same at the Home’s also the staff.
We have started having extra time off during the week which is going to be good I think when we get it working properly.
Well dear I must go. Wishing you and yours a very Happy Christmas.
Love Auntie Ida.

Realising that I had the makings of a consistency I transferred the notelet from the book which had no place in my shelving to one which had, at the very least, some mildly odd illustrations in it. ‘The authorised manual of the St John Ambulance Association’ (21st Impression, 1964) resembles, at first glance, one of those sleek black notebooks available at specialised notebook retail outlets. In fact, it is more diverting:

My blog was shifting. It had, perhaps only momentarily, come to resemble another genus in the complex digital flora that are replacing the warmed world. Many readers will already be well aware that if you go to a blog you like then click on the ones they like then click on the ones they like then click on the ones they like, you may, on a good night, be delivered to something as magnificently arcane yet cared for as A1Scrapmetal , run by Hazel.

What can be said about Hazel’s small metal objects of choice? At first I wondered if Hazel was strange in a not good way then I decided that Hazel, like many of those whose training has refined their sensibilities beyond the car park and on out beyond the beer tent to the understudied microscopies of the overlooked, was very good in a strange way. (Close reading of Hazel’s discoveries reveals that many of them unfold in drawers and containers already in her possession, as if the fruit of her preoccupations had been laid down over such a long period that they had silted over and grown stratified.)

Then my brother-in-law gave me for Christmas a secondhand book about masculinity called ‘What a Man’s Gotta Do’ (1986) by the late Antony Easthope. A useful read by a pioneer, containing perhaps the most unexceptional enclosure I have yet uncovered in a used volume.

I really have nothing to say about this bus ticket. It is a low point in the graphic trajectory of this publication. Is it 22 years old or did my brother-in-law simply slip it in on the way over on the bus? I can’t be bothered to find out.

31.01.2008

Absentee Landlord

Seamus, an old friend and currently a part-time sailing teacher, writes, having read the ‘Bob & Cate’ post just beneath this one:
Read your post on “I’m not there”. Conclusion’s attractively dispiriting. But personally, I quite like the lodger idea, though I imagine myself still present as awareness after having opted out of myself. I often watch myself operating on auto-pilot, when my lodger is a well-mannered and predictable character actor. Sometimes the identity of my lodger is decided by my audience, when I contract my behaviour out to the actor they are expecting to see. Surprisingly wide range of actors get deployed – at the sailing club a harmless genial old buffer, when teaching the children a friendly old sea-salt with unfathomable knowledge and skill, for the charity whose computer support I do a dauntingly meticulous, rigorous, and reliable nerdy pedant. I don’t choose these actors, I just watch them walk on stage as the audience collects around me. I also sometimes amuse myself by interrupting the performance with a remark or action which is quite out of character.

08.01.2008

Bob & Cate

Suppose you go to the pictures and Jude Law (pictured right), playing someone called Frank, says “I’ll be back” and he goes out then later on someone comes in and Kate Winslet says “Hi Frank” and he says “Hi” but it’s not Jude Law it’s Kevin Spacey. That’s a bit confusing. Then suppose it isn’t even Kevin Spacey that comes back in, it’s Uma Thurman and Kate says “Hi Frank” and Uma says “Hi.” That’s unacceptably confusing, isn’t it?

No. It isn’t. It’s acceptable. In Todd Haynes’ new movie “I’m Not There” (2007), a biopic of Bob Dylan, the artiste is played by six different actors, including Cate Blanchett, each of whom represents a facet or stage in the life of the singer. Clearly, it is now okay, at least in Haynes’ view, to risk confusing the audience by switching the lead actor from time to time, without preamble.

A few years ago this wouldn’t have washed. It suggests that audiences are, not necessarily knowingly, sufficiently relaxed with the malleability and inconstancy of identity to find the changes interesting rather than irritating. In a similar vein, the casting of Blanchett (pictured left) as one of the Dylans suggests an openness towards ideas about the ‘feminine side’ of the artist or the artist as one who exploits that side without being a weirdo.

Some of the actors are so un-Dylan like, such as Marcus Carl Franklin, a black child actor playing the character Woody, based in part on Woody Guthrie and on the young Dylan when he most admired Guthrie, that one has continually to work at situating the figure in any narrative or historical framework that might be available either in the movie or in the biographical material at large.

Oddly, it’s even more of a stretch with Richard Gere (also playing Bob). When it comes to Cate Blanchett, however, the disjunctions and the congruities move to another level. Blanchett’s impersonation of Dylan is startling. She has the body, the voice and the demeanour down to such a degree that we can, for moments at a time, believe that this is Bobby here, in this drama-documentary film, interacting with other actors, all of whom are, as we’d expect, competently dissolving our resistances.

But then you’re watching Bob, who happens to be played by the actress Cate and you’re buying the fiction while simultaneously registering its profound implausibility. You admire Cate doing it – which is an inappropriate mode of viewing if the fiction is to be sustained – while you ponder the enigma that is Bob Dylan. Todd Haynes (pictured right), as suggested earlier, appears to assume that this conflicted operation is within our capabilities. It’s not as if he were teaching us how to handle the contradictions so much as he is exploiting skills we have already acquired.

What is there within our everyday social experience that has enabled us to accept Haynes’ blunt confusions of identity? Is it just that we are used to the fact that we will meet people from time to time who ‘put on an act’? This is pretty unexceptional and would hardly be expected to precipitate a radical revision of the conventions of film drama. Is it that we have grown accustomed to acts of impersonation, generally executed by performance professionals, that are so accomplished that they verge on the uncanny? Surely achievements of this order have been commonplace throughout the history of the performing arts. Is it that Blanchett’s Dylan presents us with a (fictional) masculine surface that has a female interior in such a way that some sort of deep psychological truth is being illustrated? That’s an attractive thought but it may be too deep. As are other notions that touch on progressive issues of gender and sexuality.

A clue may reside in the film’s title: “I’m Not There”. Someone is talking to you but ‘they’ are not ‘there’. In Dylan’s case this may refer to the artiste’s exceptional and notorious reluctance to be pinned down or summed up. More generally, it may allude to our wan acceptance of the eroded, not to say blanched, status of that part of ourselves once regarded as persisting and enduring, the part that will always be there regardless of the weather, flying the flag that is only ours. Once that part is threatened then we might as well be glove puppets, we might as well get an actor in to deal with the everyday bric a brac.

If we do not actually experience this dilapidation ourselves, in our relations with our friends, it has certainly, I suggest, become readily recognisable abroad and has paved the way for the acceptance of the practice of taking in lodgers. The lodger, in this case, lives just beneath the skin and articulates appearance. His or her presence verges on the arbitrary, in the same way that it is arbitrary, at one level, that Blanchett plays Dylan. The evacuation of Dylan to make way for Blanchett is not an issue that Haynes foregrounds. It is, nevertheless, implicit in his representation of Dylan.

The idea of getting a lodger to play you is humiliating, it’s a strategy of last resort. That a man might be passably articulated by a woman lodger is, for many men, an even more humiliating prospect. Not everyone will be able to afford Cate Blanchett, for example. They will have to rely on lesser role models. These are increasingly drawn either from the ranks of professional performers or those who, having not achieved, simply imitate those who have. The result is that the lodger’s skills are drastically reduced to theatrical effects and postures: we are performed by imitators whose specialisms depend on having access to substance in order that they might imitatively reproduce it. If the substance has been evacuated to make room for the imitator then all that can be produced is a pure, unadulterated, undetailed, essential theatricality.

30/12/2007

On a re-reading 17 years later that last paragraph feels a bit confusing. When I wrote ‘Not everyone will be able to afford Cate Blanchett’, I wanted to suggest that we who are not film stars both have and do not have the option of incorporating Cate Blanchett into our repertoire of everyday personas. Everyone is free to incorporate the manner and mannerisms of Cate Blanchett if they find that an effective way of navigating the social. If, on the other hand, they incorporate the mannerisms of those who may have been influenced by Cate Blanchett or any other prominent figure, then they are handling used goods, insofar as what they are getting are Cate Blanchett hand-me-downs. We may unwittingly be imitators of imitators of imitators etc.

We should not imagine that Cate Blanchett herself  has not practised being Cate Blanchett. It may well be that what we see of Cate Blanchett, in her films, in interviews and so forth is not the real Cate but a version that is edited for public consumption. Given that Cate and professional actors in general, act for a living, this is hardly surprising. We should not be tempted, however, to assume that because Cate so deftly deploys what may be a public persona that this, in turn, somehow demonstrates that she has an enviable, heightened sense of the Real Cate that is to be found beneath the persona. (I use Cate as an example – everybody does this stuff.)

Everyone is free to incorporate aspects of anyone else. The performing arts provide an abundance of potential acquisitions, to such an extent that it is almost as if the plots and narratives that seem to define the essence of films and shows were merely an attractive overlay concealing an indispensable manual for everyday performative procedures that will either preserve the Real Self or obscure the fact that there is none, or obscure the fact that the subject feels that there is none.

01/08/2024

The Jingling

Strength Weekly wishes all its readers the warmest and most relaxing Christmas that their personal belief systems will accommodate. Two items must be shared at this special time: the first has given sublime pleasure to many throughout 2007 while the second has coarser charms.

22.12.2007

 

17 years later I revisited this brief seasonal trinket and discovered that the very amusing Hitler ‘Downfall’ Parody Meme Video, originally supplied above in clickable form, so popular at the time and deservedly so, was not only unavailable but nowhere to be found in the vastness of YouTube despite there being literally several hundred variants archived on that platform. In order to track it down and repost it I tried to remember what had made me laugh so much and it had something to do with invigoratingly unacceptable language (most of the memes deliver this) and football (many of the memes feature this). I scrolled for a while but then became dispirited. I had a few laughs en route but they fell in the shadow of the 2007 variant, which was a rarity in the field  back on the day.

31/07/2024

Alas, the video that was the second item is no longer available

I, Healer

It’s that time of year when I write two plays in four days and rehearse each one for eight hours. This is the annual performance project at Wimbledon College of Art, where I teach, from time to time, in the Theatre School, which delivers one of the most respected theatre and screen design courses in the country. I have written about my endeavours there before in Strength Weekly. Working with the design students is an annual lark with an extremely permissive writing brief and a design team that invariably rises to the occasion with great energy and imagination.

When I write performances for a paying public – outside the haven of Wimbledon – I feel a certain caution with regard to matters of coherence. I have no desire to be utterly incoherent but I am very absorbed in the possibilities of experimenting with the conventions and established forms of theatre and this, in turn, can lead to the production of unfamiliar forms. My plays generally have rather slender narratives and are barely concerned with story-telling. My characters lack character though I like to think they are replete with psychology. When the opportunity arises to play to an in-house audience I feel I can push these aspects further and test their limits.

At the moment I find myself drifting steadily further and further away from even the most tenuous narrrative continuity. I get irritated when I read, transcribed from the volubilities of an earnest playwright, that ‘story-telling is a healing process’. Why would you want to be healed? Nobody else is. Furthermore, if it does work, how long does it last? Two days? Then you have to see another one. I’ll stop there before I go off on one.

The idea that, in a world of rubble, theatre has an ‘urgent duty’ to shape and articulate ‘as never before’ is hopelessly redundant. All I want to do is make work that takes note of the irreversible fractures and reflects them, possibly offering a modicum of poignancy in the process. It’s much too late for instructive and consolatory models. Oops, I went off on one.

Anyway, since the fall of the Towers, the rise of consumerised psychic deracination, the consolidation of permanent war (this book is excellent on the latter) and the rapid descent into the shitter of all known ecological systems, I have felt a strong desire to write shows that, at the level of what you see and hear, are as disconnected as a snake over which a railway train has recently passed.

The idea that you might write a scene in which some people want something then either get it or do not get it strikes me as luxurious. Surely it makes more sense, in the sense of not making sense because it’s not an appropriate response anymore, to write a scene in which some people want something then some other people come in and start something that has nothing remotely to do with the first people’s desires or fears, to the extent that the first people go away and you never see them again. Now that’s what I call theatre.

This is all very well, I am finding. It’s very hard to shake off the temptation to make one scene somehow modify the one before it and set up, in a coherent way, expectations for its successor. One of the delicious playlets I have just written, ‘In the Bosom of Roy’, was intended to be as connected as a rat and a raincoat, to the extent that I started writing deliberately at great speed without planning, piling up short scenes that, I thought, were as complementary as syndiotactic polypropylene and Celine Dion. Then damn me, on an interim read through, if I didn’t find I’d written a story but with the scenes in the wrong order. (I’m aware that I’ve contradicted this claim elsewhere in Strength Weekly, and should note that while I thought that ‘I’d written a story’, many audience members did not share this view. Ed. (2019)) Having noticed this I was subsequently unable to resist completing the story so that all the people in it who wanted something did or didn’t get it. Blimey. Clearly, the West End beckons.

11.12.2007