01:
I never did university. I never went traveling. I went from art-school straight into the design and web world which is the space I’ve inhabited ever since and let my artistic streak atrophy until I’m left with this vestigial tail. I need to work that phantom limb back into a usable prehensile state again (he said stretching the metaphor to breaking point).
I’ve met some great people along the way. Lost contact with countless others. Kept the dearest to me closest.
I’ve had two major relationships in my life both of which are now ended. Both of them were with women who weren’t particularly adventurous or gregarious people. Caring, beautiful and loved all the same.
For them I stayed in the UK, to make a go of things, to further my career and until recently I thought to get married and slip into middle age even further.
My father has always pushed me to move abroad, telling me that as a young man, the most exciting thing he’d ever done was to join the army and see the world. I’m now too old to join the army and I think I’m a mite too sensitive a soul to sign up to a job which might involve shooting people or being shot myself. He still berates me for not doing it.
Now I am self-employed and single. I have hardly any outgoings; no debts and few possessions; no pets or children; no bailiffs baying for blood. I hunger for travel and experience.
My father has offered me sponsorship so that at least I won’t starve to death when times are hard and I can’t find work. If I can convince my mother to do the same then I’ll be able to enjoy and immerse myself in an alien culture for a length of time, learn a language or two and see something bigger than the island I’ve been living on this past 30 years. Luckily my job allows me to roam free and earn money as long as I have my laptop and a wifi connection.
Ideally I’d be looking at moving in the new year, where is as yet undecided, but there is a short list. Some of the places have people I already know living there so I may sofa surf. Portugal and Egypt are likely to start with. After that there’s France, Germany, Austria and Holland. I may try and get to all of them. Who knows, maybe I’ll stay in a few for a while.
This is something I’ve wanted to do since I was a young man. I’m not so young anymore but certainly no more adult and the mere thought of living abroad fills me with all sorts of conflicting emotions. Mainly excitement at the prospect of new experiences.
I’m sorry if this the first you’ve heard of it and I’m even more sorry if it upsets you but this is an action I’d definitely rather apologise for than have to gain permission.
30:
Sadly this isn’t the final version of the draft, that’s been lost somewhere along the line but I thought I’d post it here in case anyone fancied reading it anyway.
The bit with the wolf and the woodsman as well as the end where I needed to get the final act down are missing. If I can find them and if anyone’s bothered I’ll see if I can dig it out from somewhere.
INT. DAY. ASYLUM CLINIC
Not that you’d be able to tell by the sickly yellow lighting
and the lack of windows.
FADE FROM WHITE
EXTREME CLOSE UP
The Girl’s blue eye. Camera pans out to see her take a large
lungful of air as she arches her back on the table. She is
wearing a dirty white linen hospital gown. She has shock-
treatment nodes attached to her temples. They smoke lightly.
THE GIRL
*GASP*
THE DOKTOR
The procedure seems to have been a
success nurse. Have her cleaned up
and returned to her room.
He removes his elbow length black rubber gloves and hands
them to the nurse. They are wet.
NURSE
Yes Herr Doktor.
*she takes the gloves from him and
leaves*
Both The Doktor and all his staff are so immaculately clean
that they glow. Everyone else is filthy.
The Girl attempts to lever herself up onto her elbows. We see
that her blonde hair is matted with sweat or similar.
THE GIRL
What… where am I?
She’s obviously confused and disoriented.
THE DOKTOR
Now then child, be still. You need
your rest, you’ve been through a lot
recently.
He pushes her back gently onto the gurney. It is an old steel
and leather one with wrist and ankle restraints.
THE DOKTOR
Do you know where you are?
He sounds concerned, fatherly and German. He looks at her
from under his raised eyebrows and forehead mirror.
THE GIRL
I, uh, no. Who are you; what am I
doing here?
The girl raises a palm to her forehead and closes her eyes,
brow furrowed, resting on her left elbow to lift her
slightly, which is still tied, like her ankles, to the
gurney.
THE DOKTOR
You really remember nothing?
*nussink*
This is good, very good. *zer guht, ja*
The Doktor is half talking to himself at the end of his
sentences.
THE DOKTOR
Do not worry my dear. What you need
now is rest.
I will have an orderly come and
escort you to your room.
THE GIRL
Doctor, I have a question. Many
questions.
She looks earnestly at him.
THE DOKTOR
Yes, yes, ja, I’m sure. They will
have to wait. Perhaps our next
session.
He stands up straight, turning and the conversation, for him
at least, is at an end. An orderly has arrived and he wheels
The Girl away whilst she twists and turns in the gurney to
try and fire questions over her shoulder.
INT. DAY. THE ASYLUM CORRIDORS
The Girl watches as she’s wheeled through the milling crowds
of mad men that fill the tiled hallways.
Eventually they arrive at a cell with a battered iron door
with green and white chipped paint and a tiny viewing hole in
it.
She locks gazes with a giant man who seems to have a real
rabbit nose but he is immediately lost in the crowd and The
Girl is in no position to crane to find him again.
INT. DAY. THE GIRL’S CELL
THE SHOT IS POSITIONED ISOMETRICALLY FROM ABOVE AND IS EVER
SO SLIGHTLY UNCOMFORTABLY LONG.
It is grubby and looks as though it stinks. The girl is sat
with her legs out beneath her with her hands in her lap and
her head bowed forward. The floor is strewn with stones and
straw and there are muted cries and the murmur of madness
from outside.
A pewter plate of ‘food’ is slid across the floor. It’s grey
and slops over the side of the bowl.
FADE TO BLACK.
INT. DAY. THE ASYLUM ‘RECREATION’ ROOM
The Girl is sat alone at a table covered in chequers and
toppled chess pieces. She looks over her shoulder
occasionally and tucks her hair behind her ears, head bowed
as if trying to deflect attention. There is chaos all around
as begowned inmates shuffle around, jostling each other but
don’t touch her or the table.
A gowned man approaches. He has a large u-shaped scar running
around one side of his head. It is quite bald. It is the
giant man who had the rabbit nose.
He stand quietly near the table with his shoulders slumped
and his head down.
The Girl flicks a nervous glance at him and then looks back
at the table. He doesn’t move.
She waits a little and then looks back this time she stares
up at him for a good while before standing up and chasing him
off by waving her arms and shouting loudly. Think Chimps. He
cringes and runs away crying.
The Girl sits down and after a brief pause covers her eyes
with one hand and starts crying also.
THE CAMERA DOES NOT MOVE DURING THIS WHOLE EXCHANGE. IT MIGHT
BE HANDICAM.
INT. DAY. THE GIRL’S CELL
IDENTICAL SHOT TO THE LAST TIME YOU SAW THE CELL EXCEPT NOW
THE GIRL IS SAT CROSSED LEGGED AND CATCHES THE FOOD AS IT
SLIDES PAST AND WAVES AT THE UNSEEN PERSON THAT THREW IT.
INT. DAY. ASYLUM CLINIC
Another extreme close up of The Girl’s eyes. They look from
side to side in panic then close tightly.
PAN BACK.
The Girl has a gag in place and is being electroshocked, her
back is arching and her screaming is muffled.
FADE TO WHITE
INT. DAY. THE ASYLUM CORRIDORS
The Girl’s being wheeled through the corridor again. She’s
barely conscious but she locks eyes with The Giant again.
This time he’s got a rabbit nose, teeth and ears. He nods and
she passes out.
INT. DAY. THE ASYLUM ‘RECREATION’ ROOM
The Girl is listless and sits with her head slumped over her
chest. She is sat with The Giant at the games table,
surrounded by chess pieces again. As before he is normal
again.
IT IS THE SAME SHOT AS BEFORE.
They are sat contemplating the red and black checkered board
before them. The Girl has her red chess pieces in front of
her and The giant, black chequers. She moves a pawn, holds
her finger there for a while and then, happy with her
decision, removes the digit. She looks up at The Giant with a
nervous smile and nods.
He kings a piece and sends it around the board in a seemingly
random manoeuvre and removes most of her pieces, leaving only
the queen. He looks up and grins triumphantly, nods back.
The girl hangs her head and slaps her forehead.
INT. DAY. ASYLUM CLINIC
THE CAMERA TAKES IN THE WHOLE ROOM.
The Doktor is preparing his tools, this time rather than the
electroshock equipment he has a series of surgical tools on
display.
He caresses them lovingly, lightly dancing his fingertips
across the extremely shiny instruments.
He’s humming.
INT. DAY. THE ASYLUM CORRIDORS
We are stood outside The Girl’s cell, an orderly is helping
The Girl to navigate the complexities of the door.
*BANG*
The Giant has run down the corridor and smashed the game
table over the orderly’s head. He crumples.
The Giant grabs The Girl’s arm and drags her forcefully down
the corridor in the direction that he came. The crowd of
patients whoop, scream and jump in place but do not
interfere.
We hear the protests of orderlies off camera. The Giant looks
over his shoulder, to camera his arse is on show, he pulls a
comical surprised expression and pulls The Girl faster,
nipping quickly round a corner, gown flapping. They join a
small group of patients who are just stood around in a
circle, heads bowed. The orderlies barge past, knocking
everyone. They’re obviously not part of the same group but
the orderlies do not notice.
The Giant looks up and then, grabbing The Girl’s arm again,
runs in the direction the orderlies came from.
INT. DAY. INSIDE LAUNDRY ROOM
There are piles of dirty linen everywhere. We are facing the
inside of the door when we hear something hit it.
INT. DAY. OUTSIDE LAUNDRY ROOM
The Giant is rubbing his shoulder and grimacing. Shouts and
the sound of running feet are getting louder. The Giant looks
up, right, left and, smiling, grabs a handy patient and
swings him forcefully into the door, face first. The patient
continues through the newly opened aperture and collapses,
bloodied, onto one of the piles of laundry.
He shakes the girl to illicit a response. She lifts her head
slightly and groans.
THE GIRL
I… uh, yes, yes, I understand. We,
uh, have to leave.
THE GIANT
*HUH*
He smiles encouragingly and holds her cheek briefly in a
fatherly manner.
The Giant looks down at the patient.
The Giant grabs the poor groaning man and spins him once like
a hammer thrower’s hammer.
EXT. DAY. ASYLUM
The window explodes as the patient is hefted through it. The
window is on at least the second storey.
It is snowing.
INT. DAY. INSIDE LAUNDRY ROOM
The Giant picks up the girl, cradling her in his arms and
stands on the edge of the newly opened exit. He takes one
look over his shoulder and then, looking down, jumps…
CUT TO BLACK
DARKNESS
There is a loud splash.
EXT. DAY. THE RIVER.
CLOSE UP, WATER ON LENS AS IF WE ARE SWIMMING WITH THE
CHARACTERS.
The Giant and The Girl come spluttering to the surface. It
looks cold and unpleasant. Behind and above them we can see
orderlies peering over the edge of the window but not
directly at the pair.
INT. DAY. QUEEN’S CHAMBERS
THE RED QUEEN
WHAT?
She smashes a glass to the floor. She’s prone to bursts of
fury that echo her fiery exterior. She’s a tall woman,
wrapped head to toe in black rubber with a shock of red
artificial dreadlocks. She is beautiful and has immaculate
make-up. The throne room is massive and black. If stained
glass windows can be made in black and still let in light
they’d be in here.
THE RED QUEEN
What do you mean she’s gone? How can
she be gone, she was in a secure
asylum!
I built it myself and nobody’s ever
escaped my asylum!
There are always a group of lackies around the Red Queen,
replacing and refilling glasses mostly.
A lacky backs away in deference to her, head bowed and hands
clasped he retreats without ever turning his back to her and
disappears into the shadows.
30:
I spend almost all of my time in front of a computer of one sort or another. For work it’s in front of either a laptop if I’m doing the road-warrior thing or a desktop machine and for fun it’s an Xbox or Playstation. It wasn’t always like this though. Years before touchscreen technologies and haptic responses, wireless controllers and bluetooth headsets, a computer in every home, the internet, was the time of analogue.
You would recognise most of the technology in use, dinosaurs to our sleek miniaturised digital companions but obvious predecessors. Movie cameras were VHS or Betamax, running on battery or even earlier by clockwork and coiled spring. The only portable phones were military technology and later confined to cars and the business elite. Home games were still mostly still boards and dice. The digital age was yet to arrive.
I remember this era well. I remember the launch of CD, the death of recording magnetically to ferrous oxide tape. I remember buying vinyl 7″s in the shops, the pop, crackle and boom as the diamond tipped needle skipped it’s way down the grooves. I’m not sure it’s the technology itself I remember but the physical connection the media that you were handling. Renting videos and loading them into a monstrous silver machine under a large rounded glass screen.
I had a friend who used to work in a tiny town cinema as a projectionist, I used to visit him in his stuffy cubby hole above the screens and we’d drink beer and sneak a cheeky joint out the back. It was a flea pit of a cinema but a beautiful art deco building which sadly is not there anymore, just a pile of bricks in a walled off lot, no doubt awaiting rebirth as a luxury executive flat development. They used to get the blockbuster films about six months to a year after they’d been released and they were generally on their last legs. Once he let my hang around whilst he repaired a movie. With short controlled slices of just a shop bought razor blade he cut burned and scratched sections out of the reels, making something usable out of what was previously useless. Yes, of course there would be mistakes. I once sat through a film where the final scene was upside down and another where the thrilling denouement was cut halfway through due to a previous cinema carelessly burning through it, everything filtered through a fine haze of dust, scratches and hair that would dance merrily around the screen. We got our money back after that particular showing but the point that I’m trying to illustrate is that it was salvageable and it was repaired manually, not to 100% quality but enough to be usable again. It was great to see such a feat of manual dexterity and prowess.
In a digital age we take things like copies and backups for granted but in an analogue world you’re responsible for your actions, mistakes have a real world repercussion. There’s only one physical item like the one that you’re using. You may be able to replace it but it will involve cost and time. I think that’s the major difference between then and now that I personally notice. Patience.
Making mix-tapes of your favourite songs for your friends took time, effort and a great deal of patience getting it just so. It’s something I still enjoy doing as it reconnects me with my past in a way that few things can.
Even when I was at college, the memories of which appear as a through a fog, editing VHS footage on an offline editing desk was a manual task that required patience. There was very little risk involved in that process though as you were mixing down from two tapes to a third, an action which has no consequence if there are mistakes, only paid for by time. No save as, draft or undo, just action and consequence. I also loved the way that analogue technologies degrade with time and duplication. I often copied work much further than was necessary just to get different effects, playing the process to produce muffled audio effects or increasing the noise to signal ration so that human figures shambled around out of focus or beneath a curtain of scan-lines. There’s a certain element of play and experimentation that I would say is missing from digital film production, the joy of the process and journey to an undetermined end point. The act of creation rendered sterile by software.
Of course the digital world also has its caveats. Errors in duplication or catastrophic errors of a host disk will often result in entirely lost lives. This has happened to me a few times now and I’ve resigned myself to the fact that I’ll never be able to look back on the last ten years when I’m in my dotage as I’ll have nothing to prove I was even here, just a digital timeline of encounters and disjointed conversations. I don’t think I’m alone in having very little to actually show for my time on this planet in the opening part of the digital age. At least when I split with my first girlfriend there was physical evidence of our encounter in the form of real photographs. OK, so I don’t have any of them, but I know they exist still in her home. Somewhere. My last relationship I leave no trace, the better part of a decade and I evaporate like mist exposed to the morning sun, present only in memory and spoken word to be forgotten soon as the pain of separation fades and life moves inexorably forward. A period of my life enjoyed but never recorded in any real sense, just an ephemeral shadow of my personality on the internet.
As a reaction to this impermanence I have decided to re-explore my roots as a child of analogue and re-learn those atrophied manual and mental skills with a series of works that are based solely in the space of the real. Perhaps then I may make an impression worthy of remembrance.
03:
And I’m too busy to take part again.
Still, at least this time around I’m gainfully self-unemployable. Zoe seems to be hammering through her story, almost 8k words in on day three. That’s good going if she can keep up the momentum. I’ll try again next year.
20:
Katie Paterson is a conceptual artist who recorded the melting of three glaciers, collected meltwater from the glaciers, pressed three records from it and then played it until it melted. You can hear it here.
I think it’s quite magical. You might not agree.
She also translated the score of Moonlight Sonata into morse code, bounced that off the surface of the moon and played the resulting score back on a klavier. Sadly this doesn’t seem to be online anywhere. I’ve emailed her for a recording of it but I’m not sure if I’ll get a response or not.
/* edit */
hi pete,
thanks for your nice message, but sorry no, it’s not online…
it’s been sold to collectors as a limited edition, so legally can’t be given out to anyone else…however my book ‘earth-moon-earth’ is on sale for £10 with cornerhouse, and it has a cd of the morse code recording which might be interesting
also, the piano will probably be exhibited soon so maybe you can see it!
best wishes,
katie
19:
Hey. You have probably noticed (all none of you) by now that I haven’t updated in a while.
This is due to me not having done any writing for a bit. I’ve been concentrating on other interests but will be making a return at some point.
Sadly I don’t get enough time to pursue all of them all of the time so I have to choose which of them I’m going to follow at any one time. Currently it’s a music project. It does have literary roots though, so I guess it’s sort of related.
I don’t think I’ll be in a position to do the NaNoWriMo this year either which is a pain, but hopefully I’ll get my arse into gear for next year.
17:
It’s been manic at work recently, pulled two twelve hour days already this week and probably another today. With the commute that adds another four hours to each day. I’m existing on six hours sleep a night, coffee, cigarettes and whatever food I can find (picky eater rather than bin-diver).
I’m so tired I feel like I’ve been drinking.
I was stuffed with cold over the long Easter weekend so didn’t get around to writing any script which has but me way behind schedule, I should be at about fifty or so pages and I’ve currently managed twenty or so. The finish line seems a long way off and next week looks like another crazy work week, the only writing time I get is on the train to and from work at the moment.
Still, I love the script so far and hope it’s got some fresh takes on old fairy tale ideas. I might post some excerpts later.
03:
I ripped out 5 pages of dialogue from my script this morning and lost a character in the process.
It reads very much more like a fairy tale now.
I’ll miss my brain-damaged toilet-monikered hero Doulton though.
02:
So, I had a good day yesterday. Managed nine pages in total. Another two on the train this morning and wrote myself out of a cul-de-sac, invented a cool character and moved the story on to act two… Take that Ideas Toad!
01:
Well I fired up the netbook with its spangly new OS (the latest Ubuntu is gorgeous) and a fresh copy of Celtx (never used it before, already love it) and started tapping out the stuff thast’s been in my head for the last few days. So far so good. Two pages done on the way into work and a journey home and an empty house this evening hopefully means that I’ll get my way up to at least five before I forget everything.
I’m really glad I got the geeky stuff I needed done out of the way last night, I’m free to defecate poor movie scripts into the world at my own pace now.
Shock realisation that none of my major characters have names or in fact will get them.
I should really get more of it down on paper though. You know, with a pen and that.
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