Woke up yesterday morning covered in dust: woodshavings; plaster dust; sawn-brick dust and to the sound, stangely reminiscent in parts to Ryuchi Sakamoto's soundtrack to the *Sheltering Sky* (Paul Bowles as envisioned by Bernardo Bertolucci before he got infatuated by the girl Tyler). It wasn't the Japanese stylist, though, but Talvin Singh of the Asian Dub Foundation. I dreamed, in some detail, about sailing a yacht. My reasoning is that main and aft sails are, essentially, balanced by the keel but if you use the puffy sail way out front it will give you forwards propulsion with the wind behind you, but if it gets you on the side, it'll blow you over. So this rich, ambient, electronic surround-sound is going on as I roll around, head on a pillow wrapped in a plastic bag (even this is dusty) virtually crashing bows into tangy spray somewhere up in a Northern Sound ('Sound' being a stretch of water between islands). I wake up at the offer of tea. A black and white movie is playing silently on a television screen: One of those fast 30's movies like Chaplin or Harold Lloyd or the Cops one. Keystone. Buster Keaton. Ah... to wake up in the flat of a fellow architect... well, three architects, to be precise and, me.. the assistant. One book on the shelf: 10x10, chief editor 'Ilona' Iona; previous uni chum of my host. He hadn't previously realised. She was never much of a designer and now she has greater status than the rest of us put together. 'Morning' It's nearly lunchtime. All the taxis pass in the wrong direction. It is suggested that I've had one too many after my first Vodka and Red Bull at the Scotsman (heh! Forget Indiekid! I got the dissolute look to perfection! (kinda dusty and unshaven: sturdy blue-black cloth to my '60's suit jacket; falling apart) so I head off to the Palm Court bar at the Balmoral instead, via Waterstones' in order to pick up a copy of Evelyn Waugh's *Vile Bodies* which is more modernist; less elegiac than *Brideshead*. Maybe I shoulda tried Honeyz Bar. Then the theatre. I get to the Lyceum only to find my ticket is for the Playhouse: two miles away and about 500 yards from the Balmoral. Pah! Dancing. Funky stage set by Zaha Hadid and more rich electronic dub music. The dancers, at certain points, seemed to almost become the shifting arcs of the set, and there were video projections too, both magnifying and variously re-configuring the dancers and their context: the theme was 'Metapolis' : the pursuit of city, to construct one of severally similar possible etymologies. Afterwards, I met a girl who said.. 'I've known you for like, five minutes and it's obvious you're really depressed'. Perhaps I should have replied: 'That's because I can't kiss you'. But, of course, I said no such thing. We parted. In my defence, I would say that one has to balance the awe of the unknown with a fidelity to competence. Being incompetent in most areas of life, however, I'll stick with the strange; the new; the unknown... put it this way (this actually comes via a series of discussions with the ... whatever What if we were at the very beginning of human history and not compelled towards the detailed resolution of its imminent demise? Gordon +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ Brought to you by the Sinister mailing list +---+ To send to the list mail sinister@missprint.org. To unsubscribe send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to majordomo@missprint.org. WWW: http://www.missprint.org/sinister +-+ "sinsietr is a bit freaky" - stuart david, looper +-+ +-+ "legion of bedroom saddo devotees" "peculiarly deranged fanbase" +-+ +-+ "pasty-faced vegan geeks... and we LOST!" - NME April 2000 +-+ +-+ "frighteningly named Sinister List organisation" - NME May 2000 +-+ +-+ "sick posse of f**ked in the head psycho-fans" - NME June 2001 +-+ +-+ Nee, nee mun pish, chan pai dee kwa +-+ +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+