Sinister: beware the foresail

[Gordon]

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

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