Because We Must.

The White One is Evil

2007-11-18T14:26:57Z

For posterity....

I made a pop video for the emo boy band Elliot Minor. I am the girl in the horse's head. I enjoyed wearing the horse's head more than I can describe. However, I was paid zero pence for the video and am on the cover of all three versions of the single which is outrageous if you think about it - they didn't even have the courtesy to ask permission. I mean had they asked I would have said yes. It's the presumption and the fact they're signed to Warners that is outrageous.

It's all worth it though for this quite frankly HYSTERICAL 'behind the scenes' look at the making of the video. You really do have to watch it because there is the most amusing moment ever where the keyboardist checks me out in the most astonishingly obvious/ridiculous manner.

He didn't even have the guts to chat me up. I mean, I could be dating someone from the York quintet soon to be supporting McFly at Wembley. That would be supercool.

Of Jellybabies and Helicopters

2007-07-06T11:33:32Z

What a week. I can scarcely begin. There are times of parallel worlds or at least of different dimensions that slip and intertwixt and this week has been as full as a plump unpecked cherry from the Goblin's Market...

Filming the advert I got to run up to a helicopter as it landed and escort the "band" to the backstage area. I also got to bite the heads off jellybabies in a tribute to Ozzy Osbourne. (mongst other things.) That was really exciting. Though the jellybabies made me feel sick and quite hyper after the eigth take.

I went to see a music video programme at the NFT of which "She Is the New Thing" was part. We got the biggest cheer (admittedly, I might have been whooping quite loudly) and it was truly magnificent to see it on the big screen. Actually thrilling. I think I find lots of things thrilling though. But that doesn't diminish the thrillingness of everything that thrills me. After the event, I went for coffee/hot chocolate with the exceptionally WONDERFUL Lawrence and Kitten. It felt a bit like being in a TV series. But in a good way, emphasised by the fact that Kitten is unable to relate to TV. That made it even more TV-esque. Somehow.

I also made myself really sick at a fairground by not eating all day and then eating three fairground doughnuts and then going on the swings that fly out to the sides...At first it was so exciting but then it turned nightmarish and I was staring at my knees for my life. It just wouldn't end. Make it stop make it stop make it stop....

My incredible, talented, beautiful sister had her second Imagine... documentary go out on BBC1 on Wednesday night about Damon Albarn, Jamie Hewlett and the making of "Monkey: Journey to the West." What a phenomenal programme. I'm going to see the opera tomorrow en famille Silver. So excited. Really, completely can't wait.

And then of course there's
the dreams
and the deja vue
and the ripped tears
and flaming skies
and nuclear downpours
and drowning feet
and birdsong
and violets
and fear
and flight
and confusion like raindrops in July on a discarded graveyard sojourn in Paris.

Riot Kitten

2007-06-20T13:38:55Z

I have this terrible habit of getting myself into impossible situations. Situations that mean I sit at the kitchen table laughing to myself and shaking my head in wide-eyed-bemusement at my general inability to manage things sensibly for more than one month maximum. I know that my sister can tell when it's happening and she is amazing and tries to point it out in some kind of way but it's like a vortex of unavoidable downward-spiralling-rabbit-hole falling and really there's nothing anyone can do about it... just got to let it ride out and take it's course. I was teaching 14 year old Jessie about pathetic fallacy last week and these storms and crazy thunder moments and bright light through the onslaught of rain is mirroring my mental state as much as the weather does in Tennyson's "Mariana."

Kissing. It's a weird thing isn't it. Like the actual very action of it is weird, but it also does weird things to people. Is there anything more beautiful than a dilated pupil? I wish my pupils were always massively big and engulfingly black. Maybe that is the main reason that vampires are attractive and also associated with sex because their whole eyes are massively engulfing black pupils and don't people say that your pupils dilate when you kiss someone? Or something.

This week I've gone a little bit insane. Not in a bad way or a dangerous way, just every so often my nihilism takes over and because nothing really seems to have any reality behind it, there is no reason not to
run through a puddle,
get soaked in the rain,
do the splits in a forest,
wear awful eye make-up til dawn,
try to out-skip the nearest shooting star,
stay up so late you are actively trashing your body,
bathe naked in the moonlight and
throw yourself down a steep hill whilst the sun is rising and the larks are singing...

The problem is that eventully you have to pick up the rainbow slashed pieces and re-assemble them as the evanescent ark they were to begin with so that when you've finally done that and it took you about five hours, plenty of tears and a slice through your right atrium to do it, there is nothing there anyway. It's just evaporated and what's left is still the nothing with an added side order of mess.

What normally happens is I just stay out far too late when I have to be up really early the next morning and let this happen for a few days in a row until it's hard to tell where the sleeping started and the waking ended, what I dreamt and what actually happened because there wasn't really any sleeping, but at the same time there's no real evidence to tell me that I actually went out rather than just making it all up.

Everything always happens at once. Nothing happens for ages and then suddenly there's so much happening in every aspect of being that the only response is to become a teenager and not really deal with any of it.

That seems like the only sensible response.

The Frontline of Nu-Rave

2007-06-17T15:44:51Z

I admit that I recently purchased a pair of indutibly nu-rave babycham sneakers with a big multi-coloured shooting star down the side of them and multicoloured shoelace eyelets.

I also admit that I am a massive Klaxons fan and that Enter Shikari at Download rocked my world. So imagine my delight on going to the O2 Wireless Festival yesterday for free post Carlsberg ad shoot the previous day, and getting to watch Klaxons in a blue tent in a park as dusk began to fall outside.

Making the advert on Friday was incredible. The nicest crew I have ever worked with, an amazing director and, straight down the line, an inspired advert in my opinion. It made me feel validated somehow and understand that sometimes things are just right, and when they are that's the way it is and you should bathe in the rose textured sunlit glory of it all. It was so much fun playing the Rock Group Manager's PA. I got to run around talking on the phone all the time, writing down imaginary rider and guestlist requests and the director was so fabulous he'd just say "Didi, now go and get the boys and take them to lunch" and then we were off on our next insane trip to the canteen to see what would happen there. It actually made me really want to be a proper PA festival rock girl thing and now I'm trying to work out how to get into that. There must be a way? Who requires my jellybean separating, car hiring, NME photoshoot organising experience? After we'd finished filming we hung out with les sponsors and were offered tickets for the next day at the festival which made my heart swell to the top of my chest.

I woke up on Saturday to plan my exciting outfit for the days CSS and Klaxons based activities... There was a wild rainstorm over my part of town and my skinny jeans (yes, I have finally succumbed to fashion and temporarily traded in my flares...) clung to my legs in a slightly uncomfortable manner but that was OK because my nu-rave sneakers kept my feet remarkably dry. Hyde Park was under a completely different cloud... The sunshine was blistering in bursts through the stretched out cotton-wool in the blue air above and it was all very beautiful. The kids were out in force, massive plastic rainbows hanging from ridiculously large plastic chains, high topped reebok trainers capping off purple lycra leggings and silly pink visors resting on shocks of bleach striped hair. I suddenly realised I was very not new rave.

CSS covered "Pretend We're Dead" which was a stroke of brilliance and the stage was filled with bright balloons and as the high sky floated over rolling clouds above it was all kind of dreamy and amazing. The tent where Klaxons were playing was rammed. I mean crazy busy; busier than Enter Shikari at Download. The lighting rig was fantastic, searchlights sweeping the stage, neon flashes of pink lightening and an amusing amount of glo-sticks transforming a tent in Hyde Park into their own mini Northern Lights show. I got kind of swept through the crowd to the very front of the room and hung onto the barrier for dear life as my ribs got crushed and my hands clutched onto the railing. I've never been at the front front front of a gig before and it was exhilarating and felt a bit like running downhill in an electric storm when the wind is behind you propelling you along so that if you jump slightly too high for a second or two you're actually flying... I also ended up with a drumstick that made me shriek with a mixture of delight, confusion and amusement.

Everything sort of went on very late into the night and then it was suddenly 7.33am when I got in.

I have had the most amazing weekend.

Oh My London, My New Found Land!

2007-06-01T01:06:29Z

And now, once again, my love affair re-commences...

Sun fading down behind the National Gallery to be replaced by a gigantic plump and hanging moon... As the lights fade the darkness enters the ballet and the swans begin their journey of doomed romance and pirouettes...

Passion
Glamour
Heartbreak
Death
Dusk
Beauty
Wonder
Truth
Power
Perfection

Tears cascading like bluebell scented tiger tails on a rain drowned silverlake with lunar reflection in the swishing sea at midnight on dreams.

I am so glad that I love ballet. That it is there for me.

May there always be lawrence in purple velvet and david in black jeans and sunsets and moonrises.

Oh, Swans!

Check Out, Boy!

2007-05-30T17:19:19Z

It's either me, or just boys in general, or a combination of the two things.

Last week I was innocently walking down Old Street and a boy obviously started walking next to me on the street in a way that you just don't. Or at least shouldn't. Then he told me I was an actress and a dancer and then produced his card from behind my ear because he was a magician. Called Sirus. His business crad was a playing card which was quite cool, but the coolness was diminished by him offering to buy me a drink.

Today, the first check out boy I encountered asked me if I was going to stab him with the killer stilletoe I had in my bag. (I didn't have a killer stilletoe in my bag.) The second check out boy told me I looked depressed and that I really shouldn't take an overdose. (I was buying painkillers to take to alleviate pain.) Then, on the bus, I sat opposite a man who appeared harmless enough. As soon as I sat down, however, he clenched his KFC drink to his chest and said "That's my drink." So I was like "Ummm, yes." Then he started singing to himself and he had the sweetest most mellifluous voice but he suddenly stopped singing and told me to look out of the window so I could "see the Underground." Then he threw his KFC cola over me.

I got off the bus in a rather sticky state to be greeted by a violent rainstorm which washed away the cola which was a good thing, but got me even wetter which was a bad thing. I did, however, have a Proustian reflex brought on by the prettiness of sweet-scented pink flowers in the rain to wearing Tim's fake fur trimmed parka at Stay Beautiful years ago and it being warm and smelling of vanilla and that made me happy, for awhile.

I am going to Download next weekend to see My Chemical Romance and Tim has warned me that it isn't a very nice festival. If I can't cope with having KFC cola chucked on me on the 13 bus route (and in honesty I can't really), what chance is there for me coping with Download?

Gladys the Zionist

2007-05-25T08:54:32Z

My family is a never-ending source of astonishment.

At the moment my Auntie Flo is staying with us. She is a white haired amber-bead and purple kaftan wearing 80 year old with a double hip replacement and a folding stick. She was brought up in Shanghai by Russian parents and then came to Bradford when it all went wrong with gambling and she went on to be a communist and a nurse and generally a full on radical. She has always indulged my love of ballet and taken me to matinees at the Alhambra in Bradford and The Grand in Leeds since I was very young and gone on to trek across London to see me act anywhere from an open-air park to a tiny black box theatre. She is an amazing woman.

Yesterday we went to see Billy Elliot the musical and I cried all the way through. And then she told me that Dennis Skinner is one of her best friends.

Today we are going to visit Freud's House on Finchley Road.

But what really got me was the story last night of Cousin Gladys, the Argentina based Millionairess Zionist. There was a New York childless alcoholic relation called Raymond Paul and apparently she left all her millions to this one cousin Gladys because she was the only one in my Auntie Flo's family that married a Jew. Gladys still lives in Argentina with her millions and sounds hysterical. Apparently Raymond Paul told her (Gladys) that she had hidden all of her diamonds and rubies in her dressing gown pocket and when she died Gladys had to make sure she took them from there. But when Gladys went to the apartment after Raymond had died, it had all been cleared and there was not a single ruby to be found. She still had millions in the bank though.

The Horrors: She Is The New Thing

2007-05-22T23:39:43Z

This is extraordinary. What an amazing video... The bruised knees were worth it...beyond worth it. I think you can tell it is me too. I am so excited!

"I Will Show You Fear in a Handful of Dust."

2007-05-21T17:54:41Z

I feel like my stomach is made of eggshells and my insides are falling outwards. I have felt like this since Friday. It makes me want to cry and also cut myself in half.

What's the fleshy bit inside your wrist called? You know, that mushroom shaped button-clump of veins and softness. That bit makes me feel all squishy in a bad way like when you think about the kitten that had two faces. Literally two faces on one head.

Right now, my body feels like the feeling I get when I think about my wrists.

In trapeze today I think I discovered why I'm not a very good actress. My hips are comepletely blocked and contrary to the fact that I think I exist in the present mostly, it turns out that I'm actually terrified if you tell me what I'm about to do and that blocks me from doing it. We were doing beats on the high trapeze and that went brilliantly and felt like flying, but on the second go we were doing beats into pike and suddenly I couldn't even beat. Terror had kicked in and I got the squishy wrist feeling and everything went purple and dreamy and then I thought I was going to faint so I had to come down. Very fast. Fortunately, the only way down from hanging is quite fast anyway so I didn't pass out. We spent the rest of the class doing conditioning exercises which proved to me what I already knew - that I have hardly any arm strength.

The car graveyard has now extended to sofas and somehow it seems appropriate that sofa's choose Pudding Mill Lane to end their days. The dust round there is of a post-apocalyptic scrapyard universe crossed with a Texan highway. There are whole families of wild lanky cats prowling the road, laid out on exposed car engines and cascading their tails over upturned armchairs. Today there was a Mercedes truck in a snapshot motor-crash with the entire of its front ripped off to reveal an oil-glistened inner shell. It's all abandoned though and feels like no foot has trod that road for years and yet.

And yet, new things appear each week and the railings seem increasingly broken by more and more invisible forces and when the wind swirls and the dust flies off the road and spins it's way around your head to the back of your fleshy hollows, Kansas is not so far away and the ruby red shoes can be seen glittering through the haze and all might be ok if you could close your eyes and rewind the tears and block off the pain and shut your ears and stop the biting

but you can't

so it all starts again.

"I Was a Militant Suffragette."

2007-05-12T23:04:14Z

I spent a large proportion of this afternoon tying an old lady with white hair and a tweed suit to a chair and then making her sing "The March of the Women."

I was helping this fantastic girl artist run a workshop leading up to her exhibition. She is working with this old lady who is obsessed with a suffragette called Ethel Smyth (who, incidentally, seized the chance of beating time to 'The March of the Women' which she had composed, from the window of her cell in Holloway Prison with a toothbrush after she'd been arrested) and we were helping this woman 'become' Ethel by taking her through a series of transformative physical and vocal exercises. These included putting wood in her shoes, making her push a wall, getting her to walk around with some Virginia Woolf novels on her head, asking her to put a mop through her shirt and tying her to a chair. She was pretty amazing and the whole thing was disconcerting and equally fascinating. Ethel is the physical opposite of the old lady, so it was utterly bizarre seeing her physicality change before your eyes. Lucy (the artist) will probably upload some photos on her blog ( http://www.lucybeech.wordpress.com ) which is well worth checking out regardless. I think it's rare you meet people with quite as much skill, energy and ideas as her and it was concurrently exciting to be involved today. Though quite exhausting.

Generally, my eyes are filmed with bloodlights and doorstops - insides outwards - and it's all becoming less and less clear as the rains flood the pebbledashedheartways and the blossom pirouettes, discarded in a pink-petal-clogged gutter and then there's that gristle in your eye but I can't ignore it all the same and I just want to be on the trapeze really but that's already failing and ballet is as if years away but it was only a week and my mind is skipping like a heartbeat which extends across the seconds and flutteringly dislocates, ripping the delicate wing in it's descent down your throat to smother my heart.

On The High Wire, Dressed in a Leotard...

2007-05-08T12:55:59Z

Trapeze was so wonderful I can scarcely breathe...

Having braved the car graveyard, the mattress wasteland, the destitution and dust of the obversely cosily named 'Pudding Mill Lane,' arriving at the Hangar with it's high ceiling and free-running kittens was quite a marvellous moment.

My fingers are blistered, the backs of my knees are blackened but I cannot wait for next week to try it all over again. Who would have thought I could get so much pleasure from climbing a rope? We learnt so much in just one lesson... The Half Moon, The Gazelle, The Mermaid... All the names are so thrillingly evocative and also look like they sound and it is amazing that the effect is so instant.

It feels right.

Like my element.

Like I am meant in some way to be there.

The only problem is my forearms and wrists are very weak so actually getting on the training Trapeze is incredibly difficult for me because I can't really hoist myself up to Pike. By the end of the session I already felt stronger. It's amazing how beautiful it makes people look. I love the fact that under the seeming beauty lies roughened hands and damaged legs, blistered feet and screwed up stomachs... I'll give you tragic clowns with bowed heads...

I think it is the right time in my life to learn the Trapeze. When I tried before there were too many distractions, too much lack of confidence, too much trying. Now I merely want to learn. For learning's sake, no more than that...well maybe a bit more. Maybe I would like to imagine myself creating a routine and performing it, but it's about so much more than that. The sensation is a total body one. Unlike dancing where you come out dripping with sweat and light on your feet, this makes you feel oddly grounded and like your strengthening and radiating from the core outwards...

I was, indeed, on the high wire dressed in a leotard and like the song from which that is taken, I find that I feel insatiable, my thirst is awakened and I am already craving more.

There Are Some Days That Catch the Light

2007-05-02T23:33:28Z

Screaming out the window for the wolves that prowl my street.

There's a scuttle under my room, a lurking in the ginnel, a crashing in the alleyway...an unknown creature steals someone else's rubbish and the moon glows on ever watchful, ever waking, charging the midnight air with the magic of night.

Strange how people can get it so very wrong.

Sympathetic azure skies sing through the painted counterpanes of our lives, colouring veins, stringing blood, searching for loss and dooming scattered blossom through a streetlamplithaze. I walked into the church and felt the air shift. The silence of centuries swishing round my shoulderblades and dust of a millenia startling the back of my throat. Lit two candles...how many years...and watched the hidden lady, head in hands, thinking her own secret thoughts. Thought I might burst into flames but I didn't. Searching the tangled web of graves Constable's toom leers out of the shaded ivy, pine kernels crunching underfoot dried by the bleaching of the sun, cigarette stubs surrounding heralding the artist's life through the eyes of a teenage whirlwind.

I've never understood apostrophes.

I prefer the fictional world of my teenage heroine ~ http://www.myspace.com/nevergooutwitharockstar ~ to my life as me at the moment. The best thing I ever did was called "Starring Me As Her" and that's how I feel right now.

Except it all becomes too complex and I lose myself too easily into the world's of my own making. And I want to and I have to and there's nothing for it and I have often said in times of trouble but still it unravels and anyway why did you have to go and ruin it all and is it really impossible to tell the truth and whatever happened to that dress you bought and never wore but who was that girl at the pictures and why was the dreaming boy outside all alone and if today has been mostly silent why do I have to splinter the cascading mirror of resonance with a shiver of silvered shattering arrows?

The Ninth Wonder of the World

2007-04-22T23:49:25Z

There are some things that are impossible to describe. The Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford is one of them, although Philip Pullman had a pretty good attempt. Still, it is ten million times better than words. (And I speak as one devoted to Lyra Silvertongue's Oxfordian wanderings.)

I saw Shrunken Heads, the Origin of Writing and a world carved inside a carved apple core. And that was only on the first floor. The scents, the drawers, the hand-wriiten labels, the inscriptions on inscriptions, the amulets and charms and keys and chains and shells and swirls and bells and whirls... The men patrolling all-uniformed and all-aged in crisp shirts and shiny shoes, on-hand with a fountain of knowledge, really I could have stayed for ever and never seen it all... I also found out that we used to have over a hundred hyenas and some rhinoceros, tigers, elephants, lions and bears in an old cave in Kirkdale in North Yorkshire. There was a lot of information about this but no-one pointed out, highlighted or mentioned the fact that we have never had elephants and tigers in this country regrdless of whether they were in Yorkshire or not. I should probably write and point this out to them. Still, it made me super-happy that in North Yorkshire in 1821 they found copious evidence of these exotic breeds.

We followed that extraordinary excursion with a trip to Bourton-on-the-Water in the Cotswolds.

That's me and Sally on one of the many bridges. We had the best time and I was super-excited. Especially when we went to a Model Village:

The model Village was built to 1/9 scale in 1936 and was completed in 1940. It is self-christened "the ninth wonder of the world" which is amazing because they must have decided that someone else deserved to be the eighth wonder! There was a periscope in the Model Village and we discovered that strange things happened if you photographed it:

There were some old men in the Model Village and I explained to them about the magic of periscopes and we became friends. The old man I really liked was wearing an unusual bright red and turquoise shirt/jumper combination as was his wife. He said I should get a job in the museum and then cheekily asked the boy who was selling tickets if I could have a job. He didn't quite get the dancing wasp that we showed him in the model Church though. We did, however, have a great time during our seven minute relationship.

The most exciting thing ever happened next though. We went to "Birdland." There were KING PENGUINS:

I actually didn't know how to cope with this excitement. Sally and I decided the best way to cope was by pretending to BE penguins...

Really, truly the best day out. We followed it with lots of ice cream and fresh air. I don't think it could have got any better. Well, maybe if we had seen a lamb being born it might have been better but I also might have fainted. There were lots of employment opportunities in Bourton-on-the-Water and lots of the nicest houses ever. It seemed like a suitable place for me to go and live. We decided I could marry the son of the person who owns the Manor House and he could subsidise my job as Volunteer Penguin Keeper at Birdland and Saturday girl at the Model Village.

Rock'n'Roll.

He Wore The Moon

2007-04-19T00:48:54Z

I think I go out by myself quite a lot.

I go to the theatre by myself,
to the cinema by myself,
exhibitions,
cafes,
and now I seem to be going to clubs by myself too.

People tend not to bother you when you're alone in most places (cafes are the obvious exception) but it seems that it is not the done thing to be at a night-club in an unaccompanied manner. Even when it is clear that you know people who are there, people (mostly boys) seem to be able to tell that you're not there specifically with anyone and thus feel like they can talk to you - if you're by yourself you are automatically deemed a commodity of communication. Which can be annoying.

I am clawing at things that might mask the numb hole in my chest. If I find a way of lace-patterning over the hole then it becomes bearable. Superfine stitches in the brightest coloured rainbow-sharded silk threads weaving in and out of eachother slowly pull the ripped flesh together from the edges of the gaping hole, mingling with the dripping blood to form a web-like barrier...and enable me (for a moment) to breathe.

"She's a special girl you know..."

2007-04-14T11:08:09Z

I am covered in bruises.

Quite literally covered in them.

Elbows, knees, thighs, feet, hands and even somehow my chin. Though that looks less like a bruise and more like I just haven't washed properly which I have but I am bruised. Because yesterday I was in the new Horrors video being a dead-zombie-dance-girl who comes out of the floor to possess The Horrors and eat Faris's heart. The whole thing will be animated but directly from my movement and I kind of went for it, forgetting, as I do sometimes, that my body is made of flesh and if I fall over it might have an effect on it. Equally if I crawl on the floor repeatedly my knees might get bruised and if I hit the floor very hard with my hands it might be possible to burst blood vessels in my fingers. Also if I walk towards the camera upside down in the crab/bridge position thing without having warmed up my spine it might hurt the next day. This is all somehow in keeping with the essence of the video though so that might be good.

My best bit was when I got to play on all the kit after the band had finished. I got to do crazy puppet drumming, pirouette whilst playing the guitar, zombie-stomp whilst playing the guitar, sit on the floor being deranged-cute whilst playing the guitar and best bit of all play on Spider's keyboard in a mischievous-zombie-girl fashion. The Horrors weren't that friendly. That was the worst bit, but the most talkative was Spider who really is definitely the leader of the band and ultrasupercool and intelligent. Though I think I accidentally overheard his real name which is a shame. Because I actually thought he was called Spider. I know, I know, but I did.

It was an exciting day but I am worried I didn't do enough/do well enough. My confidence levels are incredibly low. I am very insecure about most things and I never used to be. I got better as the day went on but this was something that I should have been able to do easily and naturally and I know that if I had my old sense of confidence I would have been a million times better.

What has happened to make me change?

"I can hear star noise..."

2007-04-11T23:47:58Z

I have worn him like a cloak around my shoulders for the past six years.

Now, that cloak has been forcibly removed, the safety pins have been ripped away and the bare flesh (revealed) weeps blood from pinhole scars around my breast.

The night hangs in the air.

[In snapshot waking, freeze-frame sleep.]

Candyfloss balls of blossom scent the night with summer yet to pass, laburnum floats above the canal weeping tears of lilac into the lull-lulling waves of neverland. I walk home each night of the weekend gone by later than the day before and trail through the smokescreen past antres vast and floodlit parklands, tulips, daffodils, nasturtiums, pansies petals closed, heads bowed, servile in the silence, secret in their sighs.

Daisy chains and faerie tales by day
and we are running through the gardens and down the hallways,
scattering chairs
and swooning in doorways,
stealing whispers in crossroads of serendipity
and hiding in ginnels of curiosity and
everything is shakey

and i'm hot
and i'm cold all at once
and my lip has swollen
and now you're asking if a bee stung me and it's so funny because it didn't but I wondered all the same, will you ever? and the answer remains, as always, like the rose tattoo

no

but, "I can hear star noise," where are the lightening bugs?

I can and it hurts.

Reflections in D

2007-04-01T10:54:48Z

Last night the sky was tempestuous, cherry blossom dancing under the bright clear moon, London was my silhouette.

I ripped the trousers in rehearsal but had to sew them up again. I ended up cutting them off and making them into hot-pants. So it was white hot-panted and emerald-green sleeveless Chinese-topped that I made my Sadler's Wells (Lilian Baylis Theatre) debut...

The theatre was beautiful, clean, crisp, empty.

Like the word possibility.

Our piece was terribly unfashionable and as such had it's own honesty and beauty. So out of synch with current Contemporary Dance trends. Everything we wore, did, said, the way we warmed up was out-dated and yet this peculiarity gave it its own completeness. I think it was the greatest challenge I have ever had as a performer. I had nothing to rely on. I was dancing without music, in a beautiful spotlight, on-stage alone for around two minutes. No tricks, nothing to fall back on. It was proper dancing. "If in doubts do the splits and throw glitter..." Not this time davina. I had to breathe with the piece, find a way to hold the impossible positions, plie into them and yet also keep performing, attempt to illicit an emotional response and try to connect with the other dancers. Confronting the audience with the performing, moving body, forcing them to focus on the breath, the legs, the arms, the essence of what it might be to be human and dancing in a bare open space has a focussing and disquieting effect. The success from an audiences perspective may have been questionable and yet from my own I think it is the thing I am most proud of ever having done. The fear I felt was magnified into looking glass proportions. And Yet. I did it and I held it and I felt connected and at times the truth was like a mirror shard tipped with snowbloom driving into the corner of your eye.

It breathed.

My Chemical Passion

2007-03-29T23:35:38Z

Fireworks and explosions and nuclear ashes and passion on passion, screaming so loud, arms in the air, teenage dreams so hard to beat and I don't care, I'll sing along, I agree you lied to me and then there's so much make up and daggers twisting in stomachs all nerves and butterflies so sweet like their antennae are strawberry laces,

this is the world I wanted, this is a tragic affair.

Running in and out of water fountains, mascara bleeding and cheaply dyed hair wet around your ears and everyone's so happy
and everyone's so friendly
and all the worlds at your feet
and everything is special,
magic,
initial,
celebratory,
complimentary,
confusing,
coincidental.

But then there's the rain and cars crashing through puddles and ruining your skirt and people stealing umberellas and noise after midnight and the constant ring ring ringing and the intimidation of smoking tube men and wide legged sitting stances.

My hair looks like it has been dragged through a hawthorn bush backwards.

I have to be at a dance rehearsal in seven hours. My body will be very tired, I won't have any balance and however hard I try I know I will still have most of tonights make-up left on. We are wearing the worst costumes ever and yet we are performing at Sadler's Wells. I will be fulfilling a lifelong dream in a sartorial disaster. And it does matter. It matters like toffee and candy canes matter, like coffee and cupcakes matter, like music and musicians matter, like devotion and desire matter. But then at the same time it shouldn't matter at all.

In the piece I have to imagine I am drowning, that I am Ophelia-like and my body is the essence of the billowing dress of a drowning girl. (I would give you violets.) It is a solo and I have no music. It is just me and the stage. (And my awful costume.) It will take all my power to make it work. I want the audience to feel the internal pulse and be on the verge of gulping for, gasping for air by the time it ends...I must commit and believe and find the passion of tonight in tommorrow...

Trident

2007-03-28T10:18:02Z

It is with sadness that I received the following letter from Glenda Jackson MP this morning:

"It was a foregone conclulsion that the Government would receive consent for the renewal of Trident as the Conservtive Party supported, almost unanimously, the proposal. But the sizeable number of MP's most markedly from the Labour benches, who voted against renewal and the strong opposition to another generation of nuclear weapons, expressed by the electorate, nation wide, leads me to hope that this issue will not go away.

I find it both illogical and immoral that the Government, who consistently argue that post 9/11, we live in a new and more dangerous world, has only an old mind set response, producing old solutions to a new and entirely different problem. "

I think it is amazing that Glenda has kept me informed with all of the debates throughout this process. It gives me some sort of faith. She sent me a full copy of the debate that took place with this letter and it is truly astonishing to see just how huge the majority was, even when the public have made their voices so very clear. I think it's also quite astonishing that she brands the Government's decision as "illogical and immoral."

Sometimes I Go Out At Night And Paint The Stars

2007-03-27T23:04:10Z

I knew this funny boy when I was at University.

We were in a terrible production of "Measure for Measure" together. I was playing Mariana and for some reason we decided she should be dancing in her moated grange while the servant boy sung to her from a makeshift balcony. We became fast friends, the servant boy and I.

We went to see "Run Lola Run" together at the cinema. The second the film ended I ran
out of the picturehouse
down the road
across the river
over the bridge
up the hill
and right on into the sunset, chasing it out of the city centre all the way to my windowseat with the cascading feathers and brightly coloured blankets in my room in Boho. I did not look back once.

The next day, the boy asked me why I had run off. He just didn't get it, that I had had no other choice, no other option than to run, although I really thought he would have. We went to Jesus Green together as the sky darkened. Pretty soon the moon was high and the stars were raging in the sky. We discovered that if you ran in circles really fast and then lay down on your back whilst the other person continued running circles around you it felt like you were jumping from star to star. It was amazing. We stayed there for hours running and falling and watching the stars and then the grass became all dewey and the sky heavy-storm scented and my fingertips frozen so it was time to go home. I was so excited that there was a boy who got star walking. When we stood up he said;

"Don't you just want to get naked now and listen to Bjork?"

It turned out that he really really didn't get it afterall.

Boys Are Wired Wrong

2007-03-26T18:05:59Z

Innocently sitting in my favourite Primrose Hill cafe basking in the sense of just having been lying on the grass reading in glorious Spring sunshine and eating amazing American pancakes and maple syrup when my heart jumps as I have the sense of someone leaning over me. I look up and discover a man staring.

"Will you recommend me your book?"
"Ummm... I've just started reading it, but it is very good."
"I like your skin. What's your first name?"
"Davina"
"I'm Shilbey."
"Hi."
"I like your headband. I like the seaquins around your eye. It's nice the way you notice things about people you love. Well, I really fancy you Davina. You're quite a shy person aren't you? I like your eyelashes."

That one in particular was astonishing. No-one has commented on my eyelashes since I was at a party age sixteen and Mark Simmonds asked me if they were my own or false. I had been experimenting with mascara for the first time and gone a bit overboard. Then when I went to see PJ Harvey at The Crucible in Sheffield and wore fake blue eyelashes for the first and only time (quelle disastre) in a bid to resemble PJ, I got told that I looked like a drag queen. Until this day those are the only two eyelash related comments I have ever received.

Shilbey is the head of Neurio-science somewhere impressive and apparently treated Ian McEwan hence he was reading his new book. He insisted shaking my hand every few minutes and saying;

"I lack social graces but I really fancy you Davina."

He spoke in the most peculiar childlike and feminised un-emotive manner. It was very peculiar. He kept asking to borrow my book for a minute and then kept returning it saying "This really isn't my kind of book Davina," along with "You must be a very clever lady and a lot younger than me. I'm 32." He seemed to want to tell me about Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, but we never quite got there because I decided it was time to leave.

When I almost ran out of the cafe he appeared to be trying to embrace me and I had to duck out of the embrace. It was going along the same lines as when I first moved to London and met Sapp, the Japanese hairdresser, who I went for coffee with out of some kind of sympathy and the first thing he did when we got to the coffee shop was to say "Now we are boyfriend and girlfriend and we will get married, but first I will kiss you" and I suddenly remembered the really important job interview I had on the other side of London.

Do girls behave like this? Or is it just that boys are really weird?

Because We Must

2007-03-25T03:34:07Z

Interestingly, people actually read this and apparently I seem extremely unhappy and to spend the majority of my time outside in the rain, at night, crying. That must be strange for people who know me and also strange for those who don't.

I never really thought about the people reading it. If I speak obliquely that's my mind.

I entered a marvellous parallel world this eve. I went to the ultimate club - Viva Cake. Deep underground in Euston in the St Aloysius' (whose remains lay buried in an urn of lapis lazuli and silver. Could there be a more intoxicating name than lapis lazuli?) Social Club there are red vinyl booths, beauty bars and tarot readers. It was my dream club. It opens at 4.30pm has a lindy hop class and serves you limitless tea and home made cakes and involves a game of bingo. There are tables and chairs and brilliant music. I met a delightful girl called Jessie. We met on the corner of the street and became friends. She hadn't gone with anyone so sat with me and Charlie and Sonja. (Charlie was wearing a white T-shirt and red braces. Sonja had on a satin bomber jacket and white jeans. What a girl! What a boy! What a genuine, true friend.) Jessie was such a cool, intelligent and charming girl and I admired her extraordinary courage in just going out by herself and trusting the night. She was doing an art project where she is trying to accept opportunities that arise. So when I invited her to come to the Black Gardenia later, she turned up by herself and entered another underground 50's club with bravery and panache. She wore a silver clock in a heart around her neck. Wheelbarrows of painted black flowers outside, bead curtain on the way in. You could scarcely breathe through the smoke-haze but somehow it was bearable and fitted the environs. I adored it there. The man who ran it became my friend; his nonchalant quiff and slightly open pink ruffled shirt paired with weathered face were a tonic. They made everything possible. He gave me two kisses when I left. "Lonesome Tone" provided the musical backdrop and I met an illustrator called Luke who agrees that the Nightingale and the Rose is the ultimate tale of heartbreak. Matthew was concerned about me and it seemed like there were secret doors everywhere and that at any moment one would open and whisk you through to Wonderland.

After a sleepless week of my thwarted dreams and others lost desires the lack of pretension and exceptional warmth shot through my heart in a way that began to make my blood flow again, frozen as it had been in shock and hurt and loss. The Secret Public's "dark flowering of creativity" and the genius of Michael Clark, the hilarity of the ageing neo-naturists and the delight of throwing away teenage tantrums and tears to re-ignite friendship added to this blood flow...

[Incidentally, I met The Abbot. We went to the Photographer's Gallery. We talked a lot about photos. He squeezed my arm too tightly every so often and said "That's brilliant." He does yoga and doesn't drink coffee but lives in West Wittering which is one of the most extraordinary parts of the Southern coast. (Though it doesn't compare to Whitby or Robin Hood's Bay or Bridlington or Flamborough.)]

...And yet the questions remain; do I expect too much? Why do I think I should be safe from it all? Why do I think I should not be hurt? Why do I think things mean more than they do? Why do things mean more to me than anyone else?

Why do we try and believe and reach and love and kiss and search and break and swear and dance?

Because We Must.

I Wanted To Be With You Alone, And Talk About The Weather

2007-03-20T03:09:28Z

Today has been a day of pathetic fallacy.

I walked out into a snowstorm at 7.30am, black coat flapping in the whirling, spiralling frozen whispers, and felt like I was isolated within an enveloping, entrapping snowdome, at once icing my insides and melting them in the way only snow can.

Walking back late at night and the snow remains on the tips of the gravestones in the open-gated cemetery (a place which occupies a truly wild sense of time - I always monitor the gates and marvel that they are open at midnight, two am, eleven pm, but closed at ten am, lunchtime, teatime) and on the faraway peak of the gilded church. Sky so quiet, stars shining out in proud defiance.

I want to escape and curl and runaway into the vanishing effects of the blizzard.

The cold inside has temporarily subsided; the walls are keeping it out, but the shards of ice remain firmly embedded in the scarletblood chamber of my chest. We were always told at drama school never to limit our characters, never to forget that anyone can do anything, just they will do it in their own way. I have been witnessing this constantly today - amazed by the human capacity for completely unexpected behaviour and astonished by my lack of perception when it comes to anything to do with myself.

I went to see an adorable band tonight and yet whilst I was more comfortable in external surroundings than I have been for awhile, I felt quite distinctly (for the second time in the same number of days) that I was in the American Teen Film Version of my life. Baffled by the complex interplays of extremely simple communication patterns, and reminded of being an under-age teen at the Leeds indie disco and of befriending the boy who used to do the lighting through the rare airing of Rage Against the Machine, I could feel my eyes glossing over all Angela and that dreaded sense of your insides crashing down around your shoulders as you realise it's all been a big mistake, a complete misunderstanding of everything ever, and that you really should know better by now.

I had to waltz out of the night and into the weather, battling with the ice until my heart had frozen o'er once more.

Shakira! Shakira!

2007-03-19T00:59:00Z

I am writing this wearing a pink Shakira T-shirt embellished with a skull, two guitars and roses. Only Shakira could have made such a perfect T-shirt. I really believe Shakira and I could be great friends. Tonight at the one hundredth concert on her tour she performed interpretative dance, did a Salome-esque veiled belly dance in the midst of which she dramatically let her hair down, spun around in red silk arm-flags turning herself into a living tulip and flame, jumped up and down in barefeet and showed off her perfect comprehension of life, love, the universe, confetti canons and the midriff. Wow, what a girl. I bet she would understand my problems.

And I've been thinking a lot about time and space and angels and messages and love and confusion and somehow that I will never eat ever again, that nothing will ever be the same ever again, that I will never ever kiss another boy, that I will never stop crying and that my shoulder blades will never stop flittering. (We all used to have wings, once.) And that’s what people don’t tell you it’ll feel like when something inside you breaks.

It's a
fluttering shiver
a frozen lip
a running nose
stinging eyes
a crumpled face
a worthlessness
a loss
a shock down the spine
a late night and an early morning
a shaking sleep.

But maybe the worst bit is it doesn't feel like that at all. It just feels empty. Desolate. Like the word bleak.

Someone Had the Audacity to Wear Jeans at My Ballet Class...

2007-03-14T13:20:12Z

...how on any sartorial level can this be possible?

I have a terrible habit of accidentally going on dates with people. I need help. I never know or realise or expect them to be dates until after the event. Then I have to deal with the consequences of extricating myself from an undesirable situation and that is always somewhat unpleasant. A direct descendent of Lord Byron's (whose name I don't actually know but he played The Abbot in "Manfred") called me yesterday and said,

"This is The Abbot calling."

Which is astonishingly Gothic in itself and made me shake somewhat. He went on to tell me that he was only eating bread and water and was calling from his cell. He is old-ish and old men have always been terribly fond of me. I used to get letters from an old man called John Ashford about three times a week. He used to send me maps of Prague with post-it notes stuck to them saying 'How about here?' I always thought he should have just sent me a plane ticket to Prague. Another old man, Ronnie Duncan, used to invite me to poetry readings all the time and we met because of a shared fondness for WS Graham. I'm convinced he is going to leave me a lot of St Ives School art when he dies. Anyway, The Abbot asked me to go and meet him at the Photographer's Gallery because apparently I am 'fascinating.' I said yes alright because I always find it impossible to say no in such situations and it's harmless. Isn't it? This is where I need help. Is this a date? (See, I am learning to anticipate the problems. This is a big step in my life.) Should I be worried? Should I find a way to cancel? Is it peculiar to call yourself The Abbot? Am I right in believing this is a harmless and potentially pleasant encounter with a direct descendent of Lord Byron?