Friends. The TV Show. (by Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau)

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

So, Friends. The TV show. The one from the 1990s. With Joey, and Chandler, and Rachel and Monica, and Ross. And Phoebe. Phoebe was the kooky one. (Is it 'was' or is it 'is'? Do the characters from TV shows become past tense if they don't die? Especially when they are repeated on cable/satellite/freeview ad nauseum [till you are fucking sick, or possibly only watched when you feel sick, to make you feel more stable. Like the horizon.].) But now it won't be on any more, they say, though, I don't have a television, so I couldn't tell you, though I suppose I could Google it, but I won't, right now, anyway.

So I applied for some funding, from the Arts Council, and it has to be related to the Olympics (Cultural Olympiad: What does that even mean?), but I got this artist I assist, who always gets funding, and always applies, but always still manages to get it, to help me with the application, and even though I don't really have to show any evaluative proof of exactly what my project will do for the Olympiad, she sort of managed to imply that it is, somehow, related, to the Olympiad. Anyway, how she did it I don't know, but I had a lot of money to play with. Just about enough to actually pay the cast of Friends (excluding Jennifer Aniston, i.e. Rachel, and the one who plays Phoebe. We couldn't get them, I must say, for very different reasons. Rachel because I couldn't afford to pay her, and Phoebe because she had just undergone like $3 million worth of plastic surgery and was recovering at the home of a close friend [of course, no one told me about the plastic surgery, but the weird thing about L.A is that everyone implies everything, without you having to know what they are implying to work it out, simply through their weird way of denying things in an oblique, almost algorithmic way].) to get back together for a reunion episode.

The missing cast members were played by look-a-likes in rehearsal (who were almost certainly better actors than the people they looked like [which was, ironically, a bit of a problem for verisimilitude], and also really freaked out Matt Le Blanc, who played Joey, because he hasn't really had any contact with anyone and actually has frighteningly obvious symptoms of occasional paranoid psychosis, but everyone ignores it because he is technically still worth something, for like, DVD re-launches etc.) with the hope that eventually, we might be able to persuade Jennifer Aniston to get involved, but definitely not the one who played Phoebe because probably, what with all the surgery, she won't be acting, or having facial expressions, or even possibly eating solid food for some time.

The episode (which isn't going to be written by the original writers, because they are super, super rich and when I tried to phone them, even their assistant's, assistant's assistant wouldn't return my calls, so we have someone else in, who won't let me reveal their name because they will get strung up by their fucking bowels if the original writers find out they have anything to do with this.) is going to be like a meta-episode, if you know what I mean? Like it isn't going to be about anything apart from Friends. The whole episode is being filmed at a small studio in Bristol, and I have had the main apartment (Rachel and Monica's) reconstructed, and it is pretty good actually, even though I had to have certain pieces of zeitgeisty 90s furniture re-made by hand, by a pack of weirdly eager students from UWE art department, and it both cost a lot, but then, cost almost nothing compared to the fees I am paying the actors, and the security guards + super-injunction against names being released by the press for the writers.

And they all sit around in the apartment, actors & look-a-likes, reading this script which involves all of them, in character, dissecting the cultural and social and, possibly, political impact of Friends as a televisual phenomenon. And we film it and then we look at it, and then we insert, in to the script, classic Friends style jokes, like say, Monica, being really worried about cleanliness, or Joey saying something about sandwiches, but we keep the actual forward momentum of the whole episode geared towards this conversation about the gender power structures being displayed, or the city-based-friend/family dynamic being really cemented in the minds of the audience - first an audience of similar aged adults to those on screen, and then, increasingly, younger generations as the day-time repeats start and then the cast get older, and their characters and their careers start to atrophy. At one point, in one of the early rehearsals, Matthew Perry ad-libbed this incredible bit about his time spent working in the mainstream film industry, and how everyone was so cruel because none of the Friends stars, apart from the aforementioned Jennifer Aniston, ever really translated the success they had on the show, in to Hollywood success. At one point he is pointing at the look-a-like Rachel (Who are ten a penny, even now. Even after ten years, she says she gets regular work, like twice a week, to dress up as Rachel and go to some weird thing at a leisure centre in a small town in the south-west of England and just stand around not talking [which is probably because she can't even do a passable American accent, she kept making the rest of the cast laugh when she did it, so eventually, we just let her speak in her own dialect.]}, and screaming at her about how on The Whole Nine Yards with Bruce Willis, Bruce Willis, when he realised what a shit-hole of a film he was making, really turned on Matthew Perry, and kept called him a faget and a girly queer, and then, he just starts crying and saying about how she wouldn't understand and she could never know. So then that triggered the idea that we would write the look-a-likes into the script, as look-a-likes, and then we could just write Jennifer Aniston in later, if she ever got back to us. But then we realised that even then, we would have to keep the look-a-likes in, because they would be integral to the whole idea of the piece, now Matthew Perry had implicated them with his unprofessional, but breakthrough, bit of improv.

So it gets to the stage where we feel like the script is ready, a good mixture of classic Friends jokes and cultural critique, and we have given up on Aniston, and we are finally in the studio, with the cameras rolling for the final dress rehearsal, and the studio audience are sort of waiting outside, and we have someone who can do a good impression of the incredibly loud off camera laugh of what must have been one of the writers or producers of the original show, that happened every time there was a cleverish punchline, and everyone is feeling the lines and the cameras are swinging in the right direction. When suddenly, the real Phoebe (and don't ask me her real name, because when I phoned her P.A., the P.A. called her Phoebe when I used her real name, which I thought was just a slip, probably because I was talking about the project and how we would be using the original characters etc. and then she passed me on to her P.R woman, and the P.R woman called her Phoebe too, and then we were both just referring to her as Phoebe, and if I'm honest, I've forgotten the real name, because no one ever seemed to use it, and they were happy for me not to use it, so basically, I think we can assume that most other people just refer to her as Phoebe, maybe because her character is way more memorable than her actual personality? But maybe not.) just turns up unannounced on set, and just walks right in to the middle of the fake Monica apartment, where all the actors are sitting around, drinking decaf coffee and decaf green tea, waiting for the next scene with their minders and assistants on hand to take away said decaf coffee/decaf green tea when I shout ACTION. And she has serious bandages round her face like a fucking mummy and, massive sunglasses on over her (presumably, since we can't see them and the bandages definitely cover all exposed skin) vulnerable-to-sunlight eyes and eye-surrounding-skin. And she turns up and she is obviously on quite a large amount of prescription (but not necessarily prescribed) pain killers, and Matthew Perry notices straight away and starts chewing his mouth and making this moaning sound and his minders come up and shake their heads at me and take him to the side and give him a neck massage and whisper motivational N.A. derived statements in to his ear. The real Phoebe starts going on about how wonderful it is that all her friends are here and does anybody want to go down to Central Perk and see her play her new songs tonight? And everyone is smiling and nodding at her sloppy movements and obvious confusion over what is real and what is not real. Even Matt Le Blanc has this sudden clarity, while looking at her, like he is thinking 'wow, she is far gone' and for a second I think that maybe this moment might clear up his own particular issues with reality and such but then that moment is definitely gone and his minders also come over and move him away and talk to him and try and make him look in to their eyes and you can hear them telling him who he is, and what he is and how he is an actor, but not like Joey is an actor, but like Matt Le Blanc is an actor.

I ponder this for a second, and decide that Matt Le Blanc definitely has more rights to reality confusion than Phoebe, because Joey was meant to be an actor, and Matt Le Blanc was, technically, an actor. And being an actor playing an actor, must be confusing, especially when you are a bad actor, whose first major role is playing a bad actor. But I don't get long to consider this, because Phoebe has seen the girl who is playing her (who does a very good American accent, and, simply by nature of not being wrapped from the neck up in bandages, and also not being on loads of painkillers, which, give you that slow, hangy dog mouth thing [if we could see the real Phoebe's mouth, and they weren't covered in bandages], looks a lot more like Phoebe than the real Phoebe does, right now), and has started screaming so loud everyone is wincing and not nodding and smiling but looking around for their minders, and, in the case of the other people on set, just looking to me as though I'm going to magic the security out of the fucking air. But our security are outside, dealing with the carefully vetted, non-loony but just about obsessed enough to want to come to a reunion-that-will-make-no-sense-to-them-but-they'll-still-laugh-anyway, fans.

All the minders are definitely more concerned with the safety of their own charges and/or possible liability for having to tackle the real Phoebe to the ground so they are more like herding their own Friends away than dealing with the overall situation. The only people left on the set are the crew, (who now all just stand there looking at me like I'm supposed to fucking grab Phoebe and slap her and tell her to calm down) and then the look-a-likes. The Rachel look-a-like is backing away from the situation, towards where the audience would be sitting if they weren't (luckily) being held outside by our security. On the other hand, the Phoebe look-a-like is frozen to the spot with fear, and the real Phoebe is just fucking screaming at her, spewing garbled noises and spit and some of lyrics to Smelly Cat. She is moving towards her and holding her arms out and she looks like the fucking invisible woman with her bandages and her sunglasses. Her rage is palpable, I can literally taste it, because my mouth is open and my tongue can feel the hot studio lights amplifying the pheremonal situation to the point where it might be some weird feedback loop of rage/sweat/nasal-stimulus/rage for the real Phoebe. Everyone knows that when you see your doppelgänger you have to kill it otherwise there will be a time-space vortex of some sort, so in a way I'm sympathising, but then while I'm sympathising, the real Phoebe stands over look-a-like Phoebe and just fucking grabs her by the throat with two hands and picks her up off one of the special handmade 90s couches, and look-a-like Phoebe is being pulled off the ground by just her neck and I'm wondering why she doesn't grab the real Phoebe's arms to at least take some of the weight off her neck, but she doesn't, she just flails her arms around in the air, doesn't even try and hit the real Phoebe or anything.

And in my peripheral vision I see that the camera crew are still with the cameras, and technically, we are still rolling because of the previous dress rehearsal situation. So, slowly (in the context of what is happening, but quickly in a real world context, it is just that the situation means that everything is happening quite fast, so although comparative to what is happening, I'm moving quite slowly, I'm actually going quite fast), I sort of jog over to the camera guys and tell them to carry on filming and go over to the sound guys and make them point their mics at the real Phoebe's strangling of look-a-like Phoebe. By now the real Phoebe has look-a-like Phoebe on the floor, and is punching her in time to another song (that she is singing) that sounds a bit like Smelly Cat but has new words and a slightly different tune and sounds like maybe the real Phoebe has been writing new material since the end of the last series of Friends. So I figure that situation is fairly stable, as the real Phoebe looks like she might tire soon, and the look-a-like Phoebe definitely won't be knocked unconscious within the next say, two or three minutes, so I run back to the doors where the security are holding the audience, and I tell them to go and stop the fight, which has the dual benefit of making sure that no one dies, and also allows the audience to come in and get a chance to see the real Phoebe elbow dropping the look-a-like Phoebe. Instantly the audience are laughing and cheering at weirdly appropriate times, and then the guy who can do a good impression of the guy who does the big laugh starts getting in on it, and the security run up to the fight and start to break it up, and the timing is just perfect and I can see the camera operators are a bit freaked out, but on the whole they are doing their jobs and just getting on with it. And then the other cast members are back on stage with their minders, and Matt Le Blanc is just spouting Joey catchphrases and crying and Monica is trying to hug the real Phoebe (still swinging her arms and singing) and David Schwimmer is giving look-a-like Phoebe some somewhat unnecessary mouth-to-mouth and the audience give it a WOOOOHHH!! like it is a big romantic kiss.

Everything starts to settle down and the real Phoebe is herded in to a car and away from the building and the ambulance has come and look-a-like Phoebe is back on the sofa with one of those silver foil things around her (which I don't think is necessary, considering we have the hot studio lights on, but then she is still shivering and crying. It could be quite a psychological thing, the foil blanket.). And the other members of the cast are sort of chilling out a bit and meeting the audience (apart from Matthew Perry, who never came back on the stage and is in his dressing room with his minders in front of the door, talking to his psychoanalyst on the phone about possible moments of weakness re: prescription drugs and Matt Le Blanc is taking up quite a lot of the paramedics' time, but has been given a mild sedative and has somewhat calmed down and is now just mumbling about Janice and The Ducks and 'Fussball'.

I feel like maybe that might be the end of shooting for today, and maybe all days, but I have a lot of good footage and maybe I could present it as a split-screen installation, or something with a narration over the top by the Rachel look-a-like, who is looking really unnerved by what happened to the look-a-like Phoebe. I go over to her and I say something about how I am certain that, had Jennifer Aniston arrived unannounced on set, instead of the real Phoebe, the whole situation would have been totally different, way less violent. Perhaps rather less interesting, but definitely not involving any attempted strangulation. And she says she is thinking of turning down any future offers of Rachel look-a-like work. I don't say anything about the possible voice over/narration options of the finished art work, but I have her email and I can give her a few days to calm down. And, I suppose, she wouldn't have to dress up like Rachel. For the voice over work, I mean.

Extract from: 1 WEEK (Hanna Clarke and Kit Merritt)

1 WEEK was produced in seven 24-hour installments (DAY 1 – DAY 7) exploring the notions of the heterogenous archival practice of both artists. Within each 24-hour episode, confined to a make-shift office environment, the artists submitted to rigorously recorded performance using traditional communication systems to interview non-mutual acquaintances. 

 

Each person interviewed was contacted by whatever means were available at the time; phone, written correspondence, email, facebook, or live interview.

 

Every person contacted was asked 3 questions. Each question was selected on the roll of a die from groups A, B and C. (Each group containing six possible questions.)

 

The answers were later presented as chronological lists, with all personal details removed. B 5 is one of these lists.

 

B 5

WHAT IS YOUR FIRST MEMORY?

 

 

 

When I was 3 years old, and my parent’s moving house and we went to look at this house that we moved to and the guy opened the door and said oh my, how big you are,

 

Being touched by my daddy.

 

Hanna getting told off for her short skirt.

 

Finding a barbie doll under my mum’s bed when I was about 4.

 

First memory of Katy, ooh, that was er 27 years ago, 25 years ago..Yes we remember her, we remember her, black hair, dark hair, yeah. She was dark hair wasn’t she Joan, yes she was.

 

Thats a bit difficult... My first memory of Katy was as a baby.

 

Listening to the heart beat of my mum. Nah, when I was 5 in the park with some teachers from kindergarten.

 

Gosh, erm... That kind of question I always find quite weird because memories ?????????????.

 

Eating biscuits and play-dough mixed together at primary school.

 

At play-school when I was about 4 or 5, sitting on a slide.

 

Having long hair and having chopped short because my mum made me.

 

Trying one of my mum’s cigarettes and thinking it actually tasted quite bad.

 

Probably erm... well are you talking about from the age of two or three....? Alright ok, well I remember being in a group of girls at nursery and dancing in a circle.

 

My earliest memory is waking up aged two and a half and somehow climbing out  of my cot and um, sliding down an entire flight of stairs on my stomach, um, at my very first home and opening the biscuit tin and eating lots and lots of biscuits and getting very, very told off, but also like picked up and hugged massively by my Dad. It was very, very emotive because he was like "You're so naughty but I cannot believe you've done this, you're a funny little child." So, erm, that's my first ever memory. It was incredible I actually remember, like, using my teddy bear this huge teddy bear in the corner of my cot and I remember using it as like a step stool for me to climb out of the cot. It wasn't impossible, I didn't... I didn't need wires or Tom Cruise and I er… I smacked it, yeah.

 

 

 

 

Being put to sleep right before my stomach operation when I was 3 years old. Although I've always debated if this was a dream.

 

I wouldn’t be able to answer that I’m afraid...

 

Sitting under a table with my sister eating peanut butter.

 

Not so good on memories, here is one though... Dressing up in spiderman/superman costumes and making dens with my brothers and sisters.

 

My sister being born probably (coming back from the hospital)

Going down a water slide then being really annoyed that my mum/dad wasn’t at the bottom to catch me.

 

Well, actually I think its a false memory, is that any good? Actually I think its based on a photograph. Going for a lawnmower that my mum had in the garden.  I was reaching out for the lawnmower that my mum had in the garden.

 

Hmmmmm I have a really bad memory but I would have thought asking advice about printing or asking for a rubber (I'm notoriously unorganised) Kit is really organised.

 

Is picking cherries in high trees in Normandy during a hot summer vacation.

 

Just after my brother as born I got really jealous of my parents spending all their time with him so in retaliation I remember throwing 55 nappies over the top floor banister and they all landed in a pile in the hallway.

 

My memory is bit too murky a place for me to pick a first memory out of but id say one of my earliest is being between my grandad's knees whist he held a cricket bat that was almost as high as me and tried to teach me to use it.

I might only be saying that because there's a picture of that moment, perhaps I don't remember it at all...

Actually maybe the first is being sat in a primary school class when my grandmother knocked on the door and took me to the hospital where my brother had just been born. I remember him being heavier than I'd expected when I held him.

 

Jumping out of a third floor window dressed as superman (age 3)

 

I don’t know if its an actually memory or one I’ve constructed... I think its being in the back of a car in Scotland, I was about three or four, and there were some fireworks happening and I was with my parents.

 

Crying on the floor, cos I think my dad went out and he didn’t say goodbye, or something like that and then my dad came back, in the flat, cos I think he’d forgotten something... I’m not sure if its real, but yeah.

 

 

 

Um...railway. Yeah, cos its really blurry, its just there.

 

Umm, the first one I can guarantee is me, is my first day at primary school and I had this orange plastic fence there ?????????????? and I had this big hole in my hand.

 

Probably going to school, my first school, my primary school, maybe day one.  I remember it being day one... Don't know how old I was..

 

I can’t remember that... Yeah, I remember my grandfather... When I was um I was about 3 or 4...? And uh, he spent a lot of time with me...and in the morning we went to the park in Moscow, to feed squirrels, I had like these plastic containers, which, uh, actually contained sweets. It was like a present container and they would give it on Christmas to their kids and they were all designs and I love them, so I had a thing where I was collecting them... I remember that there was this pink colour container and my grandfather would go to the park, looking with nuts to attract the squirrels you know, that was my first memory.

 

Me sitting in the kitchen in a, a, one like this... A big drawer with pots in it, I was like maybe three years old and I, yes I had pots on my head.

 

 

The Perfect Screw? A concise history of the Robertson Head Screw (by Mark Bell, Obsolence Correspondent for the Foolscap Journal)

The year was 1994 and I was working on the set of “Senior Trip”, a rowdy teen film produced by that most venerable of all rowdy teen producers: National Lampoon. Like most American movies in the 1990’s this one was being shot in Canada where the bland architecture of Canadian cities bears a striking resemblance to the bland architecture of American cities, and at a time when 65 American cents could buy 1 Canadian dollar, it was well worth the bother for large productions to travel north. We had been working long hours on the grungy sex motel set where the hapless teens in the film were to accidently find themselves when the bus driver (played by none other than Tommy Chong) takes a wrong turn. The day before principle photography was to begin the producers came around for a final set check. Everything seemed fine until it was noticed that Robertson head screws had been used on all the door hinges. Nothing could proceed until all the Robertsons had been removed.

In Canada the square head of the Robertson has become the screw of choice, but for a film set that was masquerading as an American location, the screw head was a dead give away. In America it is the X of the Philips screw that dominates. The thought that the stoned teenagers watching this movie might be jarred from their inebriated states by the passing sight of a Canadian screw head is amusing to say the least. Or could it be that the Robertson head screw is simply more powerful than I thought?

Since the first known use of a metal screw in 1513, the head has consistently been a single diagonal line known as the Slot head or Flat head. This is the easiest sort of incision to produce because it can be cut after the screw is manufactured, but the design is severely flawed due to the high rate of slippage and the subsequent damage this can cause to the surface being screwed down. Slot heads also have a tendency to strip easily and are difficult to remove once a few coats of paint have been applied or a bit of rust sets in.

It took almost 400 years for the metal screw to evolve to the next level. In 1908, after a particularly nasty accident with a slot head screwdriver, the Canadian machinist, Peter Lymburner Roberston came up with an alternative design. A perfect square centered in the round head of the screw proved to be the logical solution to all of the Slot head’s problems.

Not only is the Roberston self-centering, but its design allows the screw to be placed snugly on the tip of the screwdriver making it possible to apply with one hand. This snug fit also prevents the sort of cam-out that causes Slot head and Philips screwdrivers to pop out unexpectedly once the screw is driven home. The solid shape of the Robertson also prevents the sort of striping that occurs in other designs when impatient handymen with over-torqued power tools needlessly blast away at misfit screws.

Of course it’s not just the Slot head and the Philips that comprise the competition, there’s a whole array of alternatives including the Cross-slot, the Hex socket, the Lox driver, the Tampruf, the Poxidriv, the Offset Cruciform, the Notched Spanner (similar to the Twin Groove), the PoziSquare-drive, the Quadrex and the Recex, the Holt head, the Torx, the Pin-in Pentalobular socket Torx Plus (and of course just the regular Pentalobular socket Torx), the Hexalobular socket, the Tri-wing, the Torq-set, the Snake Eye, the Spline drive and the Double Hex to name a few.

Amid all the noise and confusion of alternative screw heads, there is a beautiful simplicity to the Robertson that goes unrivaled. It is the ideal fusion of geometry’s two most basic and enduring forms, not only recalling the circle and square of da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man of 400 years earlier, but preceeding (dare I say, ‘influencing’?) Kasimir Malevich’s Suprematist abstract masterpieces of 1915.

So the question remains: Why has the Robertson not managed to secure a stronger foothold throughout the world? Why is its popularity limited to Canada and a small number of specialty industries? When the Robertson was first introduced it enjoyed a great deal of popularity. Each Model T manufactured in Canada was held together by about 700 Robertsons. Using Robertsons reduced the production time on each vehicle so significantly that Henry Ford wanted to use them on his American assembly lines as well. Ford, however, didn’t want to just buy the screws, he wanted to buy the rights as well, and when Roberson refused to sell, Ford turned to Philips, and it appears America (and the world) has never looked back.

Over the years there has been a slow increase in the availability of Robertsons in the rest of the world, but overall the Robbie still sits largely on the periphery. In 2000 the architectural historian Witold Rybczynski was asked by the New York Times to name the best tool of the millennium. He chose the screwdriver (and it’s constant companion the screw) as the best new tool of the last thousand years. In the book that followed (One Good Turn: A Natural History of the Screwdriver and the Screw) Rybczynski openly confesses to being a Robertson user. Obviously, the best tool of the millennium isn’t just any screwdriver, it’s a Robertson.

There is something oddly reassuring about the slow and steady evolution of this remarkable piece of technology. In a time when entire technologies rise and then fall into obscurity like pop songs, here is one that is still undergoing a hundred year update. At the moment it could be argued that the Robertson head screw is sitting somewhere close to obsolescence; enjoying unbridled popularity only among the 0.4% of the world’s population that makes up Canada. It may take a while, but it’s just a matter of time before the beauty and simplicity of this tiny, perfect square reaches everyone.

Private Disaster (by Matthew Breen)

“st bedes amateur footage” results 1-20 of about 450

 

I play back the video again.

 

It loads, and the image appears: a lightning-bolt of visual information. The irreversible course of events has made each second of this video a priceless, scopophiliac treasure.

 We find ourselves in hilly, grassy countryside. The sun glows in a cloud-flecked sky. There is the faint trickle of birdsong. This is a pleasant, pastoral scene. Quintessentially English. Worthy of Constable, Gainsborough and the rest.

Any sense of tranquillity however is just a passing illusion: we’re actually in the middle of a film location. The camera judders from left to right in a handheld pan, and introduces us to a tableau of buzzing activity. There is a big six-wheeled trailer van parked under a row of beeches, and next to it is a white marquee. Inside are trestle tables, with food laid out in plastic dishes and tea and coffee in metal urns. Dozens of people are stood everywhere in shot.

Two separate, segregated groups are identifiable in the crowd. One is the film crew, standing in an awkward, arbitrary pack. The other group, wearing ecclesiastical costumes and gathered in a forlorn-looking huddle, are the film’s extras. My colleagues. Other people—the grips, gaffers, best boys and the other strangely named members of the tech team—walk busily to and fro, hauling equipment and barking instructions. All activity seems to centre around the building visible in the background…

        Tucked snugly behind a verge in the upper left quarter of the image is a church. It’s small, and very old. 11^th-century, possibly pre-Norman. Made of ancient Bargate stone that was quarried for centuries from nearby Godalming. Various annexes, such as the redbrick vestry that we can see, have been added throughout the years. (Of course, I only know all this from retrospective research.)

        Scaffolding obscures one of the church’s ivy-strewn walls. Enormous, drum-like lights have been rigged up at the top. They blast a 7500-watt tungsten light into the nave windows, painfully bright and glaring even in the radiant sunshine. Crew members are pushing large aluminium boxes on casters in through the porch entrance, disappearing in and out of the interior gloom, up and down the cobbled path between the church’s grave-studded perimeter and the foreground. The church is where principle photography is taking place today.

        The camera wobbles, and this recorded world is dizzying for a moment. Then it steadies, and becomes motionless, and it finds the best angle at which to observe everything. If it seems to you that all you see is at a lopsided angle, then that’s because the camera is being held at a discreet, hip-height position. I’d had it under the waterproof folded over my arm (a precaution I always bring to set after getting soaked to the skin on Sweeney Todd.) No-one had noticed it tucked away there.

        In the middleground, a man and woman walk into shot, and I detect by the subtle, nervous movements of the crowd close by—movements you only recognise after spending countless hours sitting around on a film set—that they are the principle cast members of the project.

        The man is in his early forties: tall, slim, greying hair, handsome after a moment’s appraisal. He’s wearing the rugged brown regalia of a medieval foot-soldier. It stylises, and strangely amplifies his masculinity. He takes a cigarette packet from the pocket of his tunic, and after helping himself, offers the pack to the woman.

        She’s much younger than him: twenty-something—actually, I won’t pretend I don’t know that when this video was made, she was a month from her twenty-fourth birthday. Strawberry blonde hair flanks a fair, freckled complexion, marked by sharp pink points of cheekbones. She has bright, almond-shaped eyes—can you see in this footage that they are a green-brown? I think you can. She stands at five foot eight. She’s slender, but not waifish. Her figure, with its unique curves and ratios, seems to say something about her: half-delicate, half-mischievous, or rather oscillating invitingly between the two... Dressed in a shimmering brocaded gown, she looks nothing short of angelic—so far removed from the high-heeled siren we’re now used to seeing in those Chanel ads. She’s a ravishing, anachronistic beauty.

        After brief consideration she accepts the cigarette, and in the way her eyes meet his as she takes the pack from him, and allows him to light the cigarette for her, something seems to happen. They stand making idle, pre-shoot conversation that we cannot hear.

 The seconds pass, and the camera watches in secret.

 What unfolds can be enjoyed in that magical, fertile zone between observation and imagination. We both speculate and invent. He is the seasoned actor: famous, experienced, self-assured. He’s kind and well-mannered as he should be—but all the same he’s beguiled by his young, attractive co-star… She’s the novice: starting out, eager to prove herself, tipped for great things she feels pressured to achieve, anxious to hide her fears. This is her debut film role (again, something I only found out later) and she’s looking for protection and reassurance on this intimidating set…

 

With the handing holding the cigarette, she thumbs back hair that the wind has blown in her eyes.

 

He lays one hand to rest on the hilt of the sword at his waist. It’s a silly, ridiculous kind of gesture.

 

She laughs at something he says. Her pointed little nose crinkles, and her eyes crease. She shows a lot of her teeth as she laughs.

 

He makes way for someone to push a pallet truck past. It’s his opportunity to stand closer to her.

 

An encounter between two human beings; no more or less ordinary or extraordinary than any other—it has simply been immortalised, every nuanced interaction burnt to the reel of a DV tape. The only thing that isn’t guesswork is this: In about ten-and-a-half seconds—that is, about half a second after the footage ends—he is going to die. And she isn’t going to die.

        As the man steps closer towards the woman, there is a low noise. The limited capabilities of the camera’s mic mean it isn’t much more than an anonymous, digitised rumble; to anyone who didn’t know, just a plane flying overhead or a passing lorry nearby. In fact, it’s what’s known as a sonic boom, sounding from several thousand feet in the air above.

        The man, the woman, and everyone else in shot look up at the sky. As one second ticks inevitable into the next—second one, second two, second three—their expressions run the cycle of curiosity, into confusion, into horror. A contagion of screams and gasps erupts.

        Second four—without warning, a rash of flame suppurates the image and the camera, unable to immediately adjust for the light levels, whites out. Within the same second come the accompanying explosions that drown out the screams. If you listen closely, you’ll realise it’s just a number of versions of the same noise—a sort of ‘ssss-BOOM’—all overlaid over one another. If you were able to listen closely enough, maybe with the right software or whatever, you would be able to distinguish a whole eighteen separate ‘ssss-BOOMs’ on the video’s soundtrack…

 

Skip back, and look, if you can, at the young actress in just a few frames of video before the screen whites out—do you see? That transient image of the white-robed damsel staring heavenward to fire and destruction, her gallant knight stood helplessly beside her? This… I swear that this will stay branded in my retinae forever. I can still see the paused freeze-frame flickering as an afterimage when I close my eyes.

But this isn’t just me. As time goes one, I see this image everywhere. Newspaper, magazines, TV documentaries; it multiplies and blooms. Type in her name—type Mette Stensgaard’s name into Google, and see what image crops up the most in the results. Is this even worth mentioning? I’m sure you know the picture I’m talking about. The one you’ve seen so many times already.

This is my icon. My burning Vietnamese girl. My dead Marilyn in the morgue. This picture… I kid you not, if they knew it was me, they’d knock on my door and just hand me the Pulitzer Prize. I guarantee you. My private obsession has caught the world’s imagination.

 

… Second five—Silence after the explosions. The screams start again. They’re half of what they were. Second six—the camera swiftly compensates—second seven—and reveals a pixelline inferno of flame and smoke, a carnage censored by the camera auto-focussing onto a patina of soil sprayed across the lens. Second eight—there’s a nauseating lurch, as I swing the camera up and forward. Second nine—something large, obscured by the windowpane of dirt, comes spinning 3D movie-style into shot, and engulfs the image. Second ten. The screen goes blank. The sound dies.

 

 

 

Emergency forces were ordered to Surrey yesterday, after nineteen people were killed, dozens more injured, and widespread damage caused by a meteorite fall of freak proportions… In a tragic twist of fate, St Bede’s Church, at the epicentre of the fall, was being used that day as a location by a visiting Danish film company. Award-winning Danish actor Daniel Møller was amongst the casualties… Experts have described the incident as “the most catastrophic impact event in documented history”…

       

There. The Times’ front-page article on the 22^nd July, 2010, the day after the fall, summarises events just as well as I might. The accompanying headline was A FALLING STAR IN SURREY. A strange, surrealist-tinged phrase—perhaps to the point of being a little insensitive, I remember thinking? The Daily Telegraph, by contrast, went with HELLFIRE IN THE HOME COUNTIES, full of an eschatological fervour made appropriate by the picture below of St Bede’s burning ruins attended to by the fire-fighters’ hoses. The Sun, meanwhile, opted for METEOR DEATH STRIKE CHAOS. Blunt, tabloid histrionics. Kind of like Beat poetry.

        Newspapers are rarely measured, or subtle, in their response to tragedy, but to me, the headlines and their variety seemed part of it—an integral part to understanding the anatomy of a disaster…

 

The extras agency had rang me the night before.

        ‘Hello?’

        ‘Hi, is that David?’ said the Australian voice on the other end of the line.

        ‘Yes,’ I said.

        ‘Hi, this is Simon from Prestige Extras? I was wondering if you’d be available for some work in Surrey tomorrow…?’

        I said I was. Not many people can, or will, work at such short notice. But I usually can, which is why I get so much work from the agency.

        I had to make my own way to the set. Sometimes the film company will arrange for a coach to drive the extras out from King’s Cross, or Paddington, or similar. Other times, you’ll have to arrange the journey yourself, and the company will reimburse the travel costs later. On this occasion, I caught an early train from Waterloo to Guildford, and then took a taxi the rest of the way to Somercot Magna, where they were filming.

        The village of Somercot Magna is as charming and delightful as its Latin-derived name. It’s one of the oldest settlements in the county; you can find the original Saxon parish (Sommecot) in the Domesday Book. Perched on the edge of the Surrey Hills, and a ten-minute drive off the A283, this is a village in which the modern world has wrought very little change. A Londis shopfront might stick out a bit on the cobbled Tudor high street, and on some of the thatched roofs, you might see satellite dishes. Perhaps of an evening, too, there will be a few Porsches and Jags parked by the pub on the green. But for the most part, Somercot Magna does not look like it has changed much since the reign of Elizabeth I. It’s a blissful, chocolate-box slice of Merry England; honestly, you half-expect to see morris dancers and mummers parading round a maypole somewhere. The residents here guard their picturesque community jealously, and have worked hard to preserve it.

        If you visit Somercot Magna now, it’s no less beautiful or scenic—but it’s not the place it was. The news segments and the articles tend to go on about an invisible yet undeniable sense of tragedy and disbelief that lingers over the village. I’m a bit cynical about such things, and besides, I’m far too directly involved to be objective.

One thing is certain however: Somercot Magna is much busier than it used to be. Most of the visitors that the village used to receive were hikers stopping for a pub lunch, or couples minibreaking for the weekend. Now all manner of folk make their way here, and the B&Bs and guesthouses have never done such good business.

You will see coachloads of ashen-faced Danes—relatives and friends of those who were killed—arrive out of nowhere. They’re looking for closure, visiting this little corner of the foreign land where their loved ones died. Hippies, dharma bums, and New Age mystics come in from as far and wide as Glastonbury and San Francisco, presumably drawn here by the quasi-astrological nature of the disaster. There are the Roswell-style conspiracy nuts too. And coming in and out of the strewnfield (the site over which the meteorites fell) are the academics: geologists, astronomers, physicists, astrophysicists, theorists, ballistics experts, and many more besides. Some have been seconded; others come of their own volition to study the most talked about meteorite fall after the one that wiped out the dinosaurs.

Most of those who come to Somercot Magna, though, are the grey people. You know them. The maudlin men and women. The gawpers. The people who jostled behind the railings at Princess Diana’s funeral. Drip-fed on mail-order child abuse novels, fatted with Z-list upskirt panty-pics, they flock here in their droves, their yawning fucking iBrains full of death and catastrophe, all shrink-wrapped and on a 56-inch plasma screen…

 

        The eighteen meteorites that fell out of the sky and landed on St Bede’s on the morning of the 21^st July 2010 were, in fact, eighteen fragments of the same meteorite, which broke up soon after entering the atmosphere. As is scientific tradition, the meteorites were named after the place where they fell, and then individually classified. They were named St Bede’s-a through to St Bede’s-r.

It was St Bede’s-b, the largest of the fragments, which struck the church. Soaring at a velocity of 2500 metres-per-second, and charged with a kinetic energy measurable in megatons, it shot through the vaulted roof, down into the tiled floor of the nave, and effectively turned the church into a live grenade of stone, glass and masonry. The shrapnel and debris went hurtling everywhere in a hundred-metre radius. Before impacting, St Bede’s-b also skimmed the scaffolding rigged with lights, and started an electrical fire that quickly sent flames spreading across the long, dry summer grass. Within minutes, the nearby beeches and willows were ablaze. Little wonder, then, that the experts nicknamed this meteorite ‘Big Bad B.’

St Bede’s-j is my meteorite, at least in my mind: the one that landed the closest to me; whose force sent the shattered body of Daniel Møller flying over my head as I instinctively ducked for cover…

 

The fall killed a total of twenty-five people; nineteen in the impact, and a subsequent six in the emergency unit set up at the Royal Surrey County Hospital in Guildford. The casualties comprised of twenty-one Danes, one Swede, one German, and two Britons. Everyone who died was involved in the film shoot. No-one local to the area was hurt. The residents of Somercot Magna simply watched the disaster unfold, peering through their lace curtains at the burning rocks that traced calligraphic lines in the sky.

This was always to be a dislocated kind of tragedy. The nation was shocked and appalled—but it was never our pain to bear. We’d lost two of our own, but really, it was Denmark’s job to grieve, and so it did: the country went into a state of national mourning, not least of all for one of its most treasured film stars. (Curiously, whilst the fall brought Møller’s career to a sad, abrupt end, it positively birthed that of Mette Stensgaard, the current darling of Hollywood. Very few people deny that surviving the disaster prompted her meteoric—believe me, not my pun—rise to fame.)

The international community, meanwhile, did its best to sympathise for those who died and the dozens more who were injured. But in a world rife with war, genocide, famine and disease, only a certain amount of thought could be spared for what amounted to little more than an ocean-drop of people.

Furthermore, there wasn’t any grudge to bear or retaliatory measure to deliver—we hadn’t suffered at the hands of terrorists, criminals, or forces of our own making, but of a frightening, unfamiliar set of circumstances. Even those who might attribute the meteorites to a vengeful God were baffled; of all things, why would He reduce a church to rubble?

        Without rhyme, reason, cause or consequence, all one could do was watch the St Bede’s disaster and all its eccentric horrors. For a week, there was nothing else in the news. Then, it was gone. Images of HD lucidity turn into ambivalent memories. And for me it’s no different, except I happened to have been there, and I happened to have survived. All I can do is watch the video, and endlessly flick back and forth, with visions of Mette Stensgaard recurring in the mind’s eye.

 

Private Disaster is part of a larger work in progress.

 

Through my face: On painting and writing (by Michael Lawton)

“As I took her arm she stared through my face at the dark branches of the trees over my head.”[i]

“The most prudent and effective method of dealing with the world around us is to assume that it is a complete fiction- conversely, the one small node of reality left to us is inside our own heads.”[ii]

I have just read Crash by JG Ballard and those two quotes are in my head and in my notebook. The latter is from the combative introduction, in which Ballard talks of “the writer’s role, his authority and licence to act.”[iii] Reading it I feel challenged towards continuing in my attempts at writing, particularly the fiction. The former is taken from a chapter toward the end, I’ve transcribed it because when I read it I knew it was a painting; knew I could make a painting of it. We all keep and make photos and drawings for paintings. I also, (and I doubt I’m the only one,) see paintings in phrases like this one.

So I have two sentences; one that leads towards a painting, one that leads towards continuing my attempts at writing; this is a neat microcosm of the choice I’ve mulled over for at least five years. Starting after I’d completed a teaching qualification and realised how much I enjoyed writing my essays; not for the content but for carefully choosing the words and their order, enjoyed putting the voice in my head to paper.

Again I am asking myself, should I paint or should I write. Obviously this isn’t a hard and fast choice. I could do both, and I do sort of, but it’s not that simple. To begin with there are practical considerations; because of the part-time jobs I have to do to supplement my practice I don’t have the time and energy to commit to both properly, one dominates and that is always painting. I will explore the particular appeal of painting to me later but ultimately I think for me writing performs a different role to painting, I can almost feel gears shifting in my mind as a contemplate thinking as a painter or as a writer; for writing I retreat into a reflective posture.

Because of this I wrongly thought that painting stood out because it was about engaging with the world through making; because it is more physical it has a more direct engagement than writing. It was distinct because (as Tony Godfrey describes it;)

‘Making and looking at painting with its complex traditions is one place where we engage with the land, where we remake it and understand our continuing place in it.’[iv]

However I now think the same would apply to writing for a full-time writer. I imagine a good writer engages with the world as I do as a painter; feels that they are understanding directly through their making, for example in an (admittedly somewhat dated) essay by William Hazlitt he outlines what writing and painting do and it is the diametric opposite of what they do for me.

‘In writing, you have to contend with the world; in painting, you have only to carry on a friendly strife with Nature.’[v]

So I am painter troubled by words. I think it is perhaps important to make some distinctions. I’m not an artist who’s reached this position through a difficulty with words, (I think it is fair to say that some artists have found in imagery a relief from language,) I love reading and writing and if anything I find the distance between the two (words and painting) disconcerting. In fact I think I exploit this; to return to the Ballard quote I want to paint, it is the meaning of the word ‘through’ that triggered me wanting to paint this, the woman is not literally looking through the head at trees, this is just an expression but it is the disjunction between the word and its meaning that immediately meant I saw it as a potential painting. I can separate writing and painting but can’t stop one bleeding into the other.

As you would imagine this engagement with words has led me to try writing onto paintings, but it has never worked, has never brought anything to the painting that the image hasn’t brought itself. If the writer in me loves words, the painter in me is just as suspicious of them: It is easy to think that it is, well, too easy; by simply writing onto a picture you have given it another level, opened doorways of interpretation. But this is a false assumption, words actually reduce potential readings, they are the surest signifier we can use and leave little room for manoeuvre.

They belong on the list of things that you have to be really sure you want in the painting before using them, (off the top of my head also on this list would be skulls, cigarettes, famous people, un-mixed viridian.)

Because of this it is the most certain handling of letters that seems the most successful. When Anselm Kiefer writes on his canvas it fits, we feel the imperative driving him on, marking something, bearing witness with his work. Likewise the paintings of Ed Ruscha or Harland Miller with printed text feel definite, irrefutable.

Miller of course is also a writer, he has written about painting and fiction and a novel itself. I am interested in how different his novel felt to his paintings; though he uses words in his paintings they are not traditional narrative paintings.

I don’t want to dismiss painting as a narrative tool but it doesn’t interest me because I think that a painting should always be altered to make it a better painting rather than to better illustrate a story. But it can be I great starting point and I believe that whatever puts you in front of a painting, whatever quiets your grubby neuroses and gurning libido long enough for you to start a painting is justified.

I haven’t started my ‘Crash’ painting yet; it is cooking in the pot of my mind. So far I only have a quick biro sketch in an A6 notebook, I look at it now and again, I can see it but not yet the painting it’ll turn into. At one of these points I panic as it reminds me of a Luc Tuymans’ painting of an insect in front of a face. Shit, I think perhaps I’ll have to abandon the idea, nothing extinguishes an idea quicker than seeing it somewhere else, realised somehow in someone else’s work... Hang on though, is it a body in that painting? In fact is called Torso? To my relief it is a body but it isn’t the painting Torso it is called Superstition. I breathe a sigh of relief but don’t start the painting.

There is a chequered history of trying to use words with paintings, ‘neither can be reduced to the others terms,’[vi] is how Foucault put it in his famous chapter on Las Meninas. It is largely a fruitless task but we still do it. Why? Well we understand our world through words and likewise we want to understand painting. Writing on painting is predicated on this denial; that you can deconstruct and understand a successful painting through writing. (Though you can drive around the area, you can’t enter the building.) It is perhaps slightly masochistic to undertake a venture you know is doomed to fail.

Perhaps when Duchamp said ‘dumb as a painter’ he meant it in the conventional sense; unable to speak; painters unable to use words to talk about their paintings.

So we live in the written world. We make work in this world and I would argue that language is becoming more dominant and is seeping more and more into art practice; language is one of the cornerstones of conceptual art. I am worried that there is too much linguistics in painting; it sits better with non-painting. At the beginning of a recent article in New Scientist[vii] it is claimed that 80 per cent of our mental experiences are verbal; the majority of our thoughts are language, the world is language. Painting exists in the little space that is left. Painting is what you can’t say.

But I think here is the problem; as a writer in the 21^st century I want precision; I struggle to believe that there are things that can’t be described. As a painter I believe in the unexplainable. It is this schizophrenia that has me ‘caught in the crease.’

Eventually I start the painting, while mulling it over I have changed my mind about the size, originally I’d thought it’d be standard portrait size but I want it to be a painting not a portrait so decide to make it big; really big, taller than me at 190cm. I am nervous about this; oversized paintings of people are something else that could go on that earlier list.

The second interpretation I want to avoid is that there is some psychological hiding going on; a face behind a tree. This is harder, I don’t know this is going to work; the viewer will have to be able to see through the tree and through the head simultaneously, this something that I’ll have to work through in the painting. It makes me more than a little nervous; I think it’s going to mean using the paint slightly expressionistically but how do you use big decorator’s- brush mark-making illusionistic but not emotional.

This is another consideration unfamiliar to my inner writer used to the readymade media of words. Painting has material qualities; its own rules. It is not a neutral medium.

As I’m working so big I go to the National Portrait Gallery to see the Alex Katz, though I guess they are portraits in that they are pictures of people; (Edwin beams down at us in the NPG,) I don’t think of them as portraits per se. To me these figures are synonymous with an American sense of ‘ease.’ I don’t see individuals but a community, an archetype. And light. These paintings are as redolent of the light they were painted in as with Sean Scully paintings.

I am also working on a painting based on Antonio Del Pollaiuolo’s Apollo and Daphne. (I’ve just realised that this an interesting insight into my work; I’ve started two paintings involving people and fauna) but also what is worth examining is that this original painting would be called a ‘narrative’ painting by some, referring as it does to a story within Ovid’s Metamorphoses. But though it does show a scene from this story it doesn’t tell it. It relies on that an audience at the time it was painted would’ve known the narrative of Apollo and Daphne. The story is not told but evoked.

This then is where painting has been and where it is now, where it is superior to writing; evocation; whatever it may be; a story, or light or insouciance. Obviously words evoke to, I’ve clung to the following sentence from Hjalmar Soderberg’s Dr Glas as having the power of a painting;

“Strange, how a shudder always passes through the air just before sunrise.”[viii]

But isolated from the narrative it is meaningless, and if I copied it onto a canvas it’d become a painting. Because it occupies space rather than time, the evocation in a good painting is indisputable.

I am writing this at the fag-end of September; this is my favourite time of year. I can’t really explain why, but it is a bittersweet feeling; perhaps because I don’t know what it means. It is a nostalgia for the present, a feeling of imprecise excitement that I wouldn’t know how to describe using language: It is intangible: A remaining morsel of eighteenth century sublime in the nascent winds and turning leaves.

It is this that keeps me painting. The intangible things keep me painting. If a change of season can make me excited and not know why then I believe painting can do it to: Can do things that the writer in me can’t explain. In the same interview that Superstition is reproduced Tuymans says this;

‘Paintings were the first transmitters. No matter how long they are hung in a museum, three years or 400 years, they still give you something. Every image has this disconcerting element of going further in time, into magical time. Some may think it is naive to think that by depicting something you can capture its soul or that you have control over things. But it really does have something to do with that.’[ix]

The paintings that I like and want to make are representational, and it is easy to think with the popularity of ‘narrative figuration’; Tuymans, Doig, Katz, The Painting of Modern Life exhibition at the Hayward, that it is simply about painting reality. It isn’t. It is about creating a reality and then evoking it.

The painting might be finished. I don’t know what I think of it; it looks like nothing else I’ve done.

We change our minds as painters; I have rewritten this piece three times, Gerhard Ricther’s The Daily Practice of Painting contains an aphorism for every position in every argument in painting. In the leaflet for the recent Ruscha show at the Hayward they printed a quote of his, from the 1980’s when he was making paintings without words on them, now he has brought the words back I hope he hasn’t changed his mind, it’s what I want from painting and because painting does it better than writing its why I paint:

‘At one time I used to think that art was strictly visual, and you’re not supposed to go and dig deeper into messages. But now I believe it all has to do with tantalising your memory. The most an artist can do is to start something and not give the whole story. That’s what makes mystery.’[x]

---

[i] Crash, JG Ballard

[ii] Ibid.

[iii] Ibid.

[iv] Painting Today, Tony Godfrey

[v] The Fight and Other Writings, William Hazlitt

[vi] The Order of Things, Michel Foucault

[vii] What’s in a Name: The Words Behind Thought, David Robson, in New Scientist, Issue 2776

[viii] Dr Glas, Hjalmar Soderberg

[ix] Luc Tuymans, Ulrich Loock (Interview by Juan Vincente Aliaga)

[x] Ed Ruscha, The Hayward Gallery