"Dear Alex
Do I deduce from your blog that you are planning an imminent visit to Whitstable?

It would be good to meet up, and to think more about possible venues for your work (venues are not easy in Whitstable, none of the usual Biennale stock of disused warehouses and abandoned industrial areas to choose from).
Best wishes
Sue Jones"

Perhaps I have been remiss in my comunications. However I am looking forward to meeting Sue again. The vexed question of the presentation and siting of my work has been firmly at the back of my mind drily scritch scratching inside my skull. I am not fond of the idea of inflicting my work on an unwilling public and am always wary of those artists who seem happy to act like the fox who always craps in the most prominent place possible. The other side of me craves adulation and twenty foot projections. What I really need is a secret lair, a bat cave, a Graceland, a Neverland, perhaps not Neverland.




I have just found this crucifix and been sent this 1970's translation of a Vampire poem by Baudelaire:
The Metamorphoses of the Vampire
Then the woman with the strawberry mouth,
Squirming like a snake upon the coals,
Kneading her breasts against the iron of her corset,
Let flow these words scented with musk:
— "I have wet lips, and I know the art
Of losing old conscience in the depths of a bed.
I dry all tears on my triumphing breasts
And I make old men laugh with the laughter of children.
For those who see me naked, without any covering,
I am the moon and the sun and the sky and the stars!
I am so dexterous in voluptuous love, my dear, my wise one,
When I strangle a man in my dreadful arms,
Or abandon my breast to his biting,
So shy and lascivious, so frail and vigorous,
That on these cushions that swoon with passion
The powerless angels damn their souls for me!"
When she had sucked the pith from my bones
And, drooping, I turned towards her
To give her the kiss of love, I saw only
An old leather bottle with sticky sides and full of pus!
I shut both eyes in cold dismay
And when I opened them both to clear reality,
By my side, instead of that powerful puppet
Which seemed to have taken some lease of blood,
There shook vaguely the remains of a skeleton,
Which itself gave the cry of a weathercock
Or of a sign-board, at the end of a rod of iron,
Which the wind swings in winter nights.
— Geoffrey Wagner, Selected Poems of Charles Baudelaire (NY: Grove Press, 1974)



-- posted abroad

I awoke this morning to discover one of my sideburns was shorter than the other. I remembered a strange dream with three whispering women. Then an hour ago I received the following email from my companion which explains all. I did not remember waking in the night.

Dear Alex
Below is an account of my attempts to trim your sideburns in the night.

You fell asleep quickly after our bath. You had your hand on the base of my back and then my hip which meant I couldn't turn round in case I woke you. I could feel your sideburns bristling me on the shoulder. I must have fallen asleep. I woke up needing a wee and remembering my horrible North Sea dream.

You were on your back now, prone and I got back into bed holding the scissors.

You turned away damn you and after falling asleep several times holding the scissors I crept my hands over your shoulders and holding the sideburn as I would a cats jaw pre worming I started to cut.
'Annabel' you said 'Naughty' and told me you'd been dreaming. You jerked your face to the side and I worried the spear of the scissors would pierce your cheek.

Further Sideburn Anxiety

Whilst in London we visited Dennis Severs' house a place I will not attempt to describe. It is perhaps too obvious say that it is a vampire house but it did raise questions in my mind about how I should proceed with my sideburns. It seems I should choose from four options. Firstly I could preserve them in their current bushy state at this moment of indecision. Secondly allow them to keep growing until the biennale opens by which time I estimate they will stick out a good two inches. Thirdly I could trim them back to a more accurate facsimile of Mr Cushing's in "The Bride's of Dracula" (or any other of his van Helsing roles). Or fourthly shave them off entirely and display them under glass.



My companion has made this artist's impression. The horrifying truth is recorded below.

The Incredible Shrinking Man

Obediphobia clutches at my neck. I am worried about copyright, a subject upon which I am conveniently vague. Just a few days ago I cracked and gave up my plans to make a meticulous pencil drawn animation from UFO footage of a man tumbling into space and decided instead to project the original onto the wall of my lodgings; refilm it, print out the stills, reanimate them and slow it all down. Is this enough?have I made it my own? Or will the makers of UFO require payment? Will I be pursued by litiginous scifi buffs? While worrying I came across the closing soliloquy from "The Incredible Shrinking Man" and thought that in the end I don't really care.





"I was continuing to shrink, to become... what? The infinitesimal? What was I? Still a human being? Or was I the man of the future? If there were other bursts of radiation, other clouds drifting across seas and continents, would other beings follow me into this vast new world? So close - the infinitesimal and the infinite. But suddenly, I knew they were really the two ends of the same concept. The unbelievably small and the unbelievably vast eventually meet - like the closing of a gigantic circle. I looked up, as if somehow I would grasp the heavens. The universe, worlds beyond number, God's silver tapestry spread across the night. And in that moment, I knew the answer to the riddle of the infinite. I had thought in terms of man's own limited dimension. I had presumed upon nature. That existence begins and ends in man's conception, not nature's. And I felt my body dwindling, melting, becoming nothing. My fears melted away. And in their place came acceptance. All this vast majesty of creation, it had to mean something. And then I meant something, too. Yes, smaller than the smallest, I meant something, too. To God, there is no zero. I still exist! "

I write while watching a ridiculously over simplified facile and self contradictory documentary about homo interneticus. It has told me I am becoming more like a fox than a hedgehog. It is making me realise why I do not miss the television. I am in a hotel room, which I state by way of explanation, in London after a gruelling day trekking the streets with my companion. I am drained and weak, she seems unaffected. We have come so far. We have seen so much. One thing seen is this photograph of April Ashley Britain's pioneer of gender reassignment who in 1974 played countess Dracula at the Collegiate Theatre.

I have received a letter from my landlord informing me that upon quitting my lodgings I must render them to their original state. After a brief survey I have come up with a list of things to do.
Lean on the bathroom shelf and towel rail until they hang limply on the wall.
Prise filler out of four large holes in the kitchen.
Tear up the sealant on the bath and encourage mold growth by rubbing yoghurt into the crack.
Kick the electrical socket by the door until it starts fizzing.
Block the sink with unnamable matter.
Place three pairs of soiled pants in the airing cupboard.
Pull the toilet roll holder out and glue it back to the wall with a clear rubbery substance.
Rub lard around the oven and bake until black smoke issues forth.
That should do it.



-- posted abroad

Lord of Misrule II

In his autobiography Christopher Lee described bursting into Peter Cushing's dressing room shouting "I have no lines!" Cushing replied "you are lucky, I've read the script". Later he mentions staying with Mr and Mrs Cushing in Whitstable where he had an "elaborate aquarium of tropical fish". Like my companion he also tells of Cushing's enormous ornithological knowledge.

I was most taken by another passage on pages 274-5

"dying as Dracula was usually worse than having a tooth out. Being struck by lightning was the least of my discomforts. The worse was the time they discovered that vampires cannot abide hawthorns. I thought the religious connotation in dubious taste, but a film studio is not the ideal setting to thrash out a theological issue. I had to crash through a tangle of hawthorn bushes with a crown of thorns on my head, with Peter Cushing on the further side waiting to impale me with a stake snatched from a fence. They lacked the foresight to provide a dummy tree and I had to tear a way through vegetation with spines two inches long, emerging for tge coup de grâce shedding genuine Lee blood like a garden sprinkler.
Bullets, daggers, paper-knives, stakes, darts and lances were embedded in me. Poison, heart failure and old age attacked me from within. I became dust - red, green or sooty. I was drowned, asphyxiated and incinerated, and three times when I was burnt, the barn or studio went up too. I always came back for more. Through clouds of nuclear waste I intoned, 'the world shall hear of me again.'".



-- posted abroad

Confusion

I am impatient to get to Whitstable. It seems that I will not be able to truly move on until I have finally encountered Mr Bown in the act of calling. My companion has reminded me on several occassions that there is another bingo hall not two hundred yards from my lodgings but I am unwilling to dilute the experience with pale imitation. This morning I came across a page in my notebook which illustrates my current state of mind. It is illustrated and transcribed in list form below.



Gleam
A matter of life and death
Chromamnesia
Flowers
Lips
Standing still
Colour
Camera Obscura
Magic
Appear
Pearlville
Double acts
Chases
Slapstick
Romance
Emotion
Villains
Heroes
Make do
Westerns
Gangsters
Ruffians
Narrative ideas for the count of monte cristo
Justice
Treasure sparkling possiblities
Disguise and revenge
Plots
Goldfinger idea
Revenge on all those people who have ever slighted me
Dancers
Three girls
Dumped
Various

Last night we watched the Powell and Pressburger film "A Matter of Life and Death" I had seen it twice in the last twenty or so years. Despite this I was surprised to see that the action on Earth was in colour and Heaven in black and white. I had remembered it the other way round.

Magic

Cathy Lomax has asked me to make some work for the next edition of 'Arty' the title is to be 'magic' so I spent some time yesterday reprising my "Pepper's Ghost" illusion for the stills camera. I found a statue of the Virgin Mary to be my assistant. She seemed very comfortable in the act of appearing magically inside the studio window. Virginity is, I suppose, not a condition usually associated with magician's assistants. Though often they feign ingenuousness they know too much. They have been initiated. Though I haven't yet decided which images to send to Cathy (they must also work in black and white) I am drawn to those which reveal the illusion. It is as if knowledge of the trick has failed to diminish the magic.

Ghosts