Late last year I wrote a short comedy play for radio called Artificial Shakespeare. The play looks at a dystopian near-future where AI voice actors have taken all the speaking parts in a radio drama series.
In July I had the priviledge of having my Artificial Shakespeare recorded at The City Lit College in Holborn, directed by David Gooderson, sound by Erfan and performed by members of the City Lit Radio Theatre Company: Brigitte Boylan, Ruth Cowan, Anita Donley, Rebecca Fry, Monica Higuera, Nic Humberstone, Neil Marathe, Stephen Parkin, Jeremy Peckham and Jean Dark. This is that recording.
Incidentally, an AI created the image here, under prompting from me.
Lost and alone, I relentlessly haunt my own back catalogue, visiting and re-visiting the failures of my past. This piece – The Global Underbelly of Mexican Culture – was first printed in the pamphlet Necro-Tourist from 1999.
The Global Underbelly of Mexican Culture
Coyacan suburb, on the edge of Mexico City, was about the most unMexican place I’d seen in Mexico. In contrast to the crowded tumbledown streets, alleyways and markets I’d seen around Alameda Park and Zocalo, streaming with people, Coyacan was all lawns and driveways, villas set back behind flourishing palm trees, hardly any traffic here, hardly any people. It felt spacious and wealthy and paranoid. Like the British Ex-Pat barrios of the Spanish Costas, Coyacan had the same sense of furtively concealed lifelessness about it. Like photographs of Beverley Hills, or TV.
The Metro journey from the station in central Mexico City, across crowded town and through her endless undulating outskirts had taken almost an hour. The Metro finally coughed us up right deep in the centre of shiney, Americano chain-store shopping mall. Here the incurable cyst of corporate-branded consumerism bubbled forth its phosphorescent plate-glass pus, depositing in the wake of its rancid slipstream, inter-continental brand names, sportswear, fast food, Wendys and Fucking McDonalds. All over again, just like anywhere. O Hell.
From here we consulted our guide book and scuttled our way through the network of dull closed-curtain unpromising Coyacan suburb. We were looking for The Blue House, home to the Frieda Kahlo Museum, housing the largest collection of her works in the world.
Magically, we found the Blue House. We also found the Blue House was closed for the next eighteen months for essential repairs. As we consulted our guide book again, without much hope for other interesting places in Coyacan, it began to spit rain. After some serious trawling in the culture section, the guide book threw us the Trotsky Connection…MORE
Extract from Necrotourist – originally a limited printing of a hard-copy A5 folded stapled photocopied pamphlet produced in 2001.
A Valentines day reposting, a short piece from my 2017 pamphlet – Clutches of Love. Introduction by Katya Lubarr. Image: thanks to el Senor Don Challissimo.
Probably Inappropriately
When you done your tantric kundalini kali-spell on me I was lost enveloped in psychic love-haze, I was drawn, rising, filling, swelling emotions that confused me and had in the past lead to casually fucking someone. Probably Inappropriately.
Warning bells went off somewhere in the distance and I felt us reflex, in unison, pull back, but stayed long hours, hung in giddy uneasy equilibrium, in circular psychedelic emanations, trident penetrates the sky.
Still. Still. Still. Waiting, while unseen proto-cosmic arousals reverberate the air, threatening to immanently unfold sudden into cataclysmic karmic collisions climaxing. Still. Still. Still.
So we lay down on the bed, fully-clothed in the dull downpour afternoon. Clasped in yogic breathing intensely staring deep into soul-eyes we sank down dipped below the surface entwined long time waiting. Did you call? Probably Inappropriately.
Here is a reprint of a piece I wrote, as Jean Dark, back in 2012. I am astonished by how the memory still makes me feel happy and fulfilled.
Gaunt’s House Labyrinth
In December 2012 I took this series of photographs of the stone-laid labyrinth at Gaunt’s House in Dorset.
The Labyrinth at Gaunt’s House is a classic seven-circuit labyrinth in turf and brick, laid out in the private grounds of a Dorset Retreat Centre. It has been used for meditational and spiritual purposes by visitors to the house since it’s construction around the turn of the millennium.
In December 2012 I was staying at Gaunt’s House for a fortnight volunteering. We were painting and decorating a cottage on the grounds, in exchange for bed and board. The food was good and wholesome, the company, my workmates and fellow volunteers, were generally cheerful and uncomplicated. My accommodation was a sparse but comfortable single room in a converted stable block, it was called a “Meditation Cell”. I was at a difficult time in my life and I was struggling at home to regain my composure and maintain my solitude – I had been tempted to take a Vipassna Retreat. Obviously the Meditation Cell felt like a miraculous gift.
Meals were served four times daily in the dining hall of the main house, and the walk from my cell to the dining hall could be prolonged and enchanted by taking a long route through a pond-ridden wooded area to the back of the labyrinth at the far end of the lawn. As I was still waking in sweaty panic early in the dark in those days, I would get straight up, put jumper, trousers, waterproofs and wellies over my pajamas and walk, ramble, explore, what you will until I had to go in to breakfast. Along hedgerowed field-side paths glimpsing a wren, across sloping green meadows to a cluster of Ashes, through thick untrammelled unhunted woodland alone, over swollen winter streams following Fallow Deer, in a circuit around the artificial lake. I tramped in the morning half light, in frost, fog and ice. It was a gloriously empowering start to the day, giving me a gentle daily dose of solitude and contemplation.
I always ended my walks by stopping off at my cell, changing into workclothes and detouring through the woods to the labyrinth. Outlined permanently in bricks it remains imprinted on the earth even if no-one walks it. I walked it daily for a fortnight in December 2012, kicking through frozen woodland leaf-litter, marking out the spiral path, moving inwards to the centre, inwards and then outwards. Then breakfast, refreshed.
One afternoon towards the end of the fortnight, I had a block of freetime and decided to spend that time working with the labyrinth. I spent the dull-lighted December afternoon throwing, sweeping, raking, kicking leaf litter off the paths, to the sides where they marked out the ‘walls’ covering the bricks with moist fecund leaf mould. The path was revealed as a swathe of soft green grass. I was finishing the centre as the sun set and I walked the newly cleared labyrinth at twilight. Managing to make it across the lawn to the main house in perfect time for tea.
The photographs
In December 2012 I took this series of photographs of the stone-laid labyrinth at Gaunt’s House in Dorset.
I spend the dull-lighted December afternoon throwing, sweeping, raking, kicking leaf litter off the paths, to the sides where they marked out the ‘walls’ covering the bricks with moist fecund leaf mould.
The path was revealed as a swathe of soft green grass.
I was finishing the centre as the sun set and I walked the newly cleared labyrinth at twilight.
The photo on Leah’s post threw me. It really did, it bamboozled me and discombobulated and confused me. It was a vertical photo, almost certainly taken with a phone. A straight forward portrait orientation of a man, his head and shoulders in profile, he is unsmiling. It feels as if the man is posing, deliberately turning his face from the camera, purposely pretending he’s not being photographed. I got a palpable sense that the man was prevaricating, in profile, in portrait, or it was uncanny valley photoshopped.
But that wasn’t what shook me.
Visible behind the man is a muddy woodland path, leading off into distant damp water-logged winter crop fields, it is obviously somewhere South Eastern England. The man is wearing a dark beanie hat, it looks old. His coat is weathered. His face unshaven and blanched in the cold air. The lobes of his ears, poking out from under the hat, are ruddy with chill, both his eyes and his nose look runny.
The caption reads “Simon at the Beech Woods”.
But its not Simon, not the Simon I know, and that Simon doesn’t know Leah anyway.
It’s not Simon, it most certainly is Dan. Dan, Dan my ex-, Dan TEFL Dan, Dan in Japan, Dan.
But Leah doesn’t know Dan, in any case he’s in Japan, so why would he appear on Leah’s feed.
That was number one, the first of those things that come in threes.
I can’t decide if it’s good things or bad things that come in threes. I can’t decide if seeing Dan pretending to be Simon on Leah’s post is a good thing or a bad thing. It’s just confusing. Do confusing things also come in threes?
The second thing was the Recidivist Philosopher Podcast. That’s the name of the series, I didn’t make it up, I don’t really know what it means, I don’t even know why I even went there, but I did.
The presenter was quite stunning, the moment I saw him I couldn’t look away. He had long curly blond hair, his eyes a blinding shade of blue, vibrant against his pale eyelashes and eyebrows. His mouth was wide, his soft pink lips could barely close over his big white perfect teeth.
But that wasn’t why I couldn’t look away.
He introduced every episode with “Greetings! I am the Recidivist Philosopher! This is my podcast. My name is Dirk”. But he wasn’t Dirk, I don’t even know anyone called Dirk. It was Simon, the Simon that wasn’t at the Beech Woods, the Simon who doesn’t know Leah, although he may know Dan in Japan.
It’s so confusing, because although it definitely was Simon, and he spoke with the same unbridled enthusiasm about all the same things he always spoke endlessly about – Nietzsche, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Schiller and the rest – he didn’t speak in his normal louche Cumbrian drawl at all.
This Simon had a painfully cut-glass Home Counties accent, it was so posh it was a bit unbearable to listen to. It was so posh, super posh, like fake posh, it sounded how Jacob Rees Mogg looks, which is gruesome posh.
And although he certainly was Simon, in the podcast he wore his hair long and looked 20 years younger than he actually was, as if he’d made these podcasts when he was still young, before podcasts even existed. I hope Simon’s not dabbling in time travel.
It is so confusing, I can’t get my head around it. Especially since, the third thing of those things that come in threes hasn’t happened yet, so I’ve no way of knowing what to make of it all. I can’t for the life of me imagine what the third thing will be, or if I will even recognise it when it happens.
Bella Basura online 
