Category Archives: Performance

Her Feet, Her Blessed Feet

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Another late night insomnia driven delve into the unpublished, and possibly unpublishable stories stacked in boxes under my bed. I now present the latest installment of my Slush Pile Bonanza. This piece was written in 2016, and although I performed it a few times, it never felt quite finished. Having said that, I notice it has a word count of 666 words, so at some point I must have worked pretty hard on it to achieve such a deliberate number .

Her Feet, Her Blessed Feet

The fact is I can smell her feet from here, a hundred full paces away, I swear I can still smell her feet. And she’s up there, oblivious, waiting for me, outside the cinema. She’s schmoozing and cruising, hob-nobbing with the other celebrities on the red carpet. In tailored red-sex dress and Jimmy Choos she is a papparazzi wet dream, but she is waving only to me, directly to me.

Pathologically photogenic, especially in the pyrotechnics of a media storm, she is majestic! I should be up there beside her but I’m dawdling by a magazine kiosk watching, because I am enveloped in billows of her foot odour, even by this Newsstand, I can still smell her feet.

I’m cooling my heels and curling my toes, and I’m thinking and I’m thinking, should I turn and run? but how could I? Look! Look at her! Beautiful, flawless, intelligent, witty, sometimes wild, mostly amusing. A movie-star girl-next-door goddess-lover.

If only she’d wash her putrid feet once in a while.

This is our first date actually, I’m her guest at a launch party for a blockbuster film she stars in. Although I call it our first date, I’ve been working closely with her for six weeks now, but she approached me and quite assertively insisted it was me that accompany her here alone tonight. Just the two of us, at a movie star gala bash where she’s the resident princess of the show and I am her Podiatrist. Actually I’m on overtime this evening, I’m being paid double-time, just to be here.

Officially my brief is to assist her in breaking in a new pair of “catwalk shoes”. We’ve been working with moleskin and surgical spirit immersions all week. I hoped the spirit would harden the cushions of her sole and so reduce chances of blisters. I had also hoped the alcohol spirit would kill off fungi and dampen her aura-like reek. Futile. Tonight she smells like a passed out wino, one that forgot to wash her feet.

Maybe I’m exaggerating. Or I’m over-sensitive, being her clinical chiropodist, personal pedicurist, Reflexology Master and Consultant on Cobblers, her feet are my professional responsibility, it says so on my contract.

Although I do wonder about the legal situation with my work contract if I do decide to sleep with her. Do I still have to do her feet, or can I delegate?

She’s waving right at me now, unmistakably, I have to go to her, for the sake of my career I have to join her in the locker room stench of her bloody red carpet. Am I just a Pet Podiatrist?

Shit! This is our first date. To me, this feels like the first day of my life.

And aside from the foot odour, I am so in love with her. I so want, I so want…

Then again, I daren’t imagine what it’d be like if we did get intimate. What would I do if, while cosily settling down curled up with coffee on her Zen-White sex-sofa, she nonchalantly kicked off her Manolo Blahnik’s? Oh Lord! What if she then peeled off her sheer black tights?

I can’t! you know! Nylon panty-hose is a breeding ground for obscure and rancid bacterias, everyone knows that. Why do women do this thing with the panty-hose tights?

It isn’t only destructive of natural fauna, it isn’t only physically damaging to the whole lower regions of the female body, it also constricts the base chakra and engorges the meridians with stagnant Chi. Sex would be a psychic impossibility.

Oh! But here she comes, beaming out to me, over the heads of the flashbulbs popping, her angelic face haloed in the gold of her blonde curls, cherub-like. And her smile, hold me while I swoon, like an all-encompassing sun-rising heart-leap, that very very nearly cleanses away my retching knowledge of her corn-encrusted feet stinking.

I so want, I so want, but I really don’t know if I can stand her feet, her blessed feet….

June 2016 Word count 666

Unexpected in October

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Recent recording of a piece I first posted a year ago.

Unexpected in October – recorded reprise – Eulogy for Scott

If I can make a landscape for a dream, let it be this place. Some day soon the winter will fall, but this afternoon in this garden the sky is still clear and brazen blue, the wind still rustles in the leaves not yet turned and birds chatter on in deep greenery, insects still flutter in dappled shade. The sun still warms my face, the grass still growing under my feet, a squirrel climbs to the highest waving branches where glossy green ivy leaves entwine, waiting for the year to pass on. I close my eyes, a tranquil moment for the dead and dying, held in trance-like waiting, the sun still calls my eyes to the sky. I don’t want to lose this moment, I don’t want to go indoors, but the chill air rising creeps up my spine, a flying crow caws overhead, the wonder is breaking, broken by a growling jet that cuts the sky in two. Some day soon the winter will fall again, but now, today, this afternoon in this garden, summer still lingers on, and hope is still strong. If I can make a landscape for a dream, let it be this place.

Grandmother Punk and the Housing Inspector

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A Play for Voices

Narrator:In the crazy woman’s filthy flat the new temp from the Council Inspectorate Office was struggling with the old girl’s misconception about him. She seemed to think he was an actual inspector, a surveyor, even. She was asking awkward questions about her  
Crone:plaster condition, waterproofed inner coat and the cracked ballbearings.  
Narrator:Did she actually say cracked ballbearings? He wasn’t sure. He blustered through the memorised set response  
Temp:I need to reiterate that I am only conducting an audit of the property  
Crone:Like the domesday booke
 
Temp:You’ll need to report any repairs to the council  
Crone:An inventory of all King William, Arch Duke of Cambridge and Normany’s, newly acquired lands and posessions.  
Narrator:He hadn’t really been listening. His mind had been elsewhere. On the slow puncture in his back tyre. And the cycle pump.  
Temp:The fucking cycle pump.  
Narrator:He blustered  
Temp:Reiterate…I’m only conducting an audit…report repairs to council…  
Crone:And the installation of the new front door, three years it took them.  
Narrator:She had to have her letter flap hanging off before they lifted a finger. Who would be so low as to steal his shitty cycle pump any way.  
Temp:I need to climb up into your loft hatch  
Narrator:He said. Back on Script now. Check the loft. Check the CO2 and smoke alarms.Photograph the boiler. It wasn’t her that done this to the bathroom.
  
Crone:the paint just started falling off  
Temp:Was there mould?  
Crone:Mould? Was there mould? There was so much mould I had it coming out my ears.  
Narrator:Three house calls back the back tyre had completely deflated. That’s when he noticed some fucker had nicked his cycle pump.  
Crone:I didn’t even need to do any stripping, it just came off in my hand.  
Temp:Reiterate…conducting…report…council  
Narrator:He flustered as he thankfully backed out the front door, She said  
Crone:don’t forget to close the gate, I don’t want the cat getting out

The Bibliophile’s Day Out

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This story was inspired by one strange facebook conversation I had with Simone Chalkley long ago, we were discussing the tactile/sensual aspects of “old-skool” books. At the time we were both regulars at Fay Roberts Allographic spoken word events, which is where I first performed The Bibliophile’s Day Out. I was delighted that Simone was in the audience that Sunday evening.

So, I have been performing this story for a good few years now, but I realised today that I have never posted it on the website. Here goes…

The Bibliophile’s Day Out

The curtain closed with a swish, making the cramped changing room cubicle even more claustrophobic. I hung the random clothes on the hook, plonked my rucksack on the chair in the corner and turned my back against the mirror. It was bad enough doing this, I didn’t want to watch myself doing it. Greedily, I delved into the dark depths of the rucksack. The mixed odours rising from the bag were heady with promise, I’d been looking for the privacy to do this all day. I felt light headed as I drew out a thick Victorian binding, it’s leather-bound case positively encrusted with ornate blocking.  I quivered slightly as the unmistakeable smell of academics smoke-filled study clagged in my nostrils – the definite fruity tang of pungent nicotinicity. I smiled, though I wasn’t yet sated. I allowed my sensual ecstasy to mingle with my unerring booksellers instinct and I knew the smell of  erudite  content. Probably the  unloved cast-off of some Cambridge Librarian Lothario.

I heard a vague harrumphing the other side of the curtain. I could sense the waiting woman’s presence without even registering it.  I was onto my second book. A slim pocket book sized Ayurvedic sex manual. The aroma of incense-laden temple, with notes of satanic doom played through my cavities. Invariably, the smell of cloistered hermitage denotes books that are long out of print. Highly collectible, in my Dealers Hat.  The woman waiting outside clattered her plastic dress hangers together and tutted. I could hear her looking at her watch. But it was water off a duck’s back to me. A boutique changing room was pure luxury for your average booksniffer, I’ve made do with a cubicle in a public lavatory – not an olfactory nirvana, you know. The bleach played havoc with my nasal consciousness. In any case, I was about to do number three, a large format hardback, desperately signed by the author, never even opened. The sickening musty whiff of the remaindered warehouse, a foul but vividly unforgettable reek. The stench of the over-priced. Known in the book trade as “a dog”. Suddenly “Are you going to be in there long?” Jolted back to reality my breath solidified in my lungs. Fighting the shame of discovery, my “Sorry!” burst through my paralysis with a rush of out breath. Snarking, waiting woman said “You’ve been twenty minutes already” Then wheedling “Only I’ve got to be some where at two”. I had to get out of here. In a panicked flurry I grasped at my books, stuffing them hurriedly into the rucksack. “What the hell are you doing in there?” the alarm in her voice peaking with my own. And then I touched the last book in the hoard.

My fingers slipped wantonly over the tomes Yapp binding in naked vellum, curving  pale flaps around thick sections of handmade deckle-edge paper. The Kelmscott colophon laid across it, a Morris font  entwined around with curling, twirling botanic forms of erotic intensity. Probing the books flexible spine with my nose I breathed in a perfume of pure unadulterated First Edition, a tabla rasa of a book. The abandoned scent of forgotten storage in a dry secure garage. A book dealers dream. The most expensive book smell of all. The cubicle curtain was suddenly wrenched aside “A Booksniffer!” screamed the waiting woman. “No” I pleaded “I’m a Bookseller, a binder, no really” I stumbled. Crashing into clothes racks, running for the door. “A Booksniffer!” she fainted. A Security Guard, as thick as a bear,  ambled behind me. His pungent aftershave , like a disinfectant smudge stick, cleansed and sterilised the book-heavy air.

Bella Basura 2022

Strawberry Fair Armpit Hair 13 years on…

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Bella Basura Still Showing her Armpit Hair to Strawberry Fair. Scarecrow Corner 2019. Photo by Del Blyben

Bella Basura Still Showing her Armpit Hair to Strawberry Fair. Scarecrow Corner 2019. Photo by Del Blyben

 

In the 1990s one of my favourite small press publications was the seminal  Unlimited Dream Company series – Towards 2012 – it’s editor – Gyrus – produced a stable of beautifully themed cutting edge factual anthologies at the end of the twentieth century.

In 2006 Gyrus started a new journal – Dreamflesh, which he subtitled “A Journal of  Body, Psyche, Ecological Crisis and Archaeologies of Consciousness”. The list of contributors was an impressive roll call of writers working in marginal spiritual and philosophical paradigm, the whole was a smorgasbord of the strange and the alluring.

Dreamflesh Journal cover art by Amodali

Dreamflesh Journal cover art by Amodali

This month (August 2017) Gyrus has been posting the whole journal online, reprinting the articles and drawing out ideas that have persisted and flourished in the intervening 11 years.

In the web reprise  Gyrus summarises the  project: “Dreamflesh Journal documented an eclectic range of ideas, investigations and experiments informed by this complex ecopsychological framework. Essays, interviews and art ranged over many facets of human and non-human life that seem to be important to this transition: dreams, altered states, visionary media, occultism, sexuality & gender, animism, collective intelligences, psychosomatic healing, bodily symbolism, cognitive linguistics, new materialism, creatively disciplined prehistorical and anthropological studies, images & spirit (iconoclasm, idolatry, anthropomorphism, fetishism), death & dying, depth psychology, ecology… to name a few.”

Back in 2005, when I first heard that Gyrus was planning to edit a new journal I wrote a piece specially, my concern was female facial and body hair and I enjoyed myself writing a selected history of hirsute women. Then I sent in off to Gyrus.

A few months later  I heard it had been accepted. I was delighted to have my piece included in Dreamflesh, it  gave me the biggest readership I had ever had, I felt like I’d arrived, more than this, I felt I’d  been accepted into a publication so inspiring that it left me in awe. And the Journal was certainly well-received, The Guardian called it “a bastion of the esoteric”, and not long after the Journal was released it was reviewed in Fortean Times “There is a dimension way, way out where flesh and dream coalesce, explored by people with names such as Orryelle Defenstrate-Bascule, Gyrus, Bella Basura, Pablo Amaringo and Lars Holger Holm, not to mention the formidible Dave Lee”. And that wasn’t all, wonderfully, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, the transgender founder of Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV, wrote of Dreamflesh “I felt EXCITED as I read. No mean feat. I truly was inspired”.

In the original introduction to the Journal Gyrus evaluated the role of traditional publishing in an increasingly digitized world, “The existence of the web can goad us into a sharper awareness of how print media impact the environment, in turn encouraging us all — in both writing and reading — to try to make every piece of paper and every drop of ink count. ”

Read Strawberry fair Armpit Hair

Dreamflesh online Journal

Performance Photographs

 

A revised Strawberry Fair Armpit Hair was reprinted in March 2016 Novelty Online Magazine in their Under The Skin issue, the magazine website now seems to be down, but they still have a facebook presence.

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Mosaicked with Swimming Horses

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One-off performance in the Cambridge festival of Ideas
of Mosaicked with Swimming Horses
19th October, Upstairs at Waterstones Sidney Street

Click here for more details and to book tickets
and to view the 2018 Cambridge festival of Ideas Programme

 

 

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Bella Basura at Scarecrow Corner

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This Saturday is Strawberry Fair, the longest running free festival in Britain.
Many years ago Scarecrow Corner used to be called The Green Area, but had to change it’s name in 2012 when the whole fair went green. it’s still over in the far left corner by the river and aside from some hippy trappings – The Peace Labyrinth, Body-Art Mike’s tipi and The Tree Circle – it’s now a writhing mass of Cambridge’s finest Punk offerings. I am on at 2pm, just a short 15 minute set of classic Basura-isms.

Hope to see you there!

Up The Punx!