Dear Friends
I cannot put it more plainly: the Last Peachy Coochy of the Season will take place next Thursday June 25th. Just think, Friends, two whole Seasons have passed, each Season comprising 9 months and each month comprising 5 Coocheurs which is 45 Coocheurs per unit Season which is 90 Coocheurs since the inception of the whole crazy, life-enhancing, team-building, inspiriting, runaway, whirlwind, tatterdemalion, light-hearted, frothpacked, foamfilled, bulgent, have-you-seen, must-have, let’s go, clippety clop, rickety rackety, jazz coloured, fresh, electrifying, hello mother, did I leave my coat here, puissant, ectoplasmic, rocking, feisty, hep, spunky, good morning mister andrews, jack of many pullovers, yellow, christine, caroline, eckhardt, tingling, poppy, bulgent, heterodox, delicious, enrobed, deep fine leg, brisk, enpaced, movish, alongular, winsome, irradiated, flushed, enstartled, praxic, appointing, engruntling, who are you looking at, instep, outfront, disbodying, entrancing, enchanting, spellbinding, classy, of the people, of the populace, of them, the massive, the wide, the enbiggened, the opening, the way in, the way out, the distance made near, the far made close, the away made home, the tarmac made den, the airfield made niche, the spot made prick, the point made sharp, the mystery deepened, the unhelpful to the fore, the revelation smirched, the glimpse gone, the need, the yearn, the healing power of story, excuse me while I retch, the axelrod, the roving reporter, the contretemps, big, funny, jerky, the shapes thrown, the mustard cut, the full basket, the rug cut, the cards cut, the kid cute, the bicycling holiday, the infamous four, the neglected three, the lonely one, the sociopathic six or seven depending, here are some moments that I lived earlier, here are photos of Gran, here is Callum, here is Philip, there goes that cat you killed Tony, I never, yes you did you fucking stamped on it , I never, the bustle, the pack, the number, bulgent, full, bristling, undressed, socked, shoed, implenished, blue, green, up, in, by, at, get,

This is what you get:

David Gale’s Peachy Coochy Nites

The projector projects 20 images for precisely 20 seconds each. The Coocheur (or Presenter) speaks for precisely twenty seconds per image. Randomness is discouraged but narrative linearity is not automatically esteemed.
David Gale, having launched a nationwide performance must-have, continues to curate this series of Peachy Coochy events at ArtsAdmin’s new, stylish yet reassuring Bar. Each event features six Coocheurs, or Presenters, drawn from many walks of life. Each Coocheur will compose a verbal response to 20 images of their choice. Each presentation lasts 6 minutes and 40 seconds. There will be gaps between presentations for drinking and light conversation.

David, something of a Black Belt in these matters, will both compere and present the chopped torrent that can never be the same river twice.

A recent patron observed:
“It is not the table the chair it is the atoms the light the sense of the invisible the lifting of the veil”
(Sylvia 3/06/09)

Peachy Coochy Nites subscribes to the the National Belief System and is therefore committed to the provision of a wide range of contributors such as the impersonator, the fraud, the copyist, the colourist, the marker, the maker, the destroyer, the undoer of worlds, the spoiler of schemes, the darkener of doors.

The key to all this is, of course, memorisation. One must be able to recall that, possibly several years ago, a particular title or author was placed on the list. One can, obviously, read the list from time to time to refresh the memory but I must confess I’m a hardliner on this one: it is a sign of weakness to read the list. It exists because the act of adding to it constitutes a memorable operation in itself. No further consultation should be necessary.

I was recently very pleased to secure a particular used volume in the local branch of Traid. Here is its cover:

I first saw it in Magma, in Clerkenwell, where I should have bought it without further ado (I am not averse to the new purchase). Sensing that the volume was a portal to some interesting thinking, I did, however, remember it. But not well enough. After a year or two I had forgotten both title and author(s). Finding myself in the Clerkenwell area again - I was seeking out a source of grub screws (the ones that prevent door knobs from falling off) - I popped into Magma and endured the following exchange:
“Do you have that book that you had with pictures of the figures that you get in advertisements?”
“How do you mean?”
“You know: it’s a collection of the little…er…figures…you know…like little men and animals that are associated with products?”
“I don’t think we’ve ever had that.”
“You have! I mean ‘You have.’ It’s full of images of…they’re like cartoon characters! They help sell products.”
“No.”

In the next post I will take a look at some of these cheeky little items.

Suddenly we were in the kitchen. The air was close and still. There were five people there. None of them looked at us. Two were by the sink cleaning plates and glasses. A man sat on a stool, gazing at the floor. I realised that no sounds were coming from the sink. The cleaning was being conducted in perfect silence. Even the impacts of the utensils upon each other were somehow cancelled. A woman in a long dress walked slowly across the space. She had no facial expression. The air was so thick you could lean on it. Out in the garden were sixty people. They were murmuring.

My wife began to pull at the foil on our bottle. An elderly lady moved towards her and said “Are you going to open that with your teeth?” In my mind a voice said “Of course not, you silly old fuck.” Sometimes you can’t stop your mind. We poured ourselves a drink and and stepped through the french windows to the garden. The garden was terraced so that we found ourselves looking down to the far end where there was a shed. A man sat at an electric piano smiling. There was a mat on the grass. Some young people of student age stood beside it. They wore black tee shirts and leggings, like Left Bank bohemians from an imagined 50s. Some had beards. I looked for food but most of the bowls had been scraped clean. The man at the piano started playing music from the olden days. The young people proved to be dancers, for they now moved onto the mat and began throwing olden days shapes in a not entirely competent manner. As far as I could tell the dancing was imitative of that which is thought to have prevailed in the Elizabethan era. The lack of skill, the latter normally so crucial to that which is gripping, was gripping. I made my face go neutral, just in case.

After two such ‘numbers’ the troupe stepped off the mat to a faint patter of applause. A person stepped up to a microphone and spoke. The P.A. was not working. Nothing could be heard. My wife began gesturing to me as if to say “Amscray! Pronto!” Soon we were back in the street. On the way out I met a guy I knew from the past. We exchanged pleasantries. I said we’re out of here. He said but you’ve only just arrived. I said no we have been here since 4 o’clock. He said I didn’t see you. I said we were in the shed.

Readers accustomed to Strength Weekly’s insistence on closure will want it. My wife said “Fuck, I wish I hadn’t spent all that money on that wine.” I said “It is quite clear. They were zombies. We stumbled upon a clutch, coven or group. They live.”

In ‘The Truman Show’ (1998) Truman Burbank is the unwitting star of a hugely successful documentary TV show based on his life. The show runs continuously, following Truman from the moment of his birth into adulthood. Truman is completely unaware of the fact that everyone in his life, ranging from his wife to passersby in the street, is an actor hired to make him think he is an average guy doing normal things. The show, watched by millions, takes place in a specially consructed dome with a fully controllable climate and 5,000 concealed cameras. The setting within the dome is a seaside town. As the film unfolds Truman gradually becomes aware that something odd is going on and, after severe disillusionment and much frustration, is able, at the age of thirty, to escape the dome into the real world beyond.

In ‘Synecdoche New York’ (2008) Caden Cotard, an unsuccessful theatre director, starts to show signs of breakdown when his wife leaves him. When he is unexpectedly awarded a large ‘genius grant’ he determines to spend it on creating a piece of theatre of surpassing realism that will be enacted by a cast of hundreds in a vast replica of the city, constructed in an enormous warehouse. Rehearsals take several years, in the course of which Caden even employs actors to play the parts of himself and his assistant. While life in the warehouse city becomes increasingly hard to distinguish from the real thing, Caden cannot bring himself to open the ’show’ to the public and he and the cast grow increasingly isolated. Eventually he employs an actress to play himself while he takes her former role, that of cleaning lady. The new director guides him through his last days as the cast dwindles away and at the point of his finding a way to finish the play she gives him one last instruction: “Die.”

Truman Burbank is, at first glance, the dupe of a pervasive and overweening media whose productions synthesise classic Orwellian surveillance with a hyperextension of the logic of a game show. The film invites comparison with our own lives with its proposition that a comparable constraint is exerted upon us all. This is apparently the view of the film’s director, Peter Weir, who has said that essentially the film is about ‘Control. It’s a system of control that is larger than the one Truman lives in, at least.’ Weir also states that ‘…the primary influence - or call it control - in our lives is television, so the metaphor of the movie certainly applies to things we see all the time.’ Breakout is advocated. You must escape the compelling comforts of the false to find the real (see also ‘The Matrix’ (1999)). Such a critique and its suite of recommendations have force but they are a bit tired and familiar.

If, however, Truman’s plight is introverted so that it’s more about him and less about surveillant media-dominated consumer society blah blah then the film describes an individual’s psychological delusion. Plotwise, Truman is not suffering from delusion - a highly skilled team is maintaining him in a state in which he believes all is well. He is deluded in this belief but not because he is psychologically frail. The delusion that one is the subject of a continuous TV reality show is, however, apparently on the increase. This New York Times piece reports growing numbers of individuals presenting the ‘Truman Show Delusion’ at psychiatric clinics, some ten years after the movie opened. While it is quite possible that some of these patients saw the film and found in it a tipping point (the NYT piece confirms this), other patients suffer the delusion without having had the inflight entertainment.

The delusion is not a simple mimetic phenomenon as in ‘See the Movie, Get the Delusion!’ or a new psychiatric formation so much as the product of a hitherto contested mode of transmission, in which a condition has a broad source of generation rather than arising from distinct sets of unrelated circumstances. The transmission, in other words, is cultural. An example of a culture-specific condition would be genital retraction syndrome, wherein the subject experiences great anxiety due to his conviction that his penis is withdrawing into his body. The syndrome is largely restricted to societies within which witchcraft is prevalent.

There is controversy in psychiatric circles about the status of culture-specific conditions. I am not familiar with the specifics of the debate but suspect that it may reflect a territorial conflict regarding the mechanisms of the formation of neurosis. The history of psychoanalysis unfolds from seminal case studies of neurotic middle class individuals who were deemed to have been psychically damaged in some way by prior experience. This experience was restricted to the impact upon the patient of significant individuals, often family members. While the playing field has subsequently been considerably enlarged (including by Freud himself), it may still be the case that there is an influential body of opinion favouring the restriction of psychogenesis to small and accountable networks.

Once this limitation is relinquished we enter the territory of, to quote the Bill Murray character from ‘Ghostbusters’, ‘Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria!’ Once families are seen as filters for pervasive social malignancies which they pass on to their offspring then, at last, society is to blame! We are living in the Laingian schizogenic society (see ‘Stage & Screen 3′) and it is the Prime Minister, as well as my Mum and Dad, who has fucked me up. What a relief! Now I can focus my anger in a more socially constructive manner. Now we can listen to Patrick Schofield (see ‘Stage & Screen 4′) without secretly thinking ‘His Mummy didn’t love him, the loser.’

Patrick was ejected from his place of confinement, Truman had to fight his way out. I’m afraid the unwhimsical truth is that Patrick committed suicide three years later. I saw him quite a lot after the bin and before his death. It may be that he found life outside to be merely a more skilfully choreographed production of the same violent theatrics he had endured and analysed in the mental institution.

In ‘Synecdoche…’ Caden Cotard also dies but he has had the opportunity to make the world in his own image, thereby sealing it against the viruses that had unravelled his real life. The project is grandiose and it achieves a grand scale before the world maker is revealed as the bearer of the virus he wishes to extinguish.

Caden in 2008, unlike Truman Burbank in 1998, has acquired the power attributed to the secret police by the anonymous author of the American ’surveillance theatre’ document (see ‘Stage & Screen 1′). The conceits of ‘The Truman Show’ would not now beguile us as they did when the movie came out. We have moved on. As we near the end of the first decade of the 21st Century the prospect of being duped by ‘the system’ is not so interesting. It’s obvious. It’s obvious in part because the dramatic collapses of crucial structural elements of the system have served to expose something of the mechanics - the manual has been leaked into the public domain.

The 80s in the UK taught us, confusingly, that we were emperors and that we were shit. Digital technology, in the 90s, offered new (virtual) places to go where shits could be emperors and nobody would know they were shits. A lot of men (rather fewer women) thought that it was only a matter of time before every shit would have his own hand-carved haven. This, despite its grandiosity, is not the Truman Delusion - Truman was a victim. This is a delusion of authorship in which the victim rewrites the dictionary so that there is no longer an entry for ‘victim’. In the world thus created there can be no pain, only scenarios depicting it. After all, we have seen the manual and it has shown us that much of the system is a charade so clearly the way forward lies in theatrics.

In his editorial introduction to the January 1968 special edition of ‘Scalebor’ mental hospital magazine, price sixpence, 24 year old ’schizophrenic’ inmate Patrick Schofield refers to “the hundreds of men and women who find themselves living and working” in the hospital and states “We have tried to make the magazine an expression of their real suffering, their conflicts and their pain. We hoped to include their hopes, but we did not think it right to invent them for you.”

These words are the preface to an essay stapled at irregular intervals between the variously coloured and crudely reproduced A4 sheets of the DIY publication. Perhaps Patrick thought that his incendiary critique would be less easy to rip out if he packaged it thus. The essay is titled ‘Strange Admissions: the fear of madness and the madness of fear.” Shortly after publication, Patrick was thrown out of the loony bin and sought help from the radical shrinks of the Philadelphia Association (see ‘Stage & Screen 2′).

Here are some excerpts:

” Within Scalebor there are three main types of job: you can be a psychiatrist or therapist, a nurse or a patient. But these words are nothing more than labels. Many people at Scalebor take this labelling so seriously they completely lose sight of the fact these labels are only very approximate indications of the tasks people do. It is only when we are nearing the verge of madness that someone can claim that the staff are superior to the patients because they are staff and the patients only patients.

It might be useful to look at what is happening inside Scalebor in terms of games theory and transactional analysis. The game is called ‘Mental Hospital’; there are two sides opposing one another within the hospital, one called ’staff’ and the other ‘patients’. At the moment we shall confine ourselves to the game between nursing staff and patients; the ‘psychiatrists’ play it rather differently than the nurses.

That there is ceaseless conflict between nurses and patients is quite obvious; the game itself is far more complex. the patients are merely the counters with which it is played; anyone who wants to develop this can find themselves hours of amusement in following the daily struggles between nursing, administrative, psychology department and medical staff; how they play one another off, stab each other in the back, shift the blame and the responsibility. What is important here is the prize; and the prize to be fought for is power. That is, power over the patients. This can be exercised directly (nursing staff on the ward) or by gaining control of all the other sectors of control.

These battles are so heated that the supposed reason for the hospital’s existence - the welfare of the patients - has become merely the issue around which the feuds and vendettas are fought.

Let us focus on the major outline of the staff’s game. Its object is clearly to control the patients so that they may be maximally exploited (’cured’) before they are ejected back into the outside world. If the staff as a whole can frustrate and nullify everything the patients try to do, this will make their task extremely violent but quite easy. It is therefore their aim to ensure that nothing, absolutely nothing happens. This would of course be impossible unless extremely violent techniques were brought to bear. It is these techniques that effect and maintain that terrible feeling of silent murder that pervades the hospital.

The only counterploy available to those who find themselves cast as patients (they are the only group in the hospital who are on the receiving end all the time) is to get clear of the place as soon as they can. If the patient goes along with the staff’s idea of what a good patient ought to be, he must wreak the most awful violation upon himself. If he feels that he must not do this then he must break with the passivity he is ordered to realise. But within the game there is no room for an active patient. It is enormously threatening to the staff’s attempt to keep control, for a patient that argues, criticises and does things of his or her own initiative gives the lie to the staff’s belief that the patient is purely an object-animal.

The only organisation that Scalebor manifests is that of permanent mobilisation against the patients. The staff cannot bear to look at the chaos within themselves so they project this out onto the patients and try to abolish it out there. ”

Patrick Schofield’s essay continues in this manner. It dissects and analyses the relationships between all the contending groups in the loony bin and produces a compelling picture of the patients as a group of hapless, useful ‘object-animals’ who serve to dynamise the submerged but psychotic objectives of cabals of incarcerated professional healers.

Towards the beginning of the excerpts Patrick turns the propositions of ‘game theory’ against those who vie to heal him. These useful concepts - premised on an inescapable performative alienation at the very heart of ‘everyday behaviour’ - hark back to 50s transactional analysis (and probably, in Patrick’s case, Eric Berne’s book ‘Games People Play‘ (1964)) but draw attention to the scripting and role playing that are generally unacknowledged in everyday life. They are, of course, taken for granted in the performing arts.

Vaulting blithely over the intervening decades I will, in the next post, offer some comments on two movies that straddle the millennium: ‘The Truman Show’ (1998) and ‘Synecdoche New York’ (2008). Ten years apart, they demonstrate the shifts in ownership that have come about with regard to matters of theatricality as the latter have corroded the notion of unpremeditated and unselfconscious behaviour.

Continued in ‘Stage & Screen 6′…

In the ‘Essays’ section of Strength Weekly is a piece titled ‘What We Talk About’ in which I write about a series of experiences I had at the Anti-University of London (see the ‘1968′ entry here) in the late 60s. I supply a link to the essay here in order to develop the idea, raised in the previous post, of the schizogenic society - one which makes some of its denizens schizophrenic. The essay is largely concerned with an article that Patrick Schofield - a ’schizophrenic’ inmate of a British mental hospital - wrote for the hospital magazine. The article was the product of a fierce and lucid intelligence focused on an analysis of hospital life. Patrick was mad therefore whatever he wrote was worthless. This handy rule of thumb fell apart so spectacularly that Patrick was abruptly ejected from the hospital in order to preserve the sanity of its staff.

I invite you to read the essay before considering some extracts from Patrick’s article.

Continued in ‘Stage & Screen 5′…

If the city has been made manageable by cladding it in an exotic narrative premised on conspiratorial surveillance - which latter strikes one as a thoroughly nightmarish prospect - then we can speculate that the prospect of a city that is not centrally organised and therefore not predictable - a city in which shit just happens - is truly terrible. Conspiratorial surveillance could be seen as comforting by comparison - it does, after all, put considerable resources behind a single individual, who must, surely, be rather highly esteemed to merit such scrutiny.

The question arises as to whether there is any insight of value to be found in what the narrator actually says - as distinct from any insight that we might have into his reasons for saying it. Laing, as already suggested, would insist that beneath the mad talk resides an articulation of pain that has internal coherence and descriptive truth. He was, though, referring mainly to schizophrenic speech rather than paranoid speech i.e. a speech which makes little sense sentence by sentence or phrase by phrase while the paranoid mode - as in the ’surveillance’ piece - is entirely clear and, indeed, would pass as decent journalism in a world in which such schemes were the norm. That said, if the narrator’s view of city life is to be taken seriously - after a degree of interpretation - then it is as a critique. It has some political force.

In a book written in 1964 with Aaron Esterson, ‘Sanity, Madness & the Family’, Laing analyses a series of interviews with the families of schizophrenic individuals and concludes that a subtle scapegoating process is going on in which the schizophrenic is being burdened with the unacknowledged fears, anxieties and potential madnesses of family members who have, without consulting each other, nevertheless ‘elected’ one member to the status of madness in order to relieve the pressure on those left ‘normal’. Laing and Esterson’s thesis enabled them to develop the notion of the ’schizogenic’ family - the family that would produce or induce schizophrenia in one of its members.

If families can drive you mad then what of the societies within which those families have developed? It was a relatively modest jump from the idea of the schizogenic family to that of the schizogenic society. The society that drove you mad. The psychology designed to heal troubled individuals now had a broad social and political application.

Continued in ‘Stage & Screen 4′…

New ways of looking at the mad were supplied by the radical psychiatrist R.D. Laing and his colleagues in the 1960s. Madness was seen as a reaction to an impossible situation and treated as a crucial stage on a developmental journey that should not be aborted with drugs or electroshock but encouraged to unfold. This unfolding might be protracted and would depend on the constant, almost sacrificial ministrations of sympathetic therapists. The idea of the ‘asylum’ - a benign place of shelter - was revived and in 1965, at Kingsley Hall, in the East End of London, Laing, Berke, Redler and others began to offer residential support and radical therapy to a number of schizophrenic patients.

Mary Barnes is probably the best known of those who were recovered from - or guided through - extreme disorder by the methods of the Laingian group, which shortly formed into the Philadelphia Association. Barnes lived in a state of terror and distress much of the time, smearing her faeces on the walls and speaking incomprehensibly. Her therapist, Joseph Berke, refused the notion of the schizophrenic as as a gobbledegook-spouting loony, preferring to see both the unsettled speech and the erratic behaviour as unconventional but consistent, readable codes that might be deciphered by one who was prepared to listen and learn. Barnes was given a space in which to regress and eventually emerged from her psychosis to become a painter. She and Berke wrote of their work together here.

Everyday life at Kingsley Hall was documented by the film-maker Luke Fowler, whose work is exhibited at the Serpentine Gallery in London until June 14th. In his film ‘What You See Is Where You’re At’, showing continuously at the gallery, Fowler examines the world of David Bell, one of Laing’s most floridly expressive ‘mad’ patients.

I used to seek out, in the 60s and 70s, lectures and conferences at which Laing spoke and grew accustomed to the Q & A periods in which Bell would rise from his seat and hold forth. He had the aplomb of a seasoned orator and the mischievousness of a standup comic. His speeches, usually in response to a point Laing had made, were very hard to understand. They could be compared, probably superficially, to passages from ‘Finnegan’s Wake’ but at least with the latter came the option to read and re-read at one’s own pace. Laing would listen intently to Bell and, in front of the conference crowd, embark upon dialogues with him. He would, apparently, answer ripostes from Bell in his own slow, hesitating but thoroughly lucid manner leaving the audience impressed but rather wishing they, too, had understood the question.

What sticks in my mind as much as the spectacle of Bell’s fluent but arcane declamations was his habit of sweeping his hand compulsively across his left brow whilst speaking. So frequent and forceful were these actions that he had created on his temple an area of self-inflicted male pattern baldness.

Laing’s radical psychology did not only demystify the madman, it implicated the madman’s family and also the society in which the family found itself.

Continued in ‘Stage & Screen 3′…

His uneasiness was not allayed by the fact that, as he hiked on, ‘my companions were four moose, a bear, several deer and at least forty secret police and collaborators.’ Returning to New York he sought accommodation. The secret police had already selected and prepared an apartment for him on East 11th Street. As he ruefully observes ‘The apartment provides me with a place to live but it also provides the secret police with a living environment they control’.

The full and startling scope of the narrator’s misfortune is then summed up. ‘The building where I live, the surrounding buildings and the neighborhood serve as a theatrical set; and the ‘tenants’ of my building, neighborhood characters, and intelligence agents stage a theatrical production.’ Not only have the secret police located him where they want him, ‘they calculated that everything about the apartment building, neighbors and neighborhood would make me feel as if I had reached the end-of-the-line.’ ‘The neighborhood is an oppressive scene of poverty and desolation: great piles of uncollected garbage line the sidewalks, litter is strewn everywhere…’ ‘For several months, whenever I entered or left the building, two angry German Shepherds on the second floor would howl furiously and claw at their door.’

It wasn’t just the animals and the dilapidation, however. ‘The number of tenants seems to change every month but approximately fourteen people pretend to live in the building… a mad looking bag lady, a sleeping derelict, a sleeping teenage boy…a topless fifty year old woman wearing only white panties, a man waving a knife…I believe I am the only person who lives in the building, but there are probably rotating twenty-four hour guards to provide protection and to prevent any unauthorized visitors. Among the attempts to make the building seem “real” and inhabited are: putting phony mail in the mailboxes, collecting garbage from elsewhere and filling the building’s trash cans,and placing people in various apartments to make a variety of noises as I pass by; frequently playing radios, televisions, and musical instruments; and staging loud conversations or arguments.’

The scheme was nothing if not comprehensive. ‘The secret police have imposed upon me a substitute reality; they have dismembered and appropriated the real world and placed me in a labyrinth of intelligence operations… At any given moment several intelligence agents work together choreographing street theater and surveillance operations.’ The operations are carefully designed to simulate ordinary street life, and they require large casts of actors. ‘As I approach the intersection, a signal is given and people, most of whom are young men, start crossing the intersection from every direction; people walking on the sidewalk, boys riding by on bikes,and other people driving by in cars. Intelligence agents frequently use this kind of collaborator saturation placement at other intersections.’

The narrator continues in this fashion for several pages. Hundreds of collaborators are employed to create the street scenes through which he walks daily and he must learn, amongst other things, to resist eye contact with handsome young men who may entrap him or dealers who attempt to compromise him by offering him illicit drugs. Not a single aspect of everyday city life has escaped the choreographic machinations of the secret police.

I guess I first read the document back in the 80s, possibly not so long after it had been written. It is, by any standard, remarkable and it elicits assessments that clearly identify the reader with a small number of available attitudes: the writer is raving mad; the writer is a good, articulate writer with an exceptional imagination; the writer has an illness but could be treated in such a way that he would see the misjudgments he is making; the writer sees truths that are too painful for him to confront; the writer sees truths that are too painful for us to confront. These various positions were current in the 80s and persist today. What has changed is the level of eccentricity attributable to the individual who generates such a body of perceptions. In Part 2 I’ll look at this in more detail.

Continued in ‘Stage & Screen 2′…

Google Street View is settling in at the moment. Once the privacy fusspots calm down we can look at our houses for the rest of our lives. That they will calm down is not guaranteed but given what Google knows it’s pretty inevitable. Google knows that we know there’s something wrong about Street View but we can’t quite put our finger on it. This vague unease is more than compensated for by the vague feeling that there’s something right about it. On examination, however, the latter sentiment proves to be a bit odd and we shouldn’t let Google know about it or else they’ll invent a camera that looks through curtains.

The trouble is that when you can see your house on Street View you know it’s your house. Without this massive, globalised, external system of ratification you wouldn’t know it was your house. I mean, of course you’d know it was your house because that’s what you wake up in most days of the week. But sometimes it’s very hard to feel that life in the world, and its attendant material accoutrements, is real. I mean, of course it’s real because you can discuss it with friends and you can agree that, more or less, probably more, you are having similar experiences, which tends to validate the proposition unless you are drawn to philosophise.

Anyway, it’s to do with identity. If the world was any good you could look at your house, by standing outside in the street, say, and the experience would be simple: “That’s my house.” This isn’t to do with mortgages or ownership, by the way. If the world was any good you could stand outside your rental accommodation and something simple but important would still just happen. But it doesn’t. I mean, you see it, you could touch it if you wanted, you know it’s yours, rental or otherwise, but the angle is wrong. As in film or photography: you have to get the right angle. Angles are, however, premised on a divergence of lines or planes from a common point. In this case the common point is oneself and its pointedness has deteriorated. Identity is found wanting. Its criteria have deteriorated.

Hot air balloonists, especially on their first flights, are often taken over their houses in order to look down upon them. Same with light aircraft flying lessons. You can see how you fit into the scheme of things. Very satisfying. It does wear off though. It may be memorable but its significance fades. In this case, however, the angle is ideal. The greater the vertical distance from your house you can get, within reason, the more it is yours. And the more it is yours the more you are. In the scheme of things.

It’s to do with consumerism. We’ve been taught to test reality and our status in it by evaluating the strength of our feeling for inanimate objects. The feelings have to be good feelings, which they will be if there are sufficient objects and these objects take our love without complaint. The stronger those ties the stronger you are. Again, this isn’t to do with ownership so much as getting back what was yours anyway. Because you deserve it.

Street View flattens the world, both literally, as a screen image, and figuratively in the sense that it subsumes it into an arcade game. It is superior to the holiday snap because it permits, or seems to permit, the sensation of being able to engulf an object rather than be engulfed by it. It allows us, in conjunction with Google Earth, to approach the object from above and from the sides and all perspectives in between. In so doing we are simultaneously aware of its location in a scene or a scheme to a far greater degree than the holiday snap allows. The holiday snap, as has been widely noted, has the power to confirm that an experience actually occurred. Unless supported by a physical trace, apparently, the memory of an experience is unreliable. Street View has the power to confirm our parity with the object by dramatising an ideal relationship with it. My place in this world of objects gives me a common point.

My house looks like my house if I go out into the street now. But if I hunt it down on Street View it is a jewel sparkling with heightened houseness. It is seamlessly integrated into the Bayeux Tapestry of the digital arcade. I am a citizen of that arcade. The arcade includes me. It also includes everybody - all the more reason to claim my residency. If, for a moment, I doubt my substance, I can refer to the arcade and it will consolidate, in its virtuality, that which is unsolid.

Another piece of metaphysical electronics that heightens the sensation of being what you already are is GPS. Any mobile phone worth its salt is equipped with a Global Positioning System. Activate it and it will tell where you are wherever you are. It won’t tell you what country or street you are in but it will give you a string of figures that some people, probably not you, can translate, with the aid of maps, into a position. If you had a map you could go from your position to another position. If you had a phone, which you do, you could tell someone else your position. They could rescue you. If you were not in any particular trouble they could say “That sounds like a lovely position.”

GPS, eh? Nobody needs it. Apart from explorers and the imminent lost. The latter may suspect they are about to become lost as a result of having developed weak relationships with objects.