Pasolini, a Marxist atheist, dressed the characters in his period movies in costumes that combined elements of the street with the wardrobes deployed by 15th century painters such as Piero della Francesca. In the case of Irazoqui he had cast a haunted, pale youth who glowed with pained earnestness and dressed him so that he seemed interchangeable with the beat kids and travellers who were beginning to thumb their way around Europe at that time.

It’s doubtful whether Pasolini’s politics would have led him to endorse the apolitics of the wandering youth, but their evident disaffection might have struck him as amenable to some sharpening and adjustment. His Christ is an enflamed revolutionary whose long speeches drawn directly from the Gospels and addressed straight to camera have such a mesmerising effect that even a fundamentalist atheist, such as Strength Weekly’s currently foreign correspondent, might be persuaded to reconsider whether it was entirely right not to have helped that old lady across the road.

It is probable that Christ did not thumb rides, but he was not above borrowing other people’s transport on special occasions. On Palm Sunday, according to several of the Gospels, he got two of his disciples to take a colt or donkey from a nearby field in order that he could ride it into Jerusalem. Some years later, in 1957, thanks to Jack Kerouac, hitch-hiking was repurposed as spiritual practice. The causality is evident. I clearly remember, despite having been counselled never to ‘take a short ride’, my own ecstatic reaction to being deposited, in 1962, on the outskirts of the village of Melbourne, some seven miles out from my home town, after my very first attempt to hitch-hike to London. I had been blessed.

Kerouac admired his friend and travelling companion Neal Cassady, whom he considered to be a complete, radiant and thoroughly present being. The writer himself felt like a pale shadow of the permanently wired hipster yet was widely regarded as the very incarnation of the man liberated from context. Kerouac mentions the looks he got when he descended into towns wild-haired from the road. He was entirely aware of his eccentricity and probably died as a result of resisting the notion , thrust on him by fans and critics alike, that, as a saint, he should be blissfully unaware of his own radiant awareness. By all accounts, he endured throughout his celebrity a nagging awareness of his limited awareness and an exaggerated sense of his unsuitedness for high spiritual office. He didn’t feel like the real thing.

In the olden days, of course, there were big people who were the real thing all day long and didn’t even know it! These were the people admired by lesser people who not only imitated their bigness but affected a lack of awareness that they - the imitators - were perceived as incandescent . They were not incandescent, of course, but they understood that the effect would be compromised by their appearing to know about it.

The original big (I refer to magnitude of being, not stature) people lived over a million years ago and were authentically themselves. Their radiance has been emulated everafter.

The ‘angel-headedness’ of the hipster was his (there were no girl hipsters) emblem of ignorance. He was oblivious. In extreme circumstances this had led to Dennis leaning on the live electric hob and not noticing until the elbow of his leather jacket had burned through. This would, generally, be unusual, for a degree of poise was required to maintain the balance between innocence and experience.

Setting aside the toothsome debate about Jesus’ own levels of self-consciousness (I think he knew he was weird, right?), I return to the Berlingo and its satisfying rear double doors that open to reveal chest-high shelving, so handy for stacking boogie boards. Walking away from the hired vehicle I look over my shoulder in response to a call behind me. The young man with the blanket on his head walks towards me, his hand extended, as if in greeting. He is holding something that he wants me to have. On closer inspection I identify my Armani wraparound shades. (Well, it says Armani on them and at 5€ that guy on the stall obviously doesn’t know he’s sitting on a goldmine!) I must have dropped them as I fastened the car doors.

The young Jesus smiles amiably and I realise that he has no particular axe to grind about the crass stylishness of my fashion items. In Christ’s own day, I imagine, and this is just me imagining, they wore a piece of wood with slits in.

For a moment I rather liked the idea that this striking crusty loved me unconditionally and could, if he felt like it, produce any number of designer leisure accessories and pass them among the people that they need not squint as the rays fell upon them. Then I reverted morosely to the view that we are all copies now.

Strength Weekly goes to a hot place for a bit and leaves a site under reconstruction until September: the Essays, Journalism and Plays sections are, oddly, available via the ‘Archives’ column to your right. The archives for Jan, Feb, March 2007 will provide access to these crisp items. Plus, of course, you can use the lively ‘Categories’ column to call up eye-catching elements.

In a few days we will leave the hot place and go inland to somewhere we have not visited before. Images of this place are available and I have studied them. They depict a small town surrounded by mountains. Further detail is not available. This, then, is the ideal condition for hands-free visualisation wherein the traveller imagines where he will be staying based on the sum of his life experiences and brochures that he may have savoured.

It is fairly clear that the town has a street stretching away from me and rising slightly towards the horizon. There is a surprising number of cafes, many of which are staffed by young people in dreadlocks. At the far end of the street one can see purple cloths on which Tarot cards have been placed by oxblood-skinned New Age internationalists. I see one or two people that I last came across in Ibiza in 1963. The town is Swiss, however, and snow lies prettily on the roofs of the houses that face the camera.

I am enjoying myself in this place and will report back when it has been tested against the place to which we will drive shortly.

A further elaboration of the exercise involves the attempt to recall the details of the anticipated destination once it can no longer be anticipated, due to one’s arrival in its material equivalent.

The headline is unsatisfactory. It would have been better had it been composed thus: ‘”Three” charged with Kercher killing’. This would serve to suggest that the Three are not just any three but a special three. It could, however, create confusion, insofar as it might cast doubt on the exact numbers of suspects involved. As if a policeman had said “We think three were involved but it might have been four.” The policeman’s lack of certainty would then have been mocked by the use of the quotation marks. This possibility muddies the field.

The point is, the Three have acquired distinctiveness, unlike the three that haven’t (the ones we haven’t heard about yet). This Three are on the point of acquiring an aura but they haven’t got it yet. If they are found guilty they will certainly get it. If acquitted they may also get it, but for a shorter time. The aura isn’t the one that saints have, wherein a dinner plate worn behind the head signifies estimable goodness. It’s ‘aura’ in a neutral sense - a specialness that, one imagines, might crackle or hum about them were we to meet them.

The headline itself hums, in another way. It is compellingly marked by the absence of any indicators of the specialness of its subjects. But it does have the word ‘killing’ in it, and this focuses the attention. This attention is not repaid, it simple enables one to note that something is missing. It’s the aura that is missing, but that’s appropriate because the Three have yet to acquire the aura. So we are witnessing the period before something that may be about to take off takes off. The period is both empty and pregnant.

The headline is part of a mythopoeic process - it constitutes a stage in the making of myth. It doesn’t refer to the mythic qualities of the three accused, it presents a point on the path towards a canonisation that is possibly imminent.

You could say that any killing already follows mythic shapes, but this is contemporary mythmaking, the sort that gives rise to the auras of Sir Alan Sugar, Steven Hawking and Celine Dion. These specialnesses are confusable with charisma, though, and must therefore be regarded as aspects of mythmaking lite.

A few weeks ago in Geneva CERN announced the imminent switch-on of its latest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, which may lead to the confirmation of the existence of the Higgs Boson, the hypothetical particle that endows massless elementary particles with mass. The Kercher headline traces the path of the myth boson, one that circulates in the vicinity of certain categories of event - in this case a newspaper headline that lacks mass - and may combine with an event to give it a sheen that could become a glow that might become a radiance. This has little to do with the outcome of a court case, it’s a process looking for an object.

Well, I spotted a lone finger item on level three of a nearby stack and decided to get it. The item (something to do with salmon on a dot of toast) was placed to the far side of the level and, evidently, had proved too inaccessible to bother with. Unabashed, I extended my arm towards the plastic tower. Within millimetres of sliding my hand in, palm downwards, I realised that the sleeve of my jacket would catch the LP cover and dislodge it, Jenga style. It became clear to me that I must turn my hand over and go in upside down, palm upwards. Any reader who has reached for a canapé in this way will know the problem. I extended my index and second fingers, in a V shape, and pushed them at the toast dot. Soon I had trapped it and could withdraw my hand. Around me beautiful women milled, probably talking of chapters and plots. As my hand broke free I realised that the canapé was the right way up but my hand wasn’t. How could I get it into my mouth without inverting it and thereby tipping the smoked morsel onto the Queen Elizabeth Hall carpetting? (My other hand was holding the Taittinger, obviously.) I decided to twist my wrist round towards my mouth rather than rotate it around its axis. This is an unusual movement, rarely called for in the average day. The canapé, however, was not held by the tips of my fingers but by their sides, down in the V, for safety. Imagine my surprise when, as the dot drew nearer to my outstretched mouth, I stuck my fingers up my nose. Well, I said to myself, at least the hand is stabilised thereby. I extended my tongue, as if an okapi, and tried to pull the dainty delicacy in. After a few moments of ungainly manoeuvring I had the bastard. Quite pleasant, if not as amusing to the mouth as the one with yellow paste and bits of grass sticking out.

Gripping stuff. Rather more so than the spectacle of neo-medievalists being sunny (see previous post). The celebration outside the Tate is concerned with contemporary issues of panic, abandonment, recklessness, the difficulty of feeling mortal, the allure of danger and its pal death. Young male athletes enact a popular concern with bodies that are light - they can fly; tough - they can smash cartoonly into walls and resurrect; disposable - death loses its sting as the wider world unravels.

Feels like ages since I last dissed Shakespeare. As ardent readers of this journal may have noticed, I have no time for the fellow and consider him directly responsible for the complacently novelistic condition of much British mainstream theatre. (Yes, I know it doesn’t follow but it does when you hear my argument about it which I can’t be bothered to rehearse here because it’ll slow me up.) Nevertheless, we took our girls to his theatre the other day, to see Footsbarn do ‘A Shakespeare Party’. It’s not uninteresting going into the Globe because you succumb to the feeling that ‘this is how it was’ quite readily and find yourself studying the joinery with an uncharacteristic intentness. I was also surprised to find myself wondering about Elizabethan Health & Safety sensibilities (fairly rudimentary) and the extent to which the architects of Globe II had to accommodate the current mildly hystericised concern about such matters. There is, I’m sure, an easily obtained illustrated booklet that would lay my curiosity to rest. Stout modern handrails are in evidence.

And it’s nice sitting up in the Upper Gallery, despite the price. Not only does the tiered globularity enable good views of the stage but you can study all the other tiers and the groundlings (a fiver) at your leisure. At first I rather sweetly thought that this emblematised some sort of olden days egalitarianism but then I corrected myself: wherever you sit (or stand) you can see who can afford what and assess precisely how much better or worse their view is than yours. You know where you are. In our seats, in fact, the view of the audience was excellent and that of the stage okay. I didn’t mind this.

Then the show started. But first some context (from The Guardian article by Lyn Gardner here): ‘It is a quarter of a century since Footsbarn was resident in the UK, but its name has passed into theatrical legend as a once-great British company that we somehow allowed to get away. Now based in a farmhouse in the Auvergne region of France, where its members dream of founding a theatre school, the company grew out of a meeting between student actors Oliver Foot and John Paul Cook at Goddard College in the US, a college with a strong tradition in radical theatre, at the end of the 1960s. Back in Foot’s native Cornwall in 1971, the pair set up Footsbarn (taking its name from the barn owned by Foot’s family, where the company initially lived and worked) and travelled around the south-west, setting up a tent on Cornish cliffs and Somerset village greens, and putting on theatre for local people.’

‘The company’s aesthetic was make-and-do; a magpie approach using found materials and alighting on anything its members admired in the work of theatre-makers from Grotowski to Brook. Its pick-and-mix bag of styles appealed to new audiences. In the words of company member Paddy Hayter, who joined Footsbarn soon after it started and never left, bringing up his children on the road: “We share a performance with the audience, rather than perform it for them.” When (the Globe Theatre’s artistic director Dominic) Dromgoole caught a performance of Hamlet in Somerset in the late 1970s, the audience were so enjoying the grave-digger scene played by clowns that it went on for more than 20 minutes. Dromgoole remarked on this to a company member. “This is nothing,” he replied. “You should have been here last night. It lasted an hour, and the audience still didn’t want it to stop.”‘

There are a number of British alternative performance companies who have made their bases either in the countryside or small towns. Forkbeard Fantasy, for example, have been based in the depths of Devon since 1974 and appear entirely indifferent to urban allure. Welfare State International, founded in 1968, settled for much of their performing life in Cumbria, while I.O.U Theatre, which broke away from Welfare State in 1976, are based in Halifax in West Yorkshire.

With the exception of Forkbeard Fantasy, whose work has a fevered, zany quality that sets it apart from the others, the groups produce work that, in the words of John Fox and Sue Gill, founders of Welfare State, situates them in the ‘celebratory arts movement’. Fox and Gill devised ‘fire festivals, lantern parades, rites of passage, community carnivals and site-specific theatre’.

In 2003, I.O.U, who often work with ‘giant mechanical props’, presented ‘Tattoo’ in which ‘A fuming army of petrol driven insects are in erratic pursuit of a monstrous mechanical egg factory. Venting gooey foam along the way, this towering structure ambles through the audience attempting to keep its precious crop from the clutches of the marauding swarm.’ The work of both groups is often spectacular in scale and in detail, features bizarre structures, grotesque costumes, masks and make-up and presents audiences with work that, at its best, is startling, intensely imagistic and, importantly, demonstrates that ‘celebration’ need not be civic or even especially wholesome.

The celebratory qualities of Footsbarn involve ‘transcending the barrier of language with its unique blend of visual theatre, music and magic.’ The company focuses on the work of Shakespeare and Moliere and has performed much of its work in its own circus big tops. ‘A Shakespeare Party’ features highlights from, among others, ‘Hamlet’, ‘Romeo & Juliet’ and ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, strung together in a loose but festive manner. The festive manner consistently grates and exemplifies some of the fundamental flaws in what could be called the ’sunny side’ of the celebratory arts movement.

It would be naive to assume that when playing happy characters on stage, actors themselves are happy. We are also familiar with the assumption that Cheerful Charlie Chuckles, the widely admired comic entertainer, is himself a fount of irrepressible joy around the house. We know, in fact, that Charlie is often a morose sot who comes to life on stage and does a good job. The problem with ’sunny side celebration’, as profiled above, is that we are expected to believe that, unlike those who merely perform jollity, sunny side celebrants are actually jolly and, when they lay aside their ribbons, bladders, confetti and amusing bottoms at the end of a hard day’s capering, continue to celebrate, possibly in a slightly lower key, the very fact of being alive.

The idea that there is something to celebrate, above and beyond weddings, betrothals, comings of age etc holds, unlike the bladder, little water. I recall being told, almost on a daily basis, throughout the 60s, that there was a level of consciousness, within us all, akin to bliss. While I have no problem with the idea that we are all potential ecstatics - trainspotters, for example, have mastered the acquisition of this unnecessarily occulted condition - we should not confuse ecstasy with bliss. Ecstasy is a satisfying state based on the elimination of diverting stimuli by absorption into a single, fixating stimulus, as avid television watchers have discovered. Bliss seems to be, according to its fans, a state that is simply there, if only you could get to it. Whether it’s out there or in there is a matter of resistible debate.

So to get into bliss what you have to do is strip away all the layers of shit that prevent you getting into it. It’s not an unattractive idea. The trouble is it can’t be done. It’s possible that certain strong drugs or ritual privations might momentarily reveal glimpses of something very bright and extremely cheerful but this is a minority practice requiring a dedicated lifestyle. Most people seek out diversions that work okay for them. If it works it’s a psychological achievement, not a mythological transformation. It tends not to last, which is a bummer.

Sunny side celebrants are fundamentally irritating because their colourful jollifying suggests a permanently open line to that which is celebratable. When these people take off their wigs they’re still clowns! When they brush their teeth they’re celebrating the rhythms and sensuality of the operation! Even when they’re not happy they are happy!

The sunny siders move through the masses of the morose purporting to engage them in ways which will facilitate the casting-off of time-based sorrow. Gazing around the audience from my perch in the Upper Gallery of the Globe I thought I could see a simultaneous engagedness and quizzicality on many faces. A common expression involved a fixed smile that would indicate enjoyment were it more mobile and an anxious tension around the eyes suggesting the difficulty associated with the need to withstand the torrential effusiveness. I’m not suggesting that the audience members were uptight bastards incapable of having a good time, far from it. It’s just tricky, not to say burdensome, regressing yourself to the nursery level that might enable you to identify with the jollity.

When, after capering through the groundling audience playing olden days musical instruments, members of the cast present an enactment of the ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ playlet from ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, the Footsbarn aesthetic reaches its limits. The excerpt is presented as broad slapstick with yokel vocals and much clown-based bottomwork. At one point a bumpkin sticks a sword up another bumpkin’s arse, pulls it out then sniffs it disgustedly. I thought this wasn’t too bad - clowning, after all, derives great energy from re-presenting highlights from toilet training and, in the classic spilt paint/thrown water set-pieces of the family circus, ventilates the tensions implicit in the lifelong maintenance of a suite of highly trained sphincter muscles.

The problem is that if Elizabethan humour was relatively coarse and Footsbarn wish to make, so to speak, a stab at it, then they have to accommodate their audience’s disaffection with its lack of sophistication. Again, I’m not suggesting that sophisticates don’t laugh at toilet humour but that they like their toilet humour presented within a contemporary aesthetic rather than framed by the paradoxically wholesome didactic project of ‘taking a journey into Shakespeare’s world’. In brief: Shakespeare’s humour has been shit for a long time and nothing can be done about it. About the only recourse left to a director is to entrust the comedic episodes to exceptionally skilled comic actors who might compensate for the obsolete text and its mirthless situations by the application of inordinate amounts of energy. There are a number of very assured comic actors in the Footsbarn ensemble but the company is, nevertheless, caught between two stools (cheeky!): the tendency to modernise runs up against the fact that the ‘comic’ (and proto-celebratory) texts are intractable and insufferable while the heritage industry invitation to the ‘Late Medieval World’ theme park, if it features ‘authenticity’ achieved by the minimising of sophistication, risks alienating most adults and many children.

The jollity at the Globe was reminiscent of the mania of disc-jockeys. The late and lamented John Peel - himself an exemplar of non-sunny side genial moroseness - used to tell the tale of his employment, at the beginning of his career, by a Dallas radio station whose management requested that, while on air, he speak ‘with a laugh in his voice’. Peel’s anecdote, aired more than once on Radio 1, would culminate with a pleasing demonstration of this jollified vocalisation. His colleagues were largely not sensible of the possibility that Peel’s critique applied very much to themselves and their crazed cheeriness. Radio DJ celebratory speaking styles suggest nothing so much as panic and anxiety, given that it is not possible to locate the celebratable on a 24 hour basis.

Sunny siders, despite their justifiable antipathy to straight show business culture, are purveyors, ultimately, of depression. Celebratory art, when disconnected from august occasions, generates and - can one say this unglibly? - celebrates depression. Only the depressed would wish to display their mania vocationally. Their witnesses are drawn into unwilling reciprocation: the injunction to be up is a downer.

I think there may be some tips available here. While it’s clear that ‘bubbly’ is a gendered quality I see no real reason why men should not effervesce in their own manly way. It is obviously better to bubble than be an ill-dressed, hesitant, soup-flecked party whose intellect and accompanying non-aspergised (see previous post) knowledge specialisms have depth and texture that would enable them to sweep the game show floor. It may be the case, however, that some readers, while drawing a line at identifying with the soup element in the profile submitted above might feel, nevertheless, that all that has hitherto lain between themselves and nationwide small screen exposure is a deficit in the outgoing department.

It would be good, then, to be able to imitate bubbly even if one were essentially saturnine. It may be that one would say privately, to oneself, ‘I poo poo bubbly’ but this need not stand in the way of its affectation. To do it well we must work on our body image. Not what the body looks like but how it is seen in the mind. If, say, one often thought of oneself as a wad of damp, abandoned fabric being passed peristaltically through a dark, interminable tube made of insufficiently greased asbestos then it should be possible, and cognitive behavioral therapists will support me warmly here, to tweak the image so that it becomes something upbeat. Even the word ‘tweak’ has bubbliness and we’ve barely begun!

What do I feel when I bubble (apart from fabulous)? Well - currents of joie, for one thing. They tinkle along the arms and legs, pixillating my very fibres and inducing a slightly jumpy and erratic muscular activity which translates as shrugging, eyebrow raising, eye widening and the delicious like. It’s a force, really, and when you let it flow it shows people how alive you are. The bubbles actually shape the way your lips move so that, like a goldfish, words escape encased in bubbles that force your mouth open gradually then allow it to close smoothly over the receding curvature.

Some people say that bubbly is a form of depression. What do they know? A friend told me that she had been chatting with a man who worked as a fitness trainer for a prominent chain of health clubs. The company had been taken over by another well known and tentacular company so the latter had to give all the staff new uniforms in a different colour and retrain them so that the logos on their mental imagery reflected the vivacity of the new parent. The staff were instructed to attend a retraining day in a big hall. On stage were a small number of uniformed boosters, wearing the tee shirts that would soon be given to the massed employees. Lively pop music was playing as the trainees gathered. It was known that the boosters were looking for new people to work as managers of various teams in the clubs.

Most of the employees were depressed and resigned because that’s what spray-on ebullience does to you, so they stood around looking interested and trying on various versions of alertness. There then bounced into the hall a young woman in shorts,tee shirt, a peak cap and spotless sneakers. She too, like the sullen figures around her, was a staff re-trainee. The young woman, to the despair and fascination of her colleagues, proceeded to dance around the room to the beats of the popular upbeat music. She emitted small but excited yipping noises and smiled continually.

The boosters invited her up onto the stage and told her she had exactly what it took to be a team leader. And lo, she became one.

The pressure on the non-Asperger individual to aspergise is considerable - the consumer, for example, must resist the Argos catalogue of everyday life by acquiring expertise in matters of classification and specification. The more you know about mobile phones the less likely you are to get stiffed by those who would (virtually) mobilise you. The internalisation of such data brings the satisfactions of mastery and distinctiveness. Ballard felt that in the 21st century the most successful psychological type would be the psychopath - it may be that the backlash features the rise of the nerd.

Banksy has invited can artists from all over. Keen crowds necessitate heavy polite presence. The arcade beckons.















As far as the eye. All the way down. Not just Banksy’s sharp stencils but wrecked car installations, sculptures and pavement pieces.

The last time I felt like a citizen in this way was at one of Ken’s big riverside festivals in the GLC days. Not that the Cans Festival feels civic - more that this zone, 300 metres from Parliament, holds people from the streets, the estates and the houses quite comfortably. Oxford Street with nothing to buy. They’re sealing it off after Bank Holiday Monday.

Strength Weekly will now reconnect with the blogarium, bringing its mix of puzzles, quizzes, well-formed sentences, apt snaps and joie de vivre back to the boil. Today I saw a tiny fox cub in the back garden. It was about this long, excepting the tail.