Performance poet
Makes a living solely by shouting
Sells nothing
No books, CD's, merchandise of any kind
No teaching no broadcasting
Nowt
Punk rock ideology: no sell out
No obeisance to any convention
fast, slow
dumb, smart
light, dark
hi-energy
ever more physical/ theatrical
max variety
60 shows a year in Canada on the summer fringe tour
Born 62
Comprehensive peasant
Posh university, Bristol
Did nothing in 20s except think & be v poor [a lot]
Started performing 93
Began big word, weekly poetry cabaret
Rather very good, now forgotten
Islington
Then did Edinburgh, 96-04
Three-act show
First successful edfringe poetry cabaret in decades
Made money saying Pay As You Like At The End
Moved Edin ‘01
Began cabarets & slams
Decent shows, v successful, much impact, great fun
Tried Toronto Fringe in 01
First toured Canadian fringes in 03
Hour shows
Most fun & success ever
First ever performance poet on tour
Toured there ever since
30+ 5 star reviews
150+ 4 star
Went nomadic in 06
No home for 43 months & and counting
Write shows over winter, perform over summer
Bags of laughs
Bloody marvelous
How did it all work out so well?
... its not so much you had some of the right answers all along or, more accurately, some of the right questions its that you had masses of questions and a fair few answers and that most most of the questions and most of the answers turned out to be, not so much wrong, as not-so-important ... and you are left with the ones that are ...
The best-placed spiders web in the world… across the iron work, by the all-night light on our balcony… catching dozens and dozens of flies small flies and moths… more food than a spider could eat in, maybe a life time… except every morning, as the spider must know, the hotel cleaners brush away the web… so that every day he has to try again, and every night catch the banquet of all spider banquets, and every morning see it all lost again
...
...
A flyblown table in the riverside café where the pakoda is the best I’ve had in India… the sugar bowl now pecked by the sparrows… now atted by the flies incessant in the shade … and every now and again, the small squirrel sneakily descends the tree trunk to nervily, looking round again and again, put his paws on the bowl side, stick his long nose in and cheekily nick a mouthful, and then another
...
And behind Priscilla the sparrows work at the broom, break off strands in their beaks and, thus whiskered, flit off to unseen nest
...
The water-buffalo
Cataract in one eye
Groaning like a slowly opening creaky door in a horror-movie
...
To get lost in some unknown offmap market
somewhere off the top, the north-east, of the ghats
Veg market
Silk market
Souk within souk
Gate within gate
Door within door
House within house
Family within family
Street upon street
Alley upon alley
Window upon window
Ornament upon ornament
Temple upon temple
Mosque upon mosque
The rattle and clatter and heavy rhythm of the silk looms behind the windows and through the doors through the doors
The hallooing kids
...
On the alleyways the spiders webs so thick and so old, they are like light muslin
...
The ghatside house of four floors
Each of different design and ornament
Different pillars, different wrought ironwork
Different arches doorways doors vents balconies paint tracery
And all unlike the buildings either side
And yet the floors of equal proportion and probable age
...
I wanted to come here for twenty years and finally got here 3 years ago
I’m in the same hotel as 3 years ago
[when i was with someone else]
and i think the hotel staff think i’m
on the run with a young floozy
or at best a Princess
... Princeszilla, in fact
...
The homeless dog… a rough-coated off-white creature with a dirt-greyed belly making its steady way along the riverside ghats, so every minute it enters the territory of a group of dogs who bark en masse before it gets there, as the dogs behind it begin to stop, while the forthcoming dogs shift and side and sidle closer to it to bark right at it and then move up behind it, barking closer and closer, only stopping moving when it stops, and only stopping barking when it turns to look at them, swiftly intimidating them with a growl, before moving on so that they wait a few cowardly seconds, till the tough-nut is safely a distance away, before barking again as it moves out of their territory and they keep barking, some barking and howling long after it has moved into the next territory, who’s dogs have already started barking at it… and on it moves, fearless, bringing perpetual aggravation all the way up as we follow the localised barking along the rover, across the descending stone, past the high ornate temples, the walls of bare stone, the kiteflying kids, the cricket playing young men, the red or saffron holy men, the kids selling postcards and flowers for floating, the men on the waterside crying “booooat?” …
...
But what happen when the itinerant meets a dog stronger and more fearless?
...
Jared Diamond says the average Papuan travels very little in their life, for moving unannounced and unpermitted into another tribal territory would create an inevitable violence they might not survive… and permission is never likely
...
The burning ghats, there’s two
A caste who carry the bodies down the steps to the water
The corpse, dressed in coloured silks
first placed in the river,
then atop the short wood pyre
And then burnt
The flames starting slow
...
They’ve been burning bodies here for thousands of years
And it feels it
As you might imagine
It makes it a very intense place
...
Yet there’s something matter of fact about the process
They just do it
There’s no sign of mourners
[maybe the sorrow is done with]
There’s little ceremony
A man brushing the wood and corpse with flame
[maybe the ceremony is before death?]
They just do it
And then everyone stands looking at it
And then they stop
And it burns away
...
...
Simply everybody offers to sell me hash…
I mean, it hasn’t happened so much on this trip as the last…
when, with my hair, I could so easily have been mistaken for a hippy type…
but here in Varanasi its happening more than it ever has…
opium has also been mentioned…
while Priscilla never gets offered it…
but yesterday...
when I thought I,
with blondening wavy locks and a nice light-patterned cotton shirt,
looked more like an unfortunate relic from a
Wham video circa 1984...
i got offered it more than ever before
so maybe i don’t...
...
and for the past two days its been two offers a minute up past the busiest ghats
or down those narrow bustled streets...
hash?...
marijuana?...
you want something sir?
You want somesing sir?
...
...
Has India changed over the past 3 years, since i was last here?
Well the TV adverts are definitely better
...
Its difficult for my eye to discern any other change much
Though Varanasi is less hassly than it was
...
A bin a bin, its so good to see a bin…
so we can empty hands, and pockets and bags…
A bin a bin, its such a relief…
from the burden the guilt the hassle the worry
the complicit-down…
A bin, a bin, we want to dance round it singing
do a tango with it on the banks…
and who knows how long it will be till we see another…
A bin a bin, the last one we saw, in Aurangabad,
was the size of an SUV and had most of a
chomping horse stuck out one end of it
A bin, a bin, its so good to walk up to a bin and…
simply…
put something in it
...
And three years ago
A boat up the Ganges after sunset
When suddenly
Half a million swallows fly down the river
And back up the road
And round again
Flitting in unbelievable mass and numbers
Thousands and thousands of them blizzarding close around us
Inches from my head
For ten fifteen minutes
A CGI nightmare
A biblical plague
A wholly unreal
...
Now i’ve no idea how many but
Well, half a million?
...
While this time its not swallows
But absolutely millions of flies and moths on the ghatside after dark
A plague an infestation a million
Filling the air and each flickering in the light
...
And a cycle over to Ramnagar across the pontoon bridge
Just about keeping down the simmering road rage
[if roadrage was an Indian thing it would be big and bloody]
The rundown fort with the lame museum
Abjectly kept textiles but,
As the place used to have its own gun factory,
A curious gun room
...
Eight barrelled primitive revolver
Four barrelled tiny ladies revolver
Long Indian sword fitted with two flintlock pistols either side of the beside the handle [to spread your bets]
Glass-handled daggers
Unnamed disembowelling weapons you stick into the gut, open, and then twist
Ivory tree with individual leaves
...
And a stuffed crocodile so decayed it is shameful its there and you have to look away
P says there was a stuffed bear as bad but i couldn’t look
...
Some things are very difficult to write
Like this description of a tree seen from under the leaves on the patio of the
cafe with the great veg pakoda
...
From beneath it looks like a still of a green pool with heavy raindrops rippling concentrically all across it
... because the twigs are radial out from the end of the branches ... and the smallish leaves on those twigs curve a little towards the branch end... so it seems as if they are concentric green circles around it, like ripples... and each branch has this and, seem from below, they overlap each other, like the ripples of raindrops...
Some things are very hard to describe
...
The flute man
With his tree of flutes
Plays his forlorn tune
As he moves salelessly past
...
As the blur of the last morning haze clears in the
Rising sun
...
And men sink their bare brown backs into the silver grey of the river
So every year right its crazy right, they build all these fires, bonfires, in the street and some of them are tiny streets, with zillions of people living on top of each other and if the bonfires look like they’ve been built by idiot ten year olds that’s cos they have, and they don’t care about being under electrical wires, telephones wires, nothing, cos they’re all kids and all kids are idiots, we all know that, we were kids once, you’re indestructible and you’re gonna live forever, and like every year its so scary dangerous they have to bring in Health and Safety Inspectors from elsewhere and this time some bright spark got the brilliant idea of bringing some over from Britain who got off the plane all bright and shiny but, after just twenty-four unbelievable stuff-of-nightmare hours of confronting the realities rather than the rules of Indian H&S, are all going through an wholly incapacitating individual crisis with their brains overheating and their eyes showing white and their hands clutching clutching clutching at something, anything, while they’ve spent so much time groaning expostulating shouting that any veneer of decency and politeness and professional courtesy has collapsed within them, taking everything down a chasm with it, and also meaning no-one in this town cares at all about anything that happens to them as they all have a belligerently anti-social nervous breakdown except for one who hasn’t been known to react to anything ever, nor show any emotion, which is when someone realizes he’s actually a shop dummy and they’ve all been had and someone’s been pulling in the wages, while here the dummy’s been doing class for bribes which is another realm the Anglo-H&S boys have been deeply shocked by but the one who realizes the dummy’s a dummy only realizes this as he goes into his own mental breakdown and the sorry shocking realization just makes it all a whole bunch worse while it ain’t helped by the fact no-one cares about the obstreppoBrits, or lifts the slightest finger to help their shocked and sorry arses, so no-one tries to find a berth in a mental institution for any of them cos its, like, a weekend and it’s the full moon, in a city where a full moon still means a loony lot, so they park them in the Dying Rooms above the Ghats and have to throw out the dying which pisses off a few of them, while it means that others stage unexpected recoveries meaning their families are thrown into disarray while Granddad hops skips and bounces back to Lucknow or Kolkotha, while others are a bit pissed off at their own recovery cos they reckon they had it all square with the creator and were about to become as one with creation and not be reborn, just as planned, so getting disturbed by some dodgy government bureaucrat saying some bunch of can’t-take-it indiaphobes need their beds sharpish is kinda bloody annoying but being helpful sorts they shuffle off back home for a couple of years during which time they commit a lot of sin and, after they die, come back as diseased cockroaches, or somesuch affliction, whoops, but I’m getting ahead of myself cos the still-ill phalanx of Brit H&S officers are in the Dying Rooms which, even though they’re paranoid cos they’re having a breakdown, is understandably a cause for more raging paranoia but what it does mean is that in the future your average Varanasi temple is going to be a whole bunch safer than it is right now, excuse me, the house is on fire … meanwhile cos the Dying Rooms have been taken over by the obstreppoBrits this means less people are dying and in particular less people, or rather souls, are passing through the attractive silk-draped lilac-painted wooden door marked To Oneness With The Creator meaning the folks with the job of greeting you on the other side, the ones who have to explain what oneness with the Creator Really means, poker Thursday, reruns of Friends Friday, trip to the celestial clouds Saturday, happy clappy with the harmony of the Spheres Sunday, drug or drink of choice Monday, Tues Weds I forget, Thursday off… well they have no-one to deal with for the first time in like Millennia and don’t know what to do and wander off for a beer or a joint by the celestial Ganges and its good stuff up there, as you can imagine and have such a nice time relaxing they forget to go back, and that’s forget in ironic apostrophes, meaning the dead can’t die, or rather no-one’s getting oneness and the reverberations of bad karma start rippling out from the silk and lilac door till pretty soon it’s a shambles everywhere, arguments all the time, and simply everyone is noisily shouting and standing their shitty shirty ground and, before you know it, its turned into Varanasi and they’re all beeping horns and shouting and dodging the goats and … excuse me the house is still on fire
Meanwhile, in Holi, everyone’s had a great time and no-one got hurt
while back in the Dying Rooms the poor sods can't stop singing Boney M... its a ho, its a ho, its a holi holi day...
and a few days ago i wrote that my defining image of India so far was
...
Four saffron-clad holymen
crammed into the back of a
shiny new rickshaw
maniacally,
beeping parping and blasting its
loud horn
while impatiently, maniacally
edging thrusting inching
through the
thickly milling market throng
...
...
By which i mean that
no matter what the thoughts
The beauties
Of those holy-men
those Yogis and Saddhus
Those thoughts mean nothing right now because they are
being steered by that great impatience
Have surrendered themselves to the
Unchangeable process
The time-worn inevitable of the obnoxious driving
They are, no matter what they think or
Teach or
Believe or
Profess or
Do
as crappy a thing on the road as anything else
And it plainly hasn’t occurred to them to
stop their driver from the hyper-impatient blasting
Because the hyper-impatient blasting has been going on forever
...
And this is yet more of this country of good intentions and communal bads
...
The communal bad
Well you’ve heard of the communal good… well here, you get a strong sense of the communal bad
Like in, say, Montreal in June, when its very hot, all the aircon in the homes and businesses makes the heat in the city that much worse… so those who can afford the cool make the city worse for everyone else… and that, i might aver, is a communal bad
And here the painted adverts… for hotels and cafes… are near useless … because there are many adverts for places which don’t exist anymore… and many of the adverts have arrows pointing along the ghats, or up steps, or through archways and doorways,… yet many of these place are kilometres away and would take half an hour or more to get to… which, as many of them are no longer there, means no-one would never try to follow them… means they are useless… so they might work as reminders should you happen to walk past one of them, though as many are actually off the beaten track, you never are going to randomly chance upon them… So what I’m saying is… that indiscriminate and unthought-through signs … and the fact nothing is ever taken down or painted over… makes advertising useless… those people who have done it so poorly have ruined it for everyone else who might try… and this is yet another communal bad…
And this whole country is full of so many communal bads… so many overlaying bad habits… the driving the shitting the emptying of rubbish anywhere the horns the goats the adverts the unfinished buildings the roads
Despite which, everything gets by, everyone makes do, much of what people want is gettable doable liveable ...in the land of fudge and bodge they are used to making do, getting by
And there is a charm in the rulelessness...
And all this a product of what?... of deep poverty and big numbers ... so many people so long in such close proximity has dragged everything down and it is proving extremely hard to drag it up
