On about day 23, RJF @ sf broke for a big pause. Days 21 and 22 revolved around setting Barnie’s piece as K., “I’m not a writer, I’m a mole,” and Paul’s piece as Francis, “my friend is following me” [see pages opposite, working script, RJF]. For the former, we have Jeff on mixing-bowl and brushes, for the latter, Barnie on bass. The simple contrast of textures works. It’s as if the “bent and twisted knottiness” of the section leading up to our song, sung by the buggers’ Veras Lynn, is being teased out into into clearer structures. That this is the case has yet to be confirmed. It could merely be an unexamined impression caused by the longer narrative reaches of Barnie’s two pieces as K., the two “mole” pieces, where they sit in the overall arc of the work, keystone-like, near the middle.
Our last day, before our Pause, the last Thursday in September, Young Han, of City Art Rooms, Uri Khein, and, for the final minutes, Dominic, my brother, are in attendance. We perform the first half of RJF. Paul throws all into disarray by renaming the work, highly appropriately, A Bugger’s Opera.
This is the first time we’ve put the thing together, the renderings, the sequences. It’s not too Frankensteinian, although there are the expressive superfices of monstrosity in the K. piece, “The taste of the word, when I lick the scar on her face…,” and in the Francis piece, which ends with the image of a screaming pope. However, the reason I’m able to see at all what’s there is the cast suddenly working to see that it does work. They hold it together. Whatever ill-conceived misshapenness the work possesses can be attributed entirely to me.
Both Paul and Barnie have other gigs for the next two months. We hope to reconvene early in 08 and bring the thing to completion in production. I’m relieved. Our Pause allows time for other events. Sunday 30 September is Brazil’s final day of trading. And, looking back now as I write this a week later, I realise the enormity of our going out with a bang, not a whimper, at Brazil. It is a minor apocalypse, a major revelation: what is revealed, in its end, is what it was.
Brazil ends. RJF makes a pause. Even if the latter is merely temporary, it means a break in continuity. The permanence of the former will have consequences, if only locally, that have yet to present themselves. Although, a readily discernible consequence is that I am currently unemployed and lack even the young man’s occupation of putting burning weeds in my mouth and smoking them. All is change and if only one could wholeheartedly say, Pain is love.
Please don’t hesitate to get in contact if you have a job for me.
