Episode 2: Eccentrics, from Individuals, Eccentrics, Weirdos, Monsters, Pests, Creeps, and Alfreds.

Individuals, Eccentrics, Weirdos, Monsters, Pests, Creeps, and Alfreds:

Or; - On The Delicate Art of How Not to Have a Conversation

Episode 2 of 7: Eccentrics

[continued…]

Maybe I should carry on regardless but just turn the volume down on the friendliness factor?

Be friendly, gently. Gently friendly. Friendly gently.

If I don’t, I might earn the reputation of being…

An Eccentric

So…

Off to Wraith Club!

Let’s do the whole phatic communion (1) stuff, gently.

Remember: friendly gently.

I pass the first test.

This test involves getting my ugly mug inside the club.

Now, the door-threshold-guard person is Dahc Dermur VIII, whose Wildely inventive costumes make Steve Strange’s outfits look like the jaded-‘Oh, it will do’ attitude of a Freemans catalogue. Thankfully, I’m relaxed steering into harbour because Parma Ham has assured me at the last Slimelight that DD8 (2) is not only lovely, but doesn’t adopt the Blitz Club door-policy sneer of ‘Oh, it’s you again’.

Parma Ham is correct. DD8 is lovely.

I give both of them a grade A* in my mental markbook.

And, secretly, well done to me.

I’m almost as proud of myself as the time when Mistress Absolute hired me as a fey coffee steward to serve some pervs at Cynthia’s Cyber Bar!

I’m in.

A set of avant-garde montages project in an ante-room, occasionally interrupted by some screaming theatre-of-violence (3) performance art.

I smooth sail my way through a wide-ranging conversation (about kinksters in Kent) with photo-journalist JeanieJean and introduce myself in a gently friendly way to lighting designer, Jaek, whose outfit is gorgeous and of whom I’m secretly envious because they didn’t get any hassle on the way here.

I chat to both Torture Garden founders.

I ask Allen about Ibiza. My interactional navigation is so smooth, I wonder whether I should hobby-up sailing (4) in some spare moments I don’t have.

Later, David Wood is buoyant and so is Petra, who I meet for the first time. He asks me, with a stunned smile, ‘What’s all this?’ (5), pointing to my psychedelic Aubrey Beardsley suit.

Through a process of mysterious verbal osmosis David’s buoyancy inflates me into a hovercraft of conversational effervescence – dangerously. I notice that lines from ‘The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock’ (6) are appearing on the screen montage, so what I begin doing, like a real dickhead (and not dissimilar to one of those schoolmaster knobheads sitting in the theatre) (7), is say out loud the next line of the poem before it appears on the screen! To my surprise, one of my old acquaintances is terribly impressed and ventures to guess my profession:

Correct!

I make a note of an A* for him in my mental markbook.

It's within this interactional tidal current that I bump into Iris the Spider, and I’m swept into the elation of beingfriendly without the gently.

I’m genuinely pleased to see her.

I’ve always had the greatest respect for Iris, ever since she completed my reconfigured Zanni (8) suit. She’s très talented and works her fucking arse off. So…

‘Hey, hey, hey! Great to see you! Yes, I know. Woo-hoo! Great venue! The cable cars! I know – I was thinking that too, we’re near your office! Couldn’t believe it. Uncanny déjà vu! Ooh that dress. No, no, the other one. The red Paris one.Amazing!’

I think I’m smoothly riding the crest of a tempest-tossed conversational wave on my verbal surfboard (9), but, inlosing my gently-friendly friendly-gently poise, I do run the risk of becoming…

A Weirdo

Now, at this point, I start making my elegant social blunders…

[to be continued, rhizomatically…]

An Eccentric: Footnotes

1. The anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski’s discussion of ‘phatic communion’ as ‘a type of speech in which ties of union are created by a mere exchange of words’ would inspire many sociolinguistic studies investigating the concepts of face, solidarity, and politeness in the second half of the twentieth century. See ‘On Phatic Communion’ in a quite brilliant anthology of linguistic essays: The Discourse Reader, eds. Adam Jaworski and Nikolas Coupland (Routledge: London and New York, 1999), pp. 301-305. [Return to text]

2. I’m sure you know that the name DD8 also happens to be the current model of the Boss Digital Delay pedal, pedal, pedal, pedal, pedal, pedal. It’s the pedal that echoes, echoes, echoes, echoes, echoes, echoes. You know, the one that makes it sound as though you’re singing into a canyon, canyon, canyon, canyon, canyon, canyon. I’ve just this very moment had a vision of multiple Dhac Dermur VIII’s receding into a mise en abyme, mise en abyme, mise en abyme, mise en abyme, mise en abyme, mise en abyme. [Return to text]

3. Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and its Double (John Calder: London, 1970). [Return to text]

4. At boarding school I was in trouble again for jumping from boat to boat in our sailing lessons, systematically capsizing them with glee. For some strange reason the teacher seemed to think I was disrupting the smooth running of the afternoon. Speaking of boarding school boats, I also failed the severest of tests of attempting to launch the Rowing Eights from the river bank with a rather dismissive push, much to the bewildered consternation of my pal, Charlie Froud. [Return to text]

5. This is not the first time I’ve been asked about my Beardsley suit and I’ll tell you about it one day in assiduously tedious detail. How could you resist reading about the trials, tribulations and daring experiments of the long-sufferingMaestro - Robin Archer, who, owing to destiny, appears to be lumbered with me as his ever-fawning client? [Return to text]

6. T.S. Eliot, ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, from The Poems of T.S. Eliot, eds. Christopher Ricks and JimMcCue (Faber and Faber: London, 2015), pp. 5-9. Diligent readers know I can recite ‘Kubla Khan’ (see Confession 1, Footnote 2) but there used to be a day in the distance of receding time when I could chant the whole of this fucker too. [Return to text]

7. Oh, come on, you know the type of schoolteacher who sits in the front row at the RSC brandishing their copy of Shakespeare to see if the actors deliver their lines ‘correctly’. You don’t? Well, the sheer idiocy of this pomposity isillustrated by the historical circumstances that there never was one version of each Shakespeare play in the first place,but multiple variations. It’s a matter further complicated by all of the editorial interventions that take place during theeighteenth century and discussed in a very lively manner by Gary Taylor in Reinventing Shakespeare (Vintage: Reading, 1991), Ch.2. See also Michael Dobson’s The Making of the National Poet (Clarendon: Oxford, 1992). One ofthe most fascinating discussions of textual instability is Leah S. Marcus’s chapter on three of the versions of Hamlet and she poses the question of whether Shakespeare continued to rewrite his plays during his career in response to theirreception. See Unediting the Renaissance (Routledge: London and New York, 1996), Ch. 5. Anyone might daringly venture to assume that this brand of dickhead-schoolteacher, who continue to give the profession a bad name, might nothave read these books. Ooh, a sarky-ranting footnote, this one. [Return to text]

8. My yellow diamond harlequin suit, by House of Harlot. Actually, I must tell you one day the story of Scala TG in May when a well-meaning random told me I looked like ‘a fucked-up Pokemon’. [Return to text]

9. I’ve never used a surfboard. Never touched one. But the thought of using one does remind me of my strenuous inability, one summer afternoon, to get on a jet ski. [Return to text]