Redrafting Tuesday

It's a week after the young woman who looked similar to my mother at her age

(spit glitters on the end of her ballpoint)

sat opposite me in the cafe on the seventh floor

and I started making an opaque commentary on the sky

which she could see through

recluding away with a glance

from soft blue eyes hard not to fall for

The wild beauty of entropy will make one or break one

a whispering epic

of ravelling and unravelling

I'm waiting in a post office line

to send tobacco to the rehabiliation centre

down south

thinking of the moon's mirrorballing of the sun at night

and how it carpets my walk home from the work

along with the stripped bones of fried chickens

haphazardly flung to the ground in an act of blase voodoo

A man gives the post officer an umbrella

a good one he says

from The Savoy

on a day untarnished by rain

And my Christmas cards remain unwritten

December's malaise falling upon my heart

the melancholia synonymous with mistletoe 
softly embracing it

with the gentle coldness of snow

The day comes to a close

sooner or later

with the pedestrian symmetry of a black woman drinking a pint of stout

the alcohol looking more dependent on her

than she does on it

Clazy

A young writer sits at a keyboard and begins to write a screenplay for a film that they are almost entirely certain will never be made, the only thing stopping them being entirely certain being their faith in the flexible nature of uncertainty. In it they describe the opening shot.

A close up of a chinese woman's face. Her face is presented in a decontextualised location, we see no walls nor hear any background noise, all she is surrounded by is a blue light, the blue of cigarette smoke. Music is gently played from an unknown source, it is coming from the ether for all we as a viewer can decipher. As the music continues she begins to sing along with it, it is the song 'Crazy' written by Willie Nelson. The chinese woman sings along with it with all the cultural markings which have become cliches in the west and have often been used for the purposes of racist stereotyping; for example, the r's get pronounced a l's and, vice versa, the l's get pronounced as r's, 'Crazy, crazy for feeling so lonely', becomes, 'Clazy, clazy for feering so ron'ry'. As she continues to sing the significance of these cultural markings become less and less significant as they begin to fall into the backdrop of the depth of feeling contained within, coming out of, the chinese woman's voice, a feeling felt being one expressed regardless of whether it is being advertently performed or not. The meaning of her feeling is what becomes the focus of the scene, that she is a chinese woman who pronounces her r's a l's is only a very small aspect of the scene, there is more to her and to her song than this. Her singing is beautiful regardless of whether she has any technical ability in this area or not.

Through the rest of the day they continue writing the film as a series of sequences such as identical twin somnambulances who were separated at birth wandering at night to the same city park bench and sitting there together for ten minutes or so until they part ways only to forget about all of this the following morning, the writer's belief being that film is first and foremost, inescapably, a photographer's medium and not necessarily a storyteller's one.

Twins are a recurring motif in the film, another set of identical twin brothers in infancy appear later in the screenplay, both of them wearing batman t-shirts, both of them black boys with braids. Perhaps this is because the writer themself has a twin in mainland Europe. As children, and still to this day, they were constantly asked what it is like to be a twin, the best answer for this being to shrug their shoulders as if to say, 'it's like being a twin, it's like being a twin and not being a twin, what's it like being you?'Another question people constantly asked was whether they felt each other's pain being a twin, if they knew what the word was back then they would have said, 'of course.. empathetically', two people do not share a womb for nine months without learning a thing or two about their womb mate.

Later in the day, whilst on a walk the writer imagines a response to the film. They imagine that they are at the Cannes film festival sitting in the sunshine, a fizzy drink in front of them. They are upset. Their stomach is upset because they had a drink the night before, they had a drink and then the drink had a drink and then the drink drank them, and their head and heart is upset because they feel as though they have been misunderstood. They worry that people make a point of misunderstanding one another because it is an easier thing to do than to sit down and try to understand one another. They believe the cornerstone of civilisation should be consideration rather than debate.

Their film has been mostly received very badly, except for one or two positive reviews. The criticism of the film has mainly decided that is a work which perpetuates cultural cliches and racist stereotypes. In other words, the critics focused on the chinese lady pronouncing her r's as l's in the opening sequence rather than the nature of her song.

After their walk the writer returns home to sit at the keyboard of their computer once more. After staring at it a while they open a play they have been working on for some time and write a line to be said by the old cleaning lady, Florry, 'They are what they are. Just clouds. Some of them full of rain. Some of them fluffy. That's all there is to it really. Made out of cloud.' Thinking to themself, 'in a similar way to human beings being made out of human being', as they stare out of the window. Seeing the mid afternoon sunshine, which is surely the same sunshine as the early morning sunshine, though different, they wonder whether they should get around to brushing their teeth. As they wonder about the weather and whether to brush their teeth they begin to sing a song.

'Clazy, clazy for feering so ron'ry. I'm clazy, Clazy for feering so brue. I'm clazy for clying, clazy for tlying and I'm clazy for roving wu.'

Lassez Vanity Faire

Lassez Vanity Faire. Why February Hour-?

Samuel Kastin. It's a good question. Another good question is why not. There's something about February which is quite mysterious, that month that seemingly by magic gets an extra day every four years because of the earth actually taking 365 days and a 1/4 to fully orbit the sun. It sort of knocks the notion that time exists in hours and minutes a bit on its head. There's a line in some old notebook which reads 'life exists in hours and minutes as much as the universe does in metres and miles, which isn't to say it doesn't, because it does, but there's more to it than that'. Also, February is generally when the year begins to start, that's roughly where I would place Feb Hour, in that moment of the dusky dawning. Ideally Feb Hour would be performed outside of February, luckily enough there is also a show on the 1st of March.

LVF. What will the night consist of?

SK. A performance and a play and an interval and then another performance and another play.

LVF. Can you tell us anything about the performances?

SK. No.

LVF. What about the plays?

SK. The play by Samuel Beckett is called Rockaby and it was written in 1980. The Matchmaker was written by me in 2011. Both of them are short plays, neither longer than 15 minutes. You'll be in the pub within an hour.

LVF. Anything else you'd like to tell us about them?

SK. Not really, I think at £5 the audience should be willing to take a risk.

LVF. What if everyone thought like that?

SK. Maybe we'd get some better plays.

LVF. Do you think so?

SK. No, I don't think we're going to get many better plays, not within the theatres at least. The state of theatre is abysmal at the moment, nearly all new writing seems to have either been written by a social worker or the student from Oscar Wilde's The Nightingale and the Rose. This is because people find it easier to engage with issues than with thought and feeling, as really thinking and really feeling requires you to challenge yourself and is not always comfortable, and nor should it be. I have heard theatre being described as moribund form and certainly it seems that the theatres themselves believe this, hence this stream of work focusing on the immediate, plays about riots (riots are intrinsically undramatic) and about Enron and Blair being on trial and things like that, it's sort of like reading The Guardian, the audience goes to it and exits thinking 'oh, so this is what I'm supposed to think about that, thank God I didn't have to figure out what I actually think out for myself'. This what we say is like flogging a dead horse, or if we want to be more precise with our similes (which is the point of similes), like fucking a dead whore. I don't mind something being pointless so long as it's meaningful, however, the mist of the work put on the stage these done is done so purely arbitrarily. It's a racket, it's a fix. It's a problem that the tastemakers in this country have no taste, just a list of things they're supposed to say and a clipboard with a few boxes to tick, and continue to program art as a commodity, froth with nothing more to it than the babycinno you can ask the professional barrister for. Hence why we have decided to use a steelworker's garage to put on the work, if the theatres themselves won't put on good work, we have to start doing it for ourselves, or at least try to goddamit. Neither of the plays being performed focus on the immediate, both of them are looking at the proverbial bigger picture (which likely isn't all that big) and hopefully have a timeless quality about them, which brings us back to the evening's name, February Hour-.

******
February Hour- is being performed February 23rd, 24th, 25th, 26th and 27th at 7p.m. and March 1st at 2p.m. in Grace's Garage, Linscott Road, E5 (opposite the Biddles Bros). Tickets are £5 and available at  https://www.ticketsource.co.uk/dustyquintessences

February Hour alternative poster

February Hour-

Quintessential Dust presents;

White as an Indian Pipe
Red as a Cardinal Flower
Fabulous as a Moon at Noon
February Hour-

an evening of performances including plays by Samuel Beckett and Samuel Kastin in East London 

February 23rd, 24th, 25th, 26th, 27th
at 7.30pm (doors open at 7.00pm)
March 1st
at 2.30pm (doors open at 2.00pm)

£5

tickets available at https://www.ticketsource.co.uk/dustyquintessences

direct any enquiries to samkastin@gmail.com

'But it wasn't a dream. It was a place. And you and you and you...and you were there.'
Dorothy Gale (played by Judy Garland)
'But darling there's a gun in the garland, and, you need to know, that the dream is not all dream'
David Berman, Room Games and Diamond Rain