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

Sticking With Lou

Part of the lovesongs for the dead, a reflection on the living series

For Lou Reed (a Duet)

'If I could make this world as pure

And strange as what I see

I'd put you in the mirror

I keep in front of me

I keep in front of me'

---------

Dun-dundund

Dun-dundundun

The light before dawn

The dark before dusk

The sea in the ocean

The ocean in the sea

A burning up ember

A melting flake of snow

Dun-dundundun

Dun-dundundun

You, you can be king

You, you can be queen

You can be kind

You can be mean

You could be winter in Bradford

You could be summer and Spain

You could be lost at sea on a ship

You could be lost in the sky in a plane

My head underwater

My head in the clouds

Innocent and reckless

Sinful and calculated

Full of the joys of spring

Under the leaves in autumn

The red red robin

The happy little bluebird

Over the rainbow

Under a bridge

The light in the oven

The light inside a fridge

Dun-dundundun

Dun-dundundun

The coal for the eyes of my snowman

The buttons for the eyes of my ragdoll

Your head in the gutter

Your eyes looking at the stars

A stitch in time

The seamless now and then

My today and tomorrow

My days outside of days

A cellist in Venice

A fiddler in Rome

Like a hole in the head

The wholeness of a hole

Dun-dundundun

Dun-dundundun

The deep dazzling darkness

The illuminating light

The nighttime in the day

The daytime in the night

The right place at the wrong time

The wrong place at the right time

Nighttime

And

Lighttime

You, you are my sunshine

You, you're the light shining on my moon

Like the ocean, under you I'll swoon

Waltzing to eternity's old tune

Dun-dundundun

Dun-dundundun

I'll be your mirror

I'll be your mirror

I'll be your mirror

I'll be your mirror

I'll be your mirror

I'll be your mirror

I'll be your

I'll be your

I'll be your

I'll be your

I'll be

I'll be

I'll be

I'll be

I'll be

I'll be

Your mirror

Mirror

I'll be 

Your mirror

Mirror

I'll be your mirror

I'll be your mirror

Mirror

Mirror

Mirror

Mirror

Mirror

Mirror

Mirror

Mirror

Mi

Mi

Mi

Mirror

Mirror

Mirror

Ror

Ror

Ror

Ror

Mirror

Mirror

Mirror

Mirror

Mirror

Mirror

Dun-dundundun

Dun-dundundun

Dun

Dun

Dun

Dun

Dun-dundundun

Dun-dundundun

Dun-dundundun

It's a big world, not a wee one

It's a big world, not a wee one

With its etymological rooting in Latin separatism shares the same se stem as the words segmented and segregation and severance. A segment is something that has been cut away from a larger body thing, i.e. removed unnaturally, cut away, severed. The phenomena of identificationalism is highly reliant on fracturing.

  That the word separatist has become prefixed by ecclesiastical in The Oxford Dictionary Of English Etymology is telling because the ecclesiast by necessity has to be both a blowhard and a blagger because of the nature of the product he is peddling, pie in the sky, granfaloolenery. 

  With its etymological origins in science fiction granfaloon means more or less inverse transcendence. The transition in its case is reliant on a foolish myth (a faloon) and has the effect of closing someone down rather than opening them up, clinging to itself in seclusion rather than letting go and embracing the world at large. 

  There is a poetic contradiction inherent to the nature of embracement, that to hold and be held you have to let yourself go, to hold without holding, all embraces beginning with open arms. 

  There is a book which I consider to be pertinent to how we divide this world up, called Fup by Jim Dodge, in which a boy responds to the death of his mother by building fences, his grandfather saying to him that the more you fence out, the more you end up fencing in. 

  The act of keeping something out has an inwardly coiling effect in which the subject invariably ends up disappearing into a void of self. The act of holding the imagined other at arm's length is at risk of inadvertently holding humanity at arm's length.    

  When I got off of a train in Edinburgh many years ago, the graffiti in the train station read Scottish not British, I remember wondering how far the author wanted to take his distinction, to illustrate; scottish not british, scottish not european, scottish not nothern hemispherical, scottish not occidental, scottish not worldly, scottish not of woman born etc. Scottish not British is a synechdoche of indentitifactionalism at large, the ceaseless subcategorisation of humanity. We have to wonder what gets lost in the gulf between what is scottish and what is british, or whatever something or other not this and that maybe.  

  That there are political benefits to be gained from subcategorising oneself make it an enticing prospect. 

  In his essay What I Believe E.M. Forster writes, 'I hate the idea of causes, and I had to choose between betraying my friend or betraying my country, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.' To which I would like to add the appendage, I'm not looking for the easy way out.

  In his book also named What I Believe Bertrand Russell writes, 'The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge', To which I would like to add the appendage, we're all in the same proverbial boat.

  A key part of growing up is looking up out into the timeless sky at night and making the decision to stop being scared of the dark and learning from the flowers that good light and good soil shall help you grow and realising that we should not want the best of both worlds, we should want the best of all worlds and to be a part of that.

    

Tyrannosaur

TYRANNOSAUR

He once told me that he could beat up a tyranosaurus rex in a fight. He was convinced of this, especially if he had a hammer handy. Another time he told me that he was able to throw an empty beer bottle so far that it would smash on the moon. 

  I had seen him in fights from time to time, he was the strongest man in the region. Being small it was reassuring to me to have him around. For some he reason he liked me. It would be hard to put into words why. We just liked each other. That's all.

  I had just reached the age when I decided that people should accept that I am not interested in the things that I  am not interested in. I no longer wanted to spend whole evenings feigning interest. However, I've always looked younger than my age.
  A man was talking to me about the demonisation of the working class, in that way that people have a tendency to do when they have nothing to talk about, he had done his thesis on it. I started to think about the demons of the working class. Seeing through my eyes that my ears weren't listening he raised his voice. On hearing the man raise his voice Rex told the man to leave it out. The man finished his drink within the next few minutes and left. 

  We spent all of our time together drinking, we didn't ever do anything else. When he had nothing to talk about, he didn't talk.

  One night he was talking about my parents, he said that they were nice people. He knew them as a little old man and a little old woman going gently into the night, going out to the local pub twice a week. This was not a way of going into the night he could endure himself. He thought he would die out at sea. You see, you cannot beat up the sea, not even with a hammer handy.

  The next night he was telling me about fighting. He believed that fighting is the most intimate act there is. Part of beating someone up was the healing that would ensue if you reached the right level of damage. He believed a fighter should aim for a level of damage which would not be irrevocable, GBH was a sin to him, as bad as rape, if not worse. He believed the purpose of a good fight was to make the other person a better person. 

  The next night as we left the pub at closing time he put his hand on my shoulder and for a moment I thought he was going to ask me if I fancied a quick a fight, as though the previous night he had been building me up to it. However, instead he just finished off his drink and threw the empty beer bottle out into the night sky. We watched it disappear, listening out for the soft sound of glass smashing somewhere out in the far off distance. 

Robin Williams' Final Interview

Copenhagen Review

Hamlet.  Good afternoon Mr Williams, thanks for agreeing to be interviewed by the Copenhagen Review. Do you know how I start every discussion?

Robin Williams.  I'm familiar with the magazine, yes.

H.  To be or not to be?

RW.  As Camus famously wrote at the start of The Myth of Sisyphus, something along the lines of, 'the only true philosophical question is that of suicide.'

H.  That was long after I originally posed the question.

RW.  Excuse me, I'm not usually one who feels the need to justify his presence by dropping names. It's just that I'm used to being interviewed by publications such as Empire magazine. Magazines which ask the interviewee questions like, 'how much does a pint of milk cost?' To which I, in my comic persona, respond, 'that all depends on whose titties I'm sucking on', or, alternatively, if I really want to bring the house down, I respond, 'that all depends on whose dick I'm sucking on', the interviewer then giving me the feed line, 'but that's not milk,' to which I react, 'I'm going to have to call daddy, that son of a bitch has been telling me it's milk for 57 years'. Crass stuff, but it's what the public want. This is quite a departure for me.

H.  Just be yourself.

RW.  That's the hardest role there is. I'm much more comfortable playing a role. The most comfortable I've ever been was playing a cartoon, I didn't even have to be part of my own skin.

H.  As an old friend of mine said, 'the world is a stage.'

RW.  To answer your question I suppose that in the end it's all not to be. This is the cornerstone of inevitability. However, all we shall ever know ourselves is to be. But even the stars are one day  not to be, some of them already so,  their light taking years to finally reach our eyes even after they die. The Yin of infinity is Yanged by inevitability. Another way of putting this would be jingle jangle. Nothing lasts forever, that's the only thing that does. That and time which you so wonderfully once epitomised as dust.

H.  I was originally going to say ash but changed it to dust at the last minute.

RW.  You were right to do so, sooner or later or we all come to fade away even those that burnt out.

H.  You mentioned earlier about time lasting forever, where do you place yourself in conjunction with infinity?

RW.  I consider myself, and everyone else for that matter, inseparable from it. I am part of a waltz with eternity which will still be playing its music long after I go. To a certain extent I believe no one goes, or if they do go, where do they go to? I cannot tell you exactly what it is that the dead do, but they do it very well.

H.  Speaking from experience I consider the dead to have a hold over the living which the living does not have over them.

RW.  Yes, this may be a cliche, but like most cliches it is based on a significant element of truth, it's hard to give up the ghost. Is it OK to smoke here?

H.  Yes, Denmark is very tolerant over cigarettes.

RW.  That's one thing this piece of shit country has going for it at least. 

H.  Not that I'm what they call patriotic, but we also have a very impressive bus service and the trains run remarkably close to schedule.

RW.  I don't use public transport. Celebrity turns you into a spectacle, people stare. Some people see me and just burst out laughing, it makes me feel like the Elephantman.

H.  To a degree we're all partly John Merrick I would say. Each one of us with their own form of Elephantiasis in one way or another. Hence the girl, I forget her name, in Todd Browning's Freaks becoming so horrified in the famous 'one of us' scene, she realises not much separates any of us from those around the table. What distinguishes us all from being John Merrick or the Elephantman is how much we surround ourselves with people who recognise our humanity and whose humanity we can recognise ourselves.

RW.  Could that be, in other words- sorry to be so vague- love?

H.  Perhaps.

RW.  It's an interesting scene that 'one of us' scene. Have you ever noticed how that phrase 'one of us, one of us' matches entirely, rhythm for rhythm, 'lone-li-ness, lone-li-ness'? There seems to be something insidious about the bunching together people do at the expense of their individuality. I try to take everyone for who they are but when you're on that stage looking at God knows how many people it's hard not to just think to yourself, mass. I become anxious about mass thinking.

H.  What worries you so much about it?

RW.  It dictates the way people look at things. It makes them convinced that there is only one way, their, plural, way. The world is getting divided into two conflicting points of view, the subcategorisation being that of left or right, liberal or republican in the States. To me there's always more than one way of skinning a cat. As a comedian I know from the early years on stage that you have to change the way you tell a joke depending on who you're telling it to. Have they stopped teaching the theory of relativity at schools?

H.  Do you consider society to be heading in the right direction?

RW.  In many ways I find this indisputable. I remember when I was little boy that you weren't allowed to sit down at the front of the bus if you were black in my country. Things have changed since then. Of course, spanners get thrown in the works. Maniacs become powerful and so on. This is part of the parcel with democracy. Things take much longer than we may have hoped. I'm a great believer in patience, you yourself are no advocate of rash decisions. Unfortunately we live in a convenience culture, everything is expected to be instant. I blame the microwave and jumbo jet for this, the progress of technology has left the progress of man behind and we have started to misconceive technological advancement as humanitarian advancement. 

H.  Yes, there is an act now think later mentality very prevalent in western society. In the past I have been criticised for too much thinking and too little action but I am certain more harm has been done under unthought acts than ever what has been considered. This is the basis of the word considerate.

RW.  Excuse the pun, we need to get our acts together.

H.  In the press release your agent sent me it mentions how your career has recently taken a turn toward darker material than that which we have come to expect. Could you comment a bit on this.

RW.  That's hollywood talk. This distinction between light and dark, it's quite restrictive, after all the universe is both, just look at the sky at night. Einstein once said that out of all things he is certain of two things, the infinity of the universe and of human stupidity and he wasn't even so sure about the first one. My definition of human stupidity would roughly be how much we limit ourselves. I remember when I first came across a decimal point, I realised that everything could be made smaller and smaller and smaller, and so on. Now we border each other off at any given opportunity, everybody's something or other or other, but the last thing they're described as is human. There's people in the Southern Staes of America who think that an Arab man's head is literally made out of a towel rather than skin and bone. We should concentrate on what we share in common more and what separates us less.

H.  You don't think that that's contradictory to what you said about mass thought.

RW.  People  become masses by collective separation more than they ever do on common ground. This is where the fractures in religion come, catholics versus protestants, sunnis versus shiites . They are concentrating on what sets them apart rather than together. The most powerful political tool there is at the moment is the creation of a bogeyman. The bogeyman doesn't have to be anything scary, it just has to be other.

H.  How do you think we can bring people together?

RW.  All I know is is my trade, but I do think humour helps. If you can get a room laughing, they are laughing together. This could go either way of course. The right, or, more accurately, wrong comedian could get the public laughing in the vilest possible way. We all know that there's good laughter and bad laughter.

H.  Do you think there's such a thing as too soon? 

RW.  I think it couldn't be soon enough. Ideally people are joking about something before it's even happened. 

H.  You must feel that you have a lot to do.

RW.  Unfortunately I feel out of the fray, I am unable to laugh at myself so how can I expect anyone else to laugh at me. There's that old chestnut, if a tree falls in a forest and no one hears, does it make a sound? Likewise, if a comedian makes a joke and no one laughs, is it a joke? I feel like a dead tree. I used to say that when a show was going badly for me to win the audience back over, it used to work, not anymore.

H.  I saw Chris Rock make the same joke, the audience were rolling in the aisles.

RW.  The industry works like that. It's why the x-factor's so popular, they turn these contestants into someone they can love for fifteen minutes and then ask not to spend the night. Being loved by the public is like being a box of Kleenex, it's only a matter of time until they reach the final tissue.

H.  How does one come to terms with this, do you not feel like one of those dead stars whose light is still shining even though they are dead stars, their starpower, as they call it in your industry, long gone.

RW.  You have to find beauty where you can get it, a man, a woman, a cat, a cradle, a song or game, a tree, a rock, a cloud. Now I am a star no more, back to earth, a mere mortal, maybe I can finally take some solace in the stars, as hopefully others once, in days gone by, did me.

H.  All in the gutter.

RW.  Yes. You have to hone your perspective. No one's born with the will to live, we have to find it where we can and when we can. There's an implication that we all just passively enjoy life 'til the day we fuckin' die, we're even supposed to passively enjoy the day we fuckin' die, it's a disgrace. As an entertainer I am no longer willing to indulge this myth. This, it seems, puts me entirely at odds with my country. So be it.  

H.  Good will to live hunting.

RW.  Yes, that's very amusing. Forgive me for not laughing but it's been a long day and I'm still lagged from the flight. 

H.  With that in mind I think all there is that's left to say is thank you Mr Williams.

RW.  Call me Robin.

H.  Robin. 

RW.  It's been a pleasure sweet prince.

H.  And to say how much I enjoyed your performance as Peter Pan.

RW.  I was going to say the same to you.

The Stagefright Of The Checkout Girl

Approaching the denouement of Saturday night

a boozey cloud cuckoo land

in the space between revelry and debauchery

and all such things associated with the pangs

or songs

played on the strings of a heart

I have never seen a bloodstained razor that doesn't look happy

as though smiling a rusty smile

We were remembering the famous artist who cut open his wrists in the tub

an extension of his life's work

a distillation of red

Writing sonnets and drawing hexagrams with crayons

Inside the Sistine Chapel of hangovers

the world smearing across your eyes

smudging into your retina

There is a socialistic notion that everyone is equal because everyone has an arsehole

it is a notion I do not support

It was with her when I felt everyone was equal

they seemed to glow

everything glowed

Incandescent 

a lexicon that goes without saying

Amidst weeks of working like an unloved dog

when I should have been weeping like willow

but almost felt alright

In the looking glass hides her reflection

Yiddishy paradoxes fly all around me

the right hand taking away what the left hand never put there 

a vulture lays an egg

There's a man at the bar who swears to be the angel of death

he told me that after a long day of mercilessly slaughtering the first born gentiles of Egypt when he got back to Heaven God didn't even say thank you

shaking his head and laughing the the cynical laughter of a slaughterer

Have you heard that the clouds are the cigarette smoke of Angels?

and of all the shapes a cloud could be

What's holier than melancholia?

Jesus Christ was one of the all time great light Jewish entertainers 

When the lads talked about football in the pub

visions of a majestic ball where guests were fully clad except for their feet filled my head

Footfalls as soft as snow

Thin air conditioning

Defining eternity as neither here nor there may be unsatisfactory 

but it will have to do for the moment

It always gets to that point where the bums start talking about that bet they were gonna make

but never did

which would have made a couple of thousand

I did not get where I am today through being successful

He may not have been very lucky but he was kind

this is its own kind of luck

Walking into a mirage

not a popular mirage

She'd talk about the weight of my gaze and measure herself in the bathroom

all these glances were making her fat

Day came in like a hoax

The ghosts of ghosts

What retinas retain

Our mutual dissatisfaction was unsustainable

more or less beyond meaningless

a constant struggle to find the postcode of Atlantis

The sky at night

in some half dance of chance 

within the tender splendour of days in decay

happenstancing

sprawling and smalling

Smoking crack with the prostitute that helped him score

in the back of a mini cab

in a carpark in Scunthorpe 

the American academic

a Henry James scholar

thinks to himself this is the first 5 past 4 in the morning of the rest of my life

Walking through the supermarket

humming with electricity

everything aglow

lit by more than light

there is a crack in the speaker's voice broadcast over the tannoy

as she calls for a clean up on aisle 4

the stagefright of the checkout girl