a horse in fishnet stockings

a horse in fishnet stockings appears in the condensation on the window
it turns into a wolf
she sure looks lonely
my companion discusses his thesis on the raping of God to death
while white steam from black coffee rises up
past postcards on the pillar
of tiki girls backdropped by red
with dreams just like anyone
smiling mechanical smiles
who must be very old now
maybe even dead
or definitely dead
definitely maybe
the library book in my pocket becoming another day overdue
another day
within days upon end upon end

Musical Boxes

poster by Edward Kastin : http://edwardkastindesigns.co.uk/

ripping yarn

Kitty likes Eyeball
Eyeball likes Kitty
Kitty loves the scratching
Eyeball loves the pain

shachlitz

PaperMoon productions present

Musical Boxes

an evening of three short plays by Samuel Kastin at the Rosemary Branch Theatre May 31st, June 1st and 2nd

BLANCHE.  Where's my heart!?

STELLA.  She means her jewellery box. It's heart shaped.

A Streetcar Named Desire

  There is a word in a dying language, shachlitz. There is no equivalent word in English but the concept it denotes is a useful one. A friend of mine, one of the last speakers of this language, part of the generation that will take it to their respective graves, once translated it to me by describing its meaning; he said it means one box of meaning opening up to a deeper box of meaning. He said, "Picture in your head a square getting smaller and smaller as a circle inside it gets bigger and bigger and bigger. Now imagine opening one box only for there to be another box inside it identical in every way except for its diminished size. You carry on doing this to a point of almost ad infinitum until you get to a box so minuscule that you can barely open it but when you do you reveal a huge mountain inside of it. This is how I imagine the mountain found its way to Mohammed." Ladies and Gentlemen these are our musical shachlitz, listen carefully, we are clicking open their brass clasp, the gears in the musical machine are beginning to whir, the dancer is starting her spin…

Down The Line

Trapped in a life of procrastination Kydd longs to break out. Will he be able to get his act together before the curtain falls.

Directed by John M. Wilson

The White Crow

They say that every crow is capable of hitting the notes and sustaining the harmonies required for birdsong, but that they choose not to sing. They say that birdsong is not in their nature. However, once there was a crow that sang.

A dance piece choreographed and directed by Stephen Pelton

Yesterday Half A Century Ago

The story of The Little Drummer Boy and The Little Matchstick Girl told in the still of an evening approaching the end of the day when all that there is left are memories.

Directed by Samuel Kastin

book tickets here

http://www.rosemarybranch.com/index.php/programme/87-musical-boxes

Venus Booklaunch

if a neurotic is heavily fretting upon a chaise lounge and there isn't a Freudian there to hear them, are they being hysterical? 

Dear Friends,

I would like to invite you to the launch of my latest booklet of poems Venus In Vienna With The Virgin Mary.

It will be held at 8.30 p.m at The Lamb, 54 Holloway Road and is free to attend. Books will be available to buy there.

Sam

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.'