Today I have begun to loathe myself for procrastinating far too much. And what am I doing about it? Sitting here typing into E2! Perhaps in some pathetic hope that someone will read this and sympathise, maybe think to themselves "yeah I do that too" and I will get some sort of abstract validation from them adding my plight to the great collective subconscious.
I am supposed to be writing a set of briefing notes about Psychogeography, by luck it's a subject that interests me but every time I start up OpenOffice to begin writing a strange force distracts me, putting me in mind of that film 'The Destroying angel' by Bunuel where a party of people find that they cannot leave a room because someone hesitated when they were about to cross a threshold. I seem to remember most of them die of starvation.
Even more mystifying to me is that when I do get around to writing the notes I will be paid 500 pounds which I need really badly. But I know that quiet little destructive voice in my head and I am convinced that it wants to see if things really will get as bad as I think they will if I don't get some income for yet another month.
I have had two months to write this bunch of notes, and I have astounded myself at the lengths that I have gone to to avoid engaging with it. I decided to begin by reading everything that Guy Debord wrote concerning the Situationists adoption of Detournement and Psychogeography but managed to divert myself into reading Marcel Mauss' 'The Gift' instead (a real fun romp of an anthropological tract, that I can heartily recommend). And then out of the blue I got an offer to become a film extra. It appears that my darling wife had used her new ipad to post a surreptitious photo of me on a casting website, just at the moment when they were looking for people that looked just like me. Normally I wouldn't have played along with the idea, but what a fabulous opportunity not to finish the writing, so I went.
Although I am not allowed to talk about any details due to my contract, I can say that I was called upon to become a medieval courtier for a few days, sitting at a banquet in a massively impressive set of a great hall in a castle. Talk about walking into escapist fantasy, I began to think of the days on set as living in mythical time, an impression that was heightened by the amount of surreal time that is spent with a large number of impressively costumed people hanging around in the largest weirdest industrial estate that you ever saw. I am now completely distracted, the filming is over, and I want to do more. Now!
The contrast of sitting alone, tapping away in the small room that I call 'the office' and spending a day with several hundred extremely focused people, at the point of culmination of millions of dollars worth of effort, surrounded by lights, smoke machines and with cameras pointed at you, that contrast is about as extreme as you can get. I can fully understand why film stars often go a bit strange, the whole setup is intended to induce an alternative reality and it is very hard not to believe in it while you are there. Don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting anything to do with stardom or celebrity, after all I was only an extra amongst maybe 200 others, but the fact that at any given moment your presence alone is critical to some extent in a logistic project that is staggeringly complex, that there are people whose sole responsibility is to straighten your hair, or refill your plate, or powder your nose. The whole experience is strange and delightful and the hardest thing of all about it is coming to terms with the fact that you are earning your money just by existing in that moment, rather than by what you produce.
So today it is back to the shoddy little drama of trying to paraphrase a few alcoholic revolutionaries from the 1960's, or maybe mooching around E2 a bit more, or maybe a cup of tea.