'the invisible can appear'

'the stage is a place where the invisible can appear' 

horsemouth heard the binmen come (hail the binmen). he's up late because he stayed up late watching once upon a time in hollywood which he enjoyed.  it is 30 years and two days since the release of the (kate bush sampling)  something good by the utah saints (and very good it is too). 

in many ways horsemouth agrees with the filthy hippies who want to kill the movie stars (for showing them so much violence on tv and in the movies jokes tarrantino) - times were violent, a john waynism ruled, there was the draft for a war in vietnam.  there is an underlying violence in the culture. the manson gang react to this and are a part of it.

earlier horsemouth had watched the scythe of the house unamerican activities committee cut through RKO pictures. the val lewton pictures, the film noirs had changed into social conscience pictures (they had really always been those), the powers-that-be get nervous and launch an anti-communist witch hunt. it rampages around destroying lives and careers until it blows itself out. the survivors are bitter and wary and guilty, they cannot believe that the all-clear has been sounded, they won't recognise the song the documentarists want them to sing and become unco-operative.  silence serves them better. 

'the stage is a place where the invisible can appear'  from the empty space by peter brook. 

horsemouth has slightly distorted the quote by truncating it as he has. brook means what is invisible in society, the invisible forces, the shape of things (but he could just as well mean the invisible people - the filthy hippies for example).  he gives us merce cunningham, samuel beckett and jerzy grotowski (and he gives us julian beck and judith malina's the living theatre).  there is (of course) my dinner with andre here - an over selling of what theatre (or movies for that matter) can achieve, but there is also the lumpenproletarian masses of el nost milan, the alienation effect of brecht - there is althusser's brief essay on all this, an essay that is not really about theatre at all but about the making of ideology (what is invisible) visible. 

after people have paid their rent there is food poverty and there is energy poverty (but not actual poverty you understand, in order to get it ameliorated it can't be called that). 

this is, of course, not a social relationship (the structural result of reduced workers' share of GDP) but a temporary thing caused by spikes in food and energy prices to which a sticking plaster can be applied by the state. we must all eat better for less and heat our homes less. this following story becomes more relevant (indeed you could stage it again).

brook in hamburg in 1946.

'I saw a crowd of children  pushing excitedly into a nightclub door. I followed them. on  stage was a bright blue sky. two seedy, spangled clowns sat on a painted cloud on their way to visit the queen of heaven, 'what shall we ask her for?' said one 'dinner,' said the other and the children screamed approval...' 

here what is invisible is food and the children's need for it. 

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saturday howard may be round. it is the anniversary of the release of volume three (horsemouth will have a think about how to make that visible). it looks like a nice day out there today. yesterday horsemouth alternated some reading (in the back garden) with some listening to horror podcasts (the case of charles dexter ward). he will probably do something like this today.