twenty odd years now

[This was a late one, as is fairly obvious.]

I suck. This month my critical faculties have entered meltdown phase due to that annoying bug of everything happening at once, which has resulted in this here thing, normally a refuge to write in a sea of more pesky tasks, being left way late, then I even sent last month’s one thinking it had yet to arrive (what a schmuck) as there are very few outlets for this blessed paper in London, its hard to get hold of so I go on my failing memory to remember the difference between drafted, sent and published. Any raging inaccuracies (with regards to arguments and their actually standing up) I can put down to the fact I didn’t proofread, and thus somehow remove all culpability for my foolishness? Somehow. Part of my absconding from ‘real life’ and chucking in a mistaken attempt at careerism, thus losing the ability to organise my brain, has including taking on various temporary shift jobs, and i’ve been lucky enough to get some at some kind of interesting places, the British Museum for one and the Southbank Centre secondarily…

Anyway, it’s currently 8am, I worked a 13 hour shift yesterday, today I am dogsitting a swiss hound called Biagio who’s actually Italian (don’t ask) and going for a ‘meeting’ at a very important gallery to fake acting very important about doing scarily important things, then somehow go to work for another night, to serve ice creams and overpriced programmes to the Orchestral cognoscenti, that is to say, the aged Generation who still recognise the strains of Dvorak over the din. I work increasing amounts of shifts in the Royal Festival Hall, which is the part of the Southbank centre on the river here that looks most like a relic from brighter post-War period – It was built for the Festival of Britain, where it was constructed as a ‘tonic for the nation’. It’s a huge 3000 seat auditorium, a palimpsest to changing ideas of ‘innovative’ architecture, so that Brutalist post-war British concrete angularity juts out into the Thames, buffered only by more 1990s style attempts at water features and glass frontage. Underneath it is probably London’s most well known area to skateboard, but its all location scouts and mall grabs. It’s one of the few ‘cultural complexes’ in London to operate an ‘open foyer’ policy, and I find this, and how people react to it, endlessly fascinating. Lots of the walls on the lower floors are mirrored, which means, despite the overwhelming bias towards classical performance, in the Royal Festival Hall part at least (there are lots of other smaller spaces within the building) it is not an uncommon sight to see an impromptu troupe of criminally determined dancers staring at their synchronicity, bodypopping to this week’s ringtones (did that make me sound about fifty? Shit i’m so not ‘urban’) out of tinny mobile phone speakers. Over and over again for sometimes far longer than my shift lasts. Patrons mostly just widen their eyes and step daintily over tracksuit bottoms to make it through to their £60 seats. That said, management recently rearranged a set of ‘lazy chairs’ to make it so that a certain area was less attractive to homeless people, which shows something of a less laissez-faire attitude, but it’s not uncommon to find a sleeping bag stuffed in a corner, jettisoned for more reliable heat. Still, it shuts at 11pm.

The staff at the Royal Festival Hall are an incredible testament to the over-qualification of service industry staff in this country, symptomatic of all that implies, but it produces this bizarre situation where the staff cloakroom becomes a contact zone for all kinds of amazing conversation about people’s ‘real work.’ Everyone is writing or doing or making between shifts. Mostly graduates or practitioners in their field trying to supplement meagre income, art theorists work next to choreographers, electronic musicians next to confused punks (hi.) United by precarity and smiling in the face of time-sheets and queue management duty, I snag my fingers on illustrious patrons arty coats, make small talk about a man unbeknownst to me before I began work there: Yevgeny Sudbin, a young Russian virtuoso pianist and favourite of the old ladies who have season tickets, including an amazing woman who was tiny and smelt of pine cones, who told me she ‘just wanted to touch him.’ Amazing. I don’t complain, because last week I got to watch John Cale perform the entirety of Paris 1919 for free (the programme’s not entirely classical) its actually really easy work and it dampens my wider guilt at being agency staff in a unionised environment to know that noone seems to resent it. Work is a strange beast, work on the front line of the UK’s much-vaunted (yet slowly subsiding into the economic mud) ‘cultural sector’ stranger still.

So the dog has just realised that his mirror image is not just another dog and is going mental. This is going to be fun. His ears are literally bigger than his head. Amongst the world of things I need to do is book flights to Austin Texas for a little festival I don’t think anyones going to, and then a connecting flight to SF for a month of honourary shitwork. I couldn’t be more excited! If you or anyone you know is subletting or has a spare room, attic, half a room or shed (!) anywhere in the general bay area I guess, for around a month and wouldn’t mind the company of a baffled Brit, I’d be really interested to hear from you. I decided I had to stay until at least that Eddy Current show or I’d never forgive myself, so I’ll be around til July, but I can always head back to my old haunt, the fuh-fuh reaky filmset gothic of permanently empty hostel El Capitan. Fear. I’m really quite nice most of the time, do a good mushroom and cashew strudel and put the seat down. Seriously, please get at me on bryonybeynon@gmail.com

A final note: When mysterious guy hardcore has a Facebook group and the Youth Attack store sells t-shirts made from bin liners (how-you-say.. trash bags?) it’s possibly time to admit the mystique you’re crying out for will not be found in manufactured rarity, codified hype, cassette tapes you’ll never play, or some digital cash flow for the gotta-catch-em-all pokemon punks. Please kill me.. as a wise man once said.