Make The Moon Great Again
hello
its been a bit of a stressful week. i had a blood test and the doctor said my veins are filled with little black ovals, "like chia seeds". When I asked what they are the doctor shrugged and looked out the window. There was a dog outside. It was running very fast. "There's more on heaven and earth than dreamt of in your philosophy" the doctor said. I asked if that meant the shapes in my blood stream were in some way beyond science they just wordlessly crinkled their face a bit and opened up a spreadsheet on the computer. It shouldn't be this difficult to navigate the medical system honestly.
I've been trying not to let the ovals prey on my mind (don't let the ovals win) but i've had the most unadorned unmetaphorical anxiety dreams since. in one i wore a gleaming white outfit and immediately spilt a hot chocolate right down it - a big rorschach streak from sternum to crotch. in the other im still wearing my hot chocolate outfit but its late at night and ive lost something in the back seat of a taxi. the driver's tutting loads and im shining my phone torch fruitlessly across the empty leather chairs. what am i even looking for?
i recently and reluctantly punched a trans man as a form of gender affirming care. violence is for boys, you understand, and i let my fists do the talking (im typing this with my fists right now. it's taking ages). this is a true story btw - it's diaristic - this isn't a dry joke about how judith butler queered the concept of hate crime; i'm giving you an insight into my predicaments. and it wasn't as horrific as it sounds; violence as gender performance is a longstanding british tradition. must be nice to be gender affirmed. the closest i've gotten recently was when my partner handed me some make-up wipes and i opened the packet sideways like a packet of crisps.
it's sort of mad we're not doing anything with the moon, isn't it? it's just going spare. we've got the knowhow to get there probably publicly indexed in a wiki and it feels like the world's money is concentrated in the most whim based far-fetched ideas-people ever to slouch across the face of the earth - and yet the moon's just dangling like a low hangling fruit. i'd use it for storage personally. there's no entropy on the moon. it's probably the one place to keep your old cds where they're not going to get disc rot. i think its fascinating all discs are being eaten by the very air - people were so invested in the optical drive. seems mad we're trying to store those things in our moist oxygen rich atmosphere when there's a vacuum waiting just a few miles above us. we all live in these little houses trying to find places to keep our hoover, and yet space is an infinite(?) expanse. i just don't get it. make it make sense. make the moon great again.
Bulletin Board
The current question is: "What are you having for tea?" to which Kit has responded with their tea from last Monday: for my tea I am having greek style flatbreads with halloumi cucumber and tzatziki. I always feel a bit guilty about having both cucumber and tzatziki like it's cannibalistic or something. but a chef would just call it cucumber 2 ways.
maybe I'll put some pomegranate seeds on top, to feel something
To continue the bulletin board, Declan asks: "What was the last thing you ate that surprised you?"
When I was a child I used to like licking keys. There was a flavour not all keys had, but some were bursting with an unforgettable metallic tang. When I was doing my graphics GCSE a man came to speak to us from the paper company and claimed you don't become a master of paper unless you can recognise papers by taste like a wine sommelier.
Taste is wasted on food, is what I'm saying.
Sheffield Previews: Discount Code
Two weeks until the double preview at Regather Works in Sheffield with me and Eric Rushton! Enjoy two almost completely completed comedy shows in the DIY interior of a fruit and vegetable co-operative. To reward you for your fealty you (and yours) can use the discount code RUSHMORL for 30% off. If you already bought tickets and wish you knew about the discount code then, just contact me and we'll just figure it out.
Nicely @ Nottingham Comedy Festival
The first post-fringe item has been added to my upcoming dates. In November I'll be bringing Nicely to Nottingham Comedy Festival. Nicely is a retooled version of the show MidCult I brought to Machynlleth Comedy Festival in the Spring.
I've renamed it because MidCult was named when it was going to be about something radically different. Initially, MidCult (which was a reference to Dwight McDonald's 1960 book of essays "Masscult and Midcult" (which i don't agree with btw!! (i can evoke things without endorsing them!!))) was about my unease about how people had been describing my work lately. I feel like I've received such effusive praise in the last year or so, but it's always been framed around how I'm this mad esoteric avante garde artist, a feral savantist who lives in the very fringes of reality. I'm literally just a guy - my work isn't that weird - I don't need to be othered to be appreciated. I feel like it serves some people's egos to believe my work is some kind of outsider art just because it's got friction and ambiguity. I wanted to demonstrate this point by actually making something avant garde (as I understand it) demonstrating that no one actually wants me to do that - so therefore I must actually be making art with popular appeal in mind, and marketing and target audiences. You know, the normal dirty trappings of entertainment as an industry. A bizarre concept for a show, really - and kind of hostile. Mostly I bottled it on actually making a show that was simply too out there for the audience to tolerate. It was supposed to start in media res during a big family spaghetti dinner in which I play your gigantic disappointed father, face flecked with tomato gravy, trying to work out why you (my collective teenage child) are so rotten and whether you need to be sent to a specialist school where they're allowed to waterboard you. Over time the audience (who are collectively my single wayward child) are encouraged to advocate for themselves, but I won't listen because I'm gigantic. I'm like the size of a lorry. Ideally I'd start normal size, but there's some mechanism that means I inflate by 10-15% every time I raised my voice. Like a mood-operated violet beauregarde. A lot of my ideas end up on the cutting room floor because they're genuinely impossible.
One day though, you know, watch this space. Keep subscribing and I'll find the budget one day.
Instead, Nicely is a bunch of loose vignettes loosely themed around what it means to be kind. At some point (I'm still figuring it out) the show needs to tear itself apart to give everyone what they want.
Upcoming Shows
18th July - Sheffield - Sean Morley and Eric Rushton Edinburgh Fringe Previews
23rd July - Sheffield - Plughole New Material Night
25th July - London - Backchannel at Stanley Arts Comedy Weekend
