Crazy Night

Even by my standards, Friday was a crazy night!!

I had chanced upon an event by the Last Tuesday Society entitled An Evening of Phantasmagoria, held in subterranean Victorian vaults on Chiswell Street. It could easily have been another Punchdrunk installation – the barely lit vaults were decorated with gloriously overflowing bowls of fruit, rotting pheasants, blood stained severed dolls heads peaking out from tiny battered sackcloth bags, assorted animal skulls, and a wide range of tempting sweets. In the toilets, surgical gloves and water pistols had been carefully laid out. The audience included various intellectuals and believers, members of the London Institute of Pataphysics in resplendent Lytton Strachey beards, Oxbridge drinking club types yearning for the good old days of Empire, glamourous ladies, Goths, thespians, decadents, romantics, fantasists, and me.

i didn't feel it appropriate to take pictures of the attendees, so here is a picture of Lytton Strachey

The evening began with a talk by Marina Warner on the quest from the Age of Reason onwards for the understanding of the soul/lifeforce, or at least how the imagination has devised certain metaphors and images for the soul, taking in Phatasmagoria, Magic Lantern shows, waxworks, automata, and the performances of various mediums.

I then donned 3D glasses to watch an extraordinary film by Zoë Beloff called
“Shadow Land or Light from the Other Side” based on the 1897 autobiography of Elizabeth DEspérance, a materialization medium who could produce full body apparitions. All I could think whilst I was watching it, surrounded by gorgeous ladies in costume varying from Victorian to Gothic rubberwear, with many and varied gashes and wounds and injuries about their personages, was that this was fucking insane! The intensity of the effort that went into the film, and the evening as a whole was staggering.

this is a picture I borrowed from the Last Tuesday website which i think captures the mood of the evening

In another room Professor Mervyn Heard, a leading authority on such things, presented a Magic Lantern Show using a genuine and beautiful golden projector and original Victorian slides, including some wonderfully ghoulish images, a bit of psychedelia, and a touch of the bawdy.

By the end of all this I was certainly in an altered mental state, for a mad-cap dash across the City to the Roundhouse for the Super Furry Animals. It was like being transformed from gas to solid, vapour to liquid, walking in on this gig (SFA had been on for 20 minutes). I could only circle the outer perimeter of the performance space, taking in the spectacle of a superb band at full throttle and a gloriously inebriated and ecstatic crowd. SFA rocked hard and loud, looking and sounding great. I caught just under an hour so it was worth the effort, but the circumstances meant I was somewhat removed from the core of the gig.

What a night. In many ways it sums up this blog – the growth of my appreciation of SFA frontman Gruff Rhys from something of a running gag to a musical genius, the search for sensation, the rise of the mind-altering performance space. These conflicting yet somehow connected (by their crazed protaganist) worlds, of the ghostly Victorian gothic and the manic son et lumiere power of the rock gig, are at the core of my novel-in-progress and this crazy night may yet serve as the ultimate expression of it all.