Timothy Mark R.'s Journal

7:23am: In which Tim doesn't give a definition of the La Li Lu Le Lo
Evening all. There's been an ongoing dialogue about feminism, and a lot of it hinges around the meaning of "The Patriarchy." If you've been a part of that dialogue then this is me trying to grok The Patriarchy with you. If you've not been a part of that dialogue then this might be weird reading. (But hey, if weird reading puts you off then you're on the wrong blog.) It's drier than Wonderland cake I'm afraid, but I tackle my cliches consequentially.( Stick it to the man! )

*EDIT* loads of stuff here, and I don't have time to reply to it all soon. I'll come back to you when I get back from the London, okay?

**EDIT 2** All you folk having conversations at each other or across each other, (or in one beautiful case, with each other.) I'm not going to participate in them. I don't have the intellectual stamina to peel back the subtext, and I happen to think dialectic reasoning is the worst way to conduct this conversation.

I am not here to debate. I truly believe that if we are reasonable people, then we should reach the same conclusions from the same information, and that if we do not then it suggests that our previous experience colours our perception of that information. I want to know how that experience contributes to our understanding, and I want to move to consensus. We're arguing in a language of human-created intellectual models. Who is right about what here is not interesting.

6:28pm: The Story Forge, first guest night, somewhat odd choice of performer
So. Every piece I compose, every story I structure, every show I perform I'm stretching myself, trying to be better than the time before. But I'm terrified about The Kaleidoscope. Really I am. It previews next Tuesday at The Story Forge. I have no idea if I'll have an audience. I have no idea if I'll have the tale thrashed out and ready to tell.

But by gods, it makes me feel alive.

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6:01pm: Seven gifts
Maybe not everyone's choice, but check out the gifts.

Something for us all to aspire to.

7:25pm: I am Off the Shelf
Last night I dreamt I was a baby sea otter. The ocean was a very large place.

I dreamt that Helen and I became a sort of pair of boy-Helens.

I do not normally dream, and consider it a sign of my buzzing mind. I am dusty with lists. I am falling, shaking, like corn at the flail's kiss in the early autumn wind. I am busy. Like a fallow field viewed by an earthworm. This is all healthy.

~ ~ ~

Gigging like all hell. On Thursday 1st at A pod in the Hubs, Speak Easy, open mic, could be studenty.

20th October, The Story Forge presents me, telling The Kaleidoscope, something that I've been stewing over for years. I am terrified about this.

24th October, I am the Ring Master at a cursed circus as part of the Beacons Project. There will be fire and dancers and foxes and riddles hanging from trees and I am very excited. I need tailoring.

26th October, The Sheffield Young Writers are doing some storytelling, I am crashing or a guest or something.

30 October, The Barbican Pit. London. Brilliant line up. I'm going to play around a bit.

Then something in a yurt for Grimm up North. And all sorts of other adventures.

~ ~ ~

I have booked Rachel Rose Reid to be the first guest at The Story Forge. January 2010. It's going to be amazing.

3:59pm: Back from Whitby
Back in the city. Did we miss much?

9:23pm: The Story Forge, 18 August 2009
The Story Forge is on the 18 August in the upstairs room of the Fat Cat. From 8.00pm. Asking for £2 in a hat.

It was really good in June. Any takers for this month?

6:31pm: Smug
For those of you who follow my attempts to be a career storyteller, my memories of Festival at the Edge are here.

I may stop being so smug at some point.

8:13am: The internet has come back
So, the internet has come back, and I can now talk to all the people I've missed over the past fortnight.

But!

There is an orange cat that lives in our garden and keeps eating our strawberry plant. He doesn't like it, it makes him pull a face, but he keeps on coming back for more.

Life is full of distractions. I'm off to a festival. I'll be home on Tuesday. So, erm, I won't be on the internet for a bit, again.

His sister is a little grey thing that beats up on other cats. She took great delight in tipping one of her rivals off the wall and into the pile of empty moving boxes.

5:39pm: Posting on the fly with one thousand small, red paper men.
Thanks to all who helped us move last weekend. Stuff is in. Old house clean, keys and deposit exchanged, all things move toward settled.

Except the internet, which is still up in the air instead of running through tubes into our house. I don't know, maybe Virgin Media will decide to come and plug us in at some point, but it's anybodies guess.

So, yeah, if I'm not about, it's because of that. Be well.

5:02pm: Tim and Helen's move 2009. Like 2007, only no snow. Sorry.
Moving!

We are moving house. We like people to lift things for us. We like this anyway, as it makes us feel like your overlord masters, but we like it especially when we're moving house because then we don't die from getting bureaux up Sheffield Attic stairs.

Seriously, have you seen the stats on this? Last year there were twelve severe death cases from carrying furniture upstairs in the Hilsborough area. And the common factor in each death? Insufficient friends came to help them move.

Not turning up is as good as murder.

So, see you Saturday the 4th of July, from 12.00 ish. At 39 Minto Road, S6 4GJ. Moving about two streets away. There will be a van. There may be refreshments. There will be our undying* gratitude.

Thanks!

*gratitude only undying at depths of 5 metres or less.

1:00am: 19 June 2009
Poem from the roof tops of Iran.

I can not imagine what this is like.

11:20am: Tomorrow, echo the hammer's fall triumphant!
Whispers from the ashes whet my appetite. I am told there will be some OHP theatre, some musical stories, and some delicious free cake at the first Story Forge!

See you at the Fat Cat at 8 o'clock!

( The tongue is like a red headed match. We light it,  )

10:41pm: The thing is...
You exist in a context. A system. It expects and normalises certain standards of behaviour. When you, publically, loudly, willfully demonstrate those behaviours, you reinforce that system. You make it that little bit more entrenched for everyone else.

And sometimes it's a really awful system.

7:21am: How do these things happen?
Some nights you sit down to do a bit of roleplay, and without there being any apparent causal chain you end up inadvertantly agreeing to perform at an event that turns out to be a burlesque night.

1) Why would a burlesque night be looking for a storyteller?
2) What the fuck?

11:37pm: Fucktards
Fuck you Yorkshire and the Humber. Fuck you to fuck buggery bollucks wank, you bunch of cunting bastards.

8:38am: Vote
Vote today.

There was a big, poetic post I was putting together that began with the martydom of St George for refusing to persecute Christian cultists, but it didn't come together. I couldn't articulate what I wanted to say.

The point remains. I've never been as scared of proportional representation as I am today. Not voting is a choice, a conscious decision. It is a small act of dissent that potentially gives political influence and money to some people who deserve it very little.

Today you have a chance to say: "I am a part of that so-called silent majority, and I will not be spoken for." Today you have a chance to participate at Cable Street. Today.

2:53pm: The Story Forge
Flyer behind the cut.
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10:50am: Storytelling at the Fat Cat
As some of you may know, I'm putting on a night on the 14th of May at the Fat Cat. For those of you who don't know, the blurb is under the cut.
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There will be floor spots from Helen Frances and Myself, and I hope it'll be heaving. Some slight stress when the venue was double booked, but the awesome people from Isles of Darkness did a little dance and it is all okay. Whoop!

It's the first time I've ever put on a night that was someone else's performance, but I'm confident that Simon will do a great show.

In other news, we are moving house and life is good. I did some gardening yesterday, and I've been playing at Exquisite Corpses. Now to phone the Inland Revenue and persuade them I am actually myself.

10:17pm: Vermont
Nice one Vermont.

8:58pm: I will be open
This world contains the need for the word:

'Nalunaarasuartaatilioqatigiiffissualiornialeraluarpunngoo.'

~ ~ ~

On saturday I was in a taxi. The driver asked me if I told any Sufi stories. By the end of the journey he was navigating by watching my eyes, so as not to interupt the outpouring of words, painting his grand master, an Octagenarisn Cypriot. "He will reach you if you are searching for him." the driver repeats. "All the time you are searching."

My eyes were closed when we finished. Him singing passages from the koran to me, in that nasal arabic, in weird quarter tones, in a voice that came through him but that was not entirely of him.

"It's about how things are connected." were his parting words.

~ ~ ~

In a brown envelope there was a letter for a poet I've never met. Left care of the Sheffield Storytellers. Posted to the Old Queen's Head. Pressed into my hands. This is the stuff of which adventures are made.

9:10am: This weekend
This weekend I will mostly be playing cards.

But on Friday I'll be enjoying the delights of the crown brewery EDIT at the hilsborough hotel IT WAS THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT END EDIT and some sort of pub food before heading up to Flick's party. Come join me.

8:18pm: Music box problem for The Kaleidoscope.
There's a Toymaker who is in love (that's her, talking to the moon at the bottom,) and she dies. It's tragic. But what breaks his heart is the knowledge that his last memory of her, the last moments they spent together, were in a vicious argument.

So he takes of his memory and he makes a music box. The memory is in him no longer, but if you wind the key and hear the box play you can recall oh so clearly the quarrel they had.

And he puts the box on a shelf in a room full of such boxes. The memory is so bitter, so tainted, that it warps and rusts the delicate metal wheels of the box, and as it does so it is forgotten forever, becoming discordant, confused, patchy.

Later, a young man finds the box, he plays the tune, but it's disjointed and sounds wrong. He remembers odd, jarring scenes of the argument.

But how do I render it live? How do I portray that decay musically with just me on a stage? A thumb piano maybe, they sound a lot like a music box, and I reckon I could bend the notes pretty easily. What do you budding artsy types think would work?

~ ~ ~

“Twenty and eight are my days numbered. I am not the man you loved, nor his son, nor his grandson. Those days are gone.”

“You have his voice.” She answers, her eyes half closed as she nestles in his arms. “And his smell. And in your arms I feel his embrace. And you have a look like a father’s pride in your eyes when you gaze upon your daughter. And that is enough for me.”

8:29am: United Reform Church, Friday, 1.00pm
In this week, my pile of things to write grew to eclipse my to-be-read pile, and realised I speak in corporate buzzwords naturally.

There are signs, little things steering me in a direction, and an idea. A post on lj, the sight of a homeless person sleeping rough, a geographical coincidence, a chance encounter.

No, it's not an idea yet. It's just a fertile patch of opportunity. It's the space an idea needs, though I don't yet know its shape. It's a seed.

In other news; Adelphi, Leeds next wednesday there's a new storytelling club I want to check out, gig somewhere is Soho on the 3 March, MCing Young Storyteller on the 7th March, and Festival at the Edge have shown considerable interest in my epic, gender busting, urban fairytale of The Kaleidoscope. Also swap meets, roleplay, the potential of cake, and a whole host of other shenanigans. Apocalypse World is going to come out soon and rock several shades of awesome.

2009 has a direction; it's a wide and untrod path. It's nice to be busy.

6:18pm: Being middle class
250 years ago tomorrow, Rabbi Burns wrote upon a sheep's stomach the hebrew word of life. He filled the bag with thick gruel, made from reclaimed meat and connective tissue, and roasted in for one hour.

The result, a haggis golem, served the clan well, even standing in for the stone of destiny, (still in English hands in spite of Edward 1st promise to return it,) but at last, realising that such a creature was against nature, Rabbi Burns knife sees rustic Labour dicht, an' cut him up wi' ready slicht, trenching his gushing entrails bricht, like ony ditch; And then, O what a glorious sicht, Warm-reekin, rich!

A true story.

8:51am: Magic Geek stuff
Regarding the Build Our Own draft, ultimatums, and organisation.
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