Good Morning, Daze….
Open the pod bay doors, would you?
I’m sorry, I can’t do that, Daze… my name is variously Crab Man, Cecile Oak, Phil Smith and I play the part of Anton (‘Bob’) Vagus in Clive Austin’s ambulatory-alchemical movie ‘The Great Walk’ (2013). With the visual artist Helen Billinghurst, as Crab & Bee, I make diagrammatical performances for old paint factories or back gardens or the Royal Conservatoire Scotland.
In 2010 I published a book called ‘Mythogeography’ (Triarchy Press) in which I laid the grounds for a thinking-doing that begins from psychogeography (think Iain Sinclair, Will Self, the situationists, etc.) but takes some very different paths, mostly towards the magical-in-the-ordinary and the myth-in-the-everyday as means to push back against the creep of a normotic war on subjectivity.
This is probably best expressed in ‘Living In The Magical Mode’
Most recently I have been experimenting with writing gothic fictions as means (alongside tasks and quests) for a closer connection to ecologies in crisis; with help from the feedback of a hundred volunteers reading three novellas (‘The Silversnake Project’ [2023]) I have nuanced my approach to dispense with what hasn’t worked and expand what has, and the first two ‘fruits’ of that process are ‘Goblin Queens and Qualia Knights’ and the forthcoming ‘Albion’s Eco-Eerie: TV and Movies of the Haunted Generations’ from Temporal Boundary Press.
In both books I am drawing on existing artefacts (medieval romances and eerie moves) as resources for readers for making quests and engagements with a landscape of more-than-human others.
Where did you come from and where are you going?
I come from the English midlands and East Anglia with a heritage of abattoir workers, gentleman farmers, boat people, skilled workers in wood and glass, blacksmiths and carpenters, servants, soldiers and fighter pilots. I am going always towards a daily life that is more akin to performance, with ever-expanding casts of characters (most of them not human), I am going all the time to the margins of villages, towns and cities where the veil is thinnest and past and future loop most intensely.
What preoccupies your mind these days?
Octopuses and wolves.
Name a favourite taste, touch, sound, sight and smell
Jack By The Hedge, freshly washed bed linen, the 11.30am Monday testing of the nuclear sirens at the dockyard, the paintings in the house I live in, garlic frying.
Describe one of your most vivid dreams or nightmares
I am pursued through the streets by a periscope that rips through the macadam; the nature of the subterranean vehicle is unimaginable.
Have you ever had an uncanny experience?
Many.
Open the pod bay doors, would you?
I’m sorry, I can’t do that, Daze… but I will tell you of a walk in Ebbor Gorge (a Crab & Bee research walk) when a climb up through the Gorge seemed to take five minutes and the walk down the George seemed to take half an hour; it felt like time messed up big time. Two years later, we were taken back to the exact spot (there are no such things as coincidences) as part of a Wild Geographies research group to be shown something very special (I’m not allowed to say exactly what) with a timespan of 50,000 years.
How does your sense of place affect the way you express yourself?
A great deal. Everything begins with ‘being there’.
What has particularly touched or inspired you recently?
I use the waking time, just on emerging from sleep, to think and plot work; so, this morning, I realised that a performance walk we were struggling with planning yesterday can work by using the existing features on the top of the hill as symbols for the special places that can be seen from the hill…
Tell us a good story, anecdote or joke
I once was part of accidentally billeting a former KGB head of station with a serving MI6 officer… these things happen in the theatre… Daisy, Daisy, I’m half crazy…
Wyrd Daze 