The Purple Man Living in the Closet is Not a Metaphor

It's all a big mess, you see. A huge, terrific mess, and it can never be fixed.
The stage goes dark with a crack, as a lightbulb falls to the floor. A man in the great tower of STUFF on stage right begins fiddling with gears and levers, but only seems to generate sparks. In the flashes of fitful illumination, human beings dressed in white briefs and long fur coats scurry amidst the wreckage like exposed cockroaches. A set disintegrates with every step of the performer, beginning with a door crumbling inwards as an ever-so-tired worker comes open. A man flees from a falling pile of boxes over thirty feet high. And there's this man, in a purple dress, who just wants to get back to the one man party he's hosting in the closet.

It's a strange, dark and terrible world made flesh on stage, you see, but in these days of panic and uncertainty it all feels so terribly familiar. There's no music that isn't beaten out by gibbering performers on the backs of tables, and a vast silence is felt, vast and bloated and waiting, just beyond the chaos so well choreographed downstage. Tunnels of light are forged with a few flickering spots here and there, and performers tend to be lit for their shapes rather than their expressions. What expressions we do see are always those of fear. Well, except for the purple man. He has his own miniature disco ball in the closet and he's doing fine.

It's not all kooky silent French madness, though it certainly is that. There is much comic timing and much laughter (monkeys like to laugh at other monkeys in pain), and there is so much detritus falling about that you are a bit shocked that no one gets conked in the head. A woman has gravity reverse on her out of sheer belligerence, and men in coats bury her under furniture for convenience. A vast and terrible war is played out between paraplegics over a glass of water. What does it all mean? The title translates to 'suddenly', and that's how it is, isn't it? All your proud and noble efforts, and along comes an ass with a wheelbarrow to take away the glass of water. 

Maybe it's a bit long, and maybe it's a bit shadowy and, as some sorts in the seats around me commented, it's very French. I dunno. While I was watching those poor benighted fools onstage, I was reminded of the joy of seeing limbs flail amidst dim lights, and shapes descend into vast caverns beyond easy sight. I wished to rush onto stage and hug them, for the desire to be among them, and dig through their junk. Hope persists, but it has begun to gnaw, I admit.

All that aside, it was a sight, oh yes it was. I was struck, as the lights (really) rose and the public twittered to itself, how one voice was heard to sneer "Yes, but all that could be done by anyone with a lot of hard work."

As if that were an insult.

The show was L'Immediêt by Camille Boitel, and here is were you can see it:

http://www.mimefest.co.uk/limmediat2012.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WD0BXDZHuKA&feature=related

A Year in Time

Gromley here, students of the mystic arts!
And so a year has passed. A year rambling, work, tangents and most mighty explosions of creativity! The heavens have been shattered, the earth has boiled, the seas turned red and cats have developed opposable thumbs. Destiny has been thwarted, and fate embarrassed. Nothing was, and everything shall be.
Not that it all makes a lick of difference of course because NO ONE WROTE ANYTHING DOWN.
That's right. Verg was a little electric kindle of nervous energy at the progenation of this blog. "The People," his hiss, "The Wonder!" he cackled! I rubbed my hands with glee (though I rub my hands without cease, for they be stitched together most thoroughly) and Mumbles picked up a crowbar and started smashing the car windows in. All was as it should be. But what happened? What was the ruin of our mighty scheme?
   Our Doom had a name and it was BELPHEGOR.

   That's right, fellow devotees of demonology. Belphegor needs no introduction to the likes of you. Nor does he need an introduction to the hordes of cloying "Belphegor - the Death/Thrash/Metal Band", whom dominated the millions of pages of google image I had to wade through to uncover the image above. But enough of this! Belphegor is real, and he had his brown-encrusted claws around our hearts for the last year.
   Belphegor, you see, is the demon of sloth. No great deed gets done within his kingdom, not when there are billions of hours of distraction available at such pits of despair as www.youtube.com, or when utterly pointless games may be played and won for no other gain but the loss of a few more hours to suffer through before death (www.armorgames.com). He makes mannequins of our flesh, and polymer-cheese slices or our souls. He is BELPHEGOR, and were he not trapped on that toilet with an eternal case of heavenly-inspired constipation, he would not just kick our allegorical asses, but rend them to the very atomic fibers. Fear the coming of the Satanic Suppository that will free Belphegor, my children! Flee from the Toilet Paper of Tantalus that will cleanse his bowels!
   Thus drowned in self-loathing, indifference and home-sickness did we loose a year, a year!, of our lives to that foulness you see above. That year is irretrievable, and the Reaper draws closer with every moment spent on the electric siren that is the net. Even now, Verg and the rest of us struggle to be truly free of his machinations - a struggle, I fear, that will last yet for many decades.
   But wait! There is hope. Like the Serpent of Midgard itself, our body wriggles and stretches within the icy realm of Belphegor's influence. Inspired by friends, family and our own perverse dreams, we come to blink, scratch our eyes and awaken. We move again!

  
   As part of our methodology of discipline, Verg, Mumbles and I are determined to post one of these rambles every week. They may be dull. They may be useless. No one may be listening. But the route to success is littered with bizarre activities and we, my friends, shall be bizarre!
   So stay tuned! Harken onto our struggles! Defeat and death, of Victory and (eventually anyway) death, lie before us! Strike up the trumpets! Call out the guard! Release the hounds and feed the monkey! The days have just begun!

THIS HAS BEEN A

"GRUMBLES WITH GROMLEY" 

MOMENT

Gromley says: Haphaestus Hegemony!