I’m thinking of the word that the ‘undercover operative’ Kemper Boyd, lead character in James Ellroy’s American Tabloid uses to define a certain part of his working practice – ‘compartmentalisation’. For him it means trying to keep his very many aliases/operational personas/cover-stories and supposed allegiances under control and (most of all) separate from each other. Compartmentalisation. And for him it’s crucial because he’s working simultaneously for the FBI, the CIA, Kennedy, the Mafia, the Cuban resistance and of course himself – constantly juggling a lot of competing interests.
I don’t have so many people that I work for (and thankfully none of them so hardcore) but especially when I’m trying to do six or seven different things/projects at the same time (which is almost all of the time) and trying to live my life, I find myself – walking to the studio, or on the bus to the swimming pool – repeating that word just like Boyd does, although unlike him I’m laughing at myself. Compartmentalisation, compartmentalisation, compartmentalisation. For him the practice works because he’s a crazed but super-effective, violent, controlling (and I guess fictional) person. He can separate all his stories. Run six identities back to back with no leakage. Stay more or less in control of the game. (I’m trying to remember how the books leave him though – if he even survives? But then following plot is never really my strong point).

Anyhow, for me I don’t know. Even thinking about this word, this topic, comes because as of now I’m trying to write two ‘kind-of-blogs’ – one about the process of making Forced Entertainment’s new theatre performance The World In Pictures (you can see it at http://www.forcedentertainment.com/blog/index.html) and the other one, this one, a kind of open experiment leading up to my eventual presence or arrival (or explosion) in Graz much later this year during Styrian Autumn festival 2006 at which point I have some projects (alone and in collaboration with my partner Vlatka Horvat) in the exhibition Protections, at Kunsthaus Graz. My chances of keeping these two ‘kind-of-blogs’ (and/or the rest of my life) in any way compartmentalised seem pretty slight. And the fact that I am, at the same time, also trying to (1) complete the second draft of a novel (2) work on ideas with Hugo Glendinning for the Venice Biennale of Architecture and (3) do very many other small pieces of writing, researching and organising etc means that pretty soon by my guess nothing will be compartmentalised at all. There will be leakage. Stories and order will not be maintained. Instead my house will continue to pile up beneath paper, computer equipment/cables, rehearsal video tapes, ‘research’ DVDs (ie at this point, Caveman movies), dirty clothes and hastily unpacked foodshopping that is destined to be ‘stored’ where ever it happens to be put down when it first comes out of the bag. The computer desktop will continue to pile up also, with inconsistently labelled documents, downloaded music files, rehearsal pictures, calendars and Untitled Folders. Some day, as the general character says, in Apocalypse Now, some day this war is going to end.