Slow Hole To China

Robozombies pt. II

2009-06-06T23:58:00.001+01:00

Here follows the transcript from my communications with 118 188:

8 Feb 2009 19:37

What is the total number of
books on statistics in
the world?

The total world flow of book
copies was
approximately 4.0 billion
books. Text us again soon.
thx!

Yeah I can google that but
that’s not what I asked.

Every day we receive a few
questions, like yours, we can’t
answer. Ask us anything. thx.

31 Mar 2009 02:55

What pizza places are open in
Scarborough at 3am?

You may try Pizza Pronto on
01723501455, Pizza King on
01723375373 & Pizza Hut on
01723360706.

4 Jun 2009 22:04

What is the most common
global date of birth?

There is no common global
date of birth. Every second, a
child is born just as another
person dies. thx.
Text 118 118 and Ask us
Anything

4 Jun 2009 22:24

You’ll be pleased to know that
when I asked you what the
most common global date of
birth is you replied ‘There isn’t
one.’ Thankfully the folk at AQA
don’t take people’s
money for nothing and
promptly replied with the
global date, the UK date and
the least common date. I won’t
tell you what these dates are
because that’s your job, not
mine. This was the third
question I’ve asked 118 188
and the third time you have
completely failed to supply an
answer. No doubt you’ve
charged me for this text as
well but it’s worth the £1 to be
able to tell you that I’ll never
use your service again cos
you just got pwned by AQA. X

No charge. Please contact our
Customer Care Team on
08003891118. thx!

Zeus and Odin for Pearly Whites.

2009-06-06T23:57:00.000+01:00

Here is the problem with religion so far as I can see it:

(
humankind has answered its sense of mortality and insecurity in ways that, after centuries of rational battles, have been patently shown to be false. I rarely enter into religious arguments nowadays because, what’s the point? Either you understand rational truths or you don’t. Either you realise that there’s an infinity we can never comprehend, or you think that the trial that is your everyday existence is rewarded with eternal bliss.

Take a moment to try and understand eternal bliss. Think of the happiest thought you can. Then imagine re-living that moment of perpetual bliss for every moment that you will and ever could exist for, barring this, universally, tiny, painful, and … lifespan that dictates the rest of your eternal sense of being.

I enjoy the present, who I am, and what happens to me at the moment of my existence as I realise it. So, no matter what the truth might be, when I die I will experience something so alien to my conscious existence as I know it now that it might as well not concern me.

Which is easy for me to say; but it’s not like I never drop to my knees and pray. I did just that today, walking across Bruntsfield Links, a patch of grass in Edinburgh that is particularly pleasurable when viewed with a friend and some golf clubs, while a summer sun sets at around 9pm. And as a scorched, shining, rarity of a weekend passed away I dropped to my knees and prayed to the God(esse)s of the Weather that this could last as long as I desired.

Wouldn’t it be marvellous, joyous and blessed if we, the people who barely know what warmth is, were to bask in this heat for as long as we know we deserve. I implore you, Sun: burn me, bleach me, evaporate me.

When it’s sunny people appear. They must all be cooped up in their burrows until they blossom here in these arid conditions and realise that people aren’t just distant images in text, screen and sound, they move and exist. Perhaps now, if the heat persists, we can live through an upheaval, a social re-appraisal and re-imagining of what we actually are that isn’t 50+ years old.

And all of my pathetic dream rests upon the Weather to succeed. Fate as I appreciate it is held in Its personified hands. So I direct my irrational human desire for an answer from the Chaos not to moralistic, judgmental and totally inconsistent entities, but to the Weather, to an energy pattern we can barely understand our own influence of, to something that we rely on in an obsessive fashion, a force who’s existence we could never debate and are entirely beholden to, an unstoppable epoch of destruction and creation.

Now my baking, searing, parched, days have a purpose I never before could have imagined. Now my hatred of the clouds, the shadows and the icy wind is justified.

Join me, free yourself through God(esse)s you know exist but can never influence. Embrace the subsequent liberty.
)

Gatwick

2009-05-28T14:28:00.001+01:00

This is a story about a dog named Gatwick who was called Gatwick.

Gatwick was born on the 16th of May 1992 to Paddy and Sam(antha) although Gatwick wasn’t named until three months later on the 24th August when Gatwick was bought by Joan and Elizabeth. Gatwick never had any real concept of names.

Her parents had not named her, they had no concept of names. She was taken before they understood who she was and so forgot her. Joan and Elizabeth named her Gatwick. Gatwick could never understand this supposed act of kindness.

Here is the understanding Gatwick had of Gatwick: Joan or Elizabeth make a sound. I associate that sound with a response due to a period of learning where said response is rewarded with… rewards. Except Gatwick didn’t understand it like that, because Gatwick had no concept of names.

That’s not to say Gatwick did not have a personality. Gatwick was as individual as any other dog that ever existed, and if Fate had decided to give Gatwick a personality akin to yours then Gatwick would no doubt have hated the name Gatwick.

But It hadn’t, so this is how Gatwick's day went: get up, find food, sleep.

Except It didn’t, because every part of Gatwick’s day was as individual as any other dog’s.

But It did, because Gatwick could never understand names.

And so Gatwick functioned as Gatwick functioned. Gatwick jumped, and caught, and ran, and barked, and slept, and licked, and pawed, stood guard, and panted, and hid, and curled, and slobbered, and malted, and mated, and urinated, and walked, and ate, and fetched, and drank, protected, and comforted, and loved, and assured, and wept, and died.

But Gatwick never knew this because Gatwick had no concept of names.

And Gatwick functioned as Gatwick functioned.

So Joan and Elizabeth loved Gatwick. Gatwick was their pet.

Then Joan and Elizabeth disappeared. The people that Gatwick had come to associate with security were replaced with cold cages and anonymous bowls. Gatwick was sad, although Gatwick didn’t know this for reasons you will know by now. But Gatwick was sad, just as Gatwick was happy. Everything Gatwick had come to associate with sanctuary was distant and forgotten.

Because Gatwick could not rationalise, Gatwick had no need for memory as you do.

One day passed as the next; Gatwick did not know there would be a tomorrow any more than Gatwick knew there was a yesterday, nor that there would be an end to what had a beginning.

Until Gatwick saw Joan and Elizabeth again and jumped and Joan and Elizabeth remembered why they had called Gatwick Gatwick. They laughed and rejoiced and did things Gatwick never could. If Joan and Elizabeth had understood that Gatwick could not be like them they might have been sad just as Gatwick was happy. Gatwick was back where Gatwick belonged and functioned as Gatwick functioned.

Gatwick died on the 29th of February 2004 and Gatwick never forgot the happiest moment of her life.

No Escape

2009-05-19T17:15:00.002+01:00

Some friends of mine are doing this fundraiser and one of them asked me to put the info up here in the mistaken belief that people apart from myself and those searching for 'china pussy' on Google actually come here. True fact.

Anyway, if you're here and want to take a break from all that budget internet porn you've been looking for, are in the Edinburgh area and NOT on the Sex Offenders Register, pop along to this. It should be fun and interesting psychologically torturing a group of students trapped in pods.

NO ESCAPE: A joint fundraiser for the Open Rights Group and EUTC’s
Edinburgh Fringe production of “Escape” by Matt Wieteska.
Live coverage commences at 3pm on the 24th May: http://www.facebook.com/l/;www.mayflowerindustries.com

Edinburgh University Theatre Company is proud to announce NO ESCAPE, a
fundraiser for its 2009 Edinburgh Fringe Production of Escape by Matt
Wieteska. The event is being organised in conjunction with the Open
Rights Group, a charitable organisation that aims to protect civil
liberties when they are challenged through the incorrect use or
regulation of technology.

Escape will open at 10.30pm on the 9th of August at Venue 49: The
Bedlam Theatre. The show will then run at 1pm from the 10th - 29th of
August, excluding Sundays. Tickets will be priced at $3 on the 9th and
then at $6 / $5 conc. for the remainder of the run.

NO ESCAPE will begin at 3pm on Sunday 24th of May. Members of the
production team will be sealed inside hand-made replicas of the escape
pods used by the characters in the show. A continuous live feed will
broadcast the crew’s resilience in the face of their solitary
confinement. Encased in geodesic spheres of four-foot diameter, they
will be subjected to twenty-minutes of aural stress-testing every two
hours. This will consist of samples chosen by members of the public,
ranging from music to white noise. With limited food rations and no
distractions or stimulations beyond their own voices, the crew will
experience the conditions survived by characters in the show. After a
mandatory period of twenty-four hours confinement, their endurance
will be further put to the test as they compete to be the final
survivor.

Proceeds will be split between the Open Rights Group and the EUTC’s
production costs. Formed in 2005, ORG is a grassroots technology
organisation which exists to protect civil liberties wherever they are
threatened by the poor implementation and regulation of digital
technology. These are our “Digital Rights”. ORG aims to preserve and
extend traditional civil liberties in the digital world, and to raise
media awareness where these liberties have been abused. Further
details can be found at http://www.facebook.com/l/;www.openrightsgroup.org , and all press
enquiries should be sent to michael@openrightsgroup.org .

The Edinburgh University Theatre Company is a vibrant, student-run
organisation in the heart of Edinburgh. Staging over forty shows every
year with an award-winning presence at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe,
EUTC is committed to excellence in new theatre. Further details are
available at http://www.facebook.com/l/;www.bedlamtheatre.co.uk . Between September and April,
all press enquiries should be sent to marketing@bedlamtheatre.co.uk.
During the summer, please contact press@bedlamfringe.co.uk.

To contact the NO ESCAPE team, please email
producer@mayflowerindustries.com. For more information about the event
or the show, please visit http://www.facebook.com/l/;www.mayflowerindustries.com

Cometh the Hat, Cometh the Man.

2009-05-19T17:06:00.002+01:00

I have a hat dilemma.

I’m a big fan of hats. As a child I used to press my nose against the hedges of Ascot Races and admire all those fine people wearing such luxurious hats. Ever since I’ve dreamed of having my very own hat of which I can be proud.

And I found it. A brown Toledo. I don’t know what ‘Toledo’ means, I’ve only heard the word before in a Soledad Brothers song called ‘Mean Ol’ Toledo’ so that doesn’t help, so far I’ve yet to see my hat express any emotions, cruel or otherwise. It’s slightly perverse, then, that I’ve developed a powerful feeling of affection for this Toledo. Maybe I’m a sucker for unrequited love.

And why a hat? It’s not because of my childhood spent envying those at the Races. That never happened. A love of hats can probably be given a social or psychological or political or religious explanation. But there’s nothing self-evident to me at this time about why I love hats. I just do.

More people should wear hats. I firmly believe this. Everyone can find a hat that suits them and that hat, being the singular object it is, will invariably express something about the individual to the world, be it conscious or not.

I know a handful of people that really wear hats and each one is as fitting and unique as the other. Invariably they walk with an air of confidence, a stride that says, ‘Yes, this is a hat. I am proud to wear it because it says something about me and myself.’ This self-affirming mantra is sadly essential to any hat wearing.

Because I feel acutely aware that maybe wearing a hat may make me look like what might be classed as ‘a prick’. A Toledo can best be described as a trilby. They were worn lots in the 20s and 30s. I also own a pair of brogues. These were also worn in the 20s and 30s. Sometimes I wear the two together and if I’m feeling particularly extrrrrrrrravagant I’ll go the whole hog and throw in some tweed trousers, shit (shirt) and braces.

Why my subconscious makes me dress up as a half-hearted throwback to a lanky 30s gangster is a question I’m leaving for my mid-life crisis therapy sessions, but my crushing hat neurosis won’t leave me be. Do people think I’m showing off when I wear a hat? I don’t think that’s what I’m doing. Maybe my hat offends people. Do gangsters still wear trilbies? Does saving it only for special occasions make it become a thing? It’s probably all in my head and no one notices or cares that I happen to be wearing a hat. Why are people smiling/laughing when they walk past me? Would mummy and daddy approve of my hat?

And so on.

But that doesn’t matter. I have found my hat and I am happy with it. My hat can’t express emotions. I doubt it cares.

NSDF Reviews

2009-04-25T18:50:00.005+01:00

Here's the stuff I wrote while on holiday at Scarborough. I've even put it in some kind of order.

Wilkommen to NSDF

2009-04-25T18:50:00.003+01:00

The world is in catastrophic meltdown. The social-economic theories of the last 15 years have been exposed as gobbledegook fan fiction where the main character turns out to be an incompetent dragon who slays all the villagers and retires on a nice pension horde, a lifelong (apparent) virgin is dispensing advice to millions of fanatical followers about how best to prevent the spread of a preventable disease by not preventing it, and a woman has died from cervical cancer.

But! like a giant, black, monolithic rock (rock) rising up to smash against the tides of chaos, the National Student Drama Festival has been re-galvanised 358 days since it last died by the nomadic students who, like salmon, are drawn back to the seacoast once a year to do… things. Possibly involving mixed metaphors.

It’s a grand entrance but as you read this everything else around you will be trying as hard as it can to be grand, which might be slightly bizarre given that those who have been before will already know what to expect and so are likely to be unimpressed, while those that haven’t might well be using this paper to wipe away the tears of fear and anguish, so adding to the trauma with bright lights, sounds and directives is just going to make them twitch more. But then we wouldn’t be here if we didn’t like a show.

But we wouldn’t be here if we didn’t care either. And we do care. About you. The Festival-goer, whoever you may be. Although in this case only if you haven’t been before and need some helpful advice on what the hell an SJT is and why you’d want to be in one. If this is you then you’ve come to the right place. Below is a comprehensive guide to anything, everything and nothing you need to know about the titbits of Scarborough and the Festival. For best results, tear out this page, put it in your pocket and carry it around with you so that you can reference it without warning.

Scarborough: A History

Scarborough is a town. It was founded in 1789 by a Yorkshire man with a boat and an eye for water. He lived here undisturbed for 75 years until the Victorians discovered the bay and established a tourist colony. Now its economy thrives on neon, cuddly toys and tourists who find Blackpool a bit tart. Enjoy itss dramatic bridge, take wistful walks along the beach, hell, spend a few ironic pounds trying to grab a cuddly toy with a metal claw. Just make sure that you respect this historic town and don’t patronise the yokels. To be honest though you’re more than likely to get a glancing sideways glance at Scarborough itself because most of your time will be spent shuffling around the major venues, which are, in molecular order:

The Ocean Room – Part of the Spa Complex, it is a big hall looking thing where shows take place. As is true for the majority of the venues. It’s also got a bar concealed behind the black drapes, which is revealed for the end of Festival party. Ooooh. It’s also a venue where the crew are rumoured to be proud of their speedy turn-arounds. 15 minutes is the record to beat from last year I believe techies…

SJT McCarthy – Both the SJT McCarthy and the SJT Round are located at the Stephen Joseph Theatre (or Ess Jay Tee for short) which can be found at the major crossroads in the centre of town and to the right slightly. By the main highstreet. Opposite that shelter for homeless trains. You’ll work it out. Anyway, the McCarthy is used for those controversial things called plays.

Grand Hall – The Stomach of the Spa Complex, this gaping chasm is used whenever the Kommandants of NSDF need to herd large groups together, typically opening ceremony gubbins, dance nights and the ever-controversial and bloody stupid pub quiz. The best thing I’ve seen in here year after year (I’ve only been here for two previous years) is the pyrotechnics show where techies blow up pretty much every stage pyro you can get in five minutes to Bond music. The date is announced later in the week and it’s frakking awesome if you like exploding things and fiiiiiire.

SJT Round – Theatre space in the SJT which isn’t round but square, the liars. It’s also the location for discussions, where the cast and crew from two shows sit there and take your abuse/compliments for an hour. These take place at 12pm every day and should be next in the list after plays for things to get to. They’re a chance for everyone to have a say and create a primordial soup of ideas for you to take away and think about during workshops, performing your own plays and writing NOFF pieces.

Potter – Venue at the University Campus which you get to by heading out of town and up the hill. And a little bit further up the hill. About 20 minutes from the Spa Complex if you’re playing it safe. You might have noticed that things are quite far apart. It can take half an hour to get from SJT to the University, which isn’t a bad thing because exercise sheds the pounds. If you’re feeling particularly physically perky you can try running up the cliff round the back of the Spa. If, however, you’re unfit because you drink and smoke more than you should then get a car. Befriend a person with a car. Steal a car. (Don’t steal a car). I’ve had a car here for the past couple of years and zipping around lickety split is worth the death stares from people in green t-shirts with blisters.

Clive Wolfe Auditorium – A New Venue! Sort Of! It’s an old venue that was knocked down and rebuilt, just for us! That’s probably a lie. More likely it was rebuilt for the students at the Uni who use it as a makeshift sport’s hall instead of the theatre it was re-born to be.

Holbeck – Theatrical space at the Uni with a steep rake. What?

Spa Theatre – The only venue that could conceivably be called a traditional theatre space which is why it’s reserved for the end of Festival Award’s Ceremony. It wouldn’t be student theatre if it weren’t breaking boundaries with staging and what not. Oh no, I tell a lie, the SJT is a reasonably traditional space. I only just remembered what it looks like.

Spa Complex – Not a venue as such, more the throbbing, quivering hub of the Festival, if only because it houses the Spa Bar. Don’t lie to yourselves. You’re arty students, the bar is where you’ll naturally migrate. Get up close and personal with people from shows, unwind after a hard day’s theatre with a class A liquid drug, eavesdrop on a conversation between two NSDF bigwigs (mugshots can be found at the front of the programme), laugh at the right point, get in there and bam! you’ve networked your first contact. Unless you’re under 18. In which case… err… sorry.

Tesco’s – It’s here. It’s 24 hours. It’s located on the road on the left in between the bridge and the SJT junction. Get used to it.

Vitadome – This is where these words are being written at this very moment, in the conservatory-fronted building on ceiling of the Spa Complex. In this place, the Noffice, Noises Off is written and printed every night. Right now it’s an empty place. Ten of us are desperately trying to cobble together an issue when there hasn’t been anything to write about yet. And we need your help. All of you. Fill up these empty seats, come in for a chat, write, please for God’s sake, write! I don’t want to beg but I will. Whatever’s on your mind, we want to read it. Don’t be nervous. This is your chance to state your opinion, respond to someone else’s opinion, argue that all opinions are flawed, or just make a knob gag. If you can’t write, draw. Do it for your ego if nothing else. It’s 24-hour caffeine-induced hilarity.

And if you start to panic, remember: your itinerary has been minuted to the hour on that plastic square hanging from your neck. If you start hyperventilating because you don’t know what you’re supposed to be doing just check what it says and remember that your journey has already been meticulously laid out, so just lie back and ride the tide to your theatrical destination.

Herons Review

2009-04-25T18:50:00.001+01:00

It’s a natural indicator of the NSDF audience that on entering the McCarthy auditorium and seeing four hooded characters surrounding a figure hunched in a spotlight you can hear the group sigh of ‘Oh tits, here comes another cackhanded student social commentary…’ echoing out. But Herons is a play that knows its target audience and knows exactly how to use that audience’s expectations against itself. Like a theatre ninja.

So we’re presented with a story that centres around Billy (Simon Longman), a teenager that feels completely out of sync with his surroundings, who is being threatened by pier Scott Cooper (Edward Franklin). From this simple premise the play expands and develops in ways that are at once predictable and surprising. I hesitate to go into any more detail of the plot in case it ruins what is a beautifully pitched and paced piece, suffice to say that it reveals its details not as a cheap mystery might, but instead by letting the characters naturally uncover themselves through their dialogue and interactions.

The performances are universally impressive. Every actor possesses an uncanny ability to inhabit their character, from the seldom seen grimy wino mother Michelle Russell (Elie Rose) to gang lackies Darren Madden (Laurence Fox) and Aaron Riley (Ashley Gerlach). Worthy of special mention though are Edward Franklin and Mark Weinman. Franklin, already impressive in No Wonder, confirms all the praise he’s received with a ‘villain’ character who’s humour, anger, violence, and absolute insecurity makes his stage time feel unsettlingly precious; while Weinman’s deliberate performance and total insight are palpable from the instant he comes on stage.

Fittingly it is central character Billy who is the biggest enigma of Herons. Initially overshadowed by the other actors, as Longman’s performance grows in confidence so too does his character in presence. At first glance he is a protagonist who is nothing more than a way for a middle-class audience to judge those filthy ASBOs, but the journey he takes, his repressions, decisions and his conclusions endw up making us question our notions of victimisation and social justice.

Everything in Herons is layered: its settings, its script and its characters. It is a credit to the entire cast and crew that they have drawn out all these elements with assurance, dedication and professionalism. What in other hands would have been a standard portrayal of urban troubles and teenage angst becomes a unique vision of lies, status and retribution.

Return to the Silence Review

2009-04-25T18:49:00.003+01:00

Is it better to have heart or brains? Back in school there was invariably a teacher, usually a science or geography one, who, bereft of some inspiring homework ideas, got the class to make poster presentations about some illness/humanitarian crisis, and, no matter what, your presentation would always pale in comparison to someone else’s poster. A poster that would have less than information than yours, but also have different coloured paper and glitter sparkles so would get the better mark because some idiot teachers will always prefer flair over substance.

And Return to the Silence is bursting at the seams with flair. The audience, sat in groups of six on the theatrical equivalent of rollercoaster carts, are trundled about so that they can catch glimpses of layered scrawlings on walls which are being projected live on a screen by an actor carrying a camera while people whisper into microphones and others leap across the stage while a piano simultaneously plays in the background and a sheet comes on stage and someone eats paint and a strobe light flickers on and off and Jesus Christ, are they trying to give the audience a collective brain seizure?

Actually, they probably are in the vain hope that it will evoke some kind of empathy from the audience. Before the show we were told that the cast wanted to warn us that we might be ‘moved’ by the piece. Which was nice. A lie as it turned out, but nice that they cared. You can show the effects of neurological disorders, you can explain their causes, you can make the audience sympathise with the tragedy of it all, but you can’t expect them to truly empathise because the whole concept is, by its very nature, totally alien. How do you approach the idea of randomly losing your free will with anything but senseless terror?

Return to Silence isn’t like a poster presentation, it is a poster presentation. A presentation with so much panache that even furniture is cleared from the stage with a turn and a flourish, but it’s a factual description of a variety of tragic neurological disasters with zero drama and no emotional hook. To return to the opening question: this is a play about brains that on the skin has plenty of heart but is really a meticulously calculated piece of left-hemisphere action with no soul. Now who’s having a headfuck?

This is one person’s subjective opinion, trust in it at your peril.

2009-04-25T18:49:00.001+01:00

Every written review, comment, opinion and statement should come with the headline, ‘This is one person’s subjective opinion, trust in it at your peril.’ Recent discoveries in metaphysics and aesthetics have made it clear that there is no right or wrong, a person’s opinion is solely their own and every reaction is valid (the malleability and ambiguity of metaphysics means that it pwns physics when it comes to making an unfounded argument). So, safe in the knowledge that it’s all an illusion and you’ll never know unless you see it yourself, can we all take a step back and look at what we’ve done to ourselves?

Probably not straight away so let’s back up a bit. I thoroughly enjoyed Normal the other night. Of course I did, the director is one of my best friends, as are two out of three of the cast, the third being my girlfriend. This might be the Festival equivalent of name-dropping and if it is I want to be hung like an elephant. Regardless, it was obvious that any remote sense of objectivity I might have had lay tattered and bloodied at the feet of my desire to maintain a social life. More than that though, I simply had no idea how to differentiate between what I already knew about the people involved, the process, the truth behind Paddy’s moustache, and seeing the play as an outsider (or normals as you were ironically referred to).

Unfortunately this opened up a whole inner can of worms (the cliché is valid here because I say so) about whether I’d ever written anything with any remote sense of objectivity. After 23 seconds of pondering I concluded that no, I haven’t, but then again no one in the history of literature ever has so it’s fine. Unless you believe some holy text is the literal word of God but if this is the case then you’ve probably had difficulty following a coherent argument this far so I can call you all nincompoops with no fear of repercussions.

It’s impossible to write anything objective because that would imply that it is entirely untainted by bias and our biases (or experiences if you prefer) are what give shape to our opinions. Try and write something coherent that isn’t sourced from an opinion of some kind, I dare you. Answers on a tattoo. And science is the product of human assumptions and inductions so no help there.

All of this means that our reactions to theatre are already pre-determined by everything else in our lives and that the next show you see will directly effect your subsequent opinions of every other play and every other thought you ever have pending a lobotomy. Which might or might not be reassuring, but it does lead to two interesting conclusions.

Firstly, as no two people can ever lead exactly the same life, no two sets of opinions will ever be exactly the same. If you’re doubtful think of an opinion you have and then spend the necessary 48 seconds on the internet looking for a counter-opinion. A counter-opinion that will probably be badly punctuated and possibly in the minority, but an opinion nonetheless. And it’s valid because, secondly, no one person’s opinion can ever be said to be more right than another’s because then you’d be discriminating based on accident of birth and you’re a right bastard if you do that (my abusive step-father was a racist).

But wait Richard! If all these things are subjective then why are we constrained by morality and law? Throw off the shackles of humanity! Anarchy reigns! Bring cake! As much as I’d love to see ideologically confused drama students charging across Scarborough beach with flaming torches screaming this at the top of their lungs, it’s not quite right (oops!). It’s highly practical, us being the raging socialites that we are, to agree on some social contract where wrongs against persons are matched with compensation of some sort. So we have courts, juries, judges and so forth to decide what rights should be restricted and wrongs punished. It’s not perfect, it’s not objective and it doesn’t always work but it’s necessary.

There is no such necessity in the arts. Critics are not needed to pass or condemn shows because of social obligations to protect against wrongs. I’ve seen some eye-meltingly bad shows, but I’ve never felt morally wronged by one. The critic’s opinions are no more valid than anyone else’s. They might be well-read, learned, have years of theatrical knowledge, but the reaction and expression, ‘Fucking ace!’ is as valid a response as an eloquent thesis on the matter. That’s not to say that one won’t be infinitely more satisfying and interesting to read than the other, but that doesn’t make it any more true. Grasshopper.

All of this might seem obvious to everyone, so why do people care so much about what one person writes in a review? It does my fucking head in every Fringe when people in shows go batshit mental over reviews. Especially when they claim they don’t care and then lock themselves away weeping, smashing mirrors and wondering why everyone hates them because one person took issue with a part of their performance. It doesn’t matter that this one person’s opinion may be totally at odds with every other audience member, or that they’re naturally biased against physical theatre because they were raped by a monkey in a leotard, if it’s in print it must be more right than spoken word.

Then there are the critics. Opinionated, egotistical freaks who can’t and therefore teach, who believe that, just because they have a style of communicating their feelings that their editor likes, they are therefore the High Judges of contemporary art (the bad ones anyway).

Noises Off! is a great place to see these things taking effect. Every day there are a plethora of reviews, comments and opinions, no two ever being precisely the same. Some are well-written, some are offensive, all of them are valid and none of them are right. There are two NOFF elements that make it unique. Firstly the editorial control is set at minimum so every expression and thought can be shared and secondly there is no star system because any idiot who thinks that a theatrical experience can be distilled into a rating from one to five is a producer desperate to sell a show.

If the review serves any purpose for the performer it is as a mirror to their own insecurities. They should know intuitively if a comment is accurate about their feelings towards their performance, for them a review may raise questions but never provide answers. For the reader a review is at best enjoyable to read and a possible barometer of whether they might enjoy something. And personally as a critic writing a review is about the joy of the literary exercise.

Sometimes I wake up, look back on something I’ve written and think, ‘Maybe that was a bit harsh’. Then I argue myself to thinking that it’s OK because it doesn’t matter and anyone who takes what I mean to be anything but senseless expression of my own personal bias is mistaken and possibly in favour of censorship, the Nazis. Then I forget about it and move on to the next show. I’ve got a job to do here.

Elehant's Graveyard Review

2009-04-25T18:47:00.005+01:00

Lazy. Why bother getting a cast, sand, some versatile blocks and a budget banjo White Stripes if the main focus, the piece de resistance, the elephant in the room if you will, is totally absent from the proceedings? I could barely contain my total rage at the fact that the cast were going to TELL us about the hanging of an elephant instead of SHOWING us. In fact I didn’t contain my rage. I dripped blood from my ears on their precious rake as a result of the vastness of this slight to the supposed credulity of the audience.

Oh sure, everyone can visualise an elephant being lynched by a crane, it’s the clown character that people are going to have difficulty with… LAZY.

And don’t come at me with the argument that it would be impossible to stage. I’ve seen a film where a circus elephant learns to fly with its ears, so don’t tell me what can and can’t be achieved if your ambitions are high enough.

Time and time again I squinted my mind’s eye as tight as I could so as to truly get an impression of a five-ton elephant being asphyxiated but I was thwarted at every turn by the terminable knowledge that I was just looking at an empty patch of air. An empty patch of air that the actors occasionally patted and talked to, like that was going to make a difference.

No Wonder was wondrous, Vowel Play contained no vowels, Normal was anything but, Return to the Silence was loud, and Elephant’s Graveyard doesn’t have a real fucking elephant in it. I’m not even going to bother with the Last Yak. I’m fed up of being lied to, expected to do all the hard work of visualising the central concept because the cast are too LAZY to get off their arses and do some fundraising so that they can, say, buy an elephant and hang it from the rafters. But this… words can’t express how upset and angered I am. It’s their loss though, the American symbolism was entirely lost on me as a result of their continued refusal to surprise us at the last minute with a real life elephant crushing a man’s head like a melon. The elephant is the emblem of the Republican party. Is this significant? We may never know. Next time do it right by stringing up an elephant or at least stoning a rabbit.

Never Enough Review

2009-04-25T18:47:00.003+01:00

Last year’s Abbi Greenland and Helen Goalen of Strict Machine fame return to the Festival this year with Never Enough. Where Strict Machine dealt with women in the workplace, Never Enough tackles that other life-essential, sexual desire. So they’ve also brought a boy along with them in the form of Marc Graham.

What’s changed from last year is a much richer coherent narrative, a sprinkling of comedy and a more slimming set, all of which have improved on what was already an impressive show. What hasn’t changed though is the bizarre sexual stereotypes. Lizzi and Rebecca are almost caricatures of women; obsessed with men, food and racked with insecurities, both scheming like hell against the other. Will doesn’t fair any better, being self-deceptive to the point of vacuity.

The light-heartedness and humour of the piece goes along way to justifying these moments, stereotypes being the bread and butter of audience recognition and knowing laughs, but it feels unsatisfying to watch such honest expression of emotion in the actor’s physical movements that doesn’t translate into believable characters.

It isn’t until the last third of the play, when Lizzi starts boiling her proverbial bunnies, that the play dares to go deeper into the psychological oddities and needs of its characters. From here to the end the level of intrigue and ambiguity increases tenfold, we get some thought-provoking ideas on women who suffer abuse and are left to our own conclusions about whether or not the characters have finally found enough together. Which is a piece of luck because they take it to the limit in terms of expecting the audience to come with them for the final push.

Where it’s much more difficult to find fault with Never Enough is in the moments of physical expression. All three of the cast have a naturalness to their movement that, while not professionally trained, is technically precise and incredibly emotive. The way they flow, twist and move totally embodies their character. Every step is of significance, each turn aims to develop the piece in some way. It is a device that shows us how the characters are feeling with such clarity as to render the spoken sections needless. Stand-out moments would have to be the selection of perfect women Will ponders (ending in the line, ‘No that’s not it’) and the painting of Lizzi’s body back and blue as she expresses her desire to be touched, even if it means being beaten and subdued.

The character niggles and extensive dialogue sections are distracting, but that doesn’t deter from the fact that Never Enough’s strengths, the physical skills of Greenland, Goalen and Graham, their energy and total commitment, its sense of humour and final willingness to have a closer look at its characters, eclipse its weaknesses.

P.S. I know it’s cruel and unnecessary to mention it, but at one point one of the actors exited the stage and smacked their head into one of the pictures, which proceeded to swing about wildly for a few minutes. I only mention it because I loved the moment. Slapstick is my other favourite form of physical theatre, y’see.

Blurred Vision

2009-04-25T18:47:00.001+01:00

The Festival is having a weird effect on my perception. I keep getting the feeling that I’m seeing double. Faces, names, places, they all keep repeating themselves in front of my eyes. I hallucinate shows that my deluded brain tells me I’ve seen before. Am I going insane? Has the crushing, exhausting pressure of sleep deprivation and misguided alcohol consumption finally cracked my tiny little head? Or are eight out of the twelve shows really from the same four universities? The pink elephant that keeps following me around assures me that it’s the latter.

Even out of those with a feeble single entry, Dartington are Festival staples and University of Hull’s Never Enough is basically the new and improved Strict Machine of last year. Meanwhile, despite a year’s absence, Edinburgh’s Last Yak is a fully-automated Haozkla redux fitted with surface-to-air missiles.

It hasn’t gone unnoticed either; last year there was a Judges’ Commendations award for Promoting Student Theatre that went to York, Warwick, Nottingham and Sheffield. An award that was a bizarrely unnecessary ‘Thanks for turning up. Again.’ gesture, and also a tacit acknowledgement of the fact that the Festival is fed by a thin drip of student bodies.

This isn’t meant to undermine the quality of the shows that are on this week, nor am I trying to second-guess the selection process. Choosing what you think are the best student shows and what would best represent the Festival is undoubtedly a nightmare, and if the best shows happen to come from the same universities then so be it. But why are we being treated to the same companies doing plays that are conceptually identical to the shows they’ve done in previous years? Either there are no better examples of puppetry and physical theatre in existence out there or they’re just not being seen.

Under the pressure of Arts Council shenanigans at NSDF08 the question was asked about what NSDF could do to reach out to a wider range of students. Now a year on and that appears to have been forgotten. When the cast of Herons tell you that they only discovered NSDF by accident and that they wish they could have submitted shows the previous three years it can’t help but confirm the nagging thought that there’s a whole wealth of inspiring student theatre that we’re not privy to.

I hesitate to say that we’re owed some kind of explanation as to why there’s such a thin selection of shows because there isn’t necessarily anyone to blame. But the distorted representation and the still widespread ignorance of the existence of NSDF among the wider student body have to be openly addressed by someone higher up, one of those official types who organise these things, even if it is to say, ‘The quality student theatre is limited to a small range of places and that’s just the way it is.’ Then at least we can look at what those places are doing well and how other student bodies could learn from that.

In the meantime I’ve decided to cut cheese out of my diet and see if that clears stuff up.

Tub Review

2009-04-25T18:46:00.002+01:00

If Tub signifies anything it’s that human civilisation has officially run out of viable metaphors for love. It’s love, OK? That’s what the bathtub represents, that’s what Woman (Olivia Vinall) is drowning in, that’s what she’s searching for deep down, that’s what the repeated statements and questions are all about. There, twenty minutes of your precious life saved. If you want to experience the play yourself fill a bathtub up with water, drop some random items in there and spend twenty minutes staring at a photo of an ex-loved one, weeping as you half-heartedly masturbate and try to remember the good times.

‘It’s not there. Is it?’ the play asks in a totally non-pretentious way. Yes, it is there. It’s there from the start. Just because you take 20 minutes to finish your sentences doesn’t mean it isn’t patently obvious from the off what it is you’re trying to say. It’s bound to be about love or some other ‘deep’ emotion because it’s conceptual student drama and making it about the worsening economic situation in Burkina Faso would be stupid.

Tub takes the form of ambiguous statement from Woman followed by ambiguous statement from Man (Matthew Hassall) followed by blackout then rinse and repeat, possibly with an extra line of dialogue or perhaps a glare if it’s a good four seconds. It builds at a frustratingly slow pace, by the time the actors get to the end the audience are already there, tapping their feet and looking at their watches, while those that care feel uneasy about the fact that Woman has been physically forced by Man to take his love.

Is Man real? Is it all in her mind? Is he the Man she really loves? The actors haven’t given the audience anywhere near enough material to make us ponder these questions, let alone come up with answers. It’s totally shallow, but no less deadly for that. It’s possible to drown in an inch of water after all.

Full credit though has to go to Bathtub, which played its part with professionalism and aplomb. From its opening retching up of Woman to the fact that it managed to hide all those items so cunningly away in its enamel belly, it never once seemed phased or put off by the fact that props were being pulled out of its arse like it was a device in a Paul Daniels magic show. Instead it proved itself to be a valuable central addition to the piece. Would the show have suffered much if the actors had slipped out during a blackout and the audience were left to sit and enjoy the gentle sloshing sound of the water? Doubtful.

No Wonder Review

2009-04-25T18:46:00.001+01:00

Your child asking where babies come from must be a nightmare question for any parent. Your child bursting out of a wardrobe while you and your husband are playing dress-up sex as Peter Pan and Alice, sending your startled crack-high husband out of a window and into a coma is a recipe for emotional disaster in every thinkable way. It’s the repercussions from this tragic event, the preceding reasons and subsequent guilt, that we see from the view point of Alison, sitting by her husband’s hospital bed, and Luke, a child not yet in his teens trying to understand what happened to his dad.

The power of No Wonder lies in its imagery; the three characters dressed in black who sit at the back and provide snippets of characters, visually striking moments and haunting voiceovers. They do it by using the most basic of props and never in a way that attempts to dominate the theatricality. But, most importantly, every visual moment is coherent and done for a constructive reason. So often it feels like a group have decided to include an idea for no reason other than it looks nice, tending to gloss over the fact that it’s misleading and confusing to the audience. In No Wonder it always felt that decisions were made because they would add to the story and underlining themes.

It seems obvious, but it’s what makes the difference between a succession of visually interesting moments and a compelling narrative whole that rewards initial interest with final satisfaction. The true significance of Luke tumbling out of a wardrobe filled with porn magazines and cuddly toys from various fairy tales isn’t fully revealed until the end, but more and more during the play we are given clues, references, that elucidate the emotional trauma, and the loss of innocence, that Luke and Alison have suffered. Never, however, in an obvious way. We are left to piece it together ourselves, but No Wonder expertly gives us the shape of the pieces through the imagery and shows us the picture on the box through the underlying theme of fairy tales. Imagine that visual metaphor actually working and you’re close.

If there’s a tension between No Wonder’s imagery and the nature of the story it is trying to tell then that tension manifests itself in the form of the language. Alison doesn’t talk as her character actually would, Luke certainly doesn’t talk like a young child would. The language is at times over-laden with metaphors and stories, almost to the point of being self-indulgent and distracting. For the majority though the script gets the important bits right, thanks mainly to the conviction and understanding which Asha Bhatt as Alison and especially Edward Franklin as Luke bring to their roles. Their development is never rushed but, again, carefully plotted.

Opinion will be divided on this play based around how much you can stomach a simile and whether you enjoy stage imagery or not. If you do, then this is a carefully crafted and elegantly executed piece. If you don’t then you may wonder what all the fuss is about.

When Dicks Strike

2009-04-25T18:45:00.001+01:00

Sometimes I absolutely love students. Occasionally I question the depths of my cynicism, whether my utter commitment to doubting and undermining whatever message someone is trying to sell me is perhaps a tad obsessive and unnecessary. And then an event like the Opening Ceremony happens and my faith is restored. Yes, I realise, there are others who don’t react well to self-important patronising pricks who fuck about on the stage like it’s an Open Mic Night at the Queen Vic, I am not alone.

It’s fair to say that you won’t find a much more unimpressed audience than students and professionals outside of a Soviet show trial but it’s hardly inspirational stuff when certain fevered egos speak down to a group of students, who are sitting cross legged on the floor like they’re back in fucking primary school, and arouse not the expected merriment and laughter but squirming and barely repressed urges to rip out their own tendons.

I’m not going to name names because there’s absolutely no need. Every person in the audience who writhed or muttered ‘Fucking hell…’ under their breath knows who I’m talking about. The people on stage who tried their best not to stare open-mouthed at the offensive pun abortions that splattered on to the stage time and time again know who I’m talking about. The person(s) who I’m talking almost certainly knows who I’m talking about (or herbout) because they’d have to be a senseless incompetent not to realise, after the third joke plummeted nose first into the audience, that the ‘Oi! Oi! Did you kids know that joining two words together can make a humorous pun?’ style of humour was at best badly misjudged and at worst insulting to every person in the room.

I’m going to get in trouble for writing this. I know, I shouldn’t be slagging someone(s) off who’s taken the time out of their(s) busy schedule to get paid to come and teach us about life in the professional world of theatre. But then I remember two years ago the same person(s) referred to Festival-goers as the ‘little people’. I can forgive an unfortunate gaff about liking schools, but when it’s one of a series of head-smashingly dire moments you have to wonder if it’s not all one big ironic self-parody. It’s not. It’s an unprofessional fuck-up that may have made people wonder what exactly it is they’re meant to learn this week.

If you’re one of those paid to be here, more is expected of you. It’s probably not fair, but like I said, it’s an audience of students, if you’re going to conform to stereotypes then you should know that we’re all naturally desensitised and quick to kneejerk reactions. Let’s make a tacit agreement that I thought was there already: you don’t treat us like moronic little people and we won’t respond with vitriolic bile.

Vowel Play Review

2009-04-25T18:44:00.002+01:00

Let’s drop the gimmick and see what we’re left with: Four women in objectively bad relationships sit on stools on stage and discuss their sexual experiences in explicit detail. New ground is left firmly unploughed. Let’s insert gimmick: Four women in objectively bad relationships sit on stools on stage and discuss their sexual experiences in explicit detail using only one vowel each. Our conceptions of the rigidity and fluidity of our language are revolutionised, the inner-thoughts of these women are made clearer and everyone gives themselves a pat on the back. Well, not quite.

As far as theatrical gimmicks go this one is interesting, but beyond appreciating the effort that must have gone into constructing the script it serves no other purpose than to get the audience to listen intently for any vowel-related cock-ups (I spotted two: ‘times’ and ‘tried’, but I’m a pernickety bugger). Every show employs a gimmick to some extent, in the case of Vowel Play it’s one that absorbs a lot of audience attention and gives little in return.

True, using only one vowel each gives the characters a certain sound and shape, Beth’s various long o’s fit well with her Scottish accent, while Jess’ clipped i’s give her a stuttering, uncomfortable edge (which probably explains why she says ‘Shit; every other word) and Kim’s a’s are brash, loud and playful but it all comes crashing down with Hannah. While the other three characters try and play down the gimmick by injecting at least some fluidity into their speech, Carey Mackenzie (who is fine with the term ‘dyke’ because ‘lesbian’ has an ‘i’ and an ‘a’ in it) seems all too aware of the conceit and so fires out her lines like she’s trying desperately hard to make them up on the spot. It just highlights what a (un)necessary part of the play the whole vowel thing is.

The bulk of Vowel Play is done in monologue form, understandable given how the opening dialogues make clear how awkward they are to do in this form, and the strength of the women’s emotional feelings and sexual dilemmas is finely portrayed by three out of the four actors (honestly, Mackenzie sounded like she was drifting in and out of a smack-induced coma), but it’s still a thinly veiled attempt to add some staple feminine depth to what is, in the end, a literary exercise and nothing more.

Sad Since Tuesday Review

2009-04-25T18:44:00.001+01:00

Angels are odd things. Ethereal beings that fly around the sky and do… what, exactly? Spy on people? Re-enact bombing raids? According to Sad Since Tuesday they carry out the morbid task of collecting the dead. A few snapshots of these collections are shown in the opening moments before the play settles down proper into the story of an angel that falls to Earth on his way to collect a dying baby and ends up trapped in a chicken coop.

Yeah… the plot is best left well alone, what little of it there is. Some moments just don’t make sense, such as rain, the nemesis of all flighty things, being what causes the angel to smash to Earth. Then there’s the suggestion that the angel proceeds to spend the next few years trapped in a chicken coop belonging to the family of the baby he’s meant to collect, the only outside interest in him being a French doctor who is confused by the sound the angel’s heart makes. When the resolution comes it also goes without a trace. Almost ethereal, you might say.

Sad Since Tuesday isn’t about the plot though, it’s about the visual images and moments that the cast create. While lacking the slickness and professionalism of some of the more seasoned shows here, the play is still full of imagination. Be it in the simple yet effective sight of the angels flying or the blue fabric of water on a boat’s oar, the cast never give a potential image the chance of slipping away. Even if we have no interest in the character of the child, the cartoon mask, boots and single glove combination are at least charming to watch.

The performances are erratic (if you’re going to arbitrarily choose an accent at least make it one that all the cast are comfortable with) and, out of the three, Tom Coxon is exemplary. His pathetic (in a good way) attempts to take flight as an angel are crushingly painful to watch and his final moment on the trapeze is a brief demonstration of his natural talent and ability. All the actors contribute, but it is him who, as the centre of the piece, really takes flight (God I hate myself).

Sad Since Tuesday is nice. If that sounds patronising then that’s because it is. Everyone is going to give this show a bit of leeway because it’s an A2 piece and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The cast and crew have shown genuine dedication to the piece and, even if it doesn’t work all the time, it does show a huge amount of promise for future work from each of its contributors.

NSDF Overview

2009-04-25T18:41:00.000+01:00

Another year, another Festival. By now your alcohol-ridden brains will have already forgotten all the shows so for your benefit here’s an overview of the Festival.

Before we get going I’d like to take a moment to be a sentimental git. Skip at your leisure.

It’s worth remembering that NSDF is about more than the shows, there’s huge amounts of organisation and logistics that go on behind the scenes that we humble students will never be privy to. Last year the Festival was dominated understandably by Arts Council worries, but this year the workshops, the tone, everything (apart from having five shows discussed in one day) have been spot on and for that vast amounts of credit must go to Holly Kendrick and all those that sail with her. So… yeah, take your credit. For now…

Anyway, here, in Green Route order, are the shows as described to me by the drunk collective voice of the Spa Bar. You might want to put on some of that crap ‘Top Ten Movies Ever!’ countdown music on your iPod now for added drama.

No Wonder was a tale of the death of fairies and why Peter Pan can’t fly anymore (cos the fairies are dead). Elsewhere people in black moved things and spoke deliberately out of sync with the actors on microphones, the dicks.

Normal charted Hitler’s unsuccessful attempts to conquer Germany by slaughtering all its buxom beauties while swans hung about like they were important or something. Nevertheless it was the best play ever (comment of Richard Dennis, University of Edinburgh).

Return to the Silence was impressive for dividing audiences completely between those who thought it was an incredible, precise and professional piece of theatre that made them weep uncontrollably and those that thought it was an incredible, precise and professional piece of theatre that left them dead inside. That’ll be the ol’ neurons playing up.

Vowel Play took letters and did things with them. Dirty, unspeakable things that made some audience members blush. It was also the first show to bring that word ‘stereotypes’ to the fore. The joy.

Herons was about racism. And stereotypes. Again. Even though it wasn’t. Confusing; but not as confusing as trying to build a wall with only 27 bricks. Leggy birds were also in the minority, shame. But no matter what else you fucking cunts think, that Edward Franklin is a fucking legend.

Elephant’s Graveyard didn’t have an elephant. We’ve been over this already.

Never Enough had physical theatre. Some students discovered that their predisposition to hating physical theatre ‘just because’ had been as retarded and ignorant as they always feared it might be. Some bottoms were pushed and it all ended happily á trois.

The Last Yak had animals in it. These animals had a God. This God was a big hairy thing that kept people warm. Animals died and the RSPCA were called to the scene. A potent metaphor for the struggle of human existence.

The Wake started with a dead man coming out of a coffin. Thinking that this was the start of the long-prophesised zombie uprising I proceeded to soil myself and retreat to my fallout bunker. You can never be too careful. Word on the street says some nutter got up from the audience and started harassing the performer. Kids these days…

Tub was loved by many for its simplicity and poignancy. Sadly that was lost on me. Even NOFF editor Andrew Haydon said I had no heart because of this. I’d cry if I had a bottle of whisky to hug.

Sad Since Tuesday delicately and tenderly advocated killing children. But Tom Coxon has got the bruises on his body to prove that it was in self-defence.

And then there was Me and My Friend. This time last year I had ended the Festival with 4.48 Psychosis and a performance so heart-renderingly brutal in its examination of the human psyche that on leaving the auditorium I uncontrollably burst into tears. Why bother saying what everyone else is going to be saying anyway?

Umm… so that’s it. Muchos gracias to every single show this year, each one had aspects that more than justified it being here and being showcased. And the cajones to perform them to such a standard under that pressure is always remarkable. Thank you as well to all those I’ve shared conversations with about the shows and my views on them, especially those who I disagreed with. It’s the only way I learn.

In conclusion: I’ve been a cunt, but freedom of speech’s a bitch.

Congratulations On Purchasing Your New Obama!

2008-11-06T13:03:00.001Z

I like to keep in touch with what’s going in the world by checking my friend’s status updates on Facebook and I’ve been overwhelmed the last couple of days by the news that some Obama chap has been elected President of the United States. After doing some research I also discovered he’s black!

Now the one thing that everyone involved in campaigning, covering and coveting the whole mess seems keen to stress is that Barack Obama being elected President of the United States is in no way to do with him being black. Except it is, but it isn’t, least not in an important way. But it kind of is. What it all seemed to boil down to was that History (whatever omniscient God that is we pray to) will look back and say, ‘Marjorie! They first elected a black president in November 2008!’ and this is ‘important’ however, as any rational thinking human established way back when families first waved goodbye to each other from the African shores, the colour of a human’s skin makes no difference to whether they fuck up or not on all the things they promised. This deliverance of promises/endorsements is what is ‘important’ right now.

Still, his acceptance speech was good enough to make me feel guilty about my automatic position of casual cynicism so I hope the rest of the world joins with me in giving Barack Obama the benefit of the doubt.

It is an impressive feat given the recent background of civil rights in America. After all, this is the office of the President of the United States of America I’m talking about. Many (Americans) consider this, the position of absolute leadership, the chance to lead the Free World (their term, not mine), the pure unholy power, to be the highest attainable position in the Universe (after Jesus and God of course, and a view of rulers apparently shared by the majority of civilisations). ‘One day, son, you could be President!’, that seems to be the thought that most immediately springs to mind when I think of an American father encouraging his son, but that might be because I watch too much Simpsons.

But after this Election the sex and the race of the parties involved no longer matter. Whilst Hilary Clinton didn’t exactly smash head first through a glass ceiling this time, she did at least admirably bump into it, like an albatross might a ship’s bayside window. And it’s an amazing thing. The importance of a woman and a black man running for President of the United States cannot be underestimated more than it is overstated. The 106 year-old Anne Nixon Cooper that Obama mentioned in his speech has gone from times of not being able to vote because of her sex and the colour of her skin, to... voting for someone she wanted to be elected as her representative leader a century on. Yes sir! these are evolved times.

Sadly, as wonderful as these things are in a weird way, my ears were pricked by a list of people that Obama mentioned at the beginning of his acceptance speech that don’t have the same chance of reaching this illustrious position simply because of accident of birth or their beliefs. He said that anyone who doubts whether America is a land where all things are possible has been answered ‘now’ (presumably meaning January 11th when things can actually happen), by the people who’s voices answered them, ‘the young and old… rich and poor… Democrat and Republican… black and white… Hispanic, Asian, Native American… Gay, straight… disabled and not disabled’ and I immediately began to ponder, in this new age of tolerance, how many of these people could conceivably be elected President of the US of A?

Obviously some of these conceivability conundrums are easier to answer than others, so let’s take them in reverse alphabetical order. By the way, any notion of likelihood I make up for a person being elected in no way corresponds to its moral significance. I don’t care whether the potential inconceivability of a poor, gay, disabled Native American atheist being elected President of the United States makes it more or less important than any other minority. So, from the rear we have:

1.) Young and old.
Bzzzzt! wrong if you’re younger than 35. Your opinion between 18 and 35 is important, but not important enough for you to actually make decisions based on your opinions. Same for anyone diving headfirst out of threescore and ten. And fair play as well. Anyone younger than 35 is clearly a liability, as are ye oldes. You can’t depend on your dependents. Inconceivable!

2.) Rich and poor.
Getting into the White House does not appear to be cheap. A soapbox bum with a sound fiscal policy and superb welfare reform plans won’t be heard if he can’t afford a million-strong team of propaganda merchants. That said, a child born into poverty who works their way to riches has just as much chance of getting to the White House as anyone else. Half-conceivable!

3.) Hispanic, Asian, Native American.
Three groups that all have something in common in that they’re all minorities who have been fucked around to varying degrees by the American government. This means they are generally discriminated against by white middle-America who finds the idea of ‘one of them’ ruling the world somehow wrong. This group four years ago would also have included African-Americans and been labelled Inconceivable! Of course Obama’s changed all that for the better, so who knows? (So long as they’re born in America). Personally I reckons Steven Seagal should run, that’s one Native American who would get my non-existent vote. Conceivable Due To Recent Events!

4.) Gay, straight.
For starters I’d like to add ‘single’ to this group. True, James Buchanan was a bachelor through his presidency and Grover Cleveland married during his first term, but nowadays expecting the voter to treat a grinning individual with no family home as anything but sinister seems to be going a bit far. Meanwhile gay activists continue to fight the good fight and it’s not Inconceivable! that in a few years the gay stereotype will have vanished enough for it not to be an issue. This does perhaps re-raise the question of a family life though. That’s a lot of prejudices you gotta cut through… And straights are the ones causing the problems, so fuck them. Perhaps Conceivable!

5.) Democrat and Republican
Well duh. It’s not like the Independents have got any hope. Conceivable!

6.) Disabled and not disabled.
The question here really is what counts as disabled and not disabled. Does a top Harvard graduate with brilliant intelligence and a beautiful singing voice make me somehow disabled in comparison, as I am unable to do the things he does? If so then disabled and not disabled are two vast categories that reside either side of what society determines ‘average’ and given the last President it would seem (insert your own George W. Bush joke here, I can’t be arsed). But if Obama means severely disabled people, such as paralysed folk, those with severe mental retardation, or a terminal illness then it’s Inconceivable! It’s a sad fact that deep down no one would let a cripple lead them. Would Jed Bartlet have been elected if he’d declared his MS while running? Inconceivable!

7.) Atheists and Muslims
Two notable absences from the list of people that answered the world and surely the most Inconceivable! to be President at this time in America. Obama’s speech admirably contained next to no reference to religion. Whereas McCain in his concession speech said that Obama’s grandmother was with God watching him, Obama simply said she was watching him. Slightly creepy but acceptable. But it scares me senseless that the majority of voting Americans just would not trust a presidential candidate who believes in rational thinking and questioning the religious dogma of the past. Maybe it’s that whole ‘connection to God’ thing that our Emperors have to have, if your leader doesn’t have a God, how can he be trusted to have morals? This reasoning is of course mindvomit but the type I’m irritably used to hearing.
Of course if you do have a God it’s got to be the right one. Enough fuss was kicked up about Obama’s name and whether he went to a Muslim school as a child (he did, but funnily enough not all Muslim schools are indoctrinating terrorist factories), that an actual full-blown Muslim running for office may lead to another civil war as inbreds scream in terror and shoot that which they don’t understand. Inconceivable!

It’s easy to take the pessimistic approach and say that there’s a deep-rooted part of America that would never vote for anything less than a God-fearing Caucasian male but if this election has taught us anything, it’s that idiots can be sold any idea, even if they think they don’t agree with it, and this can be used for the power of wholesome good. Allow me to demonstrate and end with this tale of a canvasser knocking on a family’s door in Washington, Pennsylvania. A woman answers and the canvasser asks her how she will be voting in the upcoming Presidential election. ‘
‘Hal!’, the woman screams. Hal is apparently in another room watching television.
‘What?!’ Hal screams back.
‘Who are we voting for this year?’
‘We’ve voting for the nigger!’
The woman turns back to the canvasser, smiles and says, ‘We’re voting for Obama.’
With that in mind I do feel like America is genuinely capable of anything. Even if it goes about it in the most roundabout, contradictory, cackhanded way, at least it does it or dies trying.

The Tell-Tale Heart

2008-08-18T13:12:00.003+01:00

Malthouse Melbourne
The maddeningly slow fade out of the houselights and the darkness that follows sets a suitably uncomfortable tone for Poe’s short story. Martin Niedermair gives an entrancing performance as the murderer, his dementia captured by the stuttering, twitchy delivery and his scrambling up and down an endless staircase. Director Barrie Kosky accompanies on piano, the chilling soundtrack and Niedermair’s haunting singing voice combining to raise the tension of the piece. However, while the staging and performance are wonderfully unsettling, the main problem comes from the source material. For what is meant to be an insight into the mind of a murderer this play lacks the real psychological intrigue that’s expected. Inexplicable insanity is disturbing to watch, but not particularly satisfying.
Royal Lyceum Theatre, 9 – 11 Aug, Times Vary, From £10, eifp 10.

The Magical Jello Returns, Again!

2008-08-18T13:12:00.001+01:00

Calum Fleming
It’s a surreal experience watching a children’s magician plying his trade and realising that nothing has changed in 17 years. The props, the tricks and the crappy puns are exactly the same now as they ever were. There’s certainly a case for the ‘if it ain’t broke’ argument and given the uncontrollable hyperactive hysteria radiating off the young children the old routines are still as popular with their target audience as they ever were. Despite this Calum Fleming appeared nervous in his performance, he could stand to relax a whole lot more. Also this is the kind of show you’d expect at a children’s birthday, there are a lot more imaginative ways to keep children entertained at the Fringe.
Diverse Attractions, 11 – 16 Aug, 11.15 am (12.05pm), £4.00, fpp 16.

Christmas Is Miles Away

2008-08-18T13:09:00.001+01:00

High Aces Theatre Company
You can’t help but wonder at the thought process that goes into the decision to bring a play like Christmas Is Miles Away to the Fringe. It’s not exactly a cheap and stress-free time of year, so your play needs to have something distinctive or unique about it to separate it from the myriad of other shows.
To say Christmas Is Miles Away is bland in every sense may sound harsh but there really is so little of it that offers some sort of original entertainment. The concept of two teenage boys, Christie and Luke, who are best buds before their friendship breaks down via female catalyst Julie is played out as predictably as possible. Meanwhile brief moments of sincere meshing of script, character and actor are not enough to distract from the nagging lack of imagination that’s gone into the production. When Christie expresses his near-constant angst-riddled frustration for the 53rd time by sticking his hands in his pockets, sighing and turning to the audience the shortage of ideas becomes almost comical.
It may be that a script that murmurs the death of Christie’s father a couple of times as an unimportant detail and cuts out just as scenes are clawing towards development made it hard for the director and actors to find something to latch on to.
However it happened, the end result is an average piece of theatre. There’s nothing shockingly bad, but why watch it when you can see everything it does done better?
The Space @ Jury's Inn, 11 - 16 Aug , 5.05pm (6.25pm), £7.50 (£7.00), fpp 191.

The Park Keeper

2008-08-18T13:08:00.002+01:00

Belt Up
This grotesque macabre piece has no seating arrangements, the audience being scattered around the Red Room, a dark and decaying boudoir of a space specifically created for the show, by actors painted up with black and white faces who take coats and bags, chatting away in their bizarre characters. It’s a perturbing introduction and sets the tone nicely for the show.
What follows is a curious hour of theatre. The actors throw themselves around, distorting and contorting their bodies in spasmodic movements, with effortless ease of physicality. Audience members are danced with, brought into scenes and generally forced into this disturbing gothic freakshow of a world that the cast have created. It’s a well-executed piece of immersion theatre and shows great imagination on the company’s behalf.
However, despite the voyeuristic joy of watching these weird figures there’s something missing in the writing. It is apparent what writer and director Nikolaus Morris is going for in his exposure of decadence, control and the animalistic urges of humans, but there is a lack of clarity in the communication. By the end any chances of grasping at exactly the meaning is has been lost in a script that could do with more tightness and precision in its wording.
The Park Keeper is one of a series of five plays by Belt Up and this company’s ambitions and obvious talent mark them out as a group that can only get better as they

Damian Callinan In ‘Mmm… They’re Small’

2008-08-18T13:08:00.001+01:00

Damian Callinan
Damian Callinan’s personal story of dealing with impotency is probably as close to feelgood male empowerment comedy as it gets. Whatever that is. His introduction as a nurse handing out semen sample cups doesn’t bode well but his skill lies in attacking the subject of male impotency with honesty, exposing the hilarity behind the situation with anecdotes that, while knob-related, aren’t too cheap.
The delivery is at times unintentionally awkward, there are various cardboard characters and jokes are either missed by the audience or, in the case of using a plunger to offer a sample to the front row, too terrifying for some to enjoy. If comedy is a wank, this is a guilty trip to your mum’s underwear drawer.
Gilded Balloon Teviot, 30 Jul – 24 Aug (not 12), 6.15pm (7.15pm), £9.50 (£8.50), ffp 43.

Zimbani

2008-08-18T13:07:00.000+01:00

Avalon Promotions
There’s something about Zimbani that doesn’t quite click. This 70s spy adventure pastiche is great fun for its ridiculous male posturing, bad ‘taches and absurdly dramatic dialogue, but it’s a narrow genre that’s been done before. If a joke misses it’s normally because the audience have already seen where it’s going. The script ripples with nice ideas and wit, there’s a good consistency of jokes, but the narrative never leads anywhere, in the end barely saving itself from an attempted abortion in order to draw to a conclusion. Despite its flaws there is obvious talent in the performances and if the words Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace mean nothing to you then you’re in for a treat of an hour.
Pleasance Courtyard, 30 Jul – 25 Aug (not 20), 2.45pm (3.45pm), £9.50 (£8.50), ffp 111.

Titus Andronicus

2008-08-10T06:48:00.001+01:00

DDOS
Renowned as Shakespeare’s gorefest, Titus Andronicus has little to recommend it over other tragedies beyond its uber-violence and the unsettling effect it can have on its audience. It’s such a shame then that this production shows no imagination in its staging. The violence is more bland than disturbing, the plethora of opportunities to draw an unwillingly complicit audience into a visceral world of bloodlust involve either a desensitised and unconnected stabbing motion, or, even more criminally, the distant and utterly pointless inclusion of video footage. Only Bob Hamilton as Titus shows any taste for the manic, the final image of him dressed as a bloody chef giving the briefest of glimpses at what could have been a grotesque macabre piece.
Sweet ECA, 2 – 9 Aug, 2.35pm (4.05pm), £8.00 (£7.00), fpp 237.

Nola Rae – Exit Napolean Pursued By Rabbits

2008-08-10T06:47:00.002+01:00

Nola Rae
The beauty of this show is in its simplicity. Utilising nothing more than a battered Napoleonic soldier’s equipment and flimsy tent Nola Rae’s carefully choreographed clowning pokes wonderful fun at military figures. Her ability to turn a woolly pair of socks into a rabbit, a leather satchel and coat into the vivid image of a soldier, show an expert imagination and comic eye for transforming basic items into instantly recognisable characters or props. At times the narrative path lacks clarity and the gaps between certain set-ups and payoffs are too prolonged, but her ability to work with an audience and keep them entertained and engrossed for the majority of an hour without uttering a word is remarkable. I salute her!
Footsbarn’s Big Top at Calton Hill, 2 – 15 Aug, 5.00pm (6.20pm), £10.00 (£8.00), fpp 219.

Infanta: User's Guide

2008-08-10T06:47:00.001+01:00

Erika Blaxland-de Lange
Due to a recent habit I have developed I shall be reviewing this show in the form of a haiku. If you think this makes me a self-indulgent and talentless git who is wasting your time and saying less than nothing then you have an exact appreciation of what this show is like. So-called Magherita for the briefest of moments gave a knowing reference to the theatrical pain she was inflicting on the audience but what these performers need to realise is that communicating deeply personal emotions through random phrases and cries requires some inherent semblance of thought and talent. Anyway, here’s the haiku:
Jumbled and pointless
Half the crowd left and were right
This is just painful.
Laughing Horse @ The Counting House, 31 Jul – 10 Aug, 7.05pm (7.55pm), Free, fpp 206.

Another Side Of The Mirror

2008-08-08T19:33:00.000+01:00

Lynn Ruth Miller
Lynn Ruth Miller is playing with loaded dice here. You’d have to posses a heart of purest black cynicism to slag off this 75 year-old Fringe veteran as she relates stories of her life and the lessons she has learned.
She tells her tales as you would imagine a loving grandmother would to her grandchildren, recalling the first glimpses of sexuality, the trials of overcoming illness and the general warmth, love and beauty that can be found in the most mundane and unexpected of places. She is a cosy shroud that blocks out the negativity of a cruel world and makes you realise that even if you are a clearly batshit-crazy eccentric old lady there’s a place for you in this life.
It’s not gut-wrenching drama, there is no grand climax here or hidden subtlety, but it is honest and true, at least if the affirmative nods and knowing laughs from the more middle-aged members of the audience were anything to go by. To call it sweet would be patronising, heart-warming trite, but it captures something of what the Free Fringe should be about, a relaxing 50 minutes spent in the company of one who has experienced life and asks nothing but that you listen and hopefully take away a message of love and happiness.
The illusion’s disappeared now and the cynicism has returned to my heart but still I can’t shake that feeling that I should appreciate individuals for all their beauty. Curse you Lynn Ruth Miller!
Laughing Horse@The Argyle, 31 Jul – 25 Aug, 3.55pm (4.45pm), Free, fpp 183

Scaramouche Jones

2008-08-08T19:32:00.002+01:00

Guy Masterson – TTI In Association With Passion Pit Theatre UK
Not so much the biography of a 100 year old clown, more an alternative telling of the more disturbing sides of the 20th Century, this production of Scaramouche Jones is practically flawless. Justin Butcher’s performance is as in-depth and considered as you would hope from the man who wrote the play, his physicality in his clowning and embodiment of different characters as he dives around the stage being both energetic and precise, knowing and touching. As Scaramouche slowly strips out of his clown costume the audience learns through a beautifully worded and layered script of the tragedy, the hardships and suffering that go into not just the clown figure but every human, and the masks worn to cover the scars.
Assembly @ George Street, 31 Jul – 25 Aug (not 11), 12.20pm (1.35pm), £13.00 (£12.00), fpp 228.

The Reduced Edinburgh Fringe Imro Show

2008-08-08T19:32:00.001+01:00

Scratch
The beauty of improvised comedy is that when it snaps it can be some of the quickest, wittiest comedy around. But instead of snapping the Scratch improv troupe spend the majority of the show making a damp sort of ‘plib’ noise. All the performers have the confidence and basic know-how to keep a scene running and a few laughs coming but technical niggles such as repeated glaring contradictions in the attempted long form musical and a reliance on the same improv games as everyone else puts them at a distance from the masters of the genre. John Mawer and keyboardist Phil Lunn show talent and no doubt some nights the show works. But the snap/plib ratio is slightly out.
Pleasance Courtyard, 30 Jul – 24 Aug, 6.40pm (7.40pm), £8.50 (££7.00), fpp 90.

New Electric Ballroom

2008-08-06T04:24:00.000+01:00

Druid
In a self-contained colourless box three sisters are condemned to the re-telling of the destruction of early notions of romance at the New Electric Ballroom. Flashes of luminous colour in 50s dresses and cakes recall happy memories of youthful sexuality, everything else serves as a contrast. Enda Walsh’s script hurtles out lyrical images of the two sisters who have withdrawn themselves back into a womb of supposed comfort and forced their younger sister into a routine so binding that she denies the inevitable love interest of the only fishmonger who visits their cliff-side metal shack. What the audience are left with is a lasting image of the vulnerability of love and fancy and the dangers of repression.
Traverse Theatre, 2 – 24 Aug (not 11 & 18), Times vary, £18.00 (£16.00), fpp 218

80s Luke - Live At The Living Room Palladium

2008-08-06T03:52:00.000+01:00

80s Luke
I debated for a long time about whether or not to write this review because when you’re the only person in the audience it’s fair to assume you’re not seeing the comedian at their best. But I’m sorry 80s Luke, your material was toss of the highest calibre, most of which I heard down the pub four years ago. As for your mate Tony… well… any comedian that still makes jokes using the hee-lare-ee-us prop of an arrow that fits around the top of his head deserves to be pinned up on the walls of the Royal Mile as a warning to any other comedians who want to waste the public’s time with generic horseshit. It’s free for a reason.
Laughing Horse@Espionage, 31 Jul – 9 Aug, 3.25pm (4.25pm), Free, fpp 48

Breathing Corpses

2008-08-05T11:54:00.001+01:00

LS6
Giving Breathing Corpses the benefit of the doubt, this is a brave piece on what happens when your actors and director use the title of the play as the direct inspiration for their interpretation. Not doing so would require a review full of easy puns involving words like ‘death’, ‘of’ and ‘theatre’.
It’s not entirely the actors fault, they lack the maturity and confidence for a proper understanding of the characters; so where is the direction? The outside hand that draws performances out from more than a murmur, awkward monotone delivery and clumsy climaxes? The play moves at such a deadening pace that you can smell the audience festering as they are forced into a coma by this mouldy work.
Sweet Grassmarket, 4 – 24 Aug, 9.10pm (10.20pm), £7.00 (£6.00), fpp 188

Off Out By Gill Adams

2008-08-05T11:49:00.000+01:00

Crumpet Theatre Company
It’s probably a guilty mark of a cynical mind that a play about the seedy underworld of prostitution and its affect on a mother and son, a pimp and a junkie can be so predictable but still there’s nothing in the script of Off Out that you wouldn’t expect. Each character and event fills its own niche, ticking the social commentary boxes in a script that could easily shed 1/3rd of excess weight.
Thankfully a uniformly adept cast keep the audience’s attention, each actor drawing out the important aspects of their roles. Pamela Evans gives an especially acute and bleak performance as rag-doll no-hope junkie May. If anything Off Out shows how a dedicated cast can make a play work.
The Space@Jury’s Inn (V260), 1 – 9 Aug, 10.45am (11.55am), £7.00 (£6.00), fpp 220

Coming Up For Air

2008-08-04T12:26:00.003+01:00

Coming Up For Air
There’s no doubting Orwell’s taste for despair. The looming inevitability of WW2 provides the backdrop for Coming Up For Air which sees George Bowling locked into his suburban existence, desperate to escape back to his childhood village. Inevitably though his old haunts have changed, the world has moved on and turned his favourite place into a rubbish dump.
The bitterness caused by the raping of this personal cherished past is vividly portrayed by Dominic Cavendish’s adaptation of Orwell’s book and Cruttenden’s performance brings across the anger, resentment and ultimately fear of what’s to come. Orwell’s pessimism of machine guns poking from English windows may have been proved wrong, but 70 years on his work still rings with a chilling resonance.
(The listing in the Fringe Programme is completely wrong, but it's on at the Assembly Rooms at 11.00am).

Eco-Friendly Jihad

2008-08-04T12:26:00.001+01:00

Eco-Friendly Jihad
Abie Philbin Bowman
Abie Bowman claims that the title of the show is not meant to be controversial, which is a lie and also the major problem with what is otherwise a good comedy show. His tentative but honest approach to both the environmental and global issues he addresses makes sure that he is endeared to the majority of the crowd, and indeed it is difficult not to agree, laugh along and feel guilty about personal inaction. But he should hold back less and plunge the knife in further. Not only does Bowman get better laughs when he’s being more controversial, he also makes you think more. As it is the dips between laughs are too long and the acid too diluted.
Underbelly, 31 – 24 Aug (not 4 – 5, 11 – 12, 18 – 19), 3.55pm (4.55pm), £9.50 (£8.50), fpp 47

Craig Campbell

2008-08-04T12:25:00.000+01:00

Craig Campbell
Underbelly Productions By Arrangement With Avalon Productions
Unbelievable. For the majority of the show a chainsaw and shovel sit on stage yet at no point does Craig Campbell do the honourable thing and put either of us out of our misery. This one man play about a crazy violent prisoner telling his story of how he ended up in jail after working at a Funfair isn’t big and certainly isn’t clever. There’s little development, intrigue or depth. It would be fine if it was funny and there are a few brief moments of comedy, mostly when Campbell slips into more of a stand-up routine, his usual medium of choice, but the bulk of the show is boring and awkward. Still, gotta love his taste in music.
Underbelly, 31 Jul – 24 Aug (not 12), 9.50pm (10.50pm), £11.50 (£10.50), fpp 42

Rob Deering Boobs 2008

2008-08-04T03:19:00.003+01:00

Rob Deering Boobs 2008
Avalon Promotions
The publicity image is as disturbing as it is intriguing, with Rob Deering leering out, breasts heaving at the seams of a skimpy bikini. Thankfully the comedian has not had drastic surgery, but he has supposedly themed his new show on the nature of being both a feminist and a tits man. Apparently. In actual fact there’s nothing quite as challenging as that, and a good thing too. Deering is so disarmingly charming, with his big grin and (relatively) clean material that there’s never any question of sexual conventions being re-written. Instead the show is a witty evening with hilarious musical numbers involving deft footwork mixing, re-written classics and a gregarious atmosphere that would make a grumpy tortoise smile.
Underbelly’s Baby Belly, 31 – 24 Aug (not 20), 8.20pm (9.20pm), £10.50 (£9.50), fpp 92.

Reasonable Doubt

2008-08-04T03:19:00.001+01:00

Reasonable Doubt
Guy Masterson – TTI In Association With Tamarama Rock Surfers AUS
In a glitzy hotel room ex-jurors Mitchell and Susan re-unite two years after a murder trial to confront each other about their illicit affair and the paths their lives have taken since. Reasonable Doubt is meant to be a play about unveiling the truth, finding out what is really going on beneath the surface. And so for an hour the audience is subjected to the repeated distorted lies of two entirely unsympathetic characters. Their constant changing of events and sledgehammer revelations are so uninteresting and tedious because there’s nothing but antipathy for Mitchell and Susan. The performances range from competent to shaky, the real doubt in the play arising over whether the actors have a grip on the piece.
Assembly @ George Street, 1 – 25 Aug (not 11), 10.45am (12.00pm), £12.00 (£11.00), fpp 225.

Neil Delamere: Creme Delamere

2008-08-04T03:18:00.000+01:00

Neil Delamere: Crème Delamere
Lisa Richards In Association With Edcom8

Irish comedian Neil Delamere has good home support at this Fringe. The inevitable ‘Who here is from Ireland?’ question at the start of the show was met with a telling cheer from 90% of the audience, while the 2% English contingent remained resolutely tentative.

Delamere’s popularity with the Irish is due to his role as a presenter for The Panel, a weekly chat show that broadcasts on Ireland’s RTE Two which has also featured fellow comedians Ed Byrne, Dara O’Briain and Andrew Maxwell.

The vague concept of Crème Delamere is a holiday Delamere spent in Stockholm getting kicked out of galleries, near misses with trams and awkward sex with a 6’2” Swedish stunner involving the Bible and a phone book. These instances provide Delamere with excuses to go off on comedic tangents that are charmingly humourous and thankfully devoid of clichés but which are too disparate, sounding like a list of unrelated events, to create any sense of a cohesive whole.

There are obvious signs of talent, the charm he works on the audience and an off-the-cuff joke involving a recently engaged couple, an old antique dealer, a policeman and a philosophy student sitting in the audience highlight a quick wit and none of the jokes fall flat, but at no point does Delamere raise the show beyond the safe, comfortable and cosy level which it needs.

The fact that Byrne and O’Briain have become household names this side of the sea while Delamere remains a relative unknown stand-up speaks volumes about Café Delamere.

The Secret Fantasies Of Alice Pobbs, Aged 35 1/4

2008-08-04T03:17:00.000+01:00

The Secret Fantasies Of Alice Pobbs, Aged 35 ¼
Lippy Lyrics
Alice Pobbs is a middling receptionist who takes time out to imagine what her life would be like as an assortment of female characters from office tart to WI Tory lady.
The show isn’t bad, more shockingly offensive. The overriding message is that women should expect nothing more from life than being content with their shitty lot. Anna Pelly’s singing voice is adequate but tellingly the more challenging songs are pre-recorded and the disgustingly clichéd characters are handled with all the deftness and subtlety of a mastectomy. If she had chosen any other social group other than white women to satirise in such a humourless and derivative fashion Anna Pelly would have been taken out onto the Grassmarket and lynched.
Sweet Grassmarket, 1 – 10 Aug, 1.00pm, £8.00 (£7.00), fpp 94.

Foreskin's Lament

2008-08-04T03:16:00.000+01:00

Foreskin’s Lament
Trailer Trash Theatre
Setting a play in the midst of a local New Zealand rugby team is not as daft an idea as non-rugby fans might imagine (admittedly the play’s title doesn’t help). The sense of loyalty and camaraderie that goes into a rugby team, the trust that players place in each other and the chance of things going drastically wrong means there’s great potential for conflict and almost Shakespearian tragedy, especially amongst the Kiwis who are passionate to a fault over rugby.
Unfortunately Foreskin’s Lament comes close to good drama but never quite hits the mark. The characters are too stock and lacking in depth for the audience to ever really understand them. Clean (all the players have these vaguely explained nicknames) scowls and acts the tough villain, but we’re never offered an understanding of why he’s such a bastard, he just is. Foreskin has a noticeably different attitude to the others with his ‘Univarsity’ education but the eloquence of his lines is clunky at best and descends into the downright ridiculous by the end. Moira acts simply as a voice of explanation for the play and opposition to the traditional coach Tupper while the other characters slowly fade into the background.
There’s tantalising glimpses of the differences of class, masculinity and violence in the game of rugby here, which is why Foreskin’s Lament is so frustrating in its lack of ability to plunge into its material and draw out the really interesting social commentary in a coherent and intelligent manner.
Pleasance Courtyard, 3 – 25 Aug (not 17), 12.50pm (2.00pm), £10.00 (£8.00), fpp 200

Bite The Dust

2008-08-04T03:13:00.000+01:00

Bite The Dust
Teatr Provisorium and Kompania Teatr
“Fucking shit!” the four Polish soldiers shout repeatedly as they topple back and forth, crashing the giant wooden poles on their backs into the stage. These are the first words they utter and ominously describe the situation they find themselves in: alone in the woods, fighting desperately against invisible enemies and searching for some semblance of meaning in the inanities of conflict.

With Bite The Dust Polish theatre company Teatr Provisorium and Kompania Teatr have aimed to present a universal vision of the senselessness and cruelty that soldiers suffer during resistance conflict and the results are as powerful as they are bleak. The shit and grime of fighting covers their bodies, gradually eroding at their humanity. What begin as disciplined, marching figures shrouded in shadows are gradually stripped down as the absurdity of their situation is laid bare, until the CO is reduced to a hysterical chicken, breaking into fits of tears.

The staging here is perfect. A an old wooden cart provides transport and shelter, the distance and incompetence of the commander’s orders are relayed through an old gramophone, while the wooden posts strapped to the soldier’s backs represent both the forest and stakes the soldiers are bound to, waiting for their inevitable execution.

At times chunks of the script are lost in the thick Polish accents and the overall message of endurance and absurdity is one that has been heard before, but the raw imagery, blackest of humour and the poignant ending make Bite The Dust an important show to see.
Freemason’s Hall, 1 – 25 Aug (not 13), 5.00pm (6.30pm), £14.00 (£11.00), fpp 186

Resuming Transmission in 5,4,3...

2008-07-07T03:55:00.003+01:00

This place has been more dead than a McCann recently for which I blame summer and after my last ridiculous diatribe I have decided not to try squeezing out some turd ablogtion for the sake of myself and the 13 people who read this (statcounter fact) so I'm taking a break until something obvious comes along and enjoying the summer rain.

However! in little over three weeks the wonderful Edinburgh Festival and all that sail in her sets forth and I'm going to be writing reviews for various rags which may or may not deem my opinions fit for publication so will be putting a lot of stuff up here. I'm aiming at trying to burn out entirely by the end so hopefully there'll be up to five reviews a day covering music, computer games, theatre and too... much... fucking... comedy.

And given that my blog doesn't have a mammoth team of sub-editors this will be the first place to come to if you wanna find out about some good and god-awful shows I've seen. And I may even find time to drunkenly rant about the Festival, so there'll be some stuff on here that a sensible editor won't touch with a lead glove. Tell your friends. The internet's gonna break my thumbs if I don't have a good month.

Kunst Macht Frei

2008-06-17T14:38:00.001+01:00

Two hundred thousand shit fans shitting out fans at a fanning high rate. You shit. Argh. I’m. going. Insane. Help. Help. Help. Help. Help. Help. Help. Help. Help. Help. Help. Help. Help. Help. Help. Help. Help. Help. Help. Help. Help. Help. Help. Help. Help. Help. Help. Help. Help. Help. Help. Help. Help. Help. Help. Help. Help. Help. Help. Help. Help. Help. Help. Help. Help. Help. Help. Hep. Help. Help. Help. Help. Help. Help. Help. Help. Help. Help. Help. Lhep help help. Help. Help. Help. Help. Help. Help. Help. Help. Help. Help. Help. Help. Help. Help. Help. Help. Help. Help. Help. Help. Help. Help. Help. Help. Help. Help. Help. Help. Help. Help.

I want to be able to type whithout thinking about what I’m dtyping because tha touwld be nice to fdo when if hfghn even thinking about it n it just come out free and if I let my mind just float away to another place ahjdf realy need to have yuou now one by one thet fall it always breaks me down one by one they fall windows aout side pigeons I can’t keep doing this one by one they fall it always breaks me down ahobgoblin whne mnartimite on toast and signs with wine bottles and towels coming out my head with th chatir sitting on top wth a washing machine bfater than I ca type cant thin about what is tishtat im saying

My tots are jelly tots.

Drooooooooooooooone on and on and on and on without stoping lots of ights coming out of my head in funy fashions smashing with te latest passion for artistic stuff that never comes out out out damn you out of my spouting braaaaaaaains.

Flush it all away in one big exhalation of nothingness that will never see the light of anything important or subsatantial but cleasning at the same time excrememnt that comes form nowhere and blocks everything else that I’m trying to eek out with little withs and btus and whys to no avail but something with more ts and less hs ight present itself at the appropriate time possibly.

Shower. Shower. Shower. Shower.

Now finally is it worthy to be happy of when I present it can I justify what ive already rambled on at without thinking but starting to now and give it some kind of thought and movement but not because this will never see anything worth but more aware of eyes and eyes and no mouths. Never any mouths. No construction building heights scaling to the sky because of achievement and worth apparently.

i apologise

Planet Telex

2008-06-07T00:16:00.001+01:00

I

Today was a bad day. It began with all four of my bedposts simultaneously deciding to explode into pieces and drop me a distance that felt, in my rapidly-moving ascent from deep sleep to cardiac arrest, like fifty, maybe a hundred miles on to my bedroom floor. The impact of mattress with solid wood caused my body to softly bounce off my bed at an awkward angle, slowly twisting me in mid-air, so that I became fully conscious just as I realised I was heading face first into my bedroom floor.

The crack of my skull against hard wood panelling would probably have sent me straight back to sleep again had it not been for the fact that the blow was softened by 8cm of water that hadn’t been there before.

I was confused. I was wet. I was blind. I looked for my glasses and found them dead under me. The force of my impact had crushed everything right of the nosepiece. My brain found some hope to latch on to and reminded me that I’d always wanted a monocle, so I removed the left lens and squinted through it to get a one-eyed view of the room.

The entire expanse of my bedroom floor was covered by an 8cm deep sea, populated by drifting cigarette packets, island masses of stray clothes and a struggling mobile phone that screamed before finally dying with a sickening silence. The sea stretched on and out around the rest of the flat too, all the way back to its source; the washing machine. Water was spilling out of the drum and on to the floor in a trickling waterfall.

It was ka-fucked, that much was certain, but before I could think of calling a plumber I needed substance in the form of black coffee and bacon. Unfortunately my attempts to fill the kettle up from the tap ended when the tap spun off in my fingers and I got a face full of hot water. The area surrounding my right eye was scalded quite severely but my left eye was protected by the monocle goggle so I could still blearily make out what was going on.

A fluttering orange reflection in the far right of my perception reminded me of the frying pan and oil I’d left on the gas stove to gently warm. I whipped round to find the handle of the frying pan had broken and the pan was tipped on its side with the oil burning away.

If only I’d been awake enough. If only I’d been able to get my morning dose of caffeine. If only I wasn’t partially blinded, scalded and panicking. I would have recalled my mother’s tales of never pouring water on a cooking oil fire. Sadly there was water in abundance and the fire was utterly terrifying.

The resulting volcano took much of the surrounding cabinets and skin up with it in a ball of fire and as flames licked ceiling I decided that it was probably a good time to retire to the hallway and call for some emergency assistance into the matter.

Alas! to no avail. The phone emitted a brutal hissing noise into my ear that I hoped was Morse code for ‘Keep calm, help is on the way’ but nothing else.

And so I decided to abandon my rapidly sinking flat and seek help elsewhere.

II

Despite yanking, slamming and swearing my front door stood stone solid against every attempt to open it. I sloshed my way back to my bedroom, grabbed the front door keys and slammed them into the lock, twisting them every which way, frantically trying to make the lock click. The sharp sound of metal that for an instant was so elating was just the noise of the key snapping in the lock. I slammed my head against the door in exhausted desperation and the lock itself came sliding out. Then the hinges buckled and the whole door came crashing in on top of me followed by a thunderous noise of clashing stone and metal.

After I crawled out from under the door and the dust had settled I peered over the edge of what had been the stairwell landing. It was a broken a mess of rubble and stairs. Three-fifths of a bike lay smashed and twisted. In the middle of the detritus was a body. Its arms and legs were spread out like someone making a snow-angel and the whole body was rhythmically pulsing and twitching. The whole body lay down and danced in front of me apart from the head, which was a smothered mess of blood, mortar and clay.

I stumbled back into the flat, wondering if vomit was good for putting out a fire. I could feel and hear everything cracking and breaking around me. As I staggered into the front room and ran for the window out on to the street, I slipped in the water and my monocle came flying out. I heard it smash against something.

I got to the window and looked out. The long line of buildings opposite was riddled with cracks and was slowly sinking away. Cars were smashed or on fire. There were blurred images of people opposite and I touched the window with the tips of my fingers. The shapes opposite did the same and then every window on the street instantly shattered into a fine mist of glass that was caught and borne away by a stream of wind.

And above it all was the sound of everything breaking. Every device, invention, tool, mark of creation, had been built to break and was shutting down earlier than expected. The sky was intermittently lit with blinding flashes of light from thousands of miles away.

That’s when the floor split beneath me and I fell and as I fell the Earth fell with me. I flew into the centre of the Earth, through a ravine of solid rock that split in front of me like fog. I flew and flew downwards until finally my heart broke.

III

My body carried on falling, as did everything else. The planets, the stars, the galaxies, all at one moment blinked and collapsed in on itself. Something to do with the Universe believing in built-in-obsolescence and a word count.

...And The Circus Leaves Town

2008-05-29T21:20:00.000+01:00

Being the unemployed bum that I am, at 3pm I was still in my bed staring at my laptop feeling my brain rot, devoid of ideas and willing for anything to distract me; so I decided to make the bold move out of my flat and on to the Meadows for a good solid walk and constitutional. The niceties of having a relatively large expanse of green for walking about on and melting from the world become more apparent as the days get longer and the Sun grimaces its little face and squeezes some heat out of its rays, not least because there’s no more satisfying place to have a smoke than blinking into the evening Sun with the wind rustling your hair like grass and the crisp quick air cleaning out your lungs.

And as I sat on the grass at 7.14pm, smoking my rollie and trying to give the general impression to any passers-by that I was a pretentious arseburger by writing nonsense in my Moleskine, I noticed that the Carnival had come to town.

There, on the Meadows, hemmed in by a circle of large white vans and with its back turned to me in every direction, was a Fun Fair. From where I sat I could just make out the odd distinctive detail; flashing lights, the high-pitched scream of an age-old ride suddenly cut short, bits of fluffy toys hung up around stalls and groups of large men huddled around talking.

I haven’t been to a Fun Fair since I was about 8. One of the reasons for this being that I’ve never been able to shake that sense of evil that pervades all my mental images of Carnivals. As a child I remember gazing up at lurid colours and characters that would crane over me with their painted faces, who would invite me and tease me, laughing in their own way that was alien to me in every sense as I tripped out on an overdose of candyfloss. I’ve always been slightly terrified of them and the mystery, romanticism and other-worldliness of the Carnie lifestyle.

At first I was reticent to peek inside but then I reminded myself that I’m a big boy now and no clown or fortune teller will emotionally destroy me over a 14 year period ever again. Steeling myself against all the bizarre and freakish things that awaited me in that encampment I crossed the threshold into the Fun Fair world.

It seems childhood lies or the world has changed. Before me all I saw were cheap stalls filled with cheaper cuddly toys and games that the cynic in me wouldn’t touch for knowledge of them being rigged. All the stall owners were in matching branded polo-shirts, security wandered from stall to stall. The rides were covered in safety warnings, metal barriers protecting everyone from themselves. Groups of teenagers in shiny clothes stood around or blankly pushed money into arcades. Fathers with young children tried to impress. Young lovers strolled along in a completely different world altogether. Blandness and straight lines everywhere I looked.

And out back were parked the vehicles of the Carnie folk. Twenty or so cars, some BMWs, a couple of Mercedes and not one of them older than five years. It seems a good time to join the Carnival.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

2008-05-27T03:57:00.002+01:00

Before we get started let’s just get this out of the way first: this article will contain spoilers about Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. If you have any interest in seeing this film (I can’t be arsed to re-type the title and from now on will refer to it as IJATKOTCS or ICOK for short) then for Spaghetti’s sake stop reading this now and go see it. The only thing more annoying than hearing a spoiler is mentioning an inconsequential detail such as, say, the crystal skull belonging to an alien race who were some sort of archaeologists of early human civilisations worshipped by the Mayans, and then having some cretin whine at you as a result.

Although even knowing that much about ICOK won’t ruin it for you. Sure in the first paragraph I may have given away the main thrust of the plot but since when has that been a problem for the Indiana Jones franchise? Indiana Jones films have always placed administering shots of pure ecstasy to the parts of the brain that deal with memorable movie moments over anything as loathsome as plot, which is no doubt why so many Indy fanboys still physically cream themselves at the merest mention of a man stuck in a lonely dark tomb with a whip, leather jacket and hat to match.

ICOK, as seems to be the vogue in a Hollywood desolate of fresh ideas or innovation (beyond scavenging whatever material it can from comic books and computer games), is a film 19 years in the remaking. In which time we’ve discovered the internet, the middle-east and, who would’ve thunk it?, whole brand new ways to shoot action movies. There’s been a lot of pre-game talk about how ICOK wasn’t going to be one of these CGI heavy films. They promised us classic stunts. Harrison Ford, we were assured, would be fighting fit and throwing himself about with no other visual aids but the fire in his soul.

Bollocks.

Fair enough, an army of 23 gazillion demon hellspawn never appears on screen, no main characters are CGI mutations and there aren’t any spaceships (wait…) but there’s still all kinds of computer hocus-pocus that goes into making any action movie visually more impressive than they were 19 years ago.

Before I plunge into an in-depth analysis of ICOK (and I promise that despite this inordinately long pre-amble said plunging shall occur) I ask you to cast your mind back on the first three Indiana Jones films. I imagine even cultural Neanderthals who have never seen an Indy film will have those iconic images of rolling boulders, melting faces, machete hacked rope bridges and red lines across a map spring to mind. These are the memorable parts of a series of action films that had to titillate in the days before you could ask a computer to make a 65 year old man defy every natural law. And titillate they did, still do, and manage to do a damn good job of doing during the meanwhile.

But, as everyone knows, those numbers that follow the title of the series signify not the growing age and maturity of the piece but rather the multiples of special effects and all round gusto that are expected by whatever cigar chomping executives are financing the film because as we are all meant to know visual feats of awesomeness=quality. And so, where a simple high-speed powerboat chase down the canals of Venice may have sufficed before, ICOK has to drop an atomic bomb on proceedings before the film’s even got going. Just to warm things up. Literally.

I went into ICOK expecting a phenomenal opening scene because, let’s be honest, in order to enjoy Indy films all you really need to do is watch the opening and closing scenes and let your imagination paint in all the intervening boring stuff. What I didn’t expect was an intro akin to the Family Guy Chicken Fight. For starters Indy goes from being held hostage in a warehouse of ancient artefacts by a small army and fighting his way loose. He then hops, skips and jumps into a mad chase involving jeeps before fistfighting his way through various walls.

So far so Indy.

He then somehow lands fists flaying onto a rocket-on-rails which he uses to set fire to a group of pinko commie soldiers before riding it like a cocaine cowyboy into the middle of the desert. Slightly extravagant but all’s fair in an opening scene. Things take a turn for the hilarious however when Indy stumbles into what looks like a 50’s town but is actually a nuclear testing zone filled with plastic dummies. And then a nuclear bomb explodes.

8m X 8m rolling boulder. Single most destructive creation on the planet. That’s not raising the stakes, that’s going all-in blind on top of betting your mother, soul and dignity.

I mean, once your protagonist has begun the film by surviving a nuclear blast by hiding in a fridge you pretty quickly get the message that he’s sodding indestructible and that every action set-piece is going to involve a series of increasingly ridiculous scenarios that make past action Indy action scenes look like sedate episodes of Last of the Summer Wine.

It is slightly confusing how, after this immensely over-blown opening scene, ICOK for a moment becomes something of a social commentary. The lamenting over Indy’s new-found sense of befuddlement as he enters old age, a topic which Spielberg no doubt could have spun into an interesting Indy film by itself if he wanted the world to laugh at him, are mentioned and then strapped to a shuttle and jettisoned into the galaxy of Inconsequentialism as Indy appears to get more fit the more he smashes his body around. McCarthyism is also briefly plopped in as a token gesture to any Russians pissed off that the generic psycho-Nazi (sorry, Communist) villains may have been their grandparents.

And so, inevitably, Henry Jones Jr. (Indy’s real name, as ICOK seems intent on reminding you) gets back to adventuring and fighting at the first opportunity. The opportunity in this case coming in the form of crazy-rebel-youngbuck Mutt Williams who has scraps of paper containing a riddle about a crystal skull sent to him by blah-blah-blah-who-cares-the-important-thing-is-that-shit-happens.

I don’t know if there’s meant to be any suspense about the fact that Mutt is Indy’s son or not. My favourite line from Last Crusade is, ‘We named the dog Indy’, so the name Mutt acted as a decent enough signpost, and more importantly than that it’s FUCKING OBVIOUS from the start because Spielberg loves his schmaltz. Whatever, young Shia LaBeouf gives an entertaining and energetic performance, but that’s hardly surprising given that he’s the only character in the film who looks like he can’t ride the bus for free.

Ray Winstone spends the majority of the film wheezing away like he’s about to suffer a heart explosion, John Hurt acutely portrays a nursing home resident who regularly throws excrement at the nurses and Karen Allen has been barren for many a full moon now. Two of the most loved characters, Marcus Brody and Henry Jones Sr., have packed it in all together. In real life in the case of Denholm Elliott and career wise for Connery; although seeing Indy mourn over the death of his father did make me feel like I was being mentally prepared for the shocking and terrible day when Sean Connery actually kicks the bucket.

Still, huff, puff and wage their battle against the evil Irina Spalko they do, along a narrative path borne by action scenes like a non-stop rollercoaster so that by the end everyone, crew and audience alike, feels a faint sense of daze and confusion about how they got there and what just happened. The start of every action scene is a spawning point for an incredulously long chain of events that leaves one wondering how Spielberg plans his holidays.

A simple drive through the jungle with your wife and kid to the temple of your choice not enough? How about breaking out of a hostage situation and taking control of the truck, firing a rocket launcher at a big sawing machine thing, smashing into other trucks, inter-jeep-juggling of priceless artefacts, sword fighting, jeep leaping, cliff-edge driving, monkey swinging and bonnet bumping your way to your desired location.

But as the jeeps finally come crashing to a halt don’t think you can rest yet! Did we mention millions upon quadrillions of ginormous flesh-eating ants, who love nothing more than to consume humans in a gruesome fashion who swarm our plucky heroes as they pull their broken bodies from the wreckage and herd them towards a sheer drop to a wild river? And another fight. And insane stunts involving boatcars being used for strategic tree-catapult purposes.

It was immediately following this, as the boat full of OAPs casually hurtled over a sodding great big waterfall not once, not twice, but thrice that I began to think Spielberg was being a bit of a cunt. As the final temple revealed its secrets by lifting up its shafts into a giant phallic obelisk I could practically smell Spielberg’s dick cheese on the celluloid.

And the cheese did smell good. There’s no doubting Spielberg’s talent for the entertaining. The exponential explosions of action scenes had me laughing out loud with sheer joy. At one point I found my hands inadvertently clapped together which was slightly perturbing. There was a visceral sense of entertainment that made me feel like an 8 year-old child again watching my first Indy film. Given how many action films have been getting this so wrong the last few years it’s nice to see that someone can still do it, even if it does take the piss.

But ICOK isn’t an Indiana Jones film. Not in the same way that the first three were. It’s got the characters and the history, the jokes, references and everything else you’d expect to make you feel at home and comfortable but the possibilities for action films nowadays makes it incomparable to the early trilogy. For some people that will be too much and they’ll run away screaming about Spielberg being a monster who has vomited on everything that was good and holy about the world, while others for whom I wish a life not filled with tears, gasoline and fire will enjoy it or not for what it is.

Lucky 7s

2008-05-01T01:13:00.005+01:00

The longest any of your cells live for is seven years. That’s what I’ve been told since I was 7. But I’ve been burnt by facts like this before. The kind that are Gospel truths passed down by Sacred Word of Mouth which then turn out to be complete fabrications, and solely exist as means for those with superior intellects to laugh at us morons and the truths we hold dear*.

Well fukkit. The whole premise of this article rests on the fact that the longest a cell lives for is seven years. If this turns out to be false, I don’t care. I’ve lost too many childhood truths, I’m not going to lose this one. I do have faith in some things. Besides, what follows is more full of cod than an illegal Spanish Fishing Armada so it matters little. I’m too weary of ‘actual’ facts nowadays…

Moving on. The longest any of your cells lives for is seven years. This means that nothing about you is physically the same as it was seven years ago. Everything about you has grown, reproduced and died in seven years. Which could cause one to wonder what it actually is about ‘you’ that’s so fucking special, but the self is not my concern here as I fear it may get in the way of my point…

Like that.

This whole Lucky 7s theory does have some weight to it. If you’re the kind who’s convinced by Chapter and Verse Citations then Shakespeare talks about the Seven Ages of Man in a play*. The number seven can be found everywhere in society. Things like Seven Samurai remake, The Magnificent Seven, serve as poignant portraits of the changes that occur when cells are replicated and …altered… slightly. And that’s just one example out of many*.

Seven is a reasonably consistent yearly period between significant moments in life too. Oh yes. Let the facts do the talking:

1st Regeneration – 7 Earth Years
By age seven, the death of the last first born cell, most people have a pretty good idea how to eat, shit and sleep by themselves and so are deemed ready to be shipped off to have whatever passes for an education in these parts so that the next two sets of regenerated cells are suitably saturated with information.

2nd Regeneration – 14 Earth Years
The 2nd Regeneration brings with it a whole new load of cellular energy, activating hormones, rebuilding structures, readying the whole pink blob cell mass thing for genetic replication with another collection of suitable cells.

Socially it is a significant age where humans move out of childhood and start getting the ‘orn. Obviously.

3rd Regeneration – 21 Earth Years
Physical growth, sexual maturity and any other odds and sods are usually in place by now. Satisfied with a job well done each cell starts a self-destruct sequence.

A time associated with the death of immaturity and taking on complete self-reliance along with the world. And lots of fancy parties.

4th Regeneration – 28 Earth Years
A lot of particularly prodigious cell-types often self-destruct on the cusp of the 5th Regeneration. SIGNIFICANT*.

5th Regeneration – 35 Earth Years
Probably a hugely significant social event associated with this age in some non-Western culture. Saturation levels dangerously low.

6th Regeneration – 42 Earth Years
Nothing obvious but I still think there might be something to this.

7th Regeneration – 49 Earth Years
Ar ha! See, that’s kind of close to 50! Which is half a century! Ha!

8th Regeneration – 56 Earth Years
Self-destruct sequences begin to kick in,

And so forth into kerrrffflaaaaaahhhh. The fact that the system spirals out of significance is fine. We only live past our mid-30s cos we’re so gorram smart now at tricking Nature out of her fertilising bounty of corpses. Like most things in life we aren’t meant to go beyond a 5th season*.

Anyway, here I am just on the other side of my 3rd regeneration. The parties are sadly thinning out and the realisation is dawning that my 4th regeneration seems worryingly close and I should really be worrying about where I’m going to be at that point. I worry about whether my future cells will be financially secure. I worry if my unhealthy habits will cause them to be born slightly crippled. I worry if the memories passed on to my 4th Regeneration will be ones of happiness; of seizing the real world, the one outside this faux-world bubble of education that has shielded me for two Life Cycles, by its literal horns and steering it straight and true to the abattoir.

But I shouldn’t worry cos technically ‘me’ as I am right now will be dead by then.

And there are so many options open to us! So many frickin’ options! Everyday we’re bombarded with exactly how every 1 in 6 billion chance in the world has gone. Mainly if it’s gone badly. We all have these images presented to us everyday, of how the whole world is living*.

The threat of all those 1 in 6 billion chances, the billions of ways a life can go at any moment, the constant streams of information we have about what other people are doing, what they should be doing, how everyone thinks everyone else should be doing means it can be daunting for a species that until Google had been used to just about processing the empathic information of the Nation as some homogenous country blob and acting hostile to anyone who ain’t from round these parts. Now the different truths of opinions, ideas and beliefs of 6 billion people can be shared and accessed, everything can be argued against and questioned by someone.

It’s an amazing time for anyone who isn’t threatened by questioning their own beliefs every time a cell dies. And also capable of living in a relativist coma without their brain exploding. So no one. Soon we’ll just be flattened into apathetic pink jellyblobs.

So I’m going to use my 3rd Regeneration to find the 7 people in 6 billion who believe all this bullshit about 7 being a significant number*, form a cult and be re-born aged 28. Who knows into what world I shall emerge… I’m holding out hope for flying cars and robozombie armies but I fear seven years is just too short a time for one individual to make a difference.

Oh yeah, and there are seven days in a week. That's gotta be significant, right?

1. I’m looking at you, Fry.
2. Homework is to find out which play it is.
3. I can give you other examples. Probably.
4. Caps lock sincerity is binding.
5. Or album.
6. [Insert paranoid delusions of some evil media God in your contemplations here if so desired].
7. I’ll start with Dan Brown fans.

Doctor Who Raped My Eye Sockets With A Sandpaper Condom

2008-04-24T23:20:00.001+01:00

I’ll tell you who’s a menace to society. Doctor Who. That’s who. That’s what I’ve induced after watching however many episodes of this fancy new regenerated version of the show as it’s possible to cram into a few short hours.

Yes I’ve only just got round to watching this apparent saviour to British TV. This could be seen as having something to do with the slight weariness I felt towards a show which I remember from childhood as being a Philadelphia Light slice of schlock BBC science fiction entertainment mainly involving men in rubber suits for it’s emotional connection and a complete lack of fancy computer graphics to make things shiny, but then again I was three at the time so maybe this new one deserved a chance.

Or maybe it was the fact that the few new episodes I had chanced were seamless continuations along this theme, the only differences being half the rubber, double, maybe even triple, the CGI budget and bungled attempts to hack at the heartstrings.

Doctor Who afficionados assure me this is because of some timey-wimy slip up which meant I only sat down in front of the idiot lantern when a particularly piss poor episode was on, like a diver who keeps missing the pool and landing in a bloody and smashed heap on the pool edge time after time.

I reckon it was probably because I always had a nagging suspicion it wouldn’t live up to Whedon.

Whatever the reason, I’m like a moth to an atom bomb when it comes to revision distractions and I’d watched that episode set in Pompeii a few weeks back and it caused a reaction inside me. It felt like… happiness? Through the television the Doctor reached me and changed my robot brain and circuitry into real flesh, filling me with these things you humans call… emotions.

You might suspect that this is a lie, or exaggeration of the truth if you’re feeling morally dubious, and you’d be right. But if I were in a Doctor Who episode that’s the kind of thing that would happen. And the Doctor would heal another rift in the time/space insertrandompieceofbadsciencejargonhere, while simultaneously decapitating bad guys with laid back witticisms and getting off on the sexual frustration of young girls. Then next thing you know he’s only bloomin’ well teleported halfway round the sodding multi-layered, multi-dimensional, persistent jelly that is Time to do the exact same thing again.

What seems to be pretty constant with this Doctor fella is that shit follows him around like a fly follows shit. Or vice versa. Personally I reckons it’s the versa. This is a Time Lord who can travel anywhere in time and space, bending and changing whatever he deems fit. And what does he spend the majority of time doing? Pursuing his favourite pastime of sticking his feet up and watching millions of humans die at a time until stepping in at the last minute when he could quite easily have prevented the whole thing in 30 seconds.

Honestly, all he has to do is nip in the TARDIS, hop back to a point where whichever nemesis threatening reality itself is a gamete, or whatever these alien types use to reproduce, give ol’ Poppa Nutballs a swift kick in the groin/sensitive reproductive nano-plunger and relax after a job well done on a sunny beach with the intergalactic equivalent of a rum and coke.

But no. There are Rules. Rules that must be obeyed if it means doing anything apart from letting things get to their very worst before stepping in like some Hero of the Hour prick and solving everything, preferably while hefting a bloody big sledge hammer into the porcelain display case of Time. Just to show that if you really want to you can stick two fingers up to the fabric of reality if it makes your life more exciting. Git.

Oh sure, when the shit really hits the fan he tries to justify it all by healing everything up and making it like it was before, but whenever he knows that he can adopt an Etch-a-Sketch Time Policy, where everything reverts to how it was before, the body count always seems to be suspiciously higher than when he can’t. Almost as if he values the deaths of these people less, feels like he can watch these people die if he can make it all like it never happened… he likes to draw it out to feature lengths if he can, just so he can watch humankind come close to obliteration time and time again.

At least that’s what I used to think. Then I realised that the Doctor’s actually quite sincere in his repeated attempts to stop us crazy apes from letting ourselves get wiped out yet again. He’s just a patsy. For the very most evilest (and I don’t use hyperbole lightly) mind in the entire Multiverse, that sonofawhore TARDIS. The Doctor’s not a bad pilot, the TARDIS just loves dumping him wherever he knows the Doctor’s gonna be drowning in Shit Creek, especially if it means he has to choose to wipe out a people.

Right, right… the TARDIS just happened to travel to the end of the Universe, find the dormant Master, help re-awaken him and bring him back to wipe out half of humankind? It just happened to fall into a parallel world where it knew Rose would be compelled to get involved and risk everyone’s lives. The TARDIS just happened, by sheer coincidence, to butcher every last creature in the galaxy, using the time vortex to create eternal torture for every living thing, spending an eternity laughing at Creation’s destruction by its hand. (I must admit that last storyline is taken from a bit of personal fanfiction).

This would be fine, happy coincidence, if it weren’t for the fact that the TARDIS is alive. Yet it never thinks to travel to a time where solving the problem would be simple. Never does anything to prevent itself getting nicked, breaking down at just the wrong point, or being generally impotent whenever it would be a really useful ‘Get Out of Certain Death Free’ card.

The TARDIS is either fixated with watching the Doctor die, or suicidal. Maybe it misses all the other TARDISsssss in the world, I don’t know. I’m not a TARDIS. What I do know is that this thing’s a damn menace and the sooner the Doctor can realise this the sooner the TARDIS and the Doctor can duke it out in a Fantabulous Christmas Special Extravaganza.

One final note. I realise that I have probably made a million mistakes, contradictions and outright lies that would see me hung in a Doctor Who court. Thankfully we don’t have one of these because the fans are yet to take over the world, but if you do want to bring out a few Doctor facts to cripple my well-researched, thought-out and planned babble, as it seems some fans are desperate to do, then feel free. Just so I know who to… as a Doctor Who villain would say with the irony still dripping … ‘thank’ later.

Meaning I’m going to process your body and turn you into a mindless slave. Probably with metal bits attached. It’ll definitely be an evil plan anyway.

A Brief Word On What Follows

2008-04-08T00:16:00.002+01:00

The stuff down below that's all been added at once is the reason that I haven't posted on here for a while. A couple of weeks ago I was at the National Student Drama Festival where students come together and put on shows for the general delectation of the public. Thankfully there's a publication called Noises Off! which is published daily where cantankerous people like myself can voice their opinions on what they've seen.

I spent the whole week writing stuff and staying up til 5am publishing the damn thing which is why I've been reluctant to leap back into writing. There's stuff up there but the brain just seems hesitant in getting it down. I wasn't going to publish the articles on here cos I thought they would be irrelevant and misleading but I've got to put something up, so here it is.

They're in no particular order so view as your will takes you.

When You Cry In Space A Fairy Shits Herself

2008-04-08T00:14:00.000+01:00

The stuttering child’s voice and five on stage characters dressed like members of a Scout cult group with the number 8 pinned over their hearts may at first disturb the audience. But When You Cry In Space Your Tears Go Everywhere (a mouthful of a title if ever there was one) unfolds as a joyous half hour full of a childish sense of exploration and adventure, of discovery and struggling for dreams.

The play comes alive through an imaginative and innovative use of its props that are mainly paper, cut out and constructed during the play like a child’s card set, each piece, from the rotating story wheel to the space rocket and mountaineer’s gear are beautiful in their simplicity and deftly incorporated. Indeed the high production values of the play overshadow the actors who are mostly the props of the various effects, having little other role to play.

The sense of perseverance and resilience needed in scaling life’s mountains are embodied by the ever-climbing mountaineer in the background who never stops marching towards her destination. Meanwhile the others rocket into space and gasp at wonder at everything they see from there, before the mundane nature of reaching their proverbial stars is revealed in the scientific dissection of moon dust and one of the most finely crafted jokes of the Festival that plays on the monotony of routine present in even the most other-worldly kind of environments.

There’s a whole load of horseshit spouted about discovering the inner child, but for thirty minutes I was struck by how well the Tinned Fingers crew encapsulated that sense of childish wonder and translated that to a broader view of life’s journey. If there was any bad side to the show it was that I now have Kiss – I Was Made For Loving You stuck in my head. Yes, I’d have to agree, this would be the worst song to be singing to oneself at the moment of death. This thought will occupy my nightmares for a good while yet.

The Day Today

2008-04-08T00:13:00.000+01:00

As Gary Glitter once sang, ‘It’s good to be back’. Speaking of inappropriate stains, NSDF has begun again. It’s an exciting moment, that point where the first snowflakes in the forms of addled students ready and willing to tear into the nitty gritty of that most elusive enema, theatre, gather on the mountains of expectation.

I began the day with a stroll along the coast. As you may have noticed, we are located slap bang next to the sea. It is both dramatic and attractive. I wholeheartedly suggest a morning walk along the sand as it is both good for the constitution and aids motion. There are a series of algae covered rocks towards the right hand end of the beach that look like tiny hills. Feel like a giant bounding across the Dales if you are looking for some light beach entertainment.

On returning to The Complex I joined the 2 o’clock excitement that is registration (early rising is easy to avoid) and braced myself for the relentless hordes of eager beavers just begging to get their hands on a laminated ID card if only to give them that sense of cliqueness when walking around Scarborough town.

I braced a little more than necessary it turns out. Not a releasing of the sluice gates this year, more the faulty drip of a hose tap. Being the studious investigator that I am I sought out il commendatori Kendrick and asked her about the apparent drop in numbers. It’s true, our numbers are fewer than last year but that’s not anyone’s fault apart from the Christians. If they’d chosen a fixed date for their pagan festival instead of fannying about with lunar cycles then NSDF wouldn’t have to happen earlier and clash with some students finishing dissertations and what not. (That’s my view by the way, not Holly’s who is a good god fearing Christian for anyone who cares).

No doubt this will be a year of quality over quantity and the idea of less crowded workshops and discussions has this foolish optimist excited about the upcoming week.

Topping the euphoria of registration is a difficult task but what the smug git didn’t know was that the Opening Ceremony had an ace slyly placed in its bra. The Decrees were dictated by a humorous musical duo of Tony Blair The Musical fame. If fascists had caught on to the idea of issuing their World Order by the medium of song the motto of this festival wouldn’t be the cheekily suggestive ‘Bring It On’ but rather ‘Theatre Makes One Free’. Some other admin things were said both before and after the song and dance but my mind had drifted to roast beef sandwiches.

It turned out that the Opening Ceremony was a mere façade, a means of securing an audience for the first show of the Festival, Tangle by Unlimited. The overriding theme was that of a peculiar piece of quantum physics which involves two tiny particles that share the same characteristics and react to stimuli simultaneously and in the same way no matter how far apart they are. Mind boggling stuff indeed. Unfortunately if it’s true, as the play suggests, that there’s someone else in the world who shares common feelings with me then I apologise for sending him/her into a catatonic sleep.

Now came the crux of the day, the very reason for ignoring my university career, a NSDF selector approved piece of student theatre that was Lost in the Wind. It was nice. Following it I retired to the Spa bar. Where else can you see the elites of the theatrical world getting drunk and reminiscing on old times? I can recommend nothing more than sitting and listening to the ruminations of these Titans.

Actually that’s not entirely true as the end of the night (or the beginning of work as I’m coming to think of it) brought Holly Jazz Lowe’s voice with it and it is a voice I want to place in a small wooden box and bring out on occasions when I want to smile and nod my head in whatever way is the fashion with the kids these days. I have a powerlessness against this kind of voice and now that the cold dark embrace of layout beckons I shall hold my head up high as I seek out some more caffeine.

Sunrise, sunset

2008-04-08T00:12:00.001+01:00

Did you know that NSDF used to travel from place to place back in the day? I don’t know the details but I hope the hosting city was decided based on a Eurovision Song Contest set of rules where the previous year’s winners hosted. How you might ‘win’ at NSDF is something of a mystery though because this is an entertainment medium where there are no winners, only losers, but we’ll see which company gets the most awards at the end of the week and then decide.

Moving on, travel it did until settling in Scarborough’s buxom bosom in 1990, although it took another year for the Festival to slide down the hill towards the coast. Fascinating facts abound dear reader! And who can blame it? There’s a bloody big sea on the other side of the road, which enjoys nothing more than putting on a show of its own with blasting waves and dramatic sunrises. I find the sea a terrifying place because it’s so untouched by human hand. Look behind you and you can see how the earth has been shaped by human hand, but look ahead and there’s an endless abyss that looks just as it did 4 billion years ago.

Which is why the pointless lights that dazzle all over it every night perturb me slightly. Why are they there? If NSDF is worried about saving some mahulah and funding Tibetan orphans in their theatrical endeavours they could start by slashing their power bills in half by turning off the fucking lights. I know that it’s fun for the techies to try and shine some lights into the endless dark just because they can, which is why I asked a VC of an unnamed venue who I’m friends with to tell me about the lights.

Yes, he could confirm, they are bloody big lights. And they drain a whole load of power. It takes as many as four people to move them off turrets (whatever they are, I get lost in technical language) and even he admits they are entirely pointless. ‘Not any more’ was his response to my question of, ‘Are they dangerous?’ which was reassuring. However, he did remind me that the lights above the Vitadome are Park Ammms (spelling?) liable to explode when wet, due to the high voltages pulsing through them and exposed electrical connections, which would cause burning hell fire to rain down on those below. This is why techies scare people.

Mind you, expecting sensible planning from the people who have nicknamed me Richard Dawson, no doubt because of some hilarious in-joke I’m not part of, on my ID card might be a little much. I kid, the organisation has been wonderful so far. And you can’t help but have respect for people who throw caution to the wind and let all those lucky 17 year olds enjoy a few pints in the bar.

Is it just me though or is the Festival really starting to pick up? The first few shows have come and gone and people seem to be settling into the whole swing of the thing. I was just privy to a touching moment where two apparent strangers realised that they’d both graduated from Warwick in 2001 and had both worked in theatre there. Touching stuff, right here at the NSDF.

After much contemplation I’ve decided that the best way to end this is by answering some of the question that you have been asking on the NOFF Ideas and Question Board. First off the bat is Yellow Post-It No.1 who asks,
“I am in a school. We are bored of doing the same plays. What plays should we do?”
On asking my magic number 8 ball (choosing a random play in the index of Raw Talent, a detailed history of NSDF on sale now for the bargain price of £10) it responded with Jacques by Euegene Ionesco. So there you go, a bit of absurdist theatre for you to get your bored teeth into you cheeky scallywag.

Pink Post-It No. 2 asks, “How do we make theatre more like film?” By transferring CGI technology to the medium of live stage productions. Gasp as spaceships hurtle past you at the speed of light, shriek as an alien prowls past you in the aisles, chuckle manically as D-Day soldiers are torn to pieces in front of your very eyes, all in the comfort of a large dark auditorium. Or just go to the fucking cinema. Theatre and film are media that are worlds apart in every way, you might well ask how we make theatre more like comics or computer games. Actually, why haven’t there been any stage adaptations of Watchmen or Resident Evil?

Pink Post-It No.3 wants to know, “Where can I find a pub with a giant pink arse outside?” Wherever the randy Scarborough baboons go to wet their whistle. (Notice how I resisted the urge to offend Christians by answering with “Any pub opposite a church”).

Strict Machine Review

2008-04-08T00:11:00.000+01:00

There came a point about two thirds of the way through Strict Machine when I couldn’t help thinking, ‘Are they taking the piss?’. I had tried hard to interpret the physical dancing of the two women on stage as well as possible when suddenly I had an epiphany. During one scene I understood fully that they were competing to impress a man at a bar and when they each pulled out a trumpet it was because they were, literally, blowing their own trumpet. Feeling very proud of myself for solving this particular puzzle I allowed myself a smug sit back in my chair. And then the projector, which until now had cast only obscure images onto the back screen, shone the simple message, ‘Blow your own trumpet’. My smug sense of self-satisfaction was destroyed in one quasi-literal blow.

Thankfully my sense of pride did not get in the way of my enjoying an energetic piece of theatre. The foreboding introductory song that was sung by performers Abbi Greenland and Helen Gaolen set out the theme of the show of women struggling against each other to succeed in business and from there they launched into a series of eclectic dances that conveyed the story.

At times it was difficult to see exactly what message the two were trying to convey (hence my pride at interpreting the bar scene) but the divide in personalities set up between the two women in the introduction and the twitchy, manic physicality with which they threw themselves about the stage was more than enough to keep the audience interested and curious to see how the next dance would fit into the story.

It’s difficult to know how to comment on the feminist theme that ran throughout of the decisions women have to make between adopting a dominant, male strategy in business compared to that of the more feminine approach, because men never have to make that kind of decision, but Strict Machine made clear the kind of conflict that arises between women as a result of such decisions. The moment that one changed from wearing a skirt to trousers, the other was entirely subservient and eventually physically destroyed. It was touching to see the remorse felt and the eventual reconciliation between the two, something that would be noticeably absent from a male interpretation of surviving in business.

The music that accompanied the dancing was for the most part electronic and synth heavy, fitting perfectly with the routine-driven business world the characters inhabited but the transitions between songs could have been smoother. One could almost hear the sound engineer clicking ‘next song’ on the iPod. The use of a projector was also largely superfluous and distracting (and ruined my one moment of clarity) but as a whole it was a pleasurable and interesting forty minutes.

Proof Review

2008-04-08T00:10:00.000+01:00

It seems that some people have taken issue with what they perceive to be the negative reviews present in this here publication. There is a lack of balance, they claim, which is caused by these bitter, hate-filled individuals who are clearly in the group who can’t and therefore teach. And so in order to pander to the sentiments of those who blanche at the very idea of an individual having an opinion about a piece of theatre (or at least any opinion that isn’t the same as their saccharine version of events) this review of Proof will be divided into two halves consisting of things that were good about the production and things that were not so good. If you liked Proof then read the first half. If you didn’t, read the second half. Or if you’re feeling really brave, read the whole thing at once.

Good things about Proof:

1. The acting was really really good!
2. The set was wicked!
3. Ohmigosh, there were twists in the plot and everything!
4. It was both funny and touching. What a combo!
5. There was an interesting theme to do with trust and believing in the words of others throughout, which, like, totally tied in with the title of the play. Where do these geniuses get their ideas?!?!?!?

Bad things about Proof:

1. A script that was more film than theatre. Pointless!
2. A live piano soundtrack that told the audience when and where to feel emotional. It worked but in a way that was manipulative rather than moving. Who do these bastards think they are, telling me how to feel, eh?!
3. Blackouts that went on FOREVER. Some of us have got places to be, yeah?!
4. The lack of clear meaning at the end. My not completely getting it = bad, geddit?
5. The actor who was meant to be 28 years old looked about 10 years younger than all the other actors. Where’s your naturalism now, huh?!

There. A balanced review. Are you happy now? If you wish to further discuss the views expressed here with me in person then I’m the tall lanky one with Richard Dawson inexplicably written on his ID card. However, I’ll probably just quote the infamous words of a certain editor which apply to the majority of people at NSDF, including myself: “Are you being paid for your opinions? No? Then fuck off.”

Diversity at NSDF

2008-04-08T00:09:00.003+01:00

White middle class guilt is a powerful force. It’s a good thing that the sense of enjoying such luxuries as political stability, clean drinking water and student theatre while some other poor bastard is stuck around the u-bend of life through no fault of their own but the location of their birth and the world’s prejudices causes people to want to make the world a better place.

I don’t know if this was the feeling that Mark Ravenhill was trying to evoke when he opened up discussion on what NSDF should be doing to increase the diversity of shows at the Festival but I imagine that was the initial gut reaction of the largely white middle-class audience. As noble as the sentiment is, using an emotive response to fully answer a question like this should be dismissed from the off.

Thankfully the people I’ve spoken to about the issue have agreed that NSDF should always be about showcasing the very spanking best of student theatre. Positive discrimination of any kind when it comes to selection would be disastrous. If it happened the Festival Director might as well get up on stage with the ‘tick-a-box’ show, pat them all on the head and distribute ‘Didn’t they do well?’ badges. It’s offensive to all involved and benefits no one.

But that doesn’t change the fact that there’s a huge proportion of people who are not represented in student theatre. The point David Betz-Heinemann made about not being able to find a black female student to cast in a play is definitely something that’s true in Bedlam Theatre at Edinburgh University. I think we’ve wanted to put Othello on there for about the last 15 years now.

This is down to a problem with higher education in general though and these theatre companies are the wrong places to look if you want to increase diversity. However, as long as they remain the dominant forces in terms of repeated return years at NSDF it’s difficult to see how this will change.

The areas where attention needs to be focused is the drama companies that are just starting up, the ones that maybe don’t have financial means of others or come from places where putting on theatre is not the norm. These are the places where the quality of theatre may not be up to NSDF standards, caused by a lack of experience as opposed to talent. If these groups are given the support they need to sustain themselves over a period of years then no doubt down the line we’ll see a better slice of British culture at NSDF.

Expecting NSDF to fill this role though is expecting too much. The barriers to entry in theatre are just too high. With football anyone can pick up a ball and show off their skills (although they’d probably be better if they kicked it) at close to no cost. Before you even begin contemplating putting on a piece of theatre you have to pawn off at least one treasured item. And once you’ve done that you have to mortgage your grandmother in order to get to NSDF, because they’ve got spiralling costs and a foetus like reliance on the Arts Council’s financial placenta goodness.

And it’s not for the joy of putting on a show at NSDF either. Of course there’s a huge sense of pride at being selected and a great chance for everyone to learn and experience new things; but the real use of NSDF is as a stepping stone. A chance to be noticed and meet professionals in the field. Those who get the most out of NSDF are those who are looking to pursue their career professionally and these are the opportunities that NSDF should focus on by selecting the most talented. Talk of elitism can ruffle feathers but if the Festival isn’t concentrated on representing the most talented then the opportunities it provides are severely reduced.

The buck can only be passed so far though. I was appalled at how many people had only heard about NSDF by chance. If we want to make sure that the best student theatre in the country is put on then every single potential piece of student theatre should be aware that NSDF exists. If a student group do manage to put on a stunning piece of theatre against the odds and neither they nor NSDF are aware of each other’s existence then there’s a criminal waste of potential, and one that NSDF is more than capable of preventing.

The question is one that’s a nightmare to answer and I can’t see the situation changing drastically anytime soon. There’s no excuse for complacency as it’s arrogant to assume that the largely homogenous student group here in Scarborough represents the very finest theatrical talent in the UK. It’s a problem that stretches beyond the means and purpose of NSDF and will require the kind of joint social effort that’s always harder than it sounds. The problems and possible solutions I’ve outlined here are brief ideas so please take issue with them and write responses as it’s an issue that should be discussed.

NSDF Awards

2008-04-08T00:09:00.001+01:00

Repent ye sinners, the end is nigh! That’s right, despite expectations NSDF ’08 is closing its doors for the final time today, so we can all go home and think about what we’ve done. It’s customary to hand out awards at such a time, which is slightly bizarre given that appreciation of the arts is mostly subjective, but I’m a stickler for tradition and so I too would like to make some objective decisions about the shows this week and hand out some awards of my own. (Don’t worry, as is often the case in this political climate, every show will get an award so that the namby-pambies are left satisfied.)

The Trojan Award For Exemplary Manipulation of Rubber goes to Lost In The Wind for their insightful appreciation of balloons and the many shapes and sizes they can take. I have never been so emotionally affected by balloons before, and I’ve been to some fucking good balloon fairs. Well done!

The Dick Van Dyke ‘Cor’ Blimey Guv’nor!’ Award goes to The Dumb Waiter who warmed the cockles of this gaff’s heart by faithfully reproducing the accent of the much maligned cockney gangster with conviction and gusto. Huzzah!

The Happy-Slappy ‘What Was That For?’ Award goes to Fewer Emergencies for the bit of perplex glass barely visible at the back of the stage that apparently contained every object mentioned in the play. Entirely pointless and no doubt a massive drain on the budget but they went ahead and did it anyway, bless ‘em.

The Middle-Aged Mother’s Appreciation Award is customarily given to the show that evokes the biggest ‘Ooh, isn’t that nice?’ reaction from the audience and without a doubt this prestigious award must go to Proof, whose set was ‘just lovely’. A subsidiary Fuck Me! Award goes to the tech crew for getting said set out in under 15 minutes. Gosh!

The Frank Matcham Joke Award goes to that raucous bunch who put on When You Cry In Space A Fairy Shits Herself for constructing by far and away the best laugh of the entire Festival. I’m chuckling away now just thinking about it. (I’m not really, but it was still bloody funny.)

The Ian Shuttleworth ‘It Wouldn’t Have Been Allowed In My Day’ Award goes without question to Beautiful Thing, who dared to break down the kind of boundaries that would have been insurmountable 16 years ago. Challenging? You bet yer ass!

The John Leslie Award goes to Metamorphosis and if you need that one explained to you then you probably don’t want to know.

The Universal Acceptance of General Fluffiness Award goes to Jackajack, a show which evoked a feeling of warmth and love in all but the harshest of souls. I had to strangle a puppy on the way home in order to counter this feeling but still, congrats!

The Khalid Abdalla Póg Mo Thóin Award goes to the cast of Disco Pigs who I’m still convinced are going to leap out at me from a dark alley and proceed to beat nine shades of whatsit out of me, just because they can. I’m sure they’re lovely when you get to know them though.

The Michael Jackson Award For Scaring The Bejeezus Out Of An Audience was hotly contested between Metamorphosis and The Skriker because, quite frankly, both had ensemble casts that used guttural noises that made me want to turn my pants a darker shade of brown, but in the end the award had to go to The Skriker, specifically for that bloke with a stick who seemed to have dropped straight out of The Descent. Freaky!

The Boris Johnson Cigars And Brandy Award goes to those adorable girls from Strict Machine who in their own special way demonstrated why women should stay out of the workplace and in the kitchen. Mother knows best!

And finally The Move Them To The Fuck Of Their Heart Award goes to 4.48 Psychosis who, and I mean this in all sincerity, caused me to break into tears the instant I left the auditorium. The most touching, raw and emotionally draining show I’ve ever seen, quite exceptional in every way.

In conclusion I would like to thank every single person who has been involved in the Festival this year, it’s been a late-night caffeine fuelled blast and so the Thank Fuck You Were Here Too award goes to all of you lovely people, especially the Noffice crew. But not the Arts Council.

A Response to Some Angry Christians

2008-04-08T00:06:00.003+01:00

I can understand why some people might have too little faith in their convictions to laugh at themselves or a fundamental belief system that would prevent them from seeing the tongue-in-cheek nature of my previous comments so let me briefly qualify some of the facts I mentioned about Christian and Pagan festivals.

It’s certainly true that Christianity and Paganism have not shared a harmonious existence. This is because the Pagan festivals of winter and spring were in existence way before Mary got knocked up by some super-powered divine semen and were hijacked by Christians in order to make Christianity more appealing to the Pagan masses. The exchanging of Easter Eggs is an excellent example of this. Quite what a mythical bunny that lays chocolate eggs has to do with Jesus getting nailed to a cross and rising again three days later is beyond me. But look at the Pagan beliefs of fertile Mother Nature’s springtime rebirth and it all becomes clear.

As for Christmas, the Winter Solstice festival was not created by Christians. There is nothing in the Bible that would remotely suggest that Jesus was born on the 25th December. Is it coincidence that the remembrance of the birth of hope and light into the world in the form of a baby Jesus coincides with a time when people would celebrate the return of the life-giving Sun to the world? No, because the early Christians weren’t ones to miss a trick. In fact every element of the story of Jesus’ life, from the immaculate conception through to the death and resurrection of a miracle working character can be found in mythology that existed in many different guises since man first asked, ‘What are we even doing here?’

‘What has this got to do with the Festival of student theatre we are currently celebrating?’ I hear you cry. Nothing, which is why I just want to mention the brilliant pyro show I was privy to this evening. Sometimes (in fact all of the time) I think techies have a much better deal than anyone else in theatre. They get to play with awesome lighting, mind-bending sound effects and things that explode in a shower of flames and sparkles. How is that not the coolest job ever? Techies, I salute you and your ability to create literal pillars of fire.

If you're still offended by my words then I refer you to the incomparable Bill Hicks who, when confronted with Christians who took offence at what he said, simply replied, "Forgive me."

Fewer Emergencies Review

2008-04-08T00:06:00.001+01:00

Fewer Emergencies is an extraordinary piece of writing. In fifty five minutes Martin Crimp explores such a broad variety of themes, from the personal coping mechanisms of a family breakdown in Whole Blue Sky to the most violent of human action born from nothing but boredom in Face to the Wall, that you can’t help but feel short-changed by those other playwrights who take three hours to tell us that protagonist X has experience Y. All of it is borne by an engrossing style and rhythm, combining abstract metaphorical imagery with intensely emotional outbursts.

Competently putting on such a play would be a phenomenal task for any company, demanding such a range and maturity as it does. It is perhaps unsurprising then that at times, despite mostly strong performances, certain areas of the script, meaning and intonation were lost in transit.

Crimp’s technique of having characters talking in the third person, initially throwing out ideas and sentences like a writing brainstorming session before settling more into defined roles, is similar in style to his other works Attempts On Her Life and The Treatment, and it is engrossing to watch a single actor use an anonymous series of characters to flow through a dichotomy of different states and thoughts. It can be tempting though to simply speak rather than act the more obscure lines, perhaps out of a lack of thought or assumed technique.

Of the actors from the University of Hull only Catherine Pugh seemed to have a confident grasp on the more subtle areas of the script. Her ability to sink further and further into the emotional state of the mother in Whole Blue Sky, her variation in character and reactions to the events going on around her separated her from the other three actors.

David Moss had some interesting moments as a man who calmly walks into a school and executes a group of children, trying to re-tell and remember without being prompted by the others about his despicable act, but it felt like there was so much more that could have been brought across, a more in-depth investigation into the mindset of the man who is driven to atrocity by a mundane suburban existence that was missed out on much of the intensity and tension of the scene. The same can be said of Jessica Clark, who had a great singing voice and portrayed the more obvious side of her characters ably, but left me sitting there screaming, ‘Give me more, take me further!’ in my head which proved frustrating.

Despite this reticence towards pushing themselves as far as possible, images such as the final one of a child with a shattered hip pathetically crawling up some stairs, described as the actors stood on a blood splatter of stage, were well put across and the majority of the show was slick and involving. It serves to show the real challenges of pulling off such a difficult script even with a group of talented actors.

On a personal side note, I would like to thank whoever’s decision it was to choose Kyuss’ Gardenia as the opening track. All the shows I’ve seen so far have gone with contemporary music that seems to mostly involve high pitched morse code rambling bass and hearing one of the greatest rock songs ever made me happy straight away, even if it was completely out of context with the mood of the show. Perhaps if Josh Homme had been playing guitar during the Going Postal Blues in D Minor song it would’ve have been loved by more people.

Dumb Waiter Review

2008-04-08T00:05:00.002+01:00

Sometimes you can’t help feeling that there just aren’t enough plays about two male characters in a room discussing their situation. Thankfully you can always rely on Pinter to stick two fingers up to convention and so in the Dumb Waiter we have two male characters in a room discussing their situation.

The script is designed to leave the audience in suspense as to what exactly it is the two characters, Gus and Ben, are in the room for and what their ‘job’ is until the last third when it all is revealed. This method of drip-feeding the audience information is countered though by the Reservoir Dogs inspired silhouettes painted on the back wall. The heavy use of red, white and black is an evocative combination but it means that before the play has even begun you’re wondering when the guns and talk of violence are going to make an appearance.

Staging problems can be ignored if your attention is held by the actors and Will Edwards and Alex Smith for the most part do an excellent job. Edwards as the slovenly Gus is constantly fidgeting and scurrying about, from the beginning unable to rest, while Smith’s Ben makes much more precise and calculated movements, at times working hard to repress his desire to physically lash out. Clearly a lot of time and thought has gone in to working out how the differences in status and physicality separate the two characters and their commitment to these decisions is what makes their relationship so intriguing.

The one thing that everyone seems to know about Pinter is his penchant for pauses and the Dumb Waiter is no exception, indeed the first few minutes take place in silence as Gus fiddles with his shoes and Ben sits motionless on the bed, his face obscured by a paper. Edwards (who also directs because some people seem to enjoy punishing themselves) manages to ably sustain these silences, only occasionally are they unintentionally long or awkward due to a lack of motivation or slightly misjudged leading crescendo.

If there’s an overriding weakness in the play it’s to be found in Pinter’s script. It is for the most part uninteresting as he seems more than happy to throw in elements that are no doubt intended to be important but are too quickly forgotten about. The personal dialogue between the characters can be absorbing but their arc is never satisfactorily explored and the ‘shock’ ending feels more like a cheap trick than a revelation. All of which serves to make Edwards’ and Smith’s acting efforts more commendable.

Disco Pigs Review

2008-04-08T00:05:00.001+01:00

There is a moment towards the end of Disco Pigs where the character Runt states, “17 years and fuck all change”. Exchange the timescale of 60 minutes for 17 years and you have an accurate soundbyte for the show.

From the moment that the ASBO without a cause duo of Pig and Runt bound onto stage with half a shopping trolley the energy is pitched at a level that clearly the actors were directed never to deviate from no matter what the subtleties of the script might suggest. To their credit, both Pete Day as Pig and Fiona Hamilton as Runt keep this energy up throughout the performance, but in doing so they destroy any meaning that the play has beyond glorifying youthful excess and violence.

Director David Betz-Heinemann has been lazy in his approach to the script, accentuating the exuberance of Pig and Runt’s relationship at the expense of the real emotional build-up that Pig has in trying to express his love for Runt. The moment where Pig realises his desire to be with Runt is the one of the most tender in the play but could still have done with a substantial change in pace, if only to draw the audience in to his moment of exposed vulnerability. The fact that these emotions drive him to beat a man who has shown an interest in Runt to death, a shocking example of a shared experience gone wrong, is instantly passed over with an emotionless ‘Cheerio!’ from Runt. If there had been a greater confidence in pausing and letting the dramatic moments play out in contrast to the hi-octane action such sections would have had a real emotional clout.

This laziness also pervaded the staging, which made no attempt to differentiate between the various settings beyond moving two tiny blue chairs. There was the occasional excellent use of props, such as the shopping trolley and manipulation of hoodies to simulate dancing partners, which gave scenes a sense of differentiation and theatricality, but all too often there was a reliance on… nothing. The disco scenes had all the thumping bass and strobe lighting effects you would expect, but the audience had to work hard to imagine the transition from takeaway parlour to coastal viewpoint because there was nothing beyond the words in the script to suggest such a change had taken place and this is live theatre, not a radio show.

If the energy that both Day and Hamilton had for the roles had been utilised beyond a ‘Let’s go cloobin’’ surface interpretation of the material, along with some imagination for staging each scene in a unique way, this would have been a significantly more satisfying production. As it is, Disco Pigs is unpolished and monotone in nature.

Beautiful Thing Review

2008-04-08T00:04:00.000+01:00

Is it wrong to still expect a play about two male teenagers in a South London council estate discovering their homosexual feelings to be a hard-hitting and emotionally draining experience? The changes, both social and legal, that have occurred since 1993 when the play was first put on would suggest so. A play about homosexuality should no more be expected to tell a stereotypical tale than a play about heterosexual relationships should. So it’s encouraging that in Beautiful Thing the University of Sheffield has decided to focus more on the general aspects of first love rather than the controversy of being a gay teenager but in doing so they have unfortunately ended up shooting themselves in the foot with their choice of play.

This production is muddled in what it is trying to portray and for the majority treads a clumsy middle-line between the normality of a homosexual relationship and the avalanche of conflicting feelings that come with it. The fact that Ste is challenged by not only realising his sexuality but also acting on those feelings in the face of very real violence is largely glossed over to make way for the niceties that he and Jamie share. Alex Morgan tries hard to bring out the more timid and fearful sides of the character but when he admits that his father will actually kill him if he finds out he’s gay the other characters are as bleakly unaffected as they are by the escalation in beatings he suffers.

It’s a directorial decision that sucks all of the punch out of the pack and it can be seen in the relationship between Jamie and his mother Sandra as well. Luke Holbrook as Jamie is a convincing 15 year old and gives a fine performance while Lauren Knights as Sandra grasps the mindset and physicality of a 35 year-old single mother well (although there is a certain lack of variation in pitch). However by the end of the play they might as well be where they were at the start. There’s no hint that Sandra may be aware of Jamie’s sexuality so her brief and directorially befuddled anger, tears and complete acceptance come and go in an instant, leaving the audience feeling like they are watching an interpretation of Sisyphus having a bad day.

It’s even more surprising then to see the attempt that went for the lighter side of the script miss so many of the jokes. There’s a hilarious undertone of sexual innuendo running throughout that was either downplayed or ignored by the cast. This was certainly not helped the gaping cavern of the Spa Theatre that sucked up acoustics at will and in a smaller venue there would no doubt have been a more intimate connection with the comedy of the piece.

This production highlights how dated Beautiful Thing is in showing a homosexual relationship in terms of general conceptions of first love, something that could be written nowadays without much controversy but would have been alien 15 years ago. It’s nice to think that theatre has evolved since then.

Lost In The Wind Review

2008-04-08T00:03:00.000+01:00

Lost in the Wind is a play about a man who gets blown into a world full of strange characters who initially treat him with suspicion and mistrust before arriving at a state of common understanding and making a brave journey into the wilderness. Or it’s an allegory for the suffering of an armless widow and her rickets-riddled children in the Great Plague. It’s hard to know for sure and only the synopsis in the program would suggest that the former is closer to the truth.

The problem does not specifically lie in the lack of abundantly clear narrative, which would be expecting a bit much from a piece of physical theatre that contains minimal dialogue beyond yelps and gobbledegook, but more in the confused and jarring mixture of tones that are present throughout.

The characters inhabiting this other world are without exception schizophrenic nutjobs with the combined mental age of a baby chick who’s mother hen mainlined smack into her eyeball. One minute they’re quite contentedly getting on together, the next one has viciously attacked another’s pet potato, cried about it and felt remorse, then not ten seconds later he’s having a fight with another character and his snake, beaten him up and started crying again. But by the time all the characters are back together on stage again all previous grievances appear to have been forgotten and they’re off in some other crackpot direction involving being a submarine and firing foam torpedoes at someone they don’t like.

That would be fine if there were any sense of direction or progress behind the characters but like goldfish in a bowl they just keep floating around, apparently blissfully unaware of a sense of raison d’etre beyond who has the bigger balloon. It’s no wonder that the main character who has ventured into this world is initially confused before slowly submitting to their banal madness. What you feel these toddlers of the imagination need is a quick clip around the ear and a few minutes in the cool down corner but that never happens.

The story is no doubt forsaken to make way for the physical set pieces and in places there are some wonderful moments. The exploration of different elemental conditions on stage, especially the snow laden finale, are clearly presented and create some powerful images. But elsewhere the show is let down by a lack of technical proficiency. Trying to mime that a floating balloon is immobile requires the mime artist to ensure that the balloon does not move at all, not even a little. It may seem like nitpicking but it’s just one example of where the imagination and commitment of the cast is let down by an inability to professionally manipulate their tools.

The ultimate complement that can be given to a puppeteer is that their movements were ignored due to all the attention being focused on the puppet’s motions. But the puppets in this case were either poorly conceived (a shapeless newspaper construction that is more human than broadsheet) or interesting to watch but pointless. If you can’t believe in the human characters, how are you meant to commit to a stick figure puppet who is parachuting just for the hell of it?

There was nothing overtly offensive about the production, there was just nothing for the audience to connect to, to make them feel that they were part of this world. This was not helped by moments where the actors would turn to the audience and play for laughs, a ploy that was completely at odds with the overall mood of the show, nor by a non-committal stance on gobbledegook. A play without dialogue is one thing. A play where the cast communicate via incomprehensible mumbo jumbo is another. But a middle ground of some characters who are unintelligible and some who’s meaning is basically clear if you listen hard enough, achieves nothing but confusion and muddle.

Lost in the Wind is a sketch of what it’s trying to be. The ideas are there but it lacks direction and execution. At its best it’s nice to watch. And that’s meant as a complement but not an overwhelming one.

Tips for Companies at NSDF

2008-04-08T00:00:00.000+01:00

So it turns out that all the rehearsing, planning and stressing was worthwhile because thanks to a combination of talent and luck a NSDF selector has decided that your show is what this festival needs. There’s a great deal of expectation on the companies to perform shows of the highest standard and for some this pressure can be too much, so here are some tips to help you get the most out of NSDF and relax.

1. Never relax. You are ambassadors of student theatre. Every action both on and off the stage is constantly being monitored and scrutinised. If you are not performing to the highest standards at all times then you’re not only letting yourself down but also your company and the whole of student theatre as we know it.

2. Always remember that as theatrical pedigree your status at NSDF is slightly above God. Maintain a constant air of superiority to other festival goers, mixed with a few dominant hints of irritability and impatience. Verbal and physical lashing out at those who annoy you is both expected and encouraged.

3. Respond to any cock-up, no matter how minor, by driving the person(s) responsible into the sea while brandishing flaming sticks and frothing at the mouth. Cries of, ‘You’ll never work in this town again’ will give your understandable ire a weight of professionalism.

4. A list of the cast’s favourite drinks in the programme will help adoring fans know exactly how to best please you at the bar. Be sure to wordlessly accept the drink and turn your backs to them so that they don’t get any ideas above their stations.

5. If you have not brought a significant crew with you take every opportunity to make as many disparaging remarks about anonymous techies and their dark ways as possible. Some of the most stimulating and constructive debate of the festival comes from visiting that uncharted subject of how actors hate techies and vice versa.

6. Discussions can be tense as the ignorant plebs try and give you some supposedly honest feedback on your show. You’ll get the most out of these sessions by remembering that criticisms are born from jealousy and compliments from rational adoration.

7. There are awards at the end of the week and the only way to secure the best is to wage a Clintonesque mudslinging campaign against all the other inferior shows. Justification is on your side as your theatrical expertise gives you a keen insight into the flaws of others.

8. Being able to do four performances in two days is a Herculean effort beyond the capabilities of most. Give yourself a pat on the back every time you muster the effort to sleep through workshops and undermine the confidence of others.

9. If you feel that you’re unfairly suffering from a torrent of abuse in these pages then keep in mind that certain NOFFice staff are not above writing a glowing review in return for favours, be they alcoholic or sexual or both.

10. Remember that the Arts Council are here assessing the festival and if NSDF loses its funding it’s your fault. We have your name, we know where you live and you’ll never work in this town again.

Counting Horses

2008-03-11T04:30:00.000Z

Mother Gaia is dying, apparently. That is what I am assured is the case by reams of scientists, journalists and anyone else who wants to chip their personal monetary value into the matter. Our actions as humans have caused global temperatures to rise and because of this we are only nanoseconds away from ecological disaster on an unprecedented scale. Which sounds scary, but these things often do.

I sometimes wonder what exactly it is about the Earth we’re worried about harming though. The Earth has been kicking about, doing its thang for the last 4.5 billion years now and in that time it’s gone from being covered in noxious gases and volcanoes on every corner, through times when the land has been huddled together in one giant lump, shivered it’s way through a face covered in disfiguring ice and had random pot shots taken at it by passing meteors. So when it comes to a two degree hike in temperature I can’t help but feel that the Earth will live on to tell a bloated star and an uninterested galaxy of its exploits.

Then of course there are the things living on the Earth: plants and animals and fungi and whatnot (but no one really cares about the fungi cos they’re just a bit gross). A change in temperature of just a few degrees could see millions of these species wiped out in a few short years. But don’t start weeping for Nature lost just yet. A distinct species of plant or animal that you’ve never heard of or care about becomes extinct every twenty minutes and there have been five mass extinctions in the past which wiped a large portion of species of the face of the planet but still, life has survived and carried on in that sneaky way it so often does.

After watching the blindingly superb Life in Cold Blood I was struck by conflicting thoughts on the Animal Kingdom. There’s no doubt that the way animals work and adapt to their environment is nothing short of awe-inspiring, but as a human you can’t help feeling infinitely superior to animals that may be able to perform impressive feats of biological engineering but are still entirely vulnerable to their surroundings and couldn’t even begin to comprehend the concept of putting on a warm fur jacket, upping sticks and moving to a nicer location.

Sometimes I think people forget to take a look around them and see just how much humans have created and achieved and how superior we really are to animals. It all comes down to fighting and fucking in the end, we just do it in a much more elaborate and entertaining fashion. There are too many animals and plants for scientists to count and they have big calculators. If the average person could name more than ten species from the millions that could potentially be wiped out I’d be flabbergasted.

Which brings us coarsely on to humans. The ones who really stand to lose from the whole shebang. While it may be that animals are threatened more by our actions, what we’re really scared of with this whole global warming thing is how many humans may be perturbed. There’s the uncomfortable and ever lingering thought that the Universe has a tosspot sense of irony and would love nothing less than to see humankind die by its own hand.

In a way we’re the victims of our own success. Our ability to adapt means that we can inhabit every godforsaken square inch of the planet and the fact that we’re capable of inventing global communication means that we’re instantly aware when Nature decides to get Biblical on a part of the world It just plain doesn’t like. If the weather so much as shifts the comfortable lying position it’s etched into the world’s beanbag some poor bastard is going to have their house blown over.

Of course it’s easy to be so laissez-faire about the whole issue when you live in a country that has nothing to fear from Odin’s wrath beyond an inconvenient flood. And as superior as we may be to animals and plants, they are a lasting reminder of where we came from, how the world functions and how we are very much part of that biological system, so sitting idly by while they’re wiped out seems a tad morally reprehensible.

Therefore, if the pressing of my foot against the accelerator has an effect akin to 16,904 butterflies angrily flapping their wings in Tokyo’s general direction then we, as a species, should probably find a solution. And that is why, after literally hours of distracted concentration, I have come up with a solution.

It’s a solution to do with inner city congestion, a factor that no doubt raises those pesky whatevers through the roof that do bad things to the O2 layer. It utilises a tool that humans have had since we were beating rocks together over 6,000 years ago. It has played a major role in mechanisation, war and communication. I refer of course to the humble Equus caballus. The horse.

That’s right, horses. Ban everyone from driving cars in cities and instead make them ride horses. The advantages should be obvious. First off your emission levels are reduced in a snap. The harmful effects from horseshit are negligible compared to petrol, therefore making your Bigfoot emission close to zero. But more importantly than that, there’s the cool factor.

What could be better than sauntering into town on the back of your glistening steed, tipping your hat at people as you pass, and making your way to the local inn where you tie up your mount and swagger in for a shot of firewater? If the image sounds vaguely reminiscent of Wild West films then that’s because they were fucking cool. No one looks bad sitting on top of a horse and there’s no comparison like there is with Porsches and Skodas because to the layman all horses look alike and a knackered one can always be used for meat and glue.

Speed of travel wouldn’t be affected either since from my experience it’s impossible to travel above 10mph in any city area anyway. A horse is more flexible and a better companion on the road than a cold dead box of steel any day. There’s no situation where speeding through twisting streets, parking, or leaping from the window of an illicit lover isn’t made instantly more fun and convenient than with a horse.

Are there problems with the idea? Sure. There are more cows than horses for one, but cows are rubbish and would look crap cruising up the high street. Also it’s difficult to get a million horses to stand in one place over night. But these are minor sacrifices compared to raping the Earth and murdering millions of human beings, which is why I propose horses. Not for my future, but for the children’s.

EUSA - Edinburgh University Society of Apathy

2008-03-04T17:42:00.000Z

It has probably been noted by someone once that behind every successful election candidate there is a deluge of anonymous volunteers who work hard spreading the message of the candidate, handing out flyers, putting up posters and doing the general dogsbody work that keeps the election machine ticking over. These people get involved because they feel passionately about the causes they are fighting for and last night I became a small cog in the bloated machine that is the EUSA elections.

It all happened because I’d been round to visit a friend who happens to live in the same house (it is a house, not a flat) as a EUSA Presidential candidate and so the living room was full of campaign material including posters that needed to be pasted on to cardboard. And so, because it seemed rude not to help, I got my hands sticky helping my friend paste some posters for the candidate’s campaign.

I didn’t feel entirely at ease doing it though. For starters I felt guilty being one of those despicable people who contribute to the mass graffiti of election posters that adorn every available bit of space in and around University buildings at this time of year and have all the aesthetic pleasure of a breezeblock in Milton Keynes. But more than that I didn’t feel comfortable being part of a self-important, inflated and egotistical process that myself and the vast majority of students genuinely care less about than the choice between smoked or unsmoked bacon.

Last year 21% of students voted on who they wanted to be the EUSA President. Figures like that don’t suggest apathy so much as a passive/aggressive protest against the whole malarkey in the first place. That’s certainly the view of Felix Trench, a student who hilariously attempted to sell his EUSA vote on eBay so that he could “promote an 'active apathy' movement to protest against the whole thing and try to drill in some sort of common sense.” The housemate who was putting the posters together also felt that there were much more important things to worry about in the world than these elections but at least it was something for him to do of an evening.

The problem most people have isn’t an anti-EUSA thing though. I don’t know exactly what EUSA does do for me but the Unions are still standing, accommodation exists and societies get their funding. I’ve never felt the need to get anything else from EUSA and so I’ve always assumed that things have been moving along in that tedious way that administrations tend to. And yet every year we are subjected to an avalanche of garish posters, moronic slogans and mindless minions interrupting lectures in order to tell us to vote for so-and-so because they absolutely guarantee to revolutionise what it is to be a student at Edinburgh University.

The role of the President is one that requires a lot of time and dedication, hence the year’s sabbatical and not too shabby £21,000 salary that comes with the office, and students waging these fruitless campaigns where they spend most of their time accusing each other of fondling ferrets in direct contravention of some arcane EUSA law is detrimental to the entire process and off-putting to anyone who’s not interested in adding another notch to their future political career CV.

Students have always been keen to voice their opinion. God knows why, we're in the worst possible position to make rational decisions. Students have no idea what the real world is like because we're floating around in this bubble between school and the real world. And so every year individuals decide to play at being politicians and try and wage a campaign that no one cares about because they want to try it out. Which wouldn’t be a problem if it weren’t such an invasion of everyone else’s time spent in and around University at this time of year.

It’s an administrative position as well, not a political one. A certain Devil once suggested to me that if you don’t pay income and council tax then you’re not entitled to a political opinion. I’ll leave it up to you how much you agree with that but there is this to be said for it: when people vote for political parties in elections they are doing so because of issues involving welfare, taxes, defence, education and health care that are fundamental to people’s lives. I don’t know or care which candidate gets voted in as President because I know that I won’t notice it affecting my life either way. I certainly haven’t noticed these past three years anything that the President has done that’s changed my life at Edinburgh University and I can’t see that changing. It’s not a bad thing, I’m quite content with the status quo.

I remember back in my first year there was a ridiculous amount of controversy surrounding Boris Johnson standing for the position of Rector. There were posters everywhere both for and against, depressingly immature smear campaigns from both sides of the fence and in the end the election happened and someone else won. Can anyone actually remember who won? Or how the Rector of Edinburgh University has caused a fundamental shift in the way of life for students? No, of course not, the whole thing just got blown out of all proportion because students love jumping on their opinionated high horses and giving their egos a good airing.

Even hinting that maybe deciding the President through elections might not be the best method is liable to a swift knee-jerk kick in the knackers from the so-called democracy brigade but just entertain this thought experiment for a moment: what if instead of narcissistic morons wasting precious carbon resources and everyone’s time in a hyped-up popularity contest that 4/5s of students don’t care about, there was a nomination process where people who may feel intimidated by running such a relentless and ultimately unnecessary process could put themselves forward, get interviewed for the job by a group of EUSA officials who understand what the job entails and then be appointed President? It’s how most administrative positions are handed out in the real world anyway and I’d feel more comfortable with that than having to put up with this shit at the same time every gorram year.

I'm Right, You're Left, She's Gone...

2008-02-29T15:17:00.001Z

I’ve been watching the West Wing a lot recently. By a lot I mean every hour that I’m not sleeping or boozing. When it first came out I was at school and I didn’t have anything like the free time to watch an episode at the same time every week but now, thanks to my casual approach to voluntary lectures, I’ve been able to watch two seasons of West Wing (totalling just shy of a day and a half solid viewing time) in two days and I’ve emerged on the other side slightly confused.

For starters it’s a great show. The writing is so fast that you wonder whether the writers were sitting in a room with burnsen burners placed directly under their arses which were turned to full power if they didn’t produce another hilarious, historical and relevant fact about Truman for the script. Actually, it’s not writers but writer. Creator and all round nutjob Aaron Sorkin wrote pretty much every screenplay for the first four seasons which isn’t that impressive until you watch a few episodes and realise that this man must have a brain that’s more greased and wired than a cyborg Lance Armstrong bike-thing.

You do end up feeling slightly sorry for the Republicans though. The wonderfully partisan nature of American politics means that all the apparently free-thinking, liberal types in Hollywood have to be democratic. The number of contributions to the Democrat Party from Hollywood stars is endless, while the only Republican celebrities I can think of are Kelsey Grammar and Chuck Norris, a disparate group at best, most likely to decapitate you with a roundhouse kick whilst making witty comments comparing the colour of your blood to a fine Italian Merlot.

This means that the politics of the West Wing is so far to the left it’s gone completely full-circle and obliterated any semblance of sound right-wing policies. All the characters are portrayed as heroic, virtuous types who spunk out world-saving ideas on a weekly basis and rarely put a foot wrong. Even when they’re assassinating ambassadors from friendly nations who are suspected terrorists or lying to the public about the President having a serious illness, the moral weight of the script is behind the main characters so you end up supporting them through whatever pickle they’ve got themselves into.

Meanwhile the Republicans are portrayed as absolute bastards who get kicks out of handing guns to children and spitting on poor people. The Republican/Democrat divide is shown to be on the one hand people that care and just want to give peace a chance, while on the other full of crazy Christian rednecks who wouldn’t understand liberalism if it sauntered up and kissed them upside the cranium with an aluminium baseball bat.

But hang on, wait a minute. I’m no expert on American politics mainly because I don’t live there and can’t vote (and yet suffer as a direct result of America’s foreign policy decisions) but I’ve seen pictures of Barack Obama, Hilary Clinton and John McCain and I’ve subconsciously absorbed a lot of the technical jargon that flies around on the West Wing and something worries me slightly. In fact it’s not just a thing with American politics but given the climate I’ll talk about it in that context.

There must be an answer to this but I’m too lazy to work it out so can someone please explain why ideas like free-market economies and the rights of the individual have to be hijacked by bastards who also believe the Earth is five thousand years old and that freedom to express yourself sexually is the Devil’s Work, while those who want to legislate and tax people back to the stone age tend to be much more free-thinking and open-minded when it comes to society?

I’m not saying it’s true in every case, you get moderate Republicans and conservative Democrats, but in terms of perception of right and left wing politics it seems to be true. It puts me in a nightmare position because whenever I tell people that I believe in right-wing politics they tend to look at me like I’m about to don a swastika and start beating up anyone who doesn’t look like me, although for some reason when people tell me that they’re on the left I don’t presume they’re about to slaughter millions of their own people and send the rest to the gulags.

Anyway, the point is that I believe in the right of the individual and free-market economics meaning that the government is there on a minimal level purely to protect individual rights through the law and levy the occasional moderate tax in order to protect those who can’t protect themselves. Beyond that, the state is a bloated, bureaucratic, statistic driven, poll mad mess that hinders more than it helps.

However, and I can’t stress this enough, this does not mean that I’m sexist, homophobic, racist, religious or just wish that everything was the same as it was 1000 years ago before all those damn immigrants arrived. Why is it that the right-wing is loaded up with these self-righteous pricks when surely the ideas of individual liberty and minimal state intervention would lead one down the jaunty liberal path of an individual being entitled to do whatever the hell they want as long as they don’t harm anyone else?

I don’t know, I guess I’d vote Democrat if I had a choice because I’d rather be a weak leftie liberal than a racist hardcore conservative but either way I’d be unhappy. It’s the danger of media politics and the problem that I’m suffering from right now. If there were more of an actual, practical interest in politics and the way governments shape our lives then perhaps the unnecessary stigmas of the left and right could be forgotten. But as it is, when bombarded with soundbytes and stereotypical views of hippies on one side and rednecks on the other it becomes more of an intuitive decision than a well thought out declaration of political views.

I wonder if it’s possible to vote for the Democrats but insist that they take on the Republican economic plans? Or vote Republican but only on the condition that they stop going on about this abortion and God horseshit? I neither know nor care, it’s just that politics seems to be so bloody central in the UK nowadays that I have to start worrying about it in other countries. Here’s an example of how rubbish our politics is: the US gets the West Wing, we get the Thick Of It.

Mobile Circus

2008-02-27T15:00:00.002Z

When it comes to technology I am what marketing types refer to as ‘The Cash’. Not in a real and practical sense given my pitiful inflow of mahulah*, but certainly in a theoretical sense. Being the godless heathen that I am, I have to dedicate my entire purpose and meaning in life to science and the gifts that it bestows on us mortals through commercial technology. This generally involves me sitting like a starving dog outside a restaurant, wolfing down whatever random scraps happen to get thrown out.

It means my purchasing choices can be a bit askew. The reason I got my MacBook wasn’t because I scoffed at Windows and thought Microsoft was for suckers who liked their computers to act like an arthritic cat with chunks of missing fur and a tendency to blindly plunge headfirst off high surfaces. No, I got the MacBook because it is shiny. It has things that go ‘vrooom’ and ‘weee’ and ‘whoosh’ in a visual sense. It makes my brain uncomprehendingly coo and gurgle which no doubt is a nice thing but I’m not sure if that’s sufficient justification for pledging my undying allegiance to Macs*.

It’s the same for things like HD-TVs which apparently we all need and I desperately want even though the only thing I could use my £1,000 investment for at the moment would be making the Big Daddy savagely beating me to death in Bioshock that little bit sharper to the eye*. They could release a new piece of technology that did nothing but follow you around all day, occasionally reading over your shoulder and making random bleeping noises and I’d be cutting through hordes of other technology bitches to get my hands on the Uncomfortable iPresence ver.1.0.

There’s some kind of progress going on here at least. Computers continue to boost themselves up with exponentially aggressive steroids every year which makes me feel a bit guilty for using them for nothing more than writing, t’interweb and the occasional snuff film, things they’ve been able to handle for years; while HD-TV means that stuff is more real or something. I don’t actually know how these things work. The fact that my iPod is a little box with music somehow contained within it still baffles me*.

But surely there must come a point where we say in one collective voice, ‘Enough is enough. We can only push the boundaries of science so far. Once something has been perfected we must leave it and move on to save on resources and stuff’. I’m still waiting for this to happen with mobile phones.

As far as I can tell a mobile phone has two purposes: to make and receive calls and ditto for texts. As an auxiliary function they should also try their little cotton socks off at not breaking. Now in my opinion these feats were accomplished with the Nokia 3310 and every phone since has been nothing but a pointless replica of the same thing. Let’s compare some of the features found in the Nokia 3310 and the latest piece of brain-melting hardware, the Sony Ericsson W910i*.

Both phones are off to a strong start as a couple of calls to a bemused Dominos phone person prove that they are equally capable of fulfilling one of two essential phone functions. It’s a strong and confident outing from both when it comes to sending texts as well, my hands feel more comfortable around the clear and distinct plastic of the 3310 but that’s just preference. Both phones can perform the tasks that they’re employed for 98929%* of the time.

Now for the ‘other’ stuff. The new phone has polyphonic ringtones, multimedia games and a camera. But none of those matter because only a spiritually lacking cretin gets pleasure in their hilarious A-Team ringtone sounding off yet again. Multimedia games include the likes of Sonic the Hedgehog 1 which came out 53 years ago and serves only to remind us all how far computer games have come since then. Besides, Snake II on the Nokia 3310 was the best mobile game ever made because of its simplicity and addictiveness and if you like gaming on the go you’ll already have a DS. As for cameras, I’ve yet to see a cameraphone that can take photos which aren’t simply a smear of large grainy chunks of colour*. For the same money I’d have to spend getting a new phone I could just get a decent shiny camera.

I did upgrade once. I got a fancy flipper-me-open Samsung thing and it kept me happy for a while, even if it was less intuitive than the 3310 at least it could store more than 10 fucking messages*. Then it came in contact with a slither of moisture and completely gave up the ghost. In contrast my 3310 has been in three different seas, a variety of swimming pools and myself. The most it has needed after is a brief dry with a hairdryer and then it’s back, ready for more. What more could I ask for from technology?

Arseburgers. Just as I finished this* my 3310 keeled over for no reason. It seems my phone has decided to switch off at random intervals, specifically when I’m trying to call or text someone, therefore rendering this whole thing pointless. Still, if it’s any consolation it was a bigger waste of my time.

Joan of Arc

2008-02-23T17:54:00.000Z

I woke up this morning and realised I’d turned 22. There were no trumpets, no Tom Waits serenading me as I awoke, no new legal avenues of vice available to me, just an overwhelming sense of meh. This sensation was caused by the fact that 22 is my first genuine nothing birthday. Every previous birthday has been better than this one. Not in terms of enjoyment, merely the fact that in the past each successive year has brought something new to my life.

Everything up to 13 was freaking brilliant cos I was young and birthdays were amazing moments where I became a whole year older and closer to being a real person. 14 and 15 were curious because I was a teenager going through the biggest physical and mental changes of my life, and they were the first parties where alcohol was tentatively introduced. 16 I could buy cigarettes. 17 I could drive. 18 I could vote, drink and become an adult. 19 and 20 marked an important transition period from teenager to adult. 21 was the daddy; I became a man, had not one but two fuck-off parties and got loadsa presents.

22 marks the end of all that. There is nothing good about turning 22. It’s an entirely insignificant age and just the first of many. The next significant birthday is 30, which according to gender stereotypes is the most depressing moment of any woman’s life. So that’s a bullet missed at least. Then it’s 40, where I guess the real mid-life crisis sets in. Joy. Then 50, which is an achievement but bloody ages away, and after that you have to go through the whole lot again until reaching 100 which is a mixed bag cos you get a nice card from the monarch but are probably too batshit crazy to realise that you’ve finally made it to an interesting age again. All the other birthdays in between serve only to remind you that you’re getting older, you’ve achieved less than you meant to and that for one day a year you are no longer special.

What is it to be 22 anyway? The only relevant thing I can think of about the number is that it’s a famous bingo call. Not famous enough for me to be able to remember it though… two dead ducks? I forget. And it’s a palindrome too, but that’s not exactly sexy. No one sexy is 22.

I’ve certainly missed the prodigy boat. Prodigious talents make themselves known by 21 at the latest. Whenever you hear about someone young breaking out into the world of success they’re always 21 or younger. After that you have to wait til 33 at the earliest before you can breakthrough again. I’m getting to an age where I see musicians who have released seminal albums, sportstars who have achieved immense physical feats and millionaire entrepreneurs, all of which are younger than me. For no logical reason I’m filled with a vitriolic bile towards these smug bastards. Is it jealousy or fear? I think it might be fear. Fear that time is slipping away from me. I’m oooooooold.

Of course I realise that anyone over the age of 22 who is reading this will probably be entertaining thoughts of finding me and beating me savagely round the side of the head with a sledgehammer. I think 22 is depressing and old? Ha! It’s positively pre-pubescent mate. You just wait til your belly starts sliding away beyond your control, your limbs stiffen up and your hair goes grey!

Alright, fair enough. That stage is a lot more depressing than the point in my life I’m currently residing in. I don’t really feel old, I just no longer feel young. I can no longer use that excuse to myself of, ‘I’m young! I’ve got years left to mature and worry about the real world!’ I can’t do that anymore. It’s scary. It ain’t right I tells ya. Between now and 30 I can see myself in a state of limbo. Age-confused. Yearning for immaturity lost.

I think a lot of the reason for my minor early 20s crisis may be the presents I received from my family. Everything I got was clothes. Everything. Clothes all the way. I’m not complaining. I like clothes but rarely buy them and my siblings have better fashion tastes than I do anyway, so getting a big pile of clothes was great. But it’s also a pretty clear indication that you have reached an insignificant age. There are no more obvious birthday presents, or even presents at all. From now on it’s clothes, DVDs and CDs all the way. But that’s all I spend money on anyway, so net gain!

Perhaps it’s a good thing, a sign of my need to mature and move on. Birthdays are no longer just about me, jelly and ice cream. They are instead a chance to pause, to think, to get together with friends and get wasted. Yes, that’s it. Boldly should I step forward, out of the cave and into the light. Time to shake off that mentality I’ve had towards birthdays since I first popped into this world 22 years ago and demanded a party hat and a cigar.

Or I could just lie and claim to be 21 for the rest of my life. People do that. I’ve seen it in films.

Itchy Feet

2008-02-23T00:38:00.002Z

Back in the day there was a clear divide between pubs and clubs. Pubs were friendly, helpful places where friends could converse and share humorous witticisms over a pint of pleasant ale, a good pub quiz and a sumptuous roast dinner. This was in direct contrast to clubs which were vile cesspools full of eye-bleeding music and a general atmosphere of personal indifference that made me want to sit in a corner and question what exactly it was that separated those drunken, inane, lust-fuelled morons present from a cattle market of humanity and dignity.

After a sustained period of unabated bigotry towards clubbing and all matters concerning it I eventually discovered that maybe I was being a little black and white about the whole issue.

I think now that the enjoyment of heading into a dark, deafening environment is dependent on three factors. First, you have to be good enough friends with those around you so that half-heard bits of conversation and random hands gestures are fully comprehended and understood. Second, the music has to be something that makes you want to shake your derriere like you just don’t care. Last, and most debatably least, the supply line to whatever drugstore of choice, be it bar or dealer, must be readily available at all times.

The first and third factors are pretty self-evident. The kind of people you see out clubbing on their own are the 38 year-old ‘they don’t look right’ kind of individuals who are often found catching women who have suddenly collapsed on the dancefloor. No one else goes to a club on their own because if they do they become confronted with the fact that their wasting their time in a loud, obnoxious environment, pissing cash down a self-indulgent drain, suddenly snap, and cut themselves or something.

And if your consciousness doesn’t have to skewed to some extent in order to enjoy a blaring, insufferable environment where you attempt to sing and dance as you defecate what little cash you don’t have down a blackhole of hangover and debt then you might be Jesus.

The second factor is what I’ve found most important though. The quality of mates you’re with is important, sure, but if you’re all standing there staring vaguely into space, unable to communicate properly because of the crushing sound of music which in turn is crushing your soul because of its dire mediocrity and lack of any booty-shaking properties then the night is going to be shit, sans question.

It took me a few months at University before I realised that this second factor wasn’t entirely insurmountable. For a long while my only experience of music at clubs was either repetitive cheese or godawful contemporary pop. I do have a massive problem with both these kinds of music per se, not least because even when these songs are played full volume with the bass whacked up to ∞ I just can’t dance to them. If I try then I just end up repulsing myself. My limbs don’t move right, I can’t find any semblance of rhythm and I resort to vaguely swaying from side to side in a self-conscious manner, awkwardly smiling whilst some prick next to me belts out ‘Living On A Prayer’ for the umpteenth time in his life, no doubt thinking that he’s such an ironic, go-happy kind of guy.

After a few abortive attempts at ‘livin’-it-large’, ‘cloobin’ and other ridiculous northern terms, I became a bitter and cantankerous man, sneering at those who went off to sweat a lonely existence at the local club instead of enjoying a decent pint and good company. Then, one fateful night (I say fateful, in all honesty I’m sure Fate had better things to be doing with Its time) a friend seized me by the hand, hurled me into a taxi and took me to a drum ‘n’ bass night.

Things changed for me that night. I took the usual precautionary pre-club steps of necking as many whiskey and cokes as possible, bracing myself for the expected onslaught of awkwardness and depression. I’d heard drum ‘n’ bass before and it sounded ridiculous. But in a club the whole meaning behind it became clear. I found it utterly compulsive. I couldn’t help dancing, throwing my body around like a jumper in a tumbledryer I experienced my first moment of pure joy in a club. I realised what the fuss was all about, I understood why dancing was fun. It was a life-changing moment.

Now I don’t for a minute mean to suggest that drum ‘n’ bass is better than cheese. Drum ‘n’ bass outside of a club environment just sounds like noise. Which is what it is really. It’s a deep-rooted, tribal sound. The kind of music that connects with the ancestral part of my genetic code that remembers what it was like to lick frogs and stomp around a campfire, begging and pleading with the sun to rise again the next morning and for the little imps with sharp teeth to kindly bugger off. Dancing to it made me feel alive in a way that cheese and pop never could. I’m sure some people have a similar experience at cheese nights though. Horses for courses and all that. At least I hope they do… the alternative is just too fucking depressing.

Anyhoo, after realising my love for some things club, I ventured out more often and discovered that actually there are some damn good club nights out there and they aren’t the evil maggot-factories I once thought they were.

But nothing could prepare me for the sheer joy and exhilaration of Itchy Feet. For those of you who aren’t down with the kids, Itchy Feet is a club night that originated in Leeds and is all about the old school (the use of that phrase puts me decidedly out of touch with the kids). They play all the old stuff: swing, jazz, rhythm and blues, rock and roll, ska, the exact kind of music that in a similar but entirely different way to drum ‘n’ bass, creates a sensation of compulsive dancing.

It’s brilliant. Most decent stuff from the 50s and 60s has a raw rhythm to it that seems so obvious to dance to. When you click your fingers in time you don’t feel like a prick, you can copy as many dance moves from Pulp Fiction as you like and know you’re doing the right thing, and best of all you can dance like your dad and feel like the coolest jiving motherfucker in the room.

At one point I wanted to leave the dancefloor so that I could dump my coat and have a cigarette. It took me about 45 minutes to find a song that I could resist dancing to. As I was leaving ‘Back in the USSR’ come on. Then ‘Great Balls of Fire’. Then ‘Liar, Liar’. Then ‘Satisfaction’. Then ‘You Really Got Me’. Then ‘Some awesome swing number that I didn't recognise’ and so forth. I physically could not tear myself away and ended up only having one cigarette the entire time I was there. Not even the funeral of my lung-cancer riddled best friend’s father kept me away from nicotine for so long. And I wasn’t the only one. Even people queuing at the bar were shaking their hips and nodding their heads in time to the music. It was infectious.

Unfortunately there were some drawbacks. On a personal level my body is so unused to exercise that when I exert myself more than, say, lifting a pen, I break out in a thick layer of sweat that drenches my entire body, meaning I look like a surviving member of the Titanic who’s just washed up and I tend to shower those around me in a fashion not unlike a human sprinkler. In fact, so sweaty and with such gusto was I throwing myself into the music that the next day I had to work hard to reassure some friends that I wasn’t pilled up to my eyeballs. I wasn’t, honest, I just loved the music so much.

Another slight drawback is that despite my own clearly defined sense of rhythm and dance moves, when you’re dancing next to incredibly talented people from Footlights and couples who can do that whole swing your partner round and twist your arms about your head without getting jumbled up in a confused and painful knot type thing, you have occasional moments of cripplingly low self-esteem. ‘Oh God I look like an arse!’ I said to myself. But my advice is to plough on through, as long as you’re enjoying yourself and carving a big enough niche in the dancefloor you can live in your own little dream world.

Lastly, because it’s such a great night, everyone and their wife, extended in-laws, cousins and friends from the country club came along. Those who had been to the first night bemoaned the fact that there were so many more people there this time. But I wasn’t there on the first night so I’d be a bit of a hypocrite if I criticised others for turning up. You night ruining cocksuckers.

And so I have come to realise over an extended period that clubs can be bloody brilliant. All it takes is the right combinations of mates, tunes and drugs and you have a night that is distinct from a pub night and about ten times more euphoric. ‘Well done Richard’, I hear you cry, ‘you’ve caught up with the last 20 years of clubbing culture’. Whatever, most club nights are still shit but Itchy Feet is a gem. I strongly urge none of you apart from those that have already been to go to Itchy Feet next time it’s on. A more compulsive, exhilarating and joyous club night thou shalt not find.

Apart from Big Cheese at Potterow on Saturday night. That’s mega!!!111!1!!1

Ode to Betsie

2008-01-03T17:47:00.001Z

Betrayal. A cynic would say that it's the inevitable moment that arrives at a distinct point in every close relationship, as unavoidable as a rather large and above all hefty iceberg is to a ship with a hull full of hubris. Now I try to avoid cynicism. Honestly, I do. I think it's an extremely unhealthy way to live, constantly believing that no one is really caring, true or honest. But when your cynical thoughts and expectations start gaining an unnerving level of accuracy, on a spooky-psychic level on par with 'Creepy Old Gypsy Woman', then it's hard not to come to the conclusion that everyone's a back stabbing bastard.

You see, I was betrayed tonight by someone I've loved for almost five years. She was my first. My sole. My everything. I've never been inside anyone else. She made me what I am today, taught me everything I know, and has decided now, at the start of a new year full of hopes and dreams for our relationship, to go and hurt me in such a deep way that I can never be with her ever again. I don't know what went wrong. Admittedly I couldn't spend as much time with her since starting at University. And I've been sharing her with my brother these last couple of years. And I did smack her up quite severely a couple of times. But she knew that was what she was getting from the start. I thought we had a bond. Something that would last at least until I decided to go for a better looking model. Not end with a betrayal as crippling as a drop-kick to the elbow joint. May she burn to death in a scrapyard, the bitch.

Her name was Betsie 'Silver Toy Bullet' Micra and she's dead to me.

Yes, she is 'just a fucking car', so what? I loved that car. It is what psychiatrists call cathexis. The emotional investment of oneself into another person, object or idea. So my absolute devotion and love for an inanimate, pretty shitty, beat-up little Nissan Micra was completely normal and mentally healthy. According to Freud. And if you disagree with Freud then you're clearly insane or in denial. Sad.

From a young age I'd wanted to be a driver. Papa would often take me riding in his automobiles and I remember being picked up from kindergarten by him one day as a special birthday present. Papa ran over an old man at a pedestrian crossing and he laughed about it all the way home. The endless supply of cars added a hint of glamour and mystique to my father who was so often away in foreign countries selling crack to the black man. Until one tragic day when he was found, dead, in the garage. He had suffocated on the fumes after attempting to make love to his new Dodge Viper. How? That secret dies with him. Mother always strongly disapproved of the cars until after papa's death. Then she liked them. At the funeral I distinctly remember seeing her washing the hearse wearing nothing but a pair of pink marigolds. She kept saying it was a 'filthy, filthy car'. But it looked quite clean from over the top of papa's coffin.

So when I turned 17 and could finally have a car all of my very own I was of course extremely emotionally vulnerable. I didn't know what to expect. My driving instructor's car was an evil Honda that had begun to represent the instructor, as these things do. He was an ancient and cantankerous RAF pilot who smoked rollies at a rate that made me think he was having some kind of race against the Honda's rev counter. He used to go on about these memory reading causes which enabled people to read a page in a second and remember it, but he always forgot that he'd told me the exact same thing the week before. One day I was driving in town and he drove up alongside me and started rubbing his car against mine. I tried to drive on and he started nudging my bumper from behind. He was a knackered old man, so was the Honda. I began to worry that my foray into the car world would be one of loathing, revulsion and deep, deep repression.

And then she three-point turned her way deftly into the parking space of my heart. The Honda was angry, bitter, resentful. But Betsie was gentle, with her sleek silver body and license plate that cheekily spelt 'TOY' at the end, in that suggestive way so synonymous with Betsie's style. She showed me what it was to drive. Through her care I learnt the art of shifting gears, the warm embrace of the steering wheel, the inexplicable joy of accelerating smoothly round a long corner on an open mountain road. My love affair with her began in earnest as soon as I gained my license and could finally leave my traumatising memories behind at Boris Johnson's Private Driving School for Young Men. I would take Betsie out on what I liked to call 'thrashings'. It was youthful exuberance, pushing her, seeing how far I could go, how reckless I could be... ar, those first flame-filled months...

That ended soon of course. One day Betsie told me quite plainly it might be a little bit unfair to expect her to go entirely round a corner, or even turn at all, if it's really wet rain and you're going at speeds normally associated with dry, hot summers on neverending race tracks.

That bust-up was the best thing that ever happened to me and Betsie. We soon got back together and she taught me to leave behind my reckless days and move on emotionally. Soon we could be found out gallavanting through country roads. Me with a cigarette and winding road ahead of me, Betsie purring away beneath, the two of us exploring the road together. Sure, she wasn't the best car out there. Her 0-60 was in the double digits, she wasn't exactly pretty and everyone else was intent on mocking her but she was always good to me. Her 1.3L engine and light weight meant that she had an edge over other small cars, and it was immensely satisfying knowing that we were pushing each other to our limits. Not like these poxy Ferrari or Porsche owners who have all this power that they're never able to use. We had a special relationship, and I, fool that I am, thought it would last forever. But tonight, tonight...

The problems were apparent from the start, if only I'd looked harder. I would take Betsie on long trips, we would go to Cornwall, Edinburgh, Scarborough, anywhere our hearts took us. But at the end of nearly every trip, Betsie would feel poorly. It was her heart, that was the thing. After a long trip, her battery would barely even register. She'd need to be defibrillated with a couple of jump leads. I always put it down to exhaustion putting strain on the ol' ticker and never worried too much about it.

Then the squeaking started. At low revs, Betsie would make a high pitched squealing noise like she was in pain. The only way of soothing her was with a few revs which normally perked her up. We were told by doctors that it was her fan belt playing up, but we never worried too much. Betsie always seemed happy enough living with her condition. Then this Christmas my brother remarked that he thought the alternator was making the noise. Suddenly the reasons for Betsie's heart conditions became clear, if there was a problem with the alternator then no wonder she sometimes had little heart upsets.

I decided that I wanted to make one last trip up to Edinburgh with Betsie. I didn't say this of course, but I knew that Betsie was feeling worse than she ever had before. But I had faith in the ol' girl, she'd never let me down before and I knew that she had what it took to last the while. I told her we were going for Hogmany and her excitement melted me inside. The drive up north was a dream. Bestie served me well, and we had a joyful time, larking about on the motorways and gliding round corners. I felt entirely at peace. For New Year's we drove around Edinburgh, partying until dawn and mocking the poor one-way system infrastructure.

Then came the drive back home. Everything was going smoothly until we hit Liverpool. Betsie's battery warning light flashed on. This was the mechanical equivalent of someone noticing their left arm has gone a bit numb and there seems to be a dull aching pain coming from their heart. I tried to sooth Betsie, whispered words of encouragement to her and vowed to do whatever it took to keep her alive. I started revving as high as possible in order to try and charge her battery. But that meant using up more fuel. And as the fuel level got lower and lower and Betsie's battery refused to charge it dawned on me that at some point we were going to have to stop. This wasn't going to be good for Betsie's battery. I cried out, I implored the ghosts of Henry Ford, Ayrton Senna and Colin McRae to come to me in my hour of need.

It was no good. She went for another 100 miles before she started coughing and spluttering. Her whole chassis went into spasms, she refused to accelerate, the lights died and I had to pull over by the side of the motorway. This was it. Betsie had had a full blown cardiac arrest and broken down. She had failed me, and left me stranded on the side of the motorway in the freezing bollock cold, waiting for a repairman to arrive. He confirmed it, the alternator was broken. There was nothing to be done here. She was unceremoniously hauled off the motorway and I felt nothing but hatred and betrayal in my heart. How could she do this to me? She never let me down. That was her promise to me.

But now I realise that my feelings of betrayal and anger were just my way of coping with the grief. Due to circumstances I was going to have to get rid of Betsie soon anyway. I thought it would be a loving parting of ways, where we could look back on a clean sheet of fun and frolics. Instead this last incident has soured our relationship, ended it in the worst of ways. Am I partly to blame? Of course. But in this time of resolution and desires to change ourselves for the better I urge you to learn from my mistakes. Always listen and care for those you love more than you think is humanly possible. Because when they're gone from your life, you're never the same again.

What More Can I Say?

2007-12-29T02:37:00.000Z

But man has given a false importance to death
Any animal plant or man who dies
adds to Nature's compost heap
becomes the manure without which
nothing could grow nothing could be created
Death is simply part of the process
Every death even the cruellest death
drowns in the total indifference of Nature
Nature herself would watch unmoved
if we destroyed the entire human race
I hate Nature
this passionless spectator this unbreakable
iceberg-face
that can bear everything
this goads us to greater and greater acts
But even though I hate this goddess I see
the greatest acts in history
have followed her laws
Nature tells man to fight for his own happi-
ness and if he must kill to gain it
why then the murder is natural
We must reproduce we must destroy
The balance must be kept
Haven't we always beaten down those weaker
than ourselves
Haven't we torn at their throats
with continuous villainy and lust
Haven't we experimented in our laboratories
before applying the final solution
Man is a destroyer
but if he kills and takes no pleasure in it
he is a machine
He should destroy with passion
like a man
Let me remind you of the execution of Damiens
after his unsuccessful attempt to assassinate
Louis the Fifteenth (now deceased)
Remember how Damiens died
How gentle the guillotine is
compared with his torture
It lasted four hours while the crowd goggled
and Casanova at an upper window
felt under the skirts of the ladies watching
His chest arms thighs and calves were slit open
Molten lead was poured into each slit
boiling oil they poured over burning tar
wax sulphur
They burnt off his hands
tied ropes to his arms and legs
harnessed four horses to him and geed them up
They pulled at him for an hour but they'd
never done it before
and he wouldn't come apart
until they sawed through through his shoulders and hips
So he lost the first arm then the second
and he watched what they did to him and then
turned to us
and shouted so everyone could understand
And when they tore off the first leg and then the
second leg
he still lived though his voice was getting weak
and at the end he hung there a bloody torso
with a nodding head
just groaning and staring at the crucifix
which the father confessor was holding up to
him
That
was a festival with which
today's festivals can't compete
Even our inquisition has no meaning
nowadays
Although we've only just started
there's no passion in our post-revolutionary
murders
Now they are all official
We condemn to death without emotion
and there's no singular personal death to be had
only an anonymous cheapened death
which we could dole out to entire nations
on a mathematical basis
until the time comes
for all life
to be extinguished.

Assassin's Creed Review

2007-12-28T02:44:00.001Z

In Assassin’s Creed you play as Altair, an assassin during the Third Crusade who is assigned nine key figures in the Crusades who have to be killed in order to end the war. Actually you’re not playing as Altair, you’re playing as Derek, a barman in the 21st Century who’s been kidnapped by some shady organisation who force Derek to access his assassin ancestor’s memories using a machine called the Animus. So you’re playing as someone who’s playing as someone who… whatever, eventually the plot makes sense as it unfolds in that tragically inevitable ‘here comes the twist and betrayal kind’ of way.

As Altair you’re pretty much an unstoppable one many army. Your time is divvied up between three cities: Jerusalem, Acre and Damascus with a vast countryside separating them that you travel through on horseback. The cities are, without exception, beautiful. Dashing through crowded streets, climbing up walls, leaping across rooftops, jumping through market stalls, it’s all an experience that leaves you panting. The detail and work that’s gone into every surface and making the cities real, breathing places with jostling crowds and loud markets is a triumph. It acts as one big playground for Altair to lark about in and bring death from above. And when it comes to killing Altair is the best.

There are a variety of ways to take out your targets. You can sneak up on them in the middle of a ground and silently plunge a dagger into their neck before slipping away unnoticed. You can charge up, leap on their back in full view and then leg it away as quickly as possible. Or, once you’ve mastered combat (which doesn’t take too long), you can stride in, slaughter all the guards and take your time beating your poor victim to a bloody pulp.

Unfortunately if you’ve done it once, you’ve done it a million times. The sense of freedom, of being a white-cloaked angel of death, takes a massive kick to the teeth when you’re forced, every mission, to do exactly the same thing over and over and over again. Here’s how every mission works: go into one of the three districts of the city. Pickpocket a couple of people to get information. Beat someone up to get information. Eavesdrop on a conversation to get information. Kill your target when you have enough information. There’s two problems here: 1) the information you get is largely redundant because it’s simply a case of getting close to your target and killing him. It doesn’t matter how obvious you are about it. 2) Once you’ve done the first mission, every single other one follows the exact same structure. There’s a criminal lack of thought and attention that’s gone into creating some variety. There just is none. Ubisoft have worked so hard at creating awe-inspiring graphics and an innovative free-running system that they’ve forgotten that the gameplay itself has to be next-gen as well. It’s the most bizarre mish-mash of genius and laziness in any game I’ve seen.

Inevitably the ending makes it hideously obvious that there are going to be sequels, which is a good thing. Assassin’s Creed was a demo, a chance for them to build the engine that lets the whole thing run. Now that they’ve got that down, they can maybe work on making the missions interesting in the sequels and truly create a revolutionary game. As it is Assassin’s Creeds many virtues are undermined entirely by the most unforgivable of gaming sins: repetition.

Oh, Get A Sense Of Humour This Christmas

2007-12-24T10:43:00.000Z

It’s actually quite rare for people to have no sense of humour. Often the phrase ‘get a sense of humour’ is used by someone who has unexpectedly and rather fantastically sawed their foot off and stuffed it down their mouth by making some joke or comment that has resulted in him or her being called an evil and offensive bastard/bitch. As ‘get out of trouble’ phrases go it’s pretty weak. Most people have some kind of sense of humour. Osama Bin Laden is renowned for his dry wit. Hitler was a great fan of Chaplain. Even Mary Whitehouse, I’m sure, laughed at some things. Probably black minstrels being set alight by Wombles in Klan robes because deep down I have no doubt that she was a weird twisted bigot, but there was still something in that dark coal mine of her soul that tickled her fancy.

That’s a comment that may offend supporters of Mary Whitehouse. Although I’m probably safe on this one because it must be quite hard nowadays to find anyone who still believes in her radical views of what is and isn’t offensive. She thought that Tom and Jerry cartoons should be banned for fuck’s sake… But still, there’s the potential that some Mary Whitehouse groupie reading this may be offended. Which is the annoying thing about humour (yeah, that’s what this is…): it’s bound to offend someone. And the quality of the humour also has no relation whatsoever to the level of offence caused. Jim Davidson is statistically half as funny as cancer and obscenely offensive, while Derek & Clive recordings are some of the most obscene comedic tapes available and also some of the most hilarious. That’s what I think, but each person’s definition of what is and isn’t offensive can vary massively. The same person who is tickled pink by an anecdote about Jesus getting buggered by a crucifix will actively try to eviscerate you for laughing at homeless folk. Saying ‘get a sense of humour’ to someone who’s offended by what you say is pointless, they already have what they term a sense of humour and if what you’ve said doesn’t fit into that definition then it probably never will.

There are some people though who come pretty close to having no sense of humour. I know a couple of people who hate watching comedy. They take no pleasure in it, they never laugh at what the entertainers have to say, they just sit there getting angry and pissed off because what’s being said is clearly not funny and why is everyone else being so stupid and laughing along like the idiot sheep that they are? It sounds like quite a depressing condition, but the people I know who feel like this are themselves charming, lovely people who just have very high standards of what they think is funny.

The real freaks do exist though. People who actually have no sense of humour. Those who have no knowledge of what it means to be funny, what funny is, or how to react to something that is funny. I know only one person who suffers from this condition. Don’t worry, it’s no one you know. I’d be very surprised if she is reading this as she has the technical competence of a medieval maggot. It’s a crippling disease that harms all around her.

I recently finished watching the second series of Dexter. For those who don’t know, Dexter is an excellent show about a serial killer who only murders other killers. It’s a brilliant, dark and comic piece of television. Dexter, like all sociopaths, has no feelings or emotions. He is entirely blank inside, hence the reason he can kill so easily. But in order to fit in to the world around him he has to pretend he has emotions, to put on a mask of humanity so that people don’t suss that he is a psycho killer.

Watching Dexter, it suddenly became clear to me what this person (let’s call her Naamah because that’s a reference so obscure I’ll be amazed if anyone gets it) is. A humour sociopath. A humiopath if you will. Or don’t. It’s not an official medical term or anything. She has no idea what ‘being funny’ means. She observes it but does not understand it. She knows that laughing and joking are an essential part of human interaction, but she has no means of comprehending the ways to achieve this. The place in her brain where humour is processed is a complete blackspot, more devoid of activity than the Moon on a particularly slow day. So she attempts to fake it, to put it on. The results are nothing short of hideous.

She feels most comfortable attempting to be humorous when the rest of the room is laughing and joking along at that nice regular pace that banter (apologies if you hate that word) is sustainable at. Then, just as a topic is reaching its peak, in she will leap with a patently obvious banality that acts like a machete to the Achilles tendon of conversation. *slit* goes the knife, *smack* goes the conversation’s chin into the floor, spurting proverbial teeth and blood all over the shop. People try hard to muster a laugh or a chuckle, cos gorram that kind of silence must be embarrassing for her.

No, apparently not. Given that she doesn’t know what is and isn’t funny she has no way of knowing that her joke has fallen way short of its target. So she ploughs on with another ruthlessly bad observation. And another. And another. She’ll just keep filling the silence with crap observations and much-repeated anecdotes. Maybe this one will include some kind of stereotypical view, as she has half-observed that some people find stereotypes funny. And just to top it all off and make it clear that what’s been said is meant to be jovial and lighthearted, she’ll finish with a high-pitched laugh which tapers off into the phrase guaranteed to bring blood to the tear ducts, ‘oh dear…’, pronounced in as drawn out a way as possible, with an optional shake of the head and in the tone of voice that implies such phrases as ‘it’s just too funny for words’ or ‘life eh? Tch!’ but in my head is filled in with the haunting cries of ‘Despair. Despair. Despair.’

It really is remarkable how off suit her sense of humour is. I mean, the vast majority of people aren’t hilarious comedians, but almost everyone I know has amused me or made me laugh at some point. Not Naamah. I simply have to conclude that she doesn’t have a sense of humour. She is entirely clueless. Her comments and attempts at jokes cause the opposite physical reaction in me to laughter. My brain feels like it’s trying to implode in on itself, my muscles tighten, everything goes red and for a brief moment I want to take the nearest sharp object and plunge it into my bladder in some desperate attempt to make the pain stop. It’s extraordinary. Every single aspect of her sense of humour is wrong. The timing is, metre for metre, precisely off. Her intonation emphasises words in exactly the wrong way, making you cringe before the gag has even started. Her material is meticulously misjudged in its offensiveness, relevance and wit. It’s like someone’s taken a mirror to the souls of all the great comedians that have ever existed and shone their reflections on to this person, creating in the process a Devourer of comedy. A vacuum acting on all that is funny and rib-tickling.

It’s not her fault though. It must be difficult, seeing something that brings such joy to others but never being able to touch it yourself. So this Christmas, when people are sharing festive joy, japes and larks, spare a thought for those who can’t do the same. And also for those who are forced to spend time in their presence.

Pope Will Eat Himself

2007-12-24T02:02:00.000Z

Here's the last and final note from back in July which ties in nicely with the inexplicable bile that can be found below relating to another person's musical taste...

And in other news, the Spice Girls have announced that they’re re-uniting for another tour. Even Geri’s coming along!

Yes, I know this piece of groundbreaking news was announced literally aeons ago, but it’s taken that long for my brain to digest this information and try to create some kind of coherent thoughts on the matter*. The problem is that I like to see myself as someone close to music. Not in a practical, real sense; I’m completely tone deaf, sing with a voice reminiscent of a banshee being skinned alive and, worst of all, I am a failed bassist.

Yet there is still an undeniable hold that music has over me. In my opinion it’s the most basic, primal and beautiful medium humans have for expression and enjoyment*. Whenever the aliens or any kind of Higher Power decides to make itself known, it’s through music we’ll communicate. And you can quote me on that when it happens*. And the fact that I don’t understand the intricate substance behind music, along with most of the rest of the world, doesn’t matter because there’s something powerful and inexplicable that just makes you feel like you.

It’s difficult to be objective for sure. Especially with the variety and the lifestyle that is associated with each and every kind of music. The fashion, above all else. I’m going to say this straight off because I like to be honest*, I wanted, nay, demanded the Spice Girls album for Christmas back in 1997. And why should I feel guilty about that? Surely music is meant to be personal, unique to yourself? It doesn’t matter what you like, the important thing is that you like it, that it says something to you. It’s inconsequential whether you like something everyone else likes or not, it’s purely subjective, there is no definitive answer.

Yeah… I get that, but I just can’t shake the feeling that the majority of pop music* can rationally be shown to be totally pope, viz culturally dead, suffering from delusions of grandeur, deceptive, responsible for the mass mind rape of the Western World* and often found in silly hats. As far as I can tell (which is about the distance from your eyes to the computer screen) music that is good is genuine. What do I mean by genuine? Whatever you want it to mean, I’m not a fucking dictionary. There’s a lot of music I dislike because of personal preferences but I can still appreciate that it’s doing something artistically. I can’t do that with pop music, not without inducing spasms.

I thought I’d worked out why this was: because the people singing the songs aren’t the ones who write them. It’s used as a badge of merit and authenticity if a pop star is able to muster the talent to write their own songs, mainly because so many pop stars appear pretty vacant anyway and assuming any initiative on their part is just too much. If you and the rest of your band just sing and do whatever’s written on a piece of paper then you’re not a musician, you’re a performer, a face to a product. A corporate whore if you will. Why are these faces and bodies the things that get the attention and adoration, when all the talent comes from someone else? I thought this was completely unfair, where was the due recognition/hammer in the face for the people who actually create this music?

Then it was pointed out to me that these people who write the music don’t want recognition. These foetus munchers behind the music churn out whatever’s in fashion, appeal to the world through marketing and the cult of celebdom, and generally sit about on a big pile of money laughing manically as they perform vivisections on puppies*. A machine that adjusts the pitch and sound of someone’s voice so they can be made to sing well. When their only job should be to sing. Is that not a sign of an industry slightly ka-fucked? I’m not saying they shouldn’t be allowed to do it, I just don’t think their products should be stored in the ‘Music’ sections of shops.

I feel a lot of the blame lies with MTV. I still can’t quite get my head around the concept of watching music. Listening to music, yes, that makes sense. As far as you can apply sense to watching something that you can’t watch in the first place anyway. There is nothing to be gained from watching a song on television. Apart from money, lots and lots of money. I’ve nothing against money, on the contrary I’m an avid supporter of obtaining it, but not when it’s to nobody’s real advantage. You might as well make CD cases covered with spikes and coming in different flavours, give all five senses a thrill instead of just the one. People shouldn’t care what a musicians looks like, it’s completely superfluous to their music.

I saw an age old video of the Mamas and the Papas doing the seminal California Dreaming the other day. They were a bunch of fugly fuckers. Seriously, I thought they were all self-harmers who had regularly taken scouring pads to their faces. A Wikipedia test proved negative on this. Nowadays the song would have to be fronted by some buxom beauties, generally stripping or implying raunchy sex at all times but it wouldn’t make any difference to the song. Musicians are envied and adored because of their music, the music isn’t adored because of the imagery and packaging that comes with it.

Ha! Who’s being a moron now? It’s all about the image, what the music you listen to says to other people. It’s a way of feeling superior, to bond, to share, to be arrogant and 'right', whatever. And that’s all to do with the images surrounding the music as opposed to the music itself. Everyone does it, it’s one of the inescapable thing about music. If pop wasn’t labelled ‘pop’ and was sold instead as ‘Nice, heavy, groovy tunes’ I’d no doubt be hailing it as the greatest thing ever. It’s kinda sad that the Spice Girls need more money that badly, but people will go to see them, enjoy it and be happy as a result. I shouldn’t care, it’s not important, each to their own.

I just can’t shake that damn feeling of pope…

We Don't Take Too Kindly To Your Kind Around Here

2007-12-20T11:08:00.000Z

Adam Guettel; Norah Jones; Stephen Schwartz; Andrew Lloyd Webber; Shania Twain; Travis; Stephen Sondheim; Gerald Finzi; Claude Debussy; John Williams; Justin Timberlake; David Yazbek; Alan Menken; The Corrs; John Kander & Fred Ebb; Paula Cole; Delta Goodrem; Thomas Tallis; Wolfgang Mozart; Cy Coleman; William Finn; Dido; Jean Sibelius; Jennifer Paige; Savage Garden; Texas; John Legend; Gustavo Santaolalla; William Byrd; Jason Robert Brown; Scissor Sisters; Laura-Michelle Kelly; Frank Sinatra; Jennifer Hudson; Elaine Paige; Marc Shaiman; Mika; anything sung by Anna McAlpine.

Could there be a greater list of music that is insulting to general taste and decency? I’d be hard pushed to find it. Music is a purely personal thing and people can listen to whatever they want, but when I find a list of favourite music that is so chocker-block full of reeking excrement something in me riles up. I found this list by randomly clicking on a friend (I say friend, as far as I’m aware I’ve never met the man before, he added me as a friend of a friend) on Facebook’s profile and it just begs ridicule. I can’t believe one person would list quite so much drivel as their favourite music of all time. Let’s start at the top and work our way down this shambolic midden, shall we?

Adam Guettel: never heard of him and given the list of heartless fucks that follows, frankly, I don’t want to know. Yes, I know that you shouldn’t condemn that which you don’t know but in this example I cite the case of ‘ignorance is bliss’. Shall we move on?

Norah Jones: She can sing. Apparently this is something of a miracle in today’s talent starved pop public. Criticism should be reserved for her band who write her bland songs but given that I can name not one of them I’ll just say her voice could be used to induce comas and move on.

Stephen Schwartz: No idea who he is but he has a name like a cheap watch. No doubt his music is well in sync but sans soul. Next!

Andrew Lloyd Webber: Arhahahahaha… *cough* *cough* *splutter* sorry, I just half-ingested a cigarette whilst laughing at they very concept of giving Andrew Lloyd Webber musical credit. The man who did nothing but cheapen and whore out the entire notion of musical theatre and, alongside co-conspirator Tim Rice, create work that is schmaltzy feel good family shit that never should, and please God never will, be considered part of the great musical canon.

Shania Twain: She had big tits and a voice like a cat being strangled by Gary Glitter. I’m trying hard to remember one of her songs to mock but everytime I try my brain has a prolapse and I pass out for a few minutes.

Travis: These tosspots actually had the balls to sing ‘Why Does It Always Rain On Me?’ at LiveAid while videos of starving, suffering, drought ridden African children played in the background. Dreary fuckwits.

Stephen Sondheim; Gerald Finzi; Claude Debussy: I’ve clumped this lot together because I have no idea who they are. The name Debussy definitely rings a bell and ordinarily I’d go on Wikipedia to remind myself who he is, but given the standard of musical quality so far I think I’ll give it a miss. I’d rather not risk the chance of vomiting blood for a second time in one evening.

John Williams: Alright, here’s one composer with a semblance of talent. He did write one good score. But which score do I mean? Star Wars? Indiana Jones? Superman? Well here’s the trick… whistle any John Williams score and you can pretty much instantaneously switch to another mid-stream and no one will notice. All his scores sound exactly the same because he’s a one-trick-fucking-pony and should have been an extra in Schindler’s List, case closed.

Justin Timberlake: there’s nothing I can say here that Charlie Brooker hasn’t said with infinitely superior style and flair. Check out Brooker’s new book Dawn of the Dumb for evidence of this fact.

David Yazbek; Alan Menken: Fuck it, in one valiant show of ignorance I’ll just list all the cunts about whom I know nothing of and rest safe in the knowledge that their musical heritage will die alongside all those fucktards who think they’re talented: Paula Cole, Thomas Tallis, Cy Coleman, William Finn, Sibelius, Jennifer Paige, John Legend, Gustavo Santaolalla, William Byrd, Jason Robert Brown, Laura-Michelle Kelly, Jennifer Hudson, Marc Shaiman.

And bam! in one swift movement they all condemned to the annals of musical mediocrity. If you have a problem with my judgment then you're not alone.

The Corrs: Instantly fuckable. As long as they don’t insist on playing their music during lovemaking. If Jim did that I’d be forced to pop his eye out of its socket with my penis. Same goes for the girls.

Delta Goodrem: Oh come on, seriously? Seriously?! She was one of the birds off Neighbours who looked kinda hot and thought she might do a classic break out of soap operas and into the much more lucrative pop world. No! Bad Delta! It worked for Kylie but that’s the limit, the rest just end up as sad druggies mourning the days when they were at least getting paid for being worthless. This town ain’t big enough for two hopeless soap pop bitches…

Wolfgang Mozart: Oh yah. Yah. I just farking love classical music, you know? All the classic composers like, Mozart and… err… yah… yah… classical music is just so deep, yah? The violin is just like, a window into the soul, y’know? Yah. Yah. So shall we have awkward Soho sex now? Such talk = cunt.

Dido: Have you heard the bitch talk? Amy Winehouse can get away with it cos she’s got a voice on her but when the two reasons you become famous are cos your brother is a member of Faithless and you were sampled in a Eminem track about an obsessive fan who kills his wife it’s probably best to die a musical death asap. Oh wait, she already did. Huzzah!

Savage Garden: They were big for two seconds in the late 90s. Then they broke up cos their gay marriage didn’t work out. I didn’t know people still listened to their hormonally charged horseshit. It’s kind of cute in an oh-my-god-pass-the-pills-i-want-to-end-it-all-in-as-painful-a-way-as-possible kind of way.

Texas: They were the support act for David Brent’s band. Whether that’s true or not, there’s not a lot more that needs to be said about them. Oh alright then, if you insist, they were voted in the top ten of things that Scots find embarrassing about Scotland. Now that’s shit.

Scissor Sisters: OK, I’ll admit, I quite like the Scissor Sisters. Their songs do have a certain boogie nature to them that’s hard to resist. But what they did to Pink Floyd’s Comfortably Numb irrevocably condemns them to musical hell where their flesh shall be shaved away everyday for all eternity.

Frank Sinatra: Now ol’ Blue Eyes had mafia connections and I’ve been watching the Sopranos a lot recently so I’ll be careful what I say here... He was a crooning, repetitive, schmaltzy, boring, ‘my penis is bigger than yours’, atonal arsehole who’s musical shall forever be burned on the pyre of the soulless. That’s kind of unfair I guess but fukkit, I’m on a roll and I ain’t stopping now.

Elaine Page: I vaguely remember hearing her name crop up somewhere. I think it may have been on the colour supplement page I used to wipe my arse with a few months back after a particularly nasty attack of the beer skwitz. I can’t be entirely sure though, the memory does tend to play tricks after a while…

And finally… Mika: he’s metrosexual. Oooh…. That seems to be about all people can say with regards to this rake of shit. His music sounds like the Darkness’ dirty pop leftovers. Go figure.

So there we go. Without doubt the worst possible list of favourite music ever composed. All that’s missing is a bit of Chris de Burgh and Barry Manilow in order to set this soul off on a particularly nasty one-way trip to musical Heaven where they have Smooth FM on constant play and all those with half a notion of musical taste opt to rock out in Hell. At least they have some musical testes down there…

Walk Like a Woman, Talk Like a Man

2007-12-18T23:51:00.000Z

There are two physical marks of hitting puberty, surviving and on the other side becoming either a fully-fledged man or woman: Breasts and beards. Most of the time men get the beards and women get the breasts, but Nature can be a cheeky fucker and does enjoy flipping these two around for an unfortunate yet hilarious few. There are other physical changes that occur during puberty as well, but they tend to involve excessive and regular bleeding, sacks dropping and spots erupting, none of which are particularly attractive or appealing.

Breasts and beards on the other hand are wondrous things. I have what could only be described as an entirely natural obsession with both. With breasts the reasons why are pretty obvious: I miss sucking milk out of my mother’s tits. Or something. That was a psychological reason I heard a while ago which for some dark deep down reason I never questioned but hey, to be honest I don’t care what the reason is, those jubbly, bountiful parcels will never cease to entertain me no matter how sick the reasons why are.

But surprisingly enough it’s not breasts that I wish to discuss in this here thesis (it’s not a thesis) but rather beards. Y’see, breasts are easy for women cos every woman gets them. Alright, some are bigger than others, a few look like someone’s thrown highly concentrated acid on to a baby’s face and having a particularly buxom pair can condemn you to a life sans eye contact with any male, but dammit, at least they are a guarantee.

Beards are much more trixy buggers. There can be no doubt that beards are a sign of greatness and maturity, just look at some examples: Santa Claus, Gandalf and God. What do all these people have in common? They’re all made up figures of respect and authority. This is entirely because they have beards. Without them they’d be nothing, simply laughable, pre-pubescent figures with no appeal whatsoever. Can you imagine anyone being scared of a God with a bare chin? Or believing that Gandalf could perform magic in any way shape or form if he didn’t have a beard that a hobbit could get lost in? Ha! The very thought of any of these figures not sporting a full chin-tickler is laughable.

It works in real life too. I remember as a 14 year-old trying to sneak into a pub and being constantly in awe of my peers who already had massive fuck-off sideburns and were shaving thrice a day. They would confidently breeze in to any public house where people would assume they were 50, 60, 100 years old at least. From that moment on I knew that a beard was something I had to procure immediately and without delay.

And yet… and yet… beards are still treated with ridicule and contempt by some. I had a mate who over the summer had to grow a massive beard for a role he was playing. It was a mighty beard, the kind that put one in mind of biblical characters on top of mountains ranting at the world. And was this man hailed as a bastion of awesome beardiness? No. He had to put up with daily ridicule and embarrassment. He had nothing but resentment for his beard because of the social stigma that came with it. I can’t help but wonder what kind of a society we live in when these things aren’t given the veneration and respect they deserve.

Which leads me to wonder why beards are no longer associated with things that are hip and groovy. On a base level it’s fair enough cos after all, what are beards? They’re pubes growing out of your face. Doesn’t sound too pleasant and it shouldn’t. Everyday pubic hair attempts to thrust itself out in little tufts through your face. But if you look at it like that then I refer you back to the reason for breast obession. There must be something more to it than that.

I think a lot of my obsession with beards is due to the fact that I can’t grow a beard of my own. When I try I just get something around about my chin area that vaguely resembles a scrotum that’s starting to get its first fledging pubes. On a testes it’s a beautiful sign of Nature at work (but not one other people want to see). On my chin it’s a fucking travesty. Not only that, I also suffer from bald spots. Where hair should grow in order to give the impression of a mature, readyforsex male, it instead gives the impression of someone undergoing severe cancer treatment. I’m not alone in this either, one of my brothers is also a sufferer of random and apparently inexplicable baldbeardspots. My other brother can grow a beard like nobodies business but fukkit, that’s genetics for you. And I know more than a fair few 'I'll shag anything that moves cos I'm a bloke, wah-hey’ males who are sadly lacking in the beard department.

And this, I believe (obviously, otherwise I wouldn’t be typing this), is the fundamental reason why beards are so universally hated for no reason. The world is not full of bearded, happy and content with their lives individuals. It is full of males with too much emotion and not enough testosterone, jealous and bitter at those bastards who appear more manly than them because they can grow pubic hair from their face. Those spotty faced, red-cheeked individuals who have to rely on everything but their appearance to attract a member of the opposite sex. These fuckers are ruining it for the fair few that are blessed with facial pubes; what once was a mark of dignity and maturity has been undermined by those too young and immature who think it’s fair enough to take out their insecurities on those who can’t help their wholesome gifts from genetics. I'll bet you anything you like that George W. Bush couldn't grow a beard if his life depended on it and is subsequently taking it out on the more ably bushed Middle-East.

Well fuck them, fuck him and fuck those who discriminate against big breasted women in any way. They say you can’t help the way that you were born. And yet those who are born with more intelligent faculties are blessed. Those born with athletic abilities are praised. I say it’s time that those with impressive facial hair and buxom boobies were also venerated. Sure there’s no real reason to do so, but dammit, big beards and big breasts, deep down, impress everyone.

"great big sharp nasty teeth. look at the bones!"

2007-12-11T18:53:00.001Z

when i read this article i felt like jesus was on his knee's blowing me with that special technique only the holy son of god can get his mouth around. let's strip this rent-a-christ down and see what goodness lurks beneath the loin cloth:

Word spread among the [Basra] populace that UK troops had introduced strange man-eating, bear-like beasts into the area to sow panic.

jesus christ! that's fucking terrifying! what the hell do this government and army think they're doing? they've created evil genetic freaks driven relentlessly on by the taste of human flesh. they will not stop until the last scrap of human flesh is devoured. flee! run for the ocean, the freak monster's natural enemy!

But several of the creatures, caught and killed by local farmers, have been identified by experts as honey badgers.

oh thank fuck for that.

UK military spokesman Major Mike Shearer said: "We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area."

call me cynical, but nowadays i find it hard to trust anything the supposed uk military tells me. they're all norwegians dressed up as british troops. you'll see.

The director of Basra's veterinary hospital, Mushtaq Abdul-Mahdi, has inspected several of the animals' corpses. He told the AFP news agency: "These appeared before the fall of the regime in 1986. They are known locally as Al-Girta.*"

ok, that's more reassuring. the guy lives there and he has no reason to lie about it really, unless he wants to spread anti-british propaganda. which leads me onto the finest part of the article and the one that actually merits discussion...

But the assurances did little to convince some members of the public. One housewife, Suad Hassan, 30, claimed she had been attacked by one of the badgers as she slept. "My husband hurried to shoot it but it was as swift as a deer," she said. "It is the size of a dog but his head is like a monkey," she told AFP.

brilliant. absolutely superb. i mean there's just nothing you can add to that to make it more fantabidosedly perfect on so many levels. there are three reasons for this supposed eye-witness account coming about.

she actually believed it happened.*

she made it up as piece of anti-british propaganda*

she's a very unpopular person in desperate need of attention*

don't get me wrong here, i'm not trying to ridicule just idiot iraqis here. no, i believe that it's for these three reasons that all myths start, be it werewolves, vampires, witches, whatever bullshit monsters you want to talk about*.

i live in a country where the greatest source of revenue (oh yeah, there is a number 4: making wad loads of cash) is the belief that there's a fucking immortal dinosaur camped out in a freezing scottish lake. hmm... unlikely. if it is there it sure knows how to hide from the best technology that these scientists can throw at it. but what does science know, right? it can hardly compare to these actual real people who have actually stood there and have actually seen a large blurry shape in rippling water. take that science. you joy-killer*.

the idea that she'd make up the story to spread anti-british propaganda sounds slightly paranoid to me and assumes quite a lot of stupidity on her part. but it's not unheard of for these kinds of stories to come about for political reasons. from what i know of the salem witch trials* most of those who were burnt as witches were killed for political reasons. i feel mrs. hassan was being slightly naive if she thought that spreading such a story nowadays would have a similar result. i suppose it does show the amount people there hate the british troops if that's the length they're prepared to go to in order to discredit them. but meh.

as for the third reason... well have you ever seen these scientists and geeks who study these myths and claim to have seen bigfoot or nessie? much like the creatures they seek for they are solitary beasts, rarely noticed or seen by any humans. in actual fact i think reasons 1 and 3 are actually one in the same thing, and making money is quite an important factor so the list should read:

she actually believed it happened because she’s a very unpopular person in desperate need of attention

she made it up as piece of anti-british propaganda

there was an opportunity to make shed loads of cash

but you know, i'm flexible in my opinions like that.

on a serious note: these people are morons who are the kind that take an active interest in horoscopes. they must be educated, in as forcible and as disciplined way as necessary, in the errors of their ways. the imagination is a wonderful thing folks, but let's try and use it responsibly.

and pity those poor honey badgers who are as we speak being tortured and interrogated by both the americans and the iraqi insurgents. won't someone please think of the badgers*? take action, start a facebook group today, change the world!

Paths To Happiness and Omaha Beaches

2007-12-07T02:42:00.000Z

There’s an old mantra repeated by the demented that drones, ‘Don’t feel down, there’s always someone worse off than you.’ Which is ridiculous. Happiness is entirely relative to the individual and concerning yourself with the deaths and suffering of others is rarely a bright road to joy. Besides, these same hypocritical bastards also claim that ‘money can’t buy you happiness’, an equally haemorrhaged sentiment that is rarely found outside of the batshit mad guilt-ridden middle class.

Money can buy you happiness. I’m writing this on my brand-spanking new MacBook, nicknamed ‘the Sex’, which I purchased after being the owner of a laptop with a big fuck-off crack right across the screen for a year finally drove me to tears. I couldn’t see half the screen, which made writing or viewing anything an interesting challenge for the imagination, and it had reached that point in its life when Windows was just too full of crap. Opening up a large programme was like watching a chemo patient pissing blood from the strain of moving. Hopefully this MacBook won’t freeze repeatedly at the worst possible moments and ‘fall down some stairs’ like the last laptop did. Apparently Macs are more reliable…

Anyway, I bought it with money and it’s made me bloody happy. As do most of the material things that I have purchased in my life. Just because some cheeky chappy who gets his kicks from sitting cross-legged on a barren mountaintop, chanting and brainwashing impressionable middle class teenagers says that a 52” HD-TV with full surround sound adds to nothing to his life doesn’t mean I have to agree. It just means that he’s a lonely man with no soul or appreciation for higher quality image and sound. Again, a slight hypocrisy I feel from one who claims to see things with such clarity.

One of the greatest material things for increasing happiness is television. It reminds you that there’s always someone worse than you. Not worse off or less happy, just worse as a person. It doesn’t matter who you are, turn on the TV and there’ll be someone who is more inept or incapable than you. Happiness often arises through tragedy and watching some poor bastard embarrass themselves without even realising what complete fucktards they are always makes me chirp up and say, ‘At least I’m not that’.

Take, f’r instance, this latest mass pile-up car crash of a show, Arrange Me A Marriage. In the episode I was lucky enough to get drunk in front of, 42-year old musician Trevor Stewart was being pimped out with a wife. By his mum, who was arranging the marriage according to traditional Indian methods. Now that’s pretty fucking tragic for a start. Arranged marriages in India, agree with them or not, are a long-standing part of the culture and more importantly are not used to hook up incompetent middle-aged loners with fat, barren harpies. A point BBC Two (yes, BBC Two is televising this horseshit) seems to have missed.

What really made the whole thing tragic though, and therefore curiously uplifting, was how big a cunt this Trevor was. He was one of those people who offends all the senses. Even though there was a major time/space barrier between me and him I could smell his arsehole nature through the screen. The thought of still being alone at the age of 42 with no meaningful relationship lasting more than 14 months is quite a worrying thought. But as long as you’re not as big a tool as Trevor you’ll probably be alright. He had the tact, wit, charm and social awareness of rancid foetus vomit. Dear old Trevor, four weeks after being introduced to his hopeless wife-to-be at a classically awful engagement party, had seen her twice. He blamed work commitments and ‘taking a week to recover from his stag weekend in a foreign country’ for his marked absence. Unsurprisingly she told him where to stuff it and walked off, proving that beggars can and will be choosers.

This concept of laughing at freaks on TV is now the main staple of reality television. It’s a sick Victorian freakshow but it does squeeze a chuckle from my ribs and gives these bizarre individuals a chance to be on t’tele. Not all tragic losers are funny though, as yet another nutjob proved in America when, in what will no doubt be remembered as one of the more violent comments on Christmas consumerism, he opened fire on a shopping mall, killing eight people.

Sometime these losers get it so wrong. The gunman Robert Hawkins, 19, sought fame through violence and a gun culture that is clearly designed to encourage murder. If only he had instead, like Trevor and all the other countless reality-tv losers, used his butt-end of the social ladder talents to appear on some Where Shall I Cut Myself? VOTE NOW! TXT 278373 show where millions could have laughed and basked in the joy of not being him. That way we could feel good about social awkwardness and borderline psychotics instead of feeling genuine nausea, shock and disgust with the way the world works.

Bernard Manning: From Beyond The Graaaaaaaaaaaaaave

2007-11-23T16:41:00.000Z

There are plenty of weird things in life. Eyeballs that secrete milk, salmon that travel thousands of miles for a shag, women who can fire ping pong balls from where the sun does not shine. But I think having Bernard Manning who is now dead presenting his own televised obituary has got to be at least up there with hermaphrodites. Apparently Manning gained some kind of psychic insight into when his demise was going to occur and so set about making a film about his life and saying goodbye to people for Channel 4. Or he might have known his death was imminent because his kidneys were playing up due to his diabetes, the programme didn’t make that clear.

What was made clear from the first minute was that this was going to be a bizarre fucking programme if ever there was one. Watching someone look down at themselves lying dead in a coffin and taking a chair at the funeral service, chuckling along as if the speakers were making birthday speeches through the magic of blue screen is a pretty unnerving way to kick-off a programme. It’s the televisual equivalent of arriving at a large scary castle in the middle of a dark stormy night and having the door answered by a hunchbacked Igor character.

The theme continued throughout as well with Manning being filmed picking out a coffin, cracking jokes along the way. And the weirdness didn’t even stop there. Oh no. Clearly Manning wanted to raise the ante in the surreal stakes so we were treated to him sat in a spot-lit chair in the middle of a stage answering moral questions about his life from a man in a box dressed as St. Peter. All very symbolic yes, but when you’re dealing with a man who even has to turn his obituary into a slice of entertainment you know that this is a mind already slightly askew to the norm.

These moments were interspersed with clips of his best gags (not all of which I was shocked to learn were racist) and a kind of documentary trying to answer the question ‘Bernard Manning: Fat racist bigot, or Britain’s funniest comedian?’ Not really a question in my eyes, there are 127.8 British comedians funnier than Bernard Manning, but I could see the point they were trying to make, and it is an interesting problem.

Unfortunately this is where the programme hit a bit of a snag. For a documentary to be good it has to be objective. And it was in places, there were honest interviews and footage that commented on a lot of issues surrounding Bernard Manning. However, it is a bit of a challenge to stay unbiased when a man is weeping into a camera making his final farewell speech to his family. And it jars horribly when there’s a clip showing Manning singling out and mocking the one black man in the audience, followed immediately by a real heart tugging moment with Manning close to death. I found myself thinking, ‘He’s a bit of a racist cunt… but I’m so sad he’s not with us!’ Confusing to say the least. Then again, humanising an apparent racist is better than labelling him and making him a symbol. Symbols be divisive.

At other times they felt the need to play totally inappropriate wispy spiritual music over the top of his gags, as if to remind the viewer that he’s dead. Like that wasn’t made abundantly clear from the start. It’s this ridiculously saccharine way that we have to venerate the dead which meant it was difficult to make as balanced a judgment as if it had been shown when he was alive. Which would’ve undermined the concept a little.

That aside, on to the big question: was Bernard Manning just a big fat racist and is there a place for his brand of comedy in the world? Well for starters his brand of comedy was first and foremost in his ability to tell a gag. Stephen Fry was quoted as saying that Manning delivered a joke better than anyone else. And as we all know, if Stephen Fry said it, it must be true. If something is said in just the right way it triggers off some bizarre involuntary spasm in the brain that produces a physical response. It doesn’t entirely make sense but it’s one of the nicer things about being of the species homo sapiens.

Gags also require a setup and racist characters are perfect for this. They provide a character that is different or ridiculous to laugh at. All comedy is based on someone else’s tragedy, or whatever the damn quote is.

This is why I wasn’t sure if Bernard Manning was actually a racist or just a comedian with an act. The programme wasn’t sure either. It flipped back and forth between implying that he was actually a racist, due to his upbringing and the time he came from, and then implying that it was actually just an act, just a joke, harmless and all that. There was a clip from when Manning went on the Mrs Merton Show in the 90s, when it all went completely tits up for him. She asked him directly, “Are you a racist?” to which he replied, “Yes” and went on to explain how there are “some people I like and some that I don’t”. Meanwhile, Future Manning was looking back on the incident saying that it was a show that set people up and he was trying to do that to her and, in his eyes, out funnying her. Then there was the one about when Bernard told a joke about policemen beating black suspects at a police event. I couldn’t tell if it was all an act aimed at offending anyone and everyone, or if these really were deep-seated racist beliefs.

I don’t think poor old Bernard did either. The lines between comedy routine and personal life blurred long ago. Which is fucking obvious given that he took part in this headfuck of a concept for a television programme.

If it was all just an act then there is something to be said for being controversial and saying things that society doesn’t necessarily see as acceptable. I am a firm believer in the fact that anything can be funny if presented in the right way. The problem for Manning was that his style of comedy was so out of date with every other modern comedian. When he first started out, it was ‘just a joke’. Comedians told jokes, they were there to make people laugh and so to certain extent it didn’t matter what they said. Nowadays though the role of the comedian has become much more one of social commentator. Manning’s excuse that it was just a joke and you shouldn’t take jokes seriously doesn’t hold water now when it comes to a topic like racism. Modern comedy aims to attack and ridicule racism, to mock it rather than use it to get a laugh. The likes of Gervais get away with being controversial because it’s done with a sense of irony, you’re laughing because he’s playing an idiot character, you know he doesn’t really mean it. When looking at Manning I was trying to apply that same sense of playing a character to see if it would fit. Doing that was a mistake, more likely than not he was just a good old fashioned racist, as were most people then. And probably still are.

Whatever, it doesn’t matter. Comedians become big and famous because they’re saying what people want to hear. Once the crowd want to see something new, the comedians fade into the background. Manning wouldn’t have become big when he did if racist jokes weren’t acceptable and funny at that time. And if he didn’t have racist jokes he still would have succeeded because he was a funny guy, but then he would have faded out into obscurity. It’s just because everyone cares so much about racism that we’re still talking about him. Why? His views used to be the majority, he said them because he was a comedian, they’re not relevant now, let’s move on.

Manning knew he could stay in the public eye if he kept up the racist act, and everyone allowed him to do it despite changing attitudes because they wanted to stare in at him in that curious way that people have observed social freaks through the ages, be it Imperial Games, Freak Shows, or Big Brother. Everyone wants fame, Manning was no exception. The most damning part of the whole show was when Manning was trying to defend himself to a comedian and the director of a comedy school. When he got in a tight corner he started getting angry and saying that these two were nothing, he’d played the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, what the fuck had they done? As if being famous and talking to lots of people makes your view better and right. Yeah, the Nuremberg Rallies were pretty well attended too (fuck Godwin’s Law and fuck you).

It seems some people will do anything for the attention; even play up to the fact that people think you’re a racist if it keeps people talking about you just a bit longer. No one wants to fade out and be forgotten; the proudest thing about Manning’s life to him was that he would be talked about for a long time, that he’d live on past other comedians. Which said more about him and everyone else than the rest of the programme put together.

Bernard Manning’s final words to the people of the world were, “Get fucked the lot of you.” At least I can agree with him there.

al-qaeda: slightly less scary than timid moles

2007-11-17T14:06:00.000Z

Once again, this post was at the cutting edge of relevance on the 2nd July when I originally wrote it, but given that there haven't been any terrorist attacks since I guess it's still true.

if i were in a position of command in al-qaeda right now (which i'm not in case any of you mi5 people are watching) then i'd be seriously considering putting all the british cells on indefinite hiatus round about now. the point of terrorism is, surely, to win your case through fear and terror. not to make yourselves look like a bunch of incompetent nincompoops.

9/11, 7th July, both terrorist attacks that genuinely shocked the world and changed a lot of what we now take for granted. since then... well, it hasn't gone so well for those dippy terrorists. everytime another bomb fails to go off or a plan gets foiled, as it has done repeatedly since 7th july, they start to become less and less scary. blowing up a car must be one of the easiest things in the world to do. lots of petrol, a bit of fire, ba-da-bing ba-da-boom. they manage it in baghdad on a daily basis. obviously their basic explosive training is at a slightly higher level in iraq.

i begin to worry (actually, not worry, hope is probably a more accurate word) that the uk is the craggy island of the terrorist world, where all the big thickos are sent because they keep embarrassing themselves in front of all their other terrorist buddies. the buck-toothed ones who keep tripping up over their robes and setting their beards on fire by accident while osama mutters, 'this is another fine mess you've got me into al. why i oughta!' is it just me, or was the image of a bumbling idiot stumbling out of a burning jeep the kind of thing you'd expect frank dreben from naked gun to do? it's not scary it's just a bit... well, sad really.

i'd love to have seen the look on those clowns' faces when they realised it had all gone pete tong, frantically pressing the detonator, wondering why the bomb's not going off, realising that, d'oh!, they've left the plastic in the oven and now they have a group of angry glaswegians kicking the shit out of them. although the look on their face would be difficult to spot given the hideous burns. come on, glasgow airport? it's got to be the hardest fucking airport in the world! they should've known they were entering a world of pain before they even started.

well, they probably did realise that, but assumed it would be followed by eternal paradise once they detonated the bombs. arhahahahaha!! fucktards. al-qaeda is meant to be the biggest threat to this country and they can't even make a bomb that explodes. the irish could manage it and they're the butt of all the idiot jokes. and they're doctors as well! the fact that fuckwits like this are allowed to operate on sick patients worries me more than their aborted feotus attempts to cause panic. they shouldn't be shipped off to some unknown prison to face torture, they should just be shoved in the stocks so that people can walk by and laugh at how utterly rubbish these evil cunts are at doing the most basic of all terrorist activities. they are idiots.

well done al-qaeda, you have succeeded in making me not so much scared, more tickled pink with your complete incompetency at scoring more than a couple of lucky hits. consistency is what's important in life, and it's something these dippy tarts seriously lack. thank fuck.

Zombies Ate My Neighbours

2007-11-15T16:39:00.000Z

Last night a worrying thing happened. I was sitting quite calmly looking at Facebook, hitting ‘refresh’ repeatedly, when all of a sudden the lights went out. Not only that, my speakers cut out, the TV died and I could hear shrieks of terror from flats above and below (they might have been mine, I can’t remember. Trauma does terrible things to the memory). My worst fears had been realised, it was a power cut. It was emergency time.

Some people may have wondered about their loved ones, others may have gotten out the candles they had specially prepared for such an event, a select few may even have used the dimming of lights to make an inappropriate move on a loved one. I have to confess my initial thoughts were how to best plan for the oncoming zombie invasion.

I immediately ran a sink full of fresh drinking water and started searching for weapons. The best I could find were a few empty wine bottles for projectiles, a guitar for close range combat and a gun with a single bullet if worst came to worst. Next I pondered food. Obviously a supplies run to Scotmid was necessary for survival, but was it worth the risk of taking on extra zombies by heading up to Waitrose and having an all round more satisfactory ration supply?

A few sirens blared past the window and I sat tensely, waiting for the screams of people running down the street, away from those with no desire but to tear flesh from innocent faces with their teeth. Those neither living nor dead, with no goal but to consume every living thing within their bloated guts. The only beings that may very well bring about the end of humankind.

It turns out my intense paranoia was slightly misplaced. T’was merely a power cut that had affected various patches of Edinburgh and caused no end of anecdotal trouble for various Edinburgers (stupid stupid word). The news that it had been caused by a fire at a substation did nothing either to alleviate my worries at the time though. I had recently watched an episode of the West Wing where Russia covers up a nuclear missile blowing up in a silo by claiming that it was a fire in a substation. If those ruskie bastards thought they were gonna fool me over the invading pinko zombie hoard by using one of the oldest Cold War tricks in the book then they had another thought coming.

No, I was definitely wrong. There were no zombies approaching, the end of days was not here, we were all going to be fine. The worrying thing about the whole episode is that I wasn’t the only one with such paranoid delusions. One of my flat mate’s biggest phobias is the zombie attack scenario, so she too was planning our best means of escape and survival. Oh how we laughed at our unique sense of humour.

Nope. Turns out that most of my friends had had similar thoughts. To the majority, a zombie attack was the most logical assumption to make. Mentioning to one comrade via text that sleeping with a cricket under their pillow wouldn’t be such a bad idea was met with ridicule at the very notion of not being fully prepared with an EMP bomb for the robot armies that were at this very moment descending on our nations.

I think it’s safe to say that we all watch too many movies. More worrying than that though is the extent to which we rely on electricity in order to live a normal existence. Thousands, if not tens of thousands, of years of human civilisation has been living without electricity. It was simple: you went to bed with the sun, you got up with the sun. In between you’d fill in the time by banging rocks together. I’m guessing. Well what else was there to do to keep yourself entertained? I suppose you could pray for some kind of device that would keep you and your family amused.

Then some bright spark came along and invented electricity. Which is awesome and everything, but we really are dependent on that stuff. The reason myself and everyone flipped out when the power went down was because we saw ahead of ourselves the ultimate bleakness that lay in the abyss where there was no internet, no television, no computer games, no light, no cooker, no radio, just the endless black. No entertainment, nothing to shut out the tedium of life. These visions of zombies and robots flooding the streets were just the natural reaction of a species being plunged into the unknown. Of course some poor bastard panicked because they were working on their essays in the library and made the rookie error of not regularly saving their work. For shame.

The nice thing that came out of this was whole sorry mess was that despite our jonesing for electricity and the automatic reaction in the Edinburgh consciousness that a simple power cut = Armageddon, at least we were all prepared and knew what to do in the event of a zombie infestation. And if you didn’t know what to do, start drawing up emergency plans that you can follow in the case of an outbreak of zombies, robots or velociraptors. It’s not if, it’s when.

Homeless On The Streets of Edinburgh

2007-11-12T17:30:00.000Z

Tramps fascinate me. Not so much in a ‘Ooh, fascinating! Let’s a don an old jacket, grow a beard, grab a bottle of White Lightning and join their tribe in order to learn their ancient and mystic noble traditions’ kind of way, more in a ‘What the hell…?’ kind of way, where the blank can be filled with such phrases as ‘is he drinking?’, ‘is he doing?’ and ‘is he saying?’.

Outside Bedlam Theatre there is a bench that is dedicated to the memory of a student who died a few years ago. This bench is set in concrete and raised about two feet from street level on an extended wall that runs around the front of the theatre. If you sit on it you get a beautiful view all the way up George IV bridge, with the striking dome of New College in the distance. It really is a lovely bench, the perfect kind where you can sit comfortably, relax and watch life happen around you.

In tramp circles it is known as The Bench (emphasis entirely necessary). When tramps arrange to meet up and achieve whatever goal they have set themselves, they meet at The Bench. It is a beacon, a focal point which pulls any tramp within range inexorably towards itself. Fair enough, it is a lovely spot especially for those whose lifestyle means they spend a lot of time outdoors, and it adds a nice effect to the name Bedlam. This is why at any hour of the day The Bench can be found draped in tramps whose goals today seem to be the same as yesterday.

Given that I spend a lot of time at Bedlam I regularly come into contact with these folk. They’re all harmless enough, they stick to themselves, drink and occasionally stumble into the building whilst looking for some kind of mysterious object. Divining anything more about their habits is a challenge due to the lack of the most useful human skill: communication. When a flaky, bleary-eyed, reeking (sorry but they do have a certain fragrance about them) individual lurches towards me and garbles a few sounds, sniffs a bit, rinses and repeats, I normally respond with a few half-hearted ‘Yeah mate’ replies while smiling vaguely, until one of us sort of wonders off. It’s not exactly a melting pot for stimulating conversation.

Now I’ll admit to not being the most natural at making conversation with people I don’t know, but I think of much of the communication problem lies with the gallon per hour intake of White Lightning that your average sized tramp will get through. That much booze can’t be good for you…

It’s not uncommon for those of us who may occasionally and responsibly enjoy getting pissed to be struck with a mind-numbingly brilliant thought that everyone else must hear. In your head you’re coherent, urbane, insightful but for some reason your audience don't agree and start wondering why exactly they’re friends with you. Thankfully you get a good night’s rest and the next day brings the terrifying eye of sobriety and past mistakes are swiftly rectified or ignored.

Not so for the tramps. A constant intake of alcohol means that they never break out of that drunken state. It must be confusing for them. Inside their own heads they are a sparkling font of witticisms but for some reason no one will listen to them, and I can’t help but feel that might be a little frustrating for them. But that’s not really a problem because they pretty soon forget it all anyway.

Memory loss is huge when you’ve drunken that much alcohol. I worry that these tramps are like Guy Pearce in Memento, without any ability to formulate new memories. The last thing they can remember is leaving the house, saying ‘I’m just heading out for a quick drink.’ As far as they’re concerned they’re still on that same bender, any chalk that falls onto the slate that passes for their memories is wiped clean with a healthy dose of alcohol every 12 hours. They go to sleep and wake up bright-eyed and bushy tailed, looking forward to that day off work they promised themselves ‘yesterday’. Of course, after a while they must cotton on. Become aware at the back of their head that they’ve been living the same day for a while now, they've met all these tramps before and their clothes are getting a tad scruffy. That’s when the switch flicks and they embrace the psychosis induced by their ethanol-rotted brains.

Possibly. I don’t know. I’m probably insulting some group of people when I imply that all tramps are insane preachers of some drunken gospel. This is not my intention. There is of course a veritable rainbow of folk who make the homeless community such a vibrant place, from the smiling Big Issue seller trying to get their life back on track right through to the hard to identify mass in the gutter. And the alcoholic tramps probably have sad stories and they should be sympathised with, not mocked by some arrogant cock who’s never had to worry about spending a night on the streets or being dependent on alcohol to such a horrible extent.

Fair point, but I still find the insane lifestyle of the tramp an enjoyable curiosity.

Technicians: The Unsung Villains

2007-11-12T15:21:00.001Z

This article was originally printed in Noises Off, the daily magazine for the National Student Drama Festival and was written in response to an article 'Technicians: The Unsung Heroes' by Joseph Coates. As you can tell, it angered me somewhat...

Shakespeare was more of a genius than I realised. Not only did he write some of the most beautiful and influential plays in the history of literature, but he did it all… without tech! That’s right, he was happy for his plays to on at venues where the concept of the gobo hadn’t even been considered. Somehow he felt that a stage in the middle of a field was sufficient for the full weight of his plays to come across. What a fraud. That’s right, a fraud! At least that’s what Joseph Coates would have you believe.

Alright, it’s a facetious point to start with, theatre has moved on leaps and bounds in the last 40,000 years since Shakespeare’s time. Tech is now as an integral part of theatre as any other aspect. I’m not interested in belittling tech. No, instead I’m interested in belittling the moaning, pathetic, pre-pubescent, hormonally confused excuses for people that disguise themselves as techies of varying descriptions. But it’s unfair to talk about all techies like they’re one homogenous blob of angst. The word ‘techie’ is far too broad a term that applies to too many different people. Instead I’ll divide them into two categories, for simplicity’s sake let’s refer to them as the ‘talented’ and the ‘shits’. And it’s these ‘shits’ that are fucking it up for the rest of us.

I’ve had enough of hearing the same childish and unnecessary complaints from these people. Let’s have a look at just a few of these ‘shit’ comments: “Without us there would be no light. Literally.” Think someone’s got a bit of a God complex going on here… perhaps there’s a missing part of Genesis where it mentions that first God invented techies who were then graceful enough to invent light but I’ve yet to hear of it. Besides, I’m not a genius but I know how to flick a fucking light switch. Fair enough, it wouldn’t be the most impressive tech in the world but since the age of two I’ve literally been able to turn on a lightbulb.

Another typical ‘shit’ comment: “We technicians are the glue that hold you actors together.” Arrogance on this scale is so mind boggling it must be genuinely retarded. Actors get together months before a show, they rehearse and work together over a long period of time and this probably goes a long way to making them the self-obsessed luvvies (I’ve got to get some balance in here) that they are. But it’s the job of whichever poor bastard is directing them to make sure that they are a cohesive an functioning whole, the ‘shits’ a) don’t want to get involved and b) wouldn’t have the first idea how to communicate with someone from then outside world.

Please don’t think I’m talking about all techies here. Some of my best friends are techies (although unfortunately they’re not also gay, black or disabled). Let’s take a moment and consider these ‘talented’ individuals. The most important thing to say about them is that these ‘talented’ are competent. They know what they have to do and they do it quickly and efficiently with no dicking about and without that high-pitched whining that attracts dog-bitches on heat to the theatre. They have ideas, imagination. They communicate well with the director, they take an interest in the show from an early stage, they’re amicable to all the cast.

Tech runs, usually a source of immense pain to all involved, are relatively painless under the guidance of the ‘talented’. Whatever they’re spending their time doing you can rest safe in the knowledge that they’re doing it for a reason. They know that good tech is subtle. When an audience is trying to concentrate on the emotional context of a naturalistic play they don’t want to be distracted by garish and out of place lighting that happens to be ‘cool’ according to some ‘shit’. And when the ‘talented’ have done a good job they know it. They don’t seek praise like some three-year old begging for acknowledgement for the fact that they’ve managed to eat their food without spilling it down their bib. A nod and some words of praise from one professional ‘talented’ to another is enough because theirs is an art too subtle and complex for most laymen to appreciate.

Not for the ‘shits’ though. Faith in a job well done is not enough for them. Let’s have another look at the Gospel according to Coates: “When was the last time you heard someone say, ‘Who did those lights? They were cool! What about that sound? It was beautiful!’” Just because no one’s said it about your tech, doesn’t mean it’s never been said. In a recent production of Iolanthe I saw, a huge functioning waterfall at the back of the stage got one of the largest and most appreciative rounds of applause of the night. In a production of the Cosmonaut’s Last Message To The Woman He Once Loved In The Former Soviet Union the tech were brave enough to suspend two actors playing cosmonauts 30 feet above the stage. In another play, Sour Heart, there were at least 15 televisions spread out and around the stage that at various intervals played videos, images, etc. and all at separate times.

All of these plays got countless praise for the bold directions that the tech had taken from members of the public, even if they didn’t quite understand how much work went into it. And these are just three of the most recent shows I’ve seen. The ‘shits’ moan and complain as an excuse. It’s a mask used to disguise the lack of self-confidence they have in their own work. The fact is that when tech is exceptional people do appreciate it. When an actor is good people appreciate it. When an actor is appalling everyone knows who they are and will single him or her out. When the ‘shits’ completely bollocks up a show they have their anonymity to hide behind from the public.

Things have to change. No longer should actors be stuck in 10 hour long tech runs and abysmal first night performances because the ‘shits’ are too lazy and unskilled to get the lights and sound rigged properly. No longer should the ‘talented’ be tarred with the same brush as the ‘shits’. And no longer should we be subjected to the same repetitive ramblings of those with delusions of grandeur.

Hell Ain't No Bad Place To Be

2007-11-09T15:44:00.001Z

An article from June 2007. After going back over things I wrote a few months ago, I'm starting to notice some recurring themes...

I love the BBC website. Whenever I’m feeling particularly drained of ideas I just have to make a short trip there and I know I’m going to find an example of cutting edge, hard-hitting journalism which will inspire me to put fingers to keyboard and voice my opinion on the most important of current affairs. Or not, as the case may be with this article which makes the shockingly obvious claim that six out of ten of us Brits are opportunistic criminals.

Yes, it’s time to face facts and realise that when someone receives more change than they’re meant to they’ll keep it anyway. The dastards! Or when given the opportunity to take cash-in-hand for a job so as to avoid paying tax* most people will choose that option. Who would’ve thunk it?! Clearly these groundbreaking researchers are correct in saying that there is no “law-abiding majority” and that the respectable middle-classes are a “seething mass of morally dubious, and outright criminal, behaviour”. Maybe now this problem has been highlighted we can all join hands and combat this problem together.

Alright, enough of the crap sarcasm. I honestly don’t know why they bothered wasting billions of pounds on this survey when they could’ve just paid me a £5 million consulting fee so that I could tell them that people are, in general, opportunistic bastards. The fact that there was even the suggestion that middle class people are more morally upright than lower class people is a view which is frankly insulting, naïve and belongs in the Bronze Age when it might conceivably have been true*

Actually, no. Not even in the Bronze Age could it be said that people wouldn’t commit a ‘criminal’ act if it was advantageous to them. It really gets my goat when tossers make this comment, which I’ve heard more times than, “Fuck off Richard”,

“People talk about not having to lock the door in childhood, and I remember that myself. There is unquestionably more opportunistic crime. I would have to say that behind that lies a decline in belief in God, and a culture of hedonism, self-fulfilment getting on, and materialism.”

Such a statement is horseshit* through and through. The reason no one used to have to lock their door was because they lived in small, isolated communities where everyone knew each other. A criminal would have to be pretty fucking desperate/mentally challenged to nick something from a mate’s house and then try and flog it back to them down the pub. And if little Maddie went missing in a small Gloucester village, everyone would know who the local paedo was and a short lynching later everything would be gravy. Now that we live in an age where people can ship stolen goods on without breaking a sweat, it’s hardly surprising that you have to lock your door*.

Since when did a belief in God lead to better morals? Since when did being an atheist lead to better morals? Catholics rape small children, Muslims blow themselves up in crowded areas and atheists commit acts of genocide. Sure I’m generalising, but so are these pricks who constantly generalise about the world going to the dogs in the face off rapidly improving health care, technology, social equality and falling crime levels. So fuck ‘em.

I always laugh at those piss-poor anti-piracy adverts that ruin the first 30 seconds of whatever film you’re watching. “You wouldn’t steal a purse! You wouldn’t rob a bank! You wouldn’t rape a granny, defecate in her mouth and make off with her savings! Don’t steal our films!” it confidently states. Err… yes I cocking would if any of those crimes were as easy and consequence free as downloading an mp3 or the latest episode of Heroes*. Of course I don’t commit these crimes because I have respect for other people and don’t want to live in constant fear of vigilante OAPs. My moral compass is pretty straight but I won’t not do something that will benefit me and not harm anyone else significantly just because it’s against the law.

“If I thought something was OK, then found out it was against the law, I wouldn't do it. I would think it was wrong.”

It’s that kind of opinion I’m talking about. Laws are an integral part of society but I don’t think there’s a compulsion to obey them blindly. Take cannabis for example. I have no qualms with admitting that I regularly smoke joints, even if it is against the law*. And I don’t say that because I think it makes me cooler than those who don’t*, but because I personally enjoy it, I’m not harming anyone else by doing it and I think to apply the law to me and send me to jail for it would be a waste of everyone’s time and money. Speaking of drugs and petty crime, if you want to get rid of what I’m assuming people refer to as ‘lower-class’ crime then let’s tackle this whole issue of sick addicts turning to crime to fuel their addiction.

Anyhoo… I know I’m not alone in my views. After all, 6/10 people can’t be wrong. Right? We’re all ‘criminals’, we all take advantage of laws that are in place but aren’t a matter of life and death, so what? People are ‘allowed’, according to the law, to dick people over and do things to their advantage all the time. That makes them cocks, and also human. Taking more money than perhaps the government says you’re entitled too, whilst it is technically illegal, isn’t as bad in my sincere opinion as breaking up with your partner by spit-roasting their mum. Which is legal. Thank God.

Once again it all comes down to common sense. Something you and I have an abundance of and everyone else is in desperate need of in order to make this world a sensible place to live in. Don’t worry, they’ll catch up eventually.

Working On My TV Tan

2007-11-07T13:57:00.000Z

There’s a piracy advert that always makes me laugh. It is not, as you may think, a recruiting video aimed at encouraging young students to join the pirate navy. There is no such thing. It is instead an advert that is designed to discourage people from buying pirated vitamins or downloading copyrighted minerals from the internet by equating these actions with such moral wrongs as stealing an old lady’s purse, shoplifting and flying a plane into a New York skyscraper because piracy apparently funds terrorism.

Unfortunately, rather than guilt tripping the public into giving up their immoral, barbaric ways and paying for their entertainment like they should, the advert has highlighted how certain rogue members, that make up the vast majority of the moral whole, will quite gleefully break the law without any ethical considerations or legal concerns if they think they’re going to get away with it.

‘You wouldn’t steal a car!’ the advert reminds us. If breaking into a car and selling it on cheap was as big a challenge as clicking a mouse once, twice, maybe three times in order to download a song, then there would be no cars left in the world. There would only be an endless, never-seen stream of stolen cars flowing like credit around the black market.

The internet is by its very nature an absolute bastard for copyright law enforcement anyway. The anonymity of the millions involved makes policing or controlling file sharing in any effective way as pointless a task as asking Sisyphus to push a boulder up Mont Blanc. It just can’t be done.

Radiohead’s recent decision to release their album on the internet for free/a charitable donation (if you feel that you’re the kind of person who just can’t bear to see these millionaire rock stars go without cash) wasn't a brave step in a new direction. I've been able to download albums for free for the past ten years now. It was just a sign that bands and labels have started to give up and realise that they can’t win the battle against the millions who are downloading their songs for free. They're going to have to adopt some new tactics to deprive us music fans of our cash, which is why more and more bands are starting to exploit t'internet for cash prizes.

Even Cliff Richard is using the internet to promote his new record. The more people that pre-order his next shitsandwich slab of fetid drivel online, the cheaper it will be when it’s released. If, for my pre-order, I received a section of Cliff’s vocal chords that had been forcibly torn from his throat then I would be more inclined to being seduced by such an internet bargain.

At the moment though the music industry is still a long way from using the internet properly to promote, sell and spread music to the public at large. In the meantime hopefully the TV industry will cotton on quicker to the advantages of internet based media. It doesn’t look good though given that they’re arresting internet pioneers like the 26-year old man from Cheltenham who ran TV Links.

TV Links was a magical place, full of joy and wonder. Where childrin could skip through a vast library of links to TV shows, cartoons, documentaries, anime and movies, a bottomless pit of visual entertainment. Almost any TV show you'd care to mention, from Red Dwarf to Louis Theroux and back again via QI, was available to all who ventured into that domain. And for free!

Now I like TV a lot. There are amazing shows out there, both old and new, a lot of which in recent times have come from America. From dramas such as the Wire, Deadwood and the Sopranos, to South Park, Heroes, 24, Firefly, Battlestar Galactica, the list never ends. There is not a chance I would be a fan of any of these shows or many others were it not for sites like TV Links.

Living the hectic nocturnal schedule I do, I’m never consistently in at the right time to watch television. This is why I missed 24, Lost, The West Wing and the Sopranos when they first came out. I simply could not guarantee seeing every episode and these shows are like newspapers, miss them for a couple of weeks and any reality outside your own becomes a distant blurry memory. If it weren’t for internet TV I would not know about these shows or many others because I would never have watched them in the first place. The internet has reinvented what it means to watch TV shows, a method which is far more liberating and accessible than any previous system.

The BBC’s World News channel YouTube and Channel 4’s On Demand program, which makes much of the Channel 4 archive available to watch for free online, are signs that the industry is waking up and using the internet the way it should be now that it’s possible to instantly stream near DVD quality videos, but it’s still not enough. It’s a stubbornness on the part of the TV networks not to see that this is the way a lot of people watch their TV now, and the number is only going to get bigger.

What NBC should be doing, for example, is hosting every new episode of Heroes for free on their website, surrounded by advertising, and with a guaranteed good connection. They would get millions more hits, they would know exactly how many people were watching it thereby making the horseshit ratings system a thing of the past, a whole new legion of fans would be available to watch the shows, and I wouldn’t have to trawl around loads of different websites trying to find one with a working, albeit illegal, link to the episode.

The entertainment industry needs to realise that it can’t win against the internet. Sure, TV Links was taken down but there were already another bunch of websites ready to take its place. One of the main reasons it was taken down was because of the links it had to pirated movies. But the thing is, pirated movies are rubbish. If given the choice between watching some shitty, grainy handheld camera version of the latest epic on my laptop screen, or the 50 metre screen, surround sound cinema version that will blow your head off, I’d always go to the cinema because that’s an experience you can’t recreate at home. And blockbusters still makes x hundreds of millions so they can’t be too badly off.

With music and television, however, the advantages of using computers and the internet to access the media compared to the traditional methods are numerous, just like the advantages of supermarkets over having to go out and gather all your food yourself from the wild. Instead of waving their hands about and complaining about how the ol’ grey mare she ain’t what she used to be, the music and TV industries should be at the forefront of internet entertainment, leading the charge and surpassing all the other sites that offer a vast range of TV shows for free. If only to save themselves the hassle further down the line.

An Alternative Drugs Experience

2007-10-29T15:10:00.000Z

Drugs are bad. Apparently. This is the never ending, incessant view of drugs shoved down our throats at every available moment by all those shady individuals who make up 'they', as in 'they' told me so. In the first place I'm uncertain about assigning moral values to an inanimate object, it is after all those who can't control their habits and vices that are bad and even then 'sick' is a more appropriate term, but more importantly these people seem to be missing another key point. Drugs are fun.

Drugs have been fun for a long time. One of the few constants through the evolution of human civilisation has been the people getting wasted on some kind of chemical substance. It is the unfortunate case about every aspect of human life that things which are bad for you will inevitably be more fun than things which are good for you. There are a million and one things that are potentially lethal to human life and serve no purpose apart from recreation that are perfectly legal, and yet most drugs are illegal and anyone who takes them is damned. A little unfair I feel.

Taken to my idealistic extremes I will quite happily argue for the legalisation of drugs based on personal responsibility, safety and tax revenue. But more importantly than that, and before we get close to coming up with a solution to the drug problem, we first of all need to take a much more mature and intelligent look at drugs than the bipolar 'these things are bad because we say so' argument that has so utterly failed so far.

The worst kind of hypocrites when it comes to drugs are those who will condemn any kind of drug use and yet quite happily sit there and sip their wine. It is an obvious point to make but it’s one that some people clearly can’t get their heads around: alcohol is a drug. An extremely dangerous drug. It’s highly addictive, causes major damage to your body and kills tens of thousands of people in the UK every year. And yet so many people drink it because it’s a highly enjoyable habit to have. Those people who say, ‘You don’t need to drink to have a good time’ are just bare-faced liars.

Alcohol is a drug that has class A written all over it, but I’m not concerned with the alcoholics who die from alcohol abuse. Nor am I concerned with the 48 people who died from ecstasy in 2006, or the 54 people who died from cocaine in 2004. Drugs are not perfectly safe, anyone who claims they are is a moron. If you develop an addiction to a substance, for whatever reason, then it’s more than likely that it’s not going to end well for you. That’s obvious and doesn’t interest me.

What interests me is the millions of people who drink alcohol who are not alcoholics. Those who have responsibility and mental stability, who know their limits and when it is acceptable to drink. You can see them everywhere, people whose lives are not ruined by drinking, who go out for a drink and still manage to be a normal, functioning part of society. It’s not that big a leap to realise that there are people who use other drugs in a similarly mature and measured manner. Just because the story of the person who took some cocaine to celebrate a promotion, partied all night, had a great time and woke up the next day and got on with his life doesn’t make the front pages doesn’t mean it never happens.

It’s patronising and insulting to the rationality and personal freedom of human beings to be told that you’re allowed to choose to take mind altering and damaging chemical substances in the form of caffeine, nicotine and alcohol for your own personal enjoyment but none of the other drugs because… well, because… er… ‘they’ say so? If as a rational thinking adult I am free to make the decision to have a few pints for my own personal enjoyment I should be allowed to say that I want to have an ecstasy tablet because it makes clubbing more enjoyable, or a joint because I want to relax with some friends and giggle inanely at youtube videos. It’s my body, my responsibility, I’ll do what I like with it. We allow pregnant mothers to commit infanticide based on the argument that it’s their bodies and their right. Can I please have the right to lie on the grass, take some shrooms and feel happy and content with the world?

A lot of the problem lies in the intensely personal nature of the affects of drugs. Most people know what it is like to be drunk, and how they behave after a few drinks. Some people become more aggressive, some become more confident, some think it’s the best time to burst into song and tell everyone just how lovely they are. Alcohol affects everyone differently because people are many and varied in their personalities. And other drugs are the same. They bring out different aspects of people’s personalities. While the physical process in the brain may be the same the mental effects will vary from person to person.

Despite this there is a perception that illegal drugs have a homogenous effect on everyone that takes them. It’s a ridiculous thought that just goes to show how little these people, who have a knee-jerk ‘All drugs are Satan’s sperm’ reaction to drugs, respect the individuality of humans. Taking an ecstasy tablet doesn’t transform you into some pre-defined ecstasy robot whose functions are dictated by the drug. The pill will temporarily affect parts of your brain, but how these affects manifest themselves depends entirely upon the personality of the individual. That’s why some people enjoy some drugs, some people enjoy others, and some find the whole experience too weird and off-putting. That’s their choice to make, the state can’t say how drugs will affect everyone and therefore how illegal they should be in the same way it can’t say that football is a better sport than rugby.

Drugs are a nightmare topic and there really is no easy answer. The idea of legalisation seems too ridiculous for many people to even begin to comprehend and there would be some serious consequences to such an act, not all of them good. But there is no doubt in my mind that our current attitude to drugs, from treating users as criminals to presenting only one side of the drug culture in the media, is fundamentally flawed and until there’s a more open-minded and even-handed debate on the subject the problem will never get close to a resolution.

Irrefutable Proof of God's Existence

2007-10-26T16:26:00.001+01:00

I’ve always been a hardcore atheist. I’m not exactly sure what a softcore atheist is, but whatever it is I’ve never considered myself one of them. To me the world of religion was a world of fantasy, an ancient method of explaining the unexplainable that was no longer relevant or necessary in these modern times of rationality.

If there is a God, I thought, why has he abandoned us? Where are the miracles, the signs of his existence which seemed to be so common a mere two thousand years ago? Now my life has changed. I have witnessed a miracle. A sign. Proof from God that he is there watching us and cares for us.

I refer of course to this Countdown video.

On the surface it is nothing short of hilarious. Through apparent random chance and happenstance, Carol Vorderman has spelt out the word CUNTFLAPS on the board. There is nothing about this that isn’t comedy gold. However, if we scratch the surface of this comedy nugget we come to realise something of much greater importance on a spiritual level. God has sent us a message.

The two contestants playing the game are vicars. Or priests. Or some kind of religious morons anyway. They are the ones who are constantly telling us to search for God, to look for his actions. Well now I have. My eyes are truly open. Allow me to explain.

The Book of Daniel in the Old Testament contains this story about the feast of King Belshazzar of Babylon. In this story Belshazzar is an arrogant, power hungry king who believes himself to be invincible. Then at one drunken party, a hand appears and writes on the wall,

God has numbered the days of your kingdom and brought it to an end; you have been weighed on the scales and found wanting; your kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and Persians.

Clearly God’s vocabulary is different but his method is the same. God has sent us a message, using a most classical device. The clergy are a bunch of cuntflaps who have angered God and seek for nothing but to act like a bunch of twats and lower the universal consciousness of this planet. God be not pleased. That is what he is trying to show these priests. That they must mend their ways or lose themselves forever.

We must take strength from this miracle. It proves that God is not ignorant or blind to mankind’s suffering at the hands of the clergy. He is all too aware of how they have raped his good word and done all they can to hold back humans from advancing into the unknown possibilities of the Universe. Through Countdown, he has given us a sign that change is on the horizon. Not only that, but clearly God has a cracking sense of humour to boot.

All I can pray for now is that the clergy will heed this message from our great saviour and change their ways. For surely they will not be so arrogant as to claim that this event is mere coincidence. That is the way of the heretic atheist. When God sends a message as clear as this you’ve got to be a pretty big cuntflap not to realise its true meaning…

Stop The Madness

2007-10-26T15:42:00.000+01:00

Again this is another article from a few months ago, I'm still transferring them all across slowly but surely. The message is, I'm sure, still relevant though...

So Manhunt 2, the new computer game from Rockstar, has been banned for sale in the UK by the BBFC. If your first reaction to that sentence is, “Oh it’s a video game, I don’t care about that kind of mindless entertainment” then reconsider for a moment. This isn’t just an issue over video games, this is an issue of censorship and as soon as that word appears everyone should take notice.

The reason given by the BBFC for the ban was the high level of “casual sadism” in the game, apparently the fact that you spend the entire game going round committing unspeakable acts of violence means that it’s not suitable for you, me, or anyone to play. I’m so sick of hearing this whole ‘violent computer games create a violent society’ argument that I now instinctively reach for a blunt instrument to bludgeon myself with every time it’s mentioned*.

The first thing to make clear is that computer games have been violent since their inception. In Space Invaders you weren’t playing the role of Ambassador of Peace to the first extra terrestrials to make contact with Earth. Instead you were the Ambassador of Dread, launching endless missiles at E.T. and the rest of his goofy buddies who had dared to stray on to your turf. And the trend has continued. Nearly every computer game involves fighting, destroying, capturing or blowing up some kind of enemy. For fuck’s sake, even Mario enjoys setting fire to any innocent turtle that strolls his way*.

The reason for this is that computer games rely on action. The reason they’re called computer games is because, wait for it, they’re fucking games*! Games of all types are based around competition and action. There needs to be something to compete against, to beat, to overcome. It’s hardly surprising then that when playing as a computer game character you have to attack or defeat something else that’s in your path. It’s possible to have non-violent games and concepts, the likes of the Sims and most point-and-click adventures, but they’re some pretty narrow genres.

But, and this is a really big but, all these people that keep pointing the blame at computer games for causing violence are grabbing the end of the stick that’s unfortunately been dipped in bullshit. Society isn’t violent because of computer games; computer games are violent because of us. Violence and death are two of the most intriguing and compelling things to humans. They are what intrigues and entertains us.

Just look at every form of entertainment if you’re unsure. Art, music, theatre, television, film. All of it involves violence or death in it somewhere. People live their lives constantly thinking about their mortality and the unanswerable question of death. Who has never walked over a bridge and felt a strange compulsion to throw themselves off, just to see what it’s like?

A combined desire to compete and a fascination with death and mortality are pretty much the two most powerful forces in nature*. It’s not surprising we’re so easily engrossed by these things and we enjoy them to the extent we do. It’s why when people play Tomb Raider they sometimes enjoy making Lara Croft hurl herself off a 100ft cliff to a messy, explosive end on the craggy floor below for no apparent reason. You do it not only out of curiosity but also because you know that a short loading screen later Lara’s going to be safely back on the top of that cliff ready to go for another 9.0 score from the judges for her triple somersault swan dive into solid ground. No consequences, no repercussions, nothing.

It’s why when playing Grand Theft Auto it’s hilariously good fun to smash over pedestrians with your car for no good reason. Why blowing a zombie’s head off with a shotgun in Resident Evil is enough to keep you chuckling for years. And why I’m sure sawing a hooker’s arm off with a hacksaw in Manhunt 2 would have been so enjoyable. Because it doesn’t matter. Never once have I paused and questioned my moral actions in a computer game. Not once have I felt genuine guilt for levelling a village of innocent people and slaughtering them and their livestock.

The fact that these violent decisions are so easy to make is what proves how little effect they have on people. The very idea of actually battering a stranger to death * with a metal pole is morally reprehensible and unquestionable. I wouldn’t hurl myself off a cliff Lara style*; I certainly wouldn’t actually run my car into pedestrians on a whim. This is the real world.

Just writing that sentence makes me feel like a fucktard for pointing out the obvious. We all know the difference. Honestly, we do. And when I say ‘we’ I’m talking about all 6,603,487,066 of us. Everyone can tell the real world from a fucking computer game. There isn’t anyone who can’t. Not even the most off-the-wall psychotic braindead Texan* could confuse a video game with the real world. If we couldn’t then surely we’d show a little more emotional connection when the body count hits the thousands as it does in some games.

“But when the first Manhunt was released that kid got stabbed and the 14 year-old who stabbed him was obsessed with playing Manhunt, therefore Manhunt made him do it!”

A convincing logical argument for the period it takes for the optical nerve to transmit the image from your eyes to your brain. What these special people are saying is that a kid who was violent and mentally unhinged enjoyed playing a computer game where you can be violent and mentally unhinged. So far so groundbreaking. But wait! their deductive powers don’t just stop there; using this evidence they firmly conclude that video games are what made him violent in the first place.

Now since I’ve been alive there have also been computer games, so I don’t know for sure what the world was like before then. I’m starting to worry that I missed out on some golden age that lasted from the dawn of mankind until 1971 where there was no violence. People suppressed their more aggressive instincts and didn’t lash out at anyone. Then game computer games were invented and Pandora’s Box spewed forth hate and violence into the world. Why Pong? WHY!?!

But then I stop worrying because I’m not a complete muppet. I’ve said it once, I’ll say it again. We were violent before computer games, we cause the violence in computer games because it’s entertaining to us simple humans, and it’s ok because we all know the difference between the magical Xbox world and this world we can actually touch. When young people go on killing sprees it’s tragic. So tragic that everyone feels guilty because everyone knows deep down that the responsibility lies with the rest of society to identify those people who are out of sync with the rest of us and treat them. It’s shockingly apparent that parents have a huge responsibility to look after their children and provide them with a stable upbringing. When these things don’t happen, sad things are often the result. But just because you feel guilty about your inaction and want something easy to blame, don’t try to ruin my innocent entertainment you pathetic cunt.

And part of being a parent is keeping your children away from overly violent imagery that may affect them. That’s why we have the BBFC and the whole rating system. These are adult games. For adults. If you don’t think your children should be playing these games then don’t let them. And campaign harder to make sure retailers are more stringent at checking IDs. Do whatever you want to fill the empty void in your lives where your sense of fun once was, but don’t let it get to the stage where we’re being told what, as rational and free-thinking, sane, balanced adult individuals we can and can not do for our own personal enjoyment in what is fast becoming the most exciting and revolutionary form of entertainment. If we start censoring now, it’s only going to get worse.

I’m off, if you want me I’ll be decapitating something helpless and innocent.

Kill Id

2007-10-23T10:10:00.000+01:00

Superheroes are rubbish because their powers are so utterly unattainable. No matter how much you screw up your eyes and wish for it, you're never going to become invisible. Nor will you ever be able to fly, not least because the main technique adopted by most superheroes when it comes to flying is to stick two fingers up at every law of physics and gravity. Where's Superman's thrust, eh? Where the fuck is it*?

One superpower that at first glance appears really cool and is always presented thus is the ability to read people's minds. It's a power that is always shown in the same way too. Take Parkman* from the TV show Heroes for example. He seems to have some mental radio in his head that he can tune in at will to hear anyone else's thoughts. Mel Gibson in What Women Want was able to hear the thoughts of women in what was possibly the most sexist film released in the latter half of the 20th century*. There are at least 12 examples of mind readers in popular culture* and the thoughts they hear are always the same: a simple and clear snippet of speech that the other person is saying to themselves.

Now take a brief moment to sit back and think about what you're thinking. Yeah, that sounds a little bit confusing but you know what I mean. Think about all the thoughts, images, sounds, words, ideas, emotions and images of your mother naked* that pass through your head in any one instance. It's an immensely confusing cacophony of noise which you're constantly struggling with for control. Now imagine that you could hear everyone else's confusing babble of mental bollocks. If you had that ability your brain would be out of your nose and into a small bubbling puddle of mess on the floor within 17 seconds.

Of course even if you could work out a way to filter out all the crap and get some clear image of what the other person was thinking in their head it still would be a distinctly unpleasant experience. The reason being that people think bad, embarrassing, personal thoughts all the time. In any one conversation with someone a million inappropriate, ridiculous, offensive and puerile images pass through your head. People constantly think about horrible stuff and if that information were available to everyone else all the time humans would be solitary animals living in caves, each one trying to work out whether they're more disgusted at themselves for imagining their neighbour dressed up in a baby costume and suckling at their nipples just for fun, or at their neighbour for thinking the same thing*.

This is why humans have developed inhibitions, filters to keep the dark thoughts locked up. But the brain, specifically the subconscious, is an absolute bastard and refuses to take censorship lying down. I don't know what I did to annoy my brain, maybe I wronged it in a past life or something, but now it's filled with a thirst for vengeance. A thirst it quenches by humiliating and embarrassing me at every turn and generally eroding my life*.

I know that I'm not alone in this. Anyone who has ever of a night partaken in the consumption of a couple of drinks tinted with ethanol will know how the brain will leap on any opportunity for it to blurt out the most cringeworthy statement it can come up with. It's not your fault, you didn't mean to say that you think your friend is a hefty whining trollop who should get over herself and sort her life out*, but she wouldn't shut the fuck up and*, your inhibitions dimmed by the booze, your subconscious leapt in there and spunked out what you were thinking. Why? Because your brain is a bastard and hates you.

Even when you're sober you're not safe though. The subconscious adopts more covert, guerilla tactics to make your life a living misery. It mostly achieves this through guilt and love, the two main weapons in the subconscious' 'Gonna Fuck You Up' arsenal*.

Guilt takes on many forms but it all essentially boils down to the same thing: when you make the wrong decision based on what the voices in your head told you to do. When your alarm goes off at 7.30am on a cold winter morning and you're tucked up in a snug warm bed, every instinct you have is telling you to just stay there you are and let work deal with itself. Similarly, when confronted by something that you really want to buy even when strapped for cash, the mind invents a million different reasons why this purchase will revolutionise your life and make you a better person*.

It's only after the bloodshed and the tears that the guilt sets in, always caused by that one wish that you could go back and listen to the sole rational voice that had clearly thought things through. This voice is your conscious, the sensible planning area of your brain that is locked in a constant battle against the overwhelming, savage, barbarian hordes that make up the subconscious. It's hardly surprising the poor blghter loses so often. Some people might suggest that you should take some kind of personal responsibility, but these people are forgetting that the subconscious is a bastard that wants to hurt you.

As powerful a weapon as guilt is, it's nothing compared to the power of love*. If the subconscious is trying to confuse, disorientate and disturb us, which it is, then it has no better weapon than love. In the early stages the subconscious uses our inhibitions against us. It does, in fact, amp them up. So you become nervous in front of the person you fancy, tongue-tied, awkward, unable to express how you truly feel for them, until you're left as a gibbering wreck wondering why all those wonderful things you'd planned to say suddenly vanished from your mind the instant you saw the object of your desire. Meanwhile your subconscious is guffawing away at your misfortune.

Then it builds on this groundwork. It starts flooding your mind with images and thoughts of the person. You don't want it to, you're trying to move on and focus on other things, but the subconscious is a persistent bugger and it just won't let up. So your every waking hour is filled with thinking about the one you 'love'. You wonder what they're doing, what they're thinking, if they like you, if you should throw caution to the wind, seize them and make wild passionate love to them right there on the dancefloor*, never realising that there is no rational reason for what you're doing, it's just because your brain hates you.

If you're lucky the other person will be having the same screwed up thoughts about you and then bam! you're in a relationship. Now you don't only have to deal with one subconscious that's out to get you, you have to deal with two. Anger, jealousy and confusion. The three elements, so sadly forgtten by Hollywood, that make up the other half of love. The only parts of a relationship that are continously content and happy are the two subconciouses involved that have formed a mutual bond of affection together over working so hard to mislead and bring general hurt and pain to those who are ultimately just trying to fulfil a biological imperative. Sex is easy for animals because they don't have a little demon in their head which is trying to destroy their sanity.

Guilt and love are the two main examples, but the harmful effects of the subconscious can be seen in every aspect of life. Irrational mood swings, decisions, thoughts, everything is caused by a part of the brain that doesn't take too kindly to being restricted. It was partly for this reason that for a while I took part in an intensive marjiuana relief programme*. For whatever reason, I found that marijuana had an effect on my subconscious not unlike that of an elephant tranquiliser on a small yappy Yorkshire terrier. Marijuana makes everything about you content and happy, with no pesky emotions or conflicting feelings to get in the way of living.

Unfortunately the flipside of such extensive use of cannabis is an utter lack of motivation and the feeling that you're slowly fading away as a person. So now that I've stopped smoking every hour that God sends, my subconscious has woken up. And it's pissed off. What I really want is a superpower that enables me to wage a stronger war against the subconscious, that will tell it to 'fuck off' every now and then. But superpowers are another invention of the subconscious to make us feel inferior about ourselves. If I survive the year with my sanity intact I'll consider it a personal victory.

P.A.L.E.S.T.I.N.E. - E.N.I.T.S.E.L.A.P.

2007-10-22T14:38:00.000+01:00

palestine is a country in the middle of the east that regularly appears in the news, but there were probably some facts about the country you didn't know about. until now...

first some history. before palestine was created it was actually going to be used as a nepal site. the country of nepal was going to occupy the territory and the two countries were close to going to war over the dispute until saint peel stepped in and decreed otherwise. this is why there is still a high level of distrust between the nepalese and palestinians.

the people of palestine are enthusiastic lovers of exotic animals; many families have at least one saline pet. the high salt count in the animals caused by their regular dipping in the dead sea. this is also why eel paints are so commonly used to mark the country's borders. these paints are made by squeezing the eels, the liver juices of which can then be used to paint the pâté lines. this technique was used when constructing the now infamous spite lane, a long strip where prisoners were paraded through to the jeers, taunts and rotten tomatoes of onlookers.

palestine also plays a key role in the entertainment industry. many of the very first tape lines were recorded in jerusalem on the now hard to come-by salient ep by the band steep nail. there is also an entire alpine set which has been used to film such hollywood blockbusters as 'on her majesty's secret service' and 'cool runnings'. the sequel to spinal tap, spinal tee, a mockumentary about the world of golf, goes into production there this autumn.

palestine was also the setting for the arabian nights story, penis tale. a raunchy erotic love story about a penis struggling to find love in the gaza strip. penis tale was removed from subsequent editions of the arabian nights for reasons of decency.

whilst many site america as been the ufo centre, it's actually palestine that has the most flying saucer encounters. it's become such a problem that hamas has now set up the alien pest bureau. this bureau is designed to tackle the problem of alien invaders, and a highly disciplined army has arisen as a result. the recruitment scheme works as follows: anyone entering the bureau is told, "silent ape!" the shocked and stunned recruit is then told to, "enlist ape!” which he subsequently does, after which his only orders are to, "listen ape!".

this military force has recently suffered from a bout of the snipe late disease, where the snipers have a two second delay between their brain and trigger finger, which caused the disastrous crash of a passenger plane when a sniper shot late, thinking it was a ufo, the bullet caught the tail of the plane sending it into a tail speen and crashing it. ironically enough, it landed on the plane site. a site dedicated to planes and their uses.

palestine's main industry is in snail peet. this peet is created by placing layer upon layer of snails on top of each other until the weight creates this kind of gooey snail paste, a rare delicacy in arabian kitchens and a good source of non-carbon fuel. however, the process has meant that palestine has had to adopt an antipsleep policy, to prevent the snails running off when no one is looking. penalties can be severe, if one is found asleep on the job a stale pine may be inserted into any orifice the justice system deems appropriate.

palestine: the state of wonder. go there and experience something you've never experienced before. for more information, visit silent pea, the palestinian tourist board website.

Opera Vulgaris

2007-10-19T01:00:00.001+01:00

Here’s some things I’ve never done before: hunted dolphins, stuck myself to the wall with blu-tac, assassinated the sovereign leader of a country, jumped into a lion pit at the zoo*, and, perhaps most shockingly of all, before last night, I’d never been to the opera.

At school it had been easy avoiding social exclusion by pretending that I knew my Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria from my Die Entführung aus dem Serail, but at university the embarrassment and humiliation from being one of the few not to have experienced opera was just too much. So when the opera was suggested for an evening of entertainment I jumped at the chance to rid myself of my embarrassing social leprosy.

The first thing that confused me on arriving at the Festival Theatre was the general age of the audience. Most of them had been present in at least three different centuries. They all kept glancing nervously at the steep gradient of the theatre steps, wondering how best to attack them without popping another hip socket. Where were all the hip young dudes? The crazy cats ready to have their emotions frayed and torn apart by the spirit of opera? There were a few young kids; the higher up you got in the theatre, the younger the opera lover tended to be so the top bar was practically empty, but we were severely outnumbered should it have turned nasty over a particularly saucy aria di bravura.

After all the usual non-stop hilarity of finding out seats and settling down I prepared myself mentally for what was about to happen. The only things I knew about opera were the bits I’d picked up from reading Maskerade time and time again*. I couldn’t help but be reminded of that whore from Pretty Woman who’s never been to an opera before, what with being a crackwhore and living on the street and all, and of course she loves it because Hollywood loves bullshit. Would the dulcet words of Richard Gere come true for me too*?

The whole thing got going in expected fashion, the orchestra started playing, people started walking about on stage. But then came the first snag of the evening, which really I should’ve seen coming. None of them were singing in English. This was going to make it a bugger to follow, no doubt about it.

Then I noticed what the large television screens in the boxes either side of the stage were for. Subtitles for opera. Genius! They would be my guide to the action on stage. Unfortunately it soon became clear that a lot of the emotional impact was lost this way. When characters are singing long, emotional, drawn out lines on stage and the screens simply state, “Edgardo. I hate him.” it somehow detracts from that all important emotional knee to the groin.

The plot kicks off like this: Enrico is trying to marry his sister Lucia to Arturo for financial reasons but Lucia is in love with Edgardo, Enrico’s sworn enemy. When Enrico finds out that Lucia and Edgardo are at the hanky and the panky he gets a little bit angry and comes out with a plot that reads like one of those modern day honour killings.

At least that’s what the screens would have me believe. However, my suspicions were first aroused when, at the emotional peak of the scene, when Edgardo is apparently saying that he’s going to slaughter his sister and her lover, the orchestra is playing a happy little ditty and everyone on staging is singing in an upbeat manner reminiscent of puppies on a warm spring morning. I began to suspect a disgruntled slide employee of tampering with the slides to change the story. Perhaps what everyone was actually singing was, “We’re very happy with our long sticks.”

Oh yes, the chorus. The poor bastards. All the male members were dressed up in black trilbies and long black cloaks and for some inexplicable reason carried sticks around with them that were twice their height. It was bizarre. I was hoping one would flip and cry out, “You. Can not. Pass!” but I was sadly disappointed. The female members were all dressed up in black with the same wigs, creating a weird homogenous blob effect. They spent most of their time just standing on stage listening. Some characters only job was to stand still on stage, listening to the action, and occasionally move. That was it. No singing, and no explanation for their presence. It looked like the most boring job in the world…

As Act I Scene I ended with revenge being sworn, the tragic heroine of the story, Lucia, entered for Act I Scene II. She was a buxom lady in ways that I am assured are in keeping with the finest traditions of the great female divas throughout the ages. I’m not entirely sure why larger ladies have such powerful voices. A quick Google turned up some stuff about fatty tissue around the vocal chords and larger diaphragms, but I reckon it’s something to do with the personality and good sense of humour these people are apparently blessed with. Whatever the reason, she had a voice on her that would make a dead man come*.

Lucia was going on to her friend (I think) about this vision she’d had at the fountain of a girl and the water running red with blood. It sounded like Lourdes if the Virgin Mother had been on her period. Then came on Edgardo*. The screens of lies said something about the two loving each other despite the danger, bobloblaw, but my attention was distracted when Lucia knelt down.

She was wearing a red dress that had a train so long that when she knelt down it looked like she was melting into the floor in the style of the T-1000*. I got caught up in this entirely different storyline in my head where she had melted into the floor up to her thighs and keeps begging him not to leave, and he keeps making to go before the guilt brings him back to this weird cripple that he can’t help but love. Then she stood up, shattering the illusion, he gave her a quick peck on the lips, fucked off stage and the curtain came down for the interval leaving me completely dazed and confused.

So instead of trying to catch up, I decided at the beginning of Act II to ignore the screens, which obviously had no idea what was actually going on, and instead focus all my attention on the stage. This made things instantly clearer. For example, time and time again at the beginning of a scene, female members of the chorus would walk across the stage carrying candles while people sang, to no explanation from the screens. Suddenly an entire sub-plot involving a cult and ritualistic sacrifices became apparent, the material obviously being too violent and explicit to translate into English given the high chance of heart attacks in the arcane audience.

Probably not, but I didn’t care. I discovered that the most fun to be had at an opera was to sit there and just imagine how you think the scene should be going based on the music and what’s happening on stage. I was starting to create my own ridiculous plot involving mafia weddings and plans to poke the King with long sticks, when all of a sudden Lucia burst on stage, covered in blood. I found this a bit hard to work into what I thought was going on, so decided to go back to the screens and find out what I’d missed.

It turned out that Lucia had gone totally batshit. Having being convinced of Edgardo’s infidelity, she married Arturo, then killed him, and proceeded to lose every one of her marbles. She wandered about on stage in a blood-stained wedding dress hallucinating about Edgardo and getting gradually more barmy until literally crazying herself to death after about 35 minutes.

Now this bit was sung beautifully and was well done, but I kept wondering why no one was stepping to stop her. Here’s the bridesmaid at her wedding, covered in blood and going round the twist. I was hoping someone would put a blanket around her, calm her down a bit and wait for the police to arrive and put her in a mental hospital. Not just stand there staring blankly on. Then Edgardo hears that she’s dead and decides that’s as good a reason as any to plunge a dagger into his stomach and again draw out his death beyond necessary lengths. “All a bit over the top” I initially thought.

But that kind of thinking takes all the fun out of opera. It’s all about the tragedy, the melodrama, the ridiculousness of it all. That’s what makes it all so appealing. At least that’s what I deduced from one trip to the opera. It’s a Red Wine type problem. I know what red wine tastes like, if I have one type of wine immediately after another I can identify the differences in the taste. But I have no idea what makes up a good red wine, how to tell one red wine from another, or any of that kind of thing. Same with classical music. I enjoy listening to it, but I’m buggered if I have a clue what’s actually going on. And cricket as well. No idea what the finer details of cricket are. These are the kinds of things loved more by older people. Maybe it’s something you learn to appreciate with age. Personally I enjoyed making up a story* and listening to voices that were so incredible it’s humbling.

Uninformed Murderers And Liars, The Lot Of You

2007-10-08T13:45:00.000+01:00

People go on about human evolution, but human society hasn’t changed one iota since the first group of people built a wall around themselves and told everyone else to go fuck themselves. Oh sure there have been some cosmetic changes, but us cogs in the machine still have the same kind of hopes, dreams, pains, general bodily functions, as we did c.50 million years ago.

There are those who speak in disgust at the idea of gladiators in Ancient Times hacking meat off each other for the general amusement of the public, but death and violence are still what dominate our entertainment industry. Then there are the ol’ Victorian freakshows which everyone pretends to be horrified about before pouring themselves into the brand new super-deluxe freakshow for the 21st Century that is the celebrity industry.

If there’s one thing that represents a serious downward curve in the human evolutionary path towards a higher purpose, it’s the celebrity industry. Everytime a copy of heat, or any other kind of vacuous glossy shitmag is bought and someone earnestly sits down and takes an interest in all the pretty pictures, made-up stories, unimportant news, flimsy reviews, common-sense personal advice and plain hypocrisy, the human species as a whole takes a giant leap back towards the trees.

I used to think that the blame lay entirely with the celebrities. These shallow, money-grabbing, arrogant, talentless nobodies who can’t go without attention for longer than half a nanosecond before volunteering to humiliate themselves again in yet another degrading reality TV show. And it does, to a certain extent. But the real troublemakers, the ones determined to get us the ‘Worst Century for Human Evolution Ever’ title currently held by the 14th Century, are the stupid bastards who actually care about these nothingfolk.

Recently I’ve caught whiffs of the whole Britney Spears fiasco wafting past me like farts in the wind. Let’s make this absolutely clear from the start: the only important thing about Britney Spears is her singing. In the same way that the only important thing about Brad Pitt is his acting. That’s what their jobs are, who they are as people and what they do in their private life is entirely immaterial. They could mainline heroine into their eyeballs and enjoy regular bouts of pig fucking for all I care, as long as they can do their job what codgesnuffling difference does it make?

All the difference in the world apparently to some emotionally stunted shit-for-brain inepts. These individuals who feed and suck on celebrity gossip like bloated pubescent larva. Any story about the likes of Amy Winehouse smashing her head through a pint glass or Pete Doherty purchasing a new shoe stirs a feeling deep within these people not unlike the kind that perverts get when watching a snuff film. Sometimes they’ll make the arbitrary decision to ‘like’ the celebrity. They’ll get the idea that this celebrity is a nice person and should be sympathised with. Or they’ll go the opposite way and mock the celebrity to the point of ridicule.

How dare they? Genuinely how dare they? These celebrities are total strangers, all the information we get about them is horseshit churned out by PR machines and bare-faced tabloid liars. These voyeuristic bastards want to invade the lives of celebrities and uncover every facet of them for their own personal amusement. And they do so with no sense of irony or guilt. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy that if you hound someone and put immense pressure on them they’re more than likely to mess their lives up with drugs and alcohol. If you really care about them, leave them alone. Let their private lives be private.

Look at it this way: imagine Facebook acted like the tabloid press. Every action you performed, every person you met, every drink you had, every word you uttered, was repeated and shared with the rest of Facebook. Not only that, but it would make up lies about what you had and hadn’t done. It would share embarrassing photos and everyone else would comment and laugh at you. If this were the case Facebook would be a cold, desolate wasteland on the internetwork highway, its space littered with broken hearts and suicide.

When taken to its extremes, this celebrity obsession does have some serious and hilarious (in a depressingly cynical way) implications. First off the bat is the death of Diana. Ten years on and I still don’t get this. Her life was pretty much ruined by the unwarranted public interest in her day-to-day actions. And in the end, the paparazzi pressure killed her. Then, in a stroke of genius, the tabloids managed to make it seem like they loved her all this time, the public went with it because they didn’t want to face up to the fact that they might have just slightly been responsible for murdering her, and so began the most pathetic period of mourning and people pretending they cared this country has ever seen.

But it didn’t stop there. Now we have this whole Madeleine McCann saga. Everyone has their own opinion about what happened to Madeleine. Some blame the parents, some blame the Portugese police and some believe she was kidnapped by Elvis. Unfortunately they all seem to be missing the key point that they don’t know jackshit and should all shut the fuck up immediately. Who are you to judge whether someone is guilty or not based on what you read in the papers? Do you think you have some keen insight into the case because you’ve read some sensationalist headlines? The job of the press and the public is not to act as judge, jury and executioner. Although the latter role has been pretty well adopted given that there’s nothing more likely to make a kidnapper slit a young girl’s throat and hide the body than making his victim the most famous girl in the world. But that’s just my opinion.

The fact that this cult of celebrity is creeping into the world of abducted children is weird enough, but the problem started long ago when it became acceptable to take average people and idolise them for no particular reason. There is a national thirst for fame and to have your 5 seconds of fame, but why? As far as I can tell having strangers pretend that they know you and judge you is one of the most hellish things in the world.

It’s all very simple: if someone is good at their job then they should be praised for their talents. If you want to get to know a stranger with a drug problem who can’t look after their kids then just turn left out your door and walk ten metres up the road. And please, I implore you, stop caring about fake bullshit personalities so that we can focus on the important stuff like advancing the human race and colonising Mars or something.