| Thursday, June 27, 2002 |
 | After drinks with Catherine last night, I had one of those moments. Walking down Shaftesbury Avenue towards home, a woman in front of me and walking in the opposite direction teeter-tottered on a discarded rubbish bag and fell to the floor. As I returned her cigarette to her hand and helped her to her feet, she asked me the name of the club opposite, which had a scrolling marquee sign saying "for all the lovely ladies", commenting with bewilderment that she was 43 years old and the club was for all the lovely ladies. Almost as if she wasn't sure if they would let her in anymore.
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| One for the irony patrol - I have become addicted to an American anti-drugs website. Ooops.
As everyday tales of high school folk go, it struggles a little, or perhaps things have just changed. F'r example, in Episode 8 Ethan (who we already know is the morally ambiguous, weak one because he copied an essay from the Internet) got a "baggie" of "weed" from his "cousin" at a "comic book convention". Now, I may just be indulging in unnecessary geekbashing, but for all the many, many good things on offer at comic book conventions, I find it very hard to believe that they are much more likely to provide free drugs than they are to hand out oral sex. Well, not unless you pretend to be the Borg Queen and you don't mind smelling of corn snacks, anyway.
The irony is made only more perfect by the absolute lack thereof on the site itself. The hip young message board reserves the right to edit any correspondence advocating the use of illegal or harmful drugs. Matthew Lillard is asked for his "anti-drug". That's the guy who plays unshaven, perpetually-hungry, going-out-with-a-girl-called-Mary-Jane Shaggy.
Nice.
So what's your anti-drug tell me. Or tell them. I'm going to see if "self-harm - that's my anti-drug" gets through the net.
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| Tuesday, June 25, 2002 |
| The Archbishop of Central Africa is medium size. He was also officiating at the confirmation of a dear friend at St. Mary's, Stokey, in company with about a dozen other people, including a kid in a fairy princess costume so delightful one expected her parents to be crushed by a meteorite at any moment.
I tend not to spend much time in churches, leaving my stand-sit-kneel coordination tragically off, but fortunately I was absolutely surrounded by trainee priests and High Anglicans so I just about managed to scamper through. Which was good, since rituals are made concrete by their completion, and the assembled multitude were having enough trouble dealing with the excitable infants. The screaming bouncing off the high vaults made me feel like it was Christmas.
But hymns. Far too many hymns. One of which I knew, and the lovely, rousing and fiercely heterosexual boys' school tune I had learned at my choirmaster's knee was supplanted by some reedy piece of Vulcan hymnastics, which seemed to vary from note to note only in timbre, which was a shame because I was all ready to give it the full treatment, only to be wrong-footed at the last moment.
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| "When I was in primary school Paul Rodd and I were told to draw a circle and cut it out. Most of us drew round a tin. Paul, however, just started cutting away at his piece of paper. He reasoned that 'If you cut all the corners off a square you get a circle.'
Magnificent effort, but wholly unsuccessful."
Thus speaks my good friend Tommy, on McCargow. I haven't actually seen McCargow for an age, although I no doubt will at the 200th Anniversary celebration of The Clown.
Two hundred years enduring,
From age to following age,
A hundred generations
Have built our heritage.
This, with slight modifications, was my old school hymn, of which more later.
Anyway, reading McCargow is like relaxing on a sun lounger when you're twelve with a glass of cool cream soda. His words exist in suspension. It's a bit hard to describe.
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| Monday, June 24, 2002 |
| Feasts of UpsideClowny fun of late. We've had Victor's writer's bowel, Matt's apocalyptic engram bullets, Jamie's continuing attempts to have that one good wank. Meanwhile, James' strange journeys in space have been delighting a sensation-hungry crowd.
But two honourable mentions must go out in particular. Neil's final UpsideClown ever ever. We miss you, Neil! Although we're still going to pants you at the anniversary party:
My hand withdraws into its sleeve, conditioned by a dozen minor burns, and absent-mindedly strums a scale on the grille of the scorching radiator as I gaze around our living room and try to decide whether possession is defined by purchase or by usage. A nervous glance at the clock; cowardly, I know, and your pain and your confusion are still images chipping away at the barrier that I've erected, but I also know that if I wait until you get back and try to explain it face to face, this edgy resolve would dissolve in your tears and the inadequacy of my words, that we would nuzzle a greeting and I would never even try.
Do you see? He's leaving home, and not just Cockfosters.
Plus, George's has the edge provided by modernity, in a bang-up-to-the-minute slashtastic look at the World Cup, valuable both for the genuine affection between men and the intermittent moments of awkward or inappropriate technical verbiage that charqacterise much truly great slash.
David ran his hand through his wet blond hair as he peered through the billows of vapours, looking for the tall silhouette of his keeper. As he moved the curtains of steam opened to reveal David slumped, head in hands. He had removed his gloves but the rest of the uniform remained, clinging tightly to the sculptured muscles of his physique. David sighed softly; the men in the changing area seemed positively joyful in comparison with the lost creature before him. "David" he said quietly as he sat down beside the older player, placing a hand on his thigh. "David, you can't blame yourself. There were ten other men out there with you".
It's England's Finest, it's the Pride of Lions, it's....Two Lions.
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| Ugh. Aggro on the Underground, and I don't mean a heated argument about Bill Burroughs, daddio.
Smallish West African businessman sits down beside me at Bank. I, blissfully lost in the grey noise my radio produces underground, only gradually noticed that a burly barrowboy in a blue shirt (mark of the barrow boy) was leaning over him hissing abuse into his face. It seems that by pushing onto the train at Bank, SWAB had denied BBIABS the ability to get off the train, also at Bank. Justifiably, he was annoyed, but this was just getting silly; basic Tube ethics says that you don't get too aggressive during the journey, as it disrupts the day of every fellow commuter in the train. The correct course of action is to hit them with your bag in the face as you or they dismount, and apologise insincerely.
In the end I told both of them to shut up, but my early-morning buzz had been well and truly killed. Arse.
On the bright side, it's happening all over.
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| Meetup, linked to by Meg, is in effect an Internet date book - you join up and are put in touch with others, all gearing towards a monthly meet on a particular day of each month. So far so interesting, although I suspect that I'd wait a long time before finding anyone else on the site with a shared interest in Archilochus. Low numbers seem to be the main problem so far - visions of the one person up for a Harry Potter meeting turning up in a Gryffindor T-shirt and sitting in one corner of the pub trying to make a feather levitate while the patrons back away slowly.
And I bet you the one person currently signed up for the iPod meeting is Tom.
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| Tuesday, June 18, 2002 |
| Oh, for fuck's sake...a friend with better theatrical connections than I has informed me that Teevan, translator of the Bacchae, doesn't even speak Ancient Greek.
For the love of Jesus - it is an Important and Recognised Fact™ that being a translator necessarily implies speaking the dicking language. This is why United Nations translators are reasonably successful at communicating between two people who speak different languages.
Because they are able to speak both.
Now, "translating the Bacchae", for the hard of thinking, means sitting down with a Liddell and Scott and a Greek grammar and working out what the words mean, why they mean what they do, what they do within the line...little things that tell you what the play is actually about and how best to re-render that into English. What Teevan has done apparently is to read a number of translations of the Bacchae and write a play based on those.
This is not translation. At best is is interpretation, at worst cribbing. I'm very sorry if Teevan lacked the time or opportunity to learn Ancient Greek, but I'm not sure it's wise if everybody pretends you can do something to prevent you from feeling bad about your inability to do it. That's how air accidents happen.
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| Wednesday, June 12, 2002 |
| It's been a dramatic sort of a week. Not in the sense of anything dramatic actually happening, just in the sense of seeing drama. On Thurdsday the new Neil LaBute, The Distance from There, which reminded me oddly, or not so oddly, of Dennis Cooper - except there was a severe lack of the kind of stuttering, messed-up tenderness that makes the characters in Cooper, for all their wacky ephebophilic necrophiliac ways, so often lovable. As my partner for the evening observed, the main mystery was why the supporting characters, the sweet-natured boy and the paradigmatic girl with huge trousers and a Nirvana longsleeve that makes me and all right-thinking people go "bless!", didn't just abandon the protagonist round about minute five and just have a cuddle.
Still, although not ground-breaking (it reminded me in some ways of an American rustbelt Saved), it has some very good set-pieces, makes good use of the revolving stage, and the endless complexities of the post-nuclear family are nicely explored. Worth seeing.
Also worth seeing was the Bacchai on Saturday, although it has some fairly serious problems. The mixed male-female chorus is just completely fucking pointless (and done few favours by overly thematised pieces of Birtwhistle), and illustrates probably my biggest problem with the Peter Hall approach to Greek tragedy. Keep the masks, cool, have the three actors playing every part, cool, make all the main actors male, even when playing female parts, cool. So why go co-ed with the chorus, then make the costumes very obviously gender-revealing? Not to mention in one case Calvin Klein thong-revealing, which was a real "look! the fourth wall!" moment, as were Teevan's insertion of things like "suspend your disbelief", "beauty is truth, and truth beauty", the intermittent moments of "look, I translated this properly! From the Greek" - I kid you not, people actually say things like "Pentheus - that sounds a lot like Penthos, which means 'grief'. I bet there is grief, which is 'penthos', in store for Pentheus, whose name it so resembles" - and the impressive stage effects (splitting the stage and having a river of fire works. Elevating Dionysus on a pole as he talks about postmodernism does not). Plus, if you're going to have topless Bacchai, try to choreograph a bit less jiggling would be my advice.
And yet, for all its faults, it was very exciting and a lot of it was very well done. Worth it for the relatively limited opportunities to see tragedy with masks. And the nob jokes. Of which there are an insane number.
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| Tuesday, June 11, 2002 |
| Metawanking - wanking on about wanking, possibly while wanking - continues apace with Slightly Scary Steve:
I'm getting some feedback. I wouldn't put it down to my obsessiveness though it is part of my many fantasies - female masturbation. Just that I was watching while it was happening, and my laptop was ready to blog, so blog it, I did.
I'd like to observe archly that I've never heard it called that before, but I sort of have, so leave it aside. The main problem here being that it is just possible that the use of italics on "obsessiveness" is an attempt to correct my choice of words.
"Obsess", originally, meant to besiege. From the Latin, doncha know. Whereas "obsessive" lacks this meaning entirely through its inappropriate activation, "obsession" and its cognate "obsessional" retain it, although it is rarely employed. Thus, "I am obsessed by x" has the surviving implication that x is laying siege to you. Now, Big Brother is interesting precisely because it parallels the siege metaphor so nicely - the participants are cut off in a single location, surrounded by the audience, and, unable to break out, are instead reduced by attrition through the actions of that audience. Thus they are obsessed in one sense, the viewer is obsessed in another.
That sound? Oh, that's you. In the kitchen. Putting the kettle on. In a dressing gown. Because you're my wife now.
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| They had the England game on a giant screen over the bar. And when I say giant, I fucking mean it. The thing stretched up to the roof, which when you take into account the fact that the Britannia Bar is more generally known as the Britannia Barn is quite an effect.
It's holiday time on the UpsideClown with the Ibizan Book of the Dead.
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| Monday, June 10, 2002 |
| And speaking of which, when love's flame dies these days, you have to return the ringtone. Notwithstanding the white heat of technology, data is the white gold of the twenty-first century. It's a shame. I like goldsmiths. I like the way they smelt under my gaze.
I'm telling you stories. Here. Try a picture of Ravage. That calms the system.
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| Still, thankfully when the dog bites, when the door slams, when I'm feeling sad, there is always something to soothe me and remind me that it's a beautiful world, damn it. In this case, salvation arrives in the form of The Smiths ringtones. We may not have an all-Smiths disco in London, but at least we can use our mobile phones to create a similar effect.
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| One of the joys of the Internet in general and the wacky world of weblogging in particular is that there is always something new to be utterly terrified by. Just as dear, dear, Edward appears to have hit meltdown, a new star rises in the East with an obsessionally detailed account of Big Brother masturbation. Next up, Ed rallies with a lengthy discussion of what he imagines roasting human flesh would smell and taste like...
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