Let's conspire to ignite all the souls that would die just to feel alive...

Photo by John Williams from Latitude 2010

Daniel Kitson and Gavin Osborn: Stories for the Starlit Sky @ Nottingham Playhouse, Sunday 11th October 2015

Under normal circumstances, a show consisting of three one-hour acts that finishes well after 11pm would definitely be stretching it a bit for a Sunday night. But Kitson isn’t like other performers, and I’ve learned that, when he comes to town, it’s well worth investing a bit of your time to watch a master at work. He’s one of those comedians that’s very difficult to explain to people. You might remember him as the barman from Phoenix Nights with the milkbottle glasses, but he’s not like that at all. Not even close. So, how to describe this show? Well, here’s how the man himself describes it:

“In 2009 (Seriously, isn’t the passage of time horrifying?) we wrote a trilogy of story (Me) and song (Gavin) ultra combo mega shows called Stories for the Starlit Sky and comprising three interlinked stories about love (obviously), staying up all night (naturally) and a village populated by retired assassins (yeah, that makes sense). We performed them in Regents Park Open Air Theatre on three separate summer nights, one in June, one in July, one in August and all of them at midnight. There were indeed stars in the sky. Some people brought flasks. A couple of years later, we whacked them out over consecutive nights at the Latitude festival from the middle of a lake in a slightly futile battle against the ambient bass of various DJ sets and whooping intoxicated infants. Most recently in July of this year (2015, obviously guys) Regents Park Open Air Theatre had a spare night after a late drop out – I rewrote the stories a bit (one of them really quite a lot) Gavin practiced his songs and we performed all three of the shows in one night. One after the other.”

So, Kitson sits on a chair with a notebook, reading out a story. Gavin sits next to him, providing gentle backing music on a guitar, banjo or ukulele. Occasionally, Kitson will stop and Gavin will perform a full song, loosely connected to the story. There are occasional asides, but basically that’s it: a guy reading a story out from a notebook with a bit of music. Of course, that does the show no kind of justice at all. For starters, Daniel Kitson has a lovely feel for language. His stand-up sometimes seems like a stream-of-consciousness ramble with many disparate threads, but as he ties all those threads together at the end of the show, you realise that he has planned the whole thing meticulously. Every phrase, no matter how casually delivered, has clearly been carefully weighed and considered before being used. Not a word is wasted.  As someone who delights in language myself, it’s a delight to listen to him weaving this tapestry of words.

These stories are off-beat flights of fantasy and yet they are also carefully rooted in the real; they seem almost childlike, but they deal with real feelings and emotions. The three stories are different, but they are connected, and there is a narrative thread that runs throughout. Osborn’s music adds another dimension, and his very presence on the stage seems to relax the sometimes-very-intense Kitson and gives the stories room to breath and to come to life. I was spellbound throughout (even when my leg began to spasm and I began to wish that the show had begun a little earlier…. The crowd was noticeably thinner after the second interval, which is more a reflection of the fact that it was nearly half past ten on a Sunday night than it was a comment on the quality of the show... although, for my money, the last act - longer than the others - could have been a good ten minutes shorter.  Maybe, if it had all started earlier, I wouldn't have cared all that much.  But I'm human and I was tired).

This is a difficult show to categorise: it’s not stand-up, it’s not musical performance and it’s not gut-wrenchingly funny. It’s art, I think: it is beautiful, funny, uplifting and heart-breaking. There are surely not many artists who could make something like this work, but Kitson is a genius and he most definitely can.

Well worth three hours of my time on a Sunday night, and well worth seeking out, if you get the chance.

freedom of speech won't feed my children....

"1984" by George Orwell @ Nottingham Playhouse, 19th September 2015

I’m slightly embarrassed to admit this, but I’ve never read “1984”. I haven’t even seen the film adaptation – made in 1984, naturally – starring John Hurt. Because the book has been so influential and because references to it litter our every day lives, I had a bluffer’s knowledge of the plot and themes, but I was quite excited to really see first-hand an adaptation of such a famous piece of literature. The book was written in 1948, but many of the themes seem to be more relevant than ever before, but by the end of the play, I wasn’t sure whether that was because Orwell was particularly prescient or because so many of the themes of the book have simply been absorbed into our language and into our cultural reference points. I’m not sure that a cheap reality TV show starring a parade of vacuous show-offs was quite what Orwell had in mind, but Big Brother has been on our screens now since 2000, and the phrase “Big Brother is watching you” was well understood long before that. Most people will be familiar too with the concept of “Room 101”, albeit perhaps thinking it’s somewhere that minor celebrities send things that mildly irritate them for our entertainment, rather than somewhere a cage of ravenous rats might be strapped onto your face. We live in a CCTV culture and we read stories of how our emails and mobile conversations are eavesdropped; spin doctors have been selling us “newspeak” for years; hell, even the Architect in the Matrix films seems to be echoing concepts from the book. It works the other way around too: when Orwell writes in 1948,
“Sanity is not statistical – being in a minority, even a minority of one, did not make you mad” is he, consciously or unconsciously, echoing Gandhi’s (d. 1948) famous “Even if you are a minority of one, the truth is still the truth”.

Much of the play just seems so familiar.

So did I enjoy this production, one that’s been very well reviewed and is about to go on a world tour after a successful run in the West End? Hmm. Sort of. At the beginning, there was an awful lot of repetition. You know that thing that Stewart Lee does where he repeats the same joke over and over again, to the point where it stops being funny and beyond… hopefully to the point where it starts being funny again? I hate it when he does that. To me, it’s just repetition and it doesn’t make the joke any funnier as he repeats it and deconstructs it and reassembles it. It is possible to be too clever for your own good. This play reminded me of that, and it took me a good half hour before I started to settle into the plot and to actually begin to find it interesting rather than just annoying (at one point I thought I couldn't be bothered and contemplated walking out). The acting is mostly good; not very subtle perhaps, but decent (and is the stage, darling). The staging was fairly simple, but they made some nice use of off-stage locations and handheld cameras to show us what was going on, albeit it in a slightly over-stylised way, perhaps.  Oh look!  Winston and Julia think they are safe from being observed, but we're observing them on the screen, so that kind of makes us Big Brother, yeah?  Some of it was also visceral and shocking, which I imagine it is entirely meant to be - and hats off to Matthew Spencer as Winston and Tim Dutton as O'Brien in those scenes, as well as to Janine Harouni as Julia.

I’m pleased that I went, but I wouldn’t say that I especially enjoyed my time. Watching the play did, however, make me more determined to actually read the book for myself (and, to be fair, some of my criticisms of the play might derive from the original)…. So I suppose from that point of view, it’s been a success.  A partial one, at least.

1984 does sound like something that was directed by John Hughes and starring Andrew McCarthy and Molly Ringwald though. It really does. I imagine that would be a different kind of beast entirely.
Probably with a much better soundtrack.

It's a love story, baby....

Today, someone in all seriousness explained to me why the project to merge two teams together was called “Project Windsor”. Apparently it’s because the love of Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson was so great that they were able to overcome all obstacles and opposition that was preventing them from being together, and this project was just like that. Well, what the person actually said to me was something like:

“I’ve just been in this incredibly boring meeting where some bloke explained how the project to bring our teams together was called Windsor because of the love of two people or something. I’ve no idea what he was talking about”
“Windsor? You mean Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson? The Duke and Duchess of Windsor”
“Yeah. That was them”
“And he was using them as a good example of love conquering all?”
“Apparently”
“I suppose that’s one way of looking at it. Don’t most people think they were pretty unpleasant people and Nazi sympathisers?”

Seems a bit of a strange example to me. Of all the star-crossed lovers you could have picked through all of history and literature, and you chose those two?  I suppose at least one person in the world has seen that apparently godawful Madonna film about them then, eh?

People are weird. I bet he’s probably seen that Diana film too.  Hell, even "Wessex" would probably be a better choice: the untold love story of Edward and Sophie.  No?  You're not buying that?  It would make an amazing film.  Especially that bit where he tells his dad he's leaving the marines to set up a theatrical production company.

(My wife - who is kind of a big deal and knows this sort of stuff - tells me that project names should be picked at random from the dictionary and have absolutely nothing to do with the thing you’re working on, no matter how obliquely. For that reason, I’m code-naming this post “Project Insulsity”)

I gave you my music, made your song take wing...

We started working on a Phantom of the Opera medley at choir last night. The first two sections we covered were “Music of the Night” and “That’s All I Ask of You”.

I sort of grew up with this stuff: neither of my parents are big music listeners and we didn’t have much in the way of records or anything when I was growing up. My dad grew up in a pub and apparently went to sleep every night with the sounds of “Top of the Pops” records playing in the lounge bar downstairs. Perhaps not surprisingly, he’s shown almost no interest in music of any kind since. My mum I think is a little bit more interested, but not really interested enough to buy much or even to listen to much. She once heard Coldplay’s first album on the PA in Homebase or somewhere, and after a bit of detective work to try and work out what it was, for a couple of years that was a fruitful source of presents for her… either a new Coldplay album or Keane or something similar. The only other music I can really remember her having was a cassette by someone called Peter Skellern, a little bit of classic Cliff Richard and various Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals, most notably Cats and Phantom. She liked Michael Crawford, I remember and this would have been about the time that he was starring in the West End version with Sarah Brightman.  We mostly used to listen to those tapes in the car when we were driven to and from school. I thought they were alright.  You know.  As you do when you're about 12.

Anyway. I’ve had “That’s All I Ask of You” in my head all day today. When I mentioned this to a colleague, she called me highbrow.

Highbrow? You think that humming a song from an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical makes me highbrow?

Oh wait, does considering Andrew Lloyd Webber a pretty damn long way from highbrow actually just prove that I am indeed highbrow?

Dammit.

deadlines and commitments...

Like all writers worthy of the name (!), I do enjoy surfing a deadline.  As a music reviewer for Leftlion magazine, my workload is around 300 words a month in the form of two short album reviews for most issues.  Not exactly strenuous, you might assume, especially when you consider that I usually have a good couple of weeks between receiving the music and needing to submit my copy. But as any writer will tell you: that's not really how deadlines work, is it?

I like to think I'm reasonably diligent: all of the music I review is by local bands, and much of it has been self-funded and produced by people who create music for the pleasure of it and from the desire to create something.  I shouldn't think that many of them harbour delusions that they are going to be the next big thing and are making music simply because they get a kick out of it and hope a few other people do too somewhere along the way.  As an amateur critic in a free local cultural magazine, it's definitely not my job to put the boot into them.  If I don't like something, I don't review it at all.  It's simple.  Once I have the MP3s, I like to give them a fair listen before putting my thoughts down in a review.  Ideally, I will have done absolutely no googling of the bands (everyone has a Facebook page, most detailing their influences) and I try to form my own opinion.

This takes time.  It might take no time at all to write 150 words, but to be in a place where I can make those words count, I need to put in the hard yards with my headphones on.  This is where deadline surfing can be a bit problematic.  I remember one month where we had been away somewhere all week, and I came back to the house on the night my reviews needed to be in, put on my headphones and discovered that the album I was reviewing was full-on, grunting death metal and wasn't quite the relaxing mood music I was hoping for to gear me up for the week ahead.

I've been pretty good this month: my deadline is Saturday, but because I know I'll be out at the cricket tomorrow night, I've taken advantage of arriving home early this evening from a team away day at work to listen to this month's reviews.  As ever, I'm surprised by the quality of the material.  I seem to be the de-facto reviewer of most of Nottingham's punk and metal bands, and this month is no exception.  Blind Thieves sound a bit like a heavier version of Wolfsbane (I mean this as a compliment, by the way...).  Their singer definitely sounds a bit like Blaze Bayley, anyway, but they're better musicians, and their three-track EP is really pretty good.  Dark Mother are a darker, murkier proposition altogether, ploughing a slower, heavier Black Sabbath-esque furrow with some heavy, chugging riffing.  The quality of the recording isn't of the same quality as that of Blind Thieves, but somehow that suits their style.  Very different, but also good.

After a good listen today, I'll let my thoughts settle overnight and then give them a quick google for a few details before tapping up my reviews on Saturday afternoon and mailing them off... right on deadline.

bleating and babbling...

This is the Baptism of Christ by Giovanni Bellini.  It was painted at some point between 1500-1502 and can be found in the Santa Corona church in Vicenza.  It is clearly a stunningly beautiful work of art, notable for the striking realism of the figures, the beautiful symmetry (you can draw a line down the painting that passes through each aspect of the Trinity and divides the painting exactly in half and the mastery of perspective (complete with the observation of how the mountains in the background appear slightly blue tinged).

It's a masterpiece.

As part of my undergraduate degree, I spent four months studying the Renaissance in Venice.  I was mostly studying history, but one of the great things about that module (apart from being forced to spend four months living in Venice) was that I had study art history too.  At one point during the term, we were actually obliged to spend a week travelling to visit some other treasures of the Italian Renaissance.  So I went to Florence and Rome.  As you can imagine, it was hellish.  Anyway.  I got to see some of the most beautiful art ever created and discovered that - in common with everyone else with eyes - I loved Michelangelo's sculptures, especially the Pieta, Moses and the extraordinary Slave Cycle, an unfinished set of sculptures where the figures seem to be bursting out of the raw marble.  I'd never really stopped to look at art like this before, and now I was really getting the chance to appreciate some of the finest ever created.

That was more than twenty years ago, but I like to think that the fire that time in Italy kindled in me has never gone out.  I'm not claiming to be an expert or anything.  I just like it.  It's not all comic books and brain melting heavy metal in my head, you know.

But can anyone explain to me why it is that, when I look at this masterpiece by Bellini, I mostly think how Jesus looks a bit like a sheep?  Is that just me? There's definitely something sheep-y about his haircut and the expression on his face.  Just me?

Well, okay then.  As you were.

there's more art in Burger King than the British Museum today...

Lely's Venus

If you live in Nottingham, 6pm on a Tuesday evening in Central London probably doesn't seem like the most convenient time or place for a meeting.  Well, to be honest it isn't.... but I was quite keen to attend the get-together organised by the MS Trust for the runners who will be raising money for them in the London Marathon, and I've got holiday I need to use, so I just took the day off.  Besides, C. gave me a membership to the British Museum for Christmas, and this gave me a good opportunity to start to use it.

I love the British Museum.  It's one of those splendidly Victorian institutions where admission is free and where we store many of the priceless treasures that we have stolen from all over the world.  Often it's stuff that we had no right to take in the first place, and in many cases things that we have no real justification for keeping now.... the Elgin Marbles of course being a case in point.  They're splendid, but really what on earth are they still doing in London? (especially if we're going to pack bits of them off to St Petersburg on loan).

Last time I was here, I rented an audio guide and spent some time learning about the Marbles and then following a tour of some of the museum's classical highlights.  That worked pretty well, so this time around, I rented another audio guide (10% members discount) and looked at some of the museum's Ancient Egyptian collection.  The mummies here are consistently amongst the museum's most popular exhibits, and even on a Tuesday afternoon in January, some of the galleries were positively heaving with visitors.  Ah well. It's good that it's being used, right?

Iris from the Parthenon Sculptures

Actually, the mummies make me feel a bit uneasy.  In the main, they've been treated with respect here and allowed to remain wrapped up in their linen and in their sarcophagi, but there's something very unsettling to see these human remains in this setting.  Another benefit of my membership is that it gets me into any of the exhibitions for free, and I spent a fascinating hour at "Ancient Lives", a closer look at eight of the museum's mummies.  They've used modern scanning techniques to really get inside the wrappings and to examine the bodies, and the insights are startling.  There was a lot of dental decay in Ancient Egypt, it seems, with many of the bodies showing evidence of decay and abscesses that would have caused a great deal of pain and perhaps also death.

Just look at this one (from a less enlightened time when they clearly *did* unwrap the mummies).

That hole in the lower jaw is an abscess that occurred during life and caused that damage to the bone. Ouch. I imagine that stung.

My favourites here - at least from what I've discovered so far - are the classical sculptures.  Just look at Lely's Venus (2nd century AD) and Iris from the Parthenon Sculptures (around 438 BC): aren't they beautiful?  I've studied the Renaissance as part of my degree, and although I've seen some remarkable sculptures from that time (Michelangelo's Pieta or Moses, spring to mind)... I've not seen anything that can surpass some of these sculptures from thousands of years earlier.  Iris would originally have had brass wings, and just look at the way that the fabric of her translucent tunic ripples against her thigh.  How can you get such a subtle effect from solid stone? Have you ever seen anything as beautiful?

I learned loads from the physios, former runners and nutritionists at the MS Trust get together that evening, but my day at the British Museum was a lovely way to spend a random midweek day in a dark and cold January.

I've just finished reading - on Monday night -  The Adventures of Luther Awkwright, the seminal comic strip by Bryan Talbot.  So I was mildly surprised and pleased to see a chap wearing an Octobriana t-shirt at the British Museum.

In the Members' Room, of all places!  Good heavens!

...and nightcrawler too

I’m going through another comic book phase. This one is being greatly facilitated by my discovery of Comixology… an app that provides a fantastic way of reading this stuff on a tablet / smartphone. I’m not going to preach at you though and tell you that this is the cat’s whiskers, mind. The one format isn’t inherently better than another and both are just different ways of accessing the same material. It’s exactly the same with books: I’m happily able to switch between reading books on the kindle and reading an actual, honest-to-goodness physical book made of paper. Ultimately, both formats do the same job.

Having said that, I won’t lie to you: sometimes it’s just super convenient to finish reading one thing and download the next one in the series almost immediately so you can push on through. It takes up a lot less shelf space on an iPad too. And comic books look *amazing* on a retina screen.

My first download was an old classic, and the comic book that truly got me started: Frank Miller’s “Dark Knight Returns”. For some reason, it was 69p for the first volume, and all four together cost less than the collected “graphic novel” version. From there, although I was sorely tempted to download Watchmen or Sandman or other classics that I already own, I started looking around for quality stuff that I might well have missed. Luckily, Comixology seems to sell almost everything and has a very comprehensive library from any comic book imprint you might care to mention. I thought I’d start with some Eisner award winners:

Superman: Red Son.. a re-imagining of a classic hero based upon the “what if” scenario of Kal-El landing in 1950s Ukraine instead of Kansas and growing up as a Soviet icon. Superb.

Y: The Last Man… a dystopian future where all male mammals have suddenly and (thus far) inexplicably dropped dead across the whole planet, apart from one teenager and his pet monkey.  Imagine that: 495 of the Fortune 500 CEOs dead; 95% of all commercial pilots; 85% of all government representatives; 100% of Catholic priests; 2.9 billion people.... dead in an instant.  The series follows this boy and the surviving women as they try to make sense of a radically altered world. Promising.

100 Bullets…. A somewhat noir concept where, as Wikipedia says, “the core concept is based on the question of people willing to act on the desire of violent revenge if given the means, opportunity, and a reasonable chance to succeed. In each issue, the mysterious Agent Graves approaches someone who has been a victim of a terrible wrong. Graves gives them the opportunity to take revenge by providing a handgun, 100 bullets, and documentation about the primary target responsible for their woes. He informs the candidate the bullets are completely untraceable by any law enforcement investigation, and as soon as they are found at any crime scene investigations will immediately cease”. I’ve struggled with this in the past, but I thought I’d give it another go. Jury’s still out for me after one issue

My favourite though is a series called “Fables”. Wiki again: “a comic book series created by writer Bill Willingham, published by DC Comics's Vertigo imprint beginning in 2002. The series deals with various characters from fairy tales and folklore – referring to themselves as "Fables" – who have been forced out of their Homelands by "The Adversary" who has conquered the realm. The Fables have traveled to our world and formed a clandestine community in New York City known as Fabletown. Fables who are unable to blend in with human society (such as monsters and anthropomorphic animals) live at "the Farm" in upstate New York”

Old King Cole is nominally in charge when the series starts, but the show is really run by Snow White with the (reformed?) Big Bad Wolf as the community’s sheriff. Other characters include Pinocchio, Little Boy Blue, the three pigs, Prince Charming (successively married and divorced by Snow, Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty), Sinbad, Beauty and the Beast, Goldilocks…. The list goes on. I’m sure I won’t do it any justice at all by trying to explain why I love it, but it has a dark edge and embraces the Grimm-style original, bloodier tales and I think the whole thing works rather well transplanted into a modern day New York.

Of course, the danger with being able to download these on demand is that I’ve been doing exactly that and my paypal account is taking something of a hammering (and, a little like Amazon’s pricing strategy for kindle books*, the e-comics are not as cheap as you might imagine). Well, it feels like a good use of both my time and my money to me, and I happen to think that things like this have a value and it’s a price I’m prepared to pay.

So yes. I’m 40 years old and I spend my time reading comics. It’s brilliant, innit?

* Yes, I do know that Comixology has recently been purchased by Amazon and that there has been uproar about their withdrawal from Apple’s in-app purchasing (you buy your comics through their website directly). It might not be quite as convenient now, but it works well enough if you ask me.

we're one, but we're not the same....

It was John Irving who pulled me out of a rut of fantasy.  There's nothing wrong with fantasy books, and I still read them today, but I'd been reading them almost to the exclusion of everything else and wanted to break the habit. David Eddings, David Gemmill, Pratchett, Tolkien, Raymond E Feist, Terry Brooks, The Dragonlance books... they were mostly excellent reads, but I was nearly twenty years old and thought I should probably be reading something a little more "improving".  For some arbitrary reason, I decided I should read some contemporary American literature, and thanks to a tip from a friend, I got stuck into "The World According to Garp".

My world changed.

It's a wonderful book, and it introduced me to the glorious, rambling sagas of John Irving.  From there I jumped straight into "Hotel New Hampshire",  then "A Prayer for Owen Meany", "The Cider House Rules", and so on until I got up to "The Son of the Circus", his most recent book at the time.  The rut was well and truly broken.  They're brilliant books all. I'd go as far as to say that Owen Meany remains perhaps my favourite book ever, certainly it's the book with the most satisfyingly realised ending.  It's a masterpiece.

Irving's books since then haven't really been quite as good.  "A Widow for One Year", "The Fourth Hand", "Until I Find You", "Last Night in Twisted River".   They're all readable enough, but they're just not at quite the same level as his earlier works.  I still keep buying them and reading them, of course.  His credit is still good with me.

I've just finished his latest, "In One Person".  It's a fantastic book, I'd say his best in twenty years.  It tells the story of Billy, a bisexual man coming to terms with his own sexuality and with having crushes on the wrong people.  One critic I saw was raving about how Irving was touching on completely new ground as a novelist.

Well, steady on there.  Most of the Irving tropes, familiar to his readers, are all in place: it's set in New England, the narrator is a novelist with an absent father, there's a transsexual former sporting star, a second-rate boarding school, someone with a loud and distinctive voice, speech impediments, there's wrestling, a period spent in Vienna, there are even some bears... albeit not the usual kind found in Irving's books.  Even with all of those things comfortably in place, "In One Person" still manages to tell a compelling story.

I watched "Pride" at the weekend.  It's a wonderful film that had me almost in tears several times.  "In One Person" had me all choked up too: coincidentally, it covers some of the same issues and takes place partly over the same time period (some of the most moving passages of the book take place in the mid-1980s as AIDS was starting to really take hold).  Perhaps it's best summed up by a line towards the end of the book, thrown as an accusation at the protagonist about his novels:

"You create all these characters who are so sexually 'different' as you might call them ... and then you expect us to sympathize with them, or feel sorry for them, or something"

Well, yes.  That's exactly it.  No matter how far from "normal" some of these characters are (or are perceived to be), either in the book or in "Pride", they're all completely human, and every human being contains multitudes.

A friend posted a link this week to an article in the Guardian suggesting that society was still afraid of bisexuality.  I encouraged him to read this book, where the subject is the central pillar of the plot and is handled with enormous sensitivity.  It's not a perfect book by any means: Irving is one of those novelists who likes to tie up every loose end, and he does exactly that here, but I felt that he brought the book to an end far too abruptly.  For such a magnificently crafted book, the ending could almost be accused of being a little....trite?

No matter.  I loved it. Highly recommended. Spellbinding.

Next a book where cats converse with people.  Non-fiction, then.

time for primal concrete sledge....

I've been watching a documentary on Sky Arts called "Metal Evolution".  I stumbled across it completely by accident, and it was originally aired in 2011, so it's not exactly new, but I've been watching it avidly ever since.  Basically, it's a guy who drew out a series of family trees of where he thought heavy metal music came from and how it developed, and then went around the world interviewing the people involved.  Each programme is based around a theme: new wave of British heavy metal or thrash or grunge or hair metal or whatever and then tells the story, tracing the origins of the sub-genre and working through the key bands and how it developed.  The theme music is "The Trooper" by Iron Maiden.  I was hooked immediately.

The first programme I watched (episode 3) saw the presenter in England following the thread of bands in the late 60s and early 70s who evolved from the Blues into something much heavier: Deep Purple, Rainbow, Black Sabbath, Cream, Led Zeppelin.  It's gripping stuff, although I've particularly enjoyed the episodes on the NWOBHM (inexplicably pronounced as a word by the presenter, and sounding something like nu-wob-ham) and on thrash, where we follow the bands that I grew up with and who formed my gateway into metal: bands like Iron Maiden and Metallica and Anthrax.  Even the hair metal programme was interesting, if only to remind you how ridiculous and vapid most of those bands were, but also to see how the emergence of a "real" band like Guns n'Roses killed the scene almost stone dead overnight and how the members of those bands then really struggled to make ends meet.  I ended up having real respect for some of the survivors (if not for their music or their fashion sense).

The episode on grunge was fascinating mainly because of the way that almost every grunge band went out of their way to deny any metal influence (which is clearly nonsense when you listen to something like Alice in Chains or Soundgarden).  It seems that hair metal made a lasting impression on these guys, and in their jeans and plaid shirts, they were keen to avoid any comparison with their spandex-clad near contemporaries.  Also amusing was the scorn of these guys for the second wave of gruge bands who followed once the record companies went sniffing for more of the same in the wake of the success of Nirvana and Pearl Jam and the like: all tried to sing like Eddie Vedder (apparently that's called "yarling") and all were fairly crap.  Creed seemed to be the subject of the most scorn, which reminded me of the story of when their fans who tried to sue them after a live show because they were so awful.

Anyway.  It's a good show, and the next episode I have on my sky box is about "Nu" metal... Rage Against the Machine and the likes.  Should be good.  Worth checking out.

One consequence of watching the show is that it's had me scurrying back to my old CDs and loading the likes of Anthrax, Slayer and Pantera onto my iPod to listen to at my desk at work.  I first heard Slayer back in about 1988, and they're not half as heavy as I remembered them being, but they are seriously good.  I'm not sure that being caught singing "Raining Blood" out loud at my desk would be a good thing, but on balance "Fucking Hostile" might be worse.

Rock hard, rock heavy, rock animal.

\m/ 

reflector or director?

I watched Game of Thrones last night.  I've tried hard to make what follows spoiler free, but if you're following the programme and you're not right up to date, then please approach with caution.

Still with me?  OK.

I watched the latest episode, "The Viper and the Mountain".  Then, as I usually do, I headed over to the Guardian's series blog for GoT to have a look at what other fans of the show thought.  The show airs on Sunday night in the US, and the blog usually goes up straight after that, but as we only get to see the show on a Monday night, there's already been a few hours to get the discussion started and there's already a lot to catch up on.  It's one of those blogs where, if you can read between the trolls and the smug book readers wanting to discuss things that haven't happened yet, the readers are as interesting as the author.

Pretty early in the discussion, DMcCool had this to say:

"I have to admit this was the point where I finally "got" Game of Thrones message, the Red Wedding had enough clues in it here they really rammed the message home. A horrendously bleak and grotesque view of humanity and an obsession with everything gruesome and ugly.The level of gore and constant brutal deaths for every sympathetic character carries GoT over into the realm of the SAW films. After coming close at the end of the last season, I think this was enough for me, I'm finally off the ride. I don't want to spend any more time in this joyless and cruel world. The saving grace of this episode (and in my opinion the best scene this season by a mile) was surely the conversation between Tyrion and Jaime, and the flashes of actual friendship there, but it is far too rare a thing in Westeros; everyone is either a psychopath or a bleating victim. It's just a horribly nasty view of humanity; it's humanity stripped of humanness with just the dull statistics "so and so killed so and so for such a political reason" left. [plot point redacted to avoid spoiler], but then GRRM has to play his one trick again and kill [a] character in the most gruesome and horrible way he can think of. It's getting old, and I can see where this story is going. I finally committed viewer suicide and spoilered myself to kill off any curiosity, freeing me from this joyless and depressing fantasy world."

You know what?  I actually kind of agree with him.  I'm not a prude and I have been known to enjoy 18 certificate films from time to time.  I'm not going to stop watching the show, but last night's episode really excelled itself in the utterly gratuitous amount of violence and gore displayed on the screen.  I knew what was coming because I've read the books, but I was actually still shocked by what I saw depicted on the screen.  These images didn't just flash up on the screen, the camera lingered lovingly on them the way that it sometimes lingers on the also-fairly-gratuitous (mostly female) nudity.

Listen, I know that G.R.R.Martin is portraying a world based loosely upon Wars of the Roses era England, and that war in the period was horrific: people died horrible deaths and were literally cut to pieces by swords and other pointy objects or bludgeoned to death by blunt objects;  people were tortured; people were and raped.  I get it.  Martin was actually forced to come out and defend scenes of rape in a previous episode in this season.  His defence was that it would be dishonest to back away from that side of war.

Hmm.

I don't like watching films in 3-D.  The reason that I give is that I don't believe it adds enough to the viewing experience.  I read books and I'm perfectly capable of using my imagination.  I don't need to see objects appearing to come out of a cinema screen to believe that I'm watching a 3-D world and not a projection on a flat screen.  I feel much the same way about the massive use of CGI in films.  Just because you can make it look like an entire city has been laid waste doesn't necessarily mean that you should always lay waste to a city.  Sometimes less is more.

This week's Game of Thrones did not depart massively from the book, and the most upsetting scene in particular is pretty clearly laid out there too over a couple of sentences.  It's horrible in the book too.... but somehow it's so much worse seeing the whole thing laid out lovingly and lingeringly in high definition.  I'm positive they could have achieved exactly the same shocking effect without such a gratuitous display of blood and gore.

This is a good show, and I'm going to tune in again next week, obviously.... but so graphic was the violence that I have at least asked myself the question as to why I'm still watching and you can't help but wonder what kind of impact exposure to these kind of images may have on some people.  It can't be healthy, can it?  What does it say about us that this is how we like to be entertained? The Romans liked seeing people being butchered in the arena, and it's widely agreed that this was a symptom of a sick, brutalised society.  The magic of television means that no one actually died to bring me this episode of Game of Thrones, but although I might be entertained, I'm hardly edified by the experience.

As the song said way back in 1992:

Because a child watches 1500 murders before he's
twelve years old and we wonder why we've created
a Jason generation that learns to laugh
rather than to abhor the horror

Television... breeding ignorance and feeding radiation for the best part of a century.

Are you not entertained?

I wanna be yours....

It's not actually her birthday until the end of next week, but because the celebrations are starting this weekend, and because I probably won't have a chance to post tomorrow, I thought I'd put this up now.

To my beautiful wife.

I Wanna Be Yours, by John Cooper Clarke

I wanna be your vacuum cleaner
breathing in your dust
I wanna be your Ford Cortina
I will never rust
If you like your coffee hot
let me be your coffee pot
You call the shots
I wanna be yours

I wanna be your raincoat
for those frequent rainy days
I wanna be your dreamboat
when you want to sail away
Let me be your teddy bear
take me with you anywhere
I don’t care
I wanna be yours

I wanna be your electric meter
I will not run out
I wanna be the electric heater
you’ll get cold without
I wanna be your setting lotion
hold your hair in deep devotion
Deep as the deep Atlantic ocean
that’s how deep is my devotion

Happy birthday!

* please note that no actual vacuuming is guaranteed as a result of this. Indeed, on previous track record, this seems very unlikely indeed.... It's a metaphor, innit.

like pockets jingling....

When we were in London the other week, we spent an interesting couple of hours on Sunday morning in the British Museum.  We often visit the Natural History Museum when we're in town, but as a historian, I find myself drawn to another of the capital's vast, Victorian repositories of stolen goods.  The British Museum is particularly brazen in this regard, and seems to be above all else a tribute to the sheer brass-necked thievery of the British Imperial past.  Never mind the Elgin Marbles, what on earth are we doing with a huge basalt statue taken from Easter Island?  Donated to the museum by Queen Victoria, although quite what business she had with it in the first place is another matter.

It was raining and the place was swarming with tourists, so we took a decision to avoid the obvious choke points like the Rosetta Stone and the Egyptian mummies and to head to less obvious sections to explore.  I very much enjoyed the Medieval Europe section, especially an intricately carved wooden instrument - a citole - that appeared to be a hybrid between a guitar and a violin and had some astonishingly detailed, tiny wooden carvings.  There was also the usual array of impressive classical statuary.... question: were these sculptures modelled in freezing cold rooms, or did they all have tiny cocks?

Anyway.  The thing that really made an impression on me during our visit was an installation called  Cradle to Grave by a collective of artists called Pharmacopoeia (Susie Freeman, Dr Liz Lee and David Critchley) and dating from 2003.  As the British Museum website explains:

"Cradle to Grave explores our approach to health in Britain today. The piece incorporates a lifetime supply of prescribed drugs knitted into two lengths of fabric, illustrating the medical stories of one woman and one man.  Each length contains over 14,000 drugs, the estimated average prescribed to every person in Britain in their lifetime. This does not include pills we might buy over the counter, which would require about 40,000 pills each.  Some of the treatments are common to both: each starts at birth with an injection of vitamin K and immunizations, and both take antibiotics and painkillers at various times. Other treatments are more specific. The woman takes contraceptive pills, and hormone replacement therapy in middle age. The man has asthma and hay fever when young, but enjoys good health until his fifties. He finally stops smoking after a bad chest infection when he is seventy. He is treated for high blood pressure for the last ten years of his life and has a heart attack and dies of a stroke in his seventies. He takes as many pills in the last ten years of his life as in the first sixty-six.  Cradle to Grave also contains family photographs and other personal objects and documents. The captions, written by the owners, trace typical events in people's lives. These show that maintaining a sense of well-being is more complex than just treating episodes of illness."

It's astonishing.  Initially it's a lot to take in, but as you wander down the exhibit, looking at the drugs and the photos that sit alongside them, you really start to get a feel for the individual and the role that medicines have played in their lives.  Look at how the contraceptive pills and hormone replacement pills are replaced by a breast cancer treatment.  It's a remarkable sounding statistic, but when all those pills are all laid out like this, you can really see what it means to take as many pills in the last ten years of your life as in the first sixty-six.  One side ends suddenly with death, and the other side is still going strong, presumably continuing to add pills to the list.  It's a remarkable exhibit.

As I took it all in, I suddenly became aware that I was feeling mortal.  I'm not sure if I've ever really experienced this emotion before.  I wouldn't say that it was unpleasant, exactly, but it was a little bit unsettling.  I think it was as I looked at the pictures of the man ageing and looking as his tally of pills really started to mount.  He was young and fit and healthy, then he got old, then he really faded away and died.  In those last few photos, he looks like a ghost; a shadow of the man he was earlier in life.  It's emotional: you're looking at someone's whole life and it's hard not to be moved by that and to reflect on your own journey.

I turn forty next month, and more than ever before I'm aware of the failings of my own body.  My own personal medical journey has seen me taking more drugs in the last five years or so than probably in the thirty-five years before that.  I hope there's plenty left in front of me yet, but the pile in the display behind me is really starting to mount up.  I wonder what people looking at the photos of my life would think as they browsed their way down and start looking at the pile of syringes that start at 35 and pile on into the indefinite future.

I'm not really bothered about getting older, I don't think.  My team at work tease me about it all the time, but I'm not sure I'd want to be their age again for all the tea in China.  Why?  Because I think I'd lose a lot more than I would gain.  It's not really ageing that worries me, I think it's the realisation that I'm not immortal.

When it comes to immortality, I'm definitely from the Woody Allen school: "I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying."  Not because I want to live forever, you understand.  Can you imagine?  That would surely be awful.  No, it's because it's a really clever thing to say and I wish I'd thought of it for myself.  Similarly, when the end does come - as it must - and the priest at my deathbed is asking me to renounce Satan, I sincerely hope I have the presence of mind left to steal from Voltaire and to say "Now is not the time for making new enemies."

A mid-life crisis would be tedious, wouldn't it?  Let's try and avoid that if we can.

(...but mostly me)

My stage career isn't very long or distinguished.  Over the years, I have appeared in a number of plays in a variety of minor roles.  Only once have I appeared in anything close to a leading role, and I like to think that my performance as Thomas Stanley, the puritan former vicar in the Roses of Eyam is still talked about by some of the tens of people who came to see it..... who can't relate to a man who refused to comply with the terms of the 1662 Act of Uniformity?

Most of my roles have been in musicals, which is somewhat ironic as I really don't like them very much at all.  I have been a stoat in Wind in the Willows, The Reverend John Witherspoon (another vicar?  typecasting!) in 1776, a workhouse boy and an old lady (seriously) in Oliver!,  a slave in Joseph and the Technicolour Dreamcoat.... for that last one, I appeared onstage wearing nothing but a loincloth.  Such is my dedication to my art.  I used to be a chorister, so sometimes I would also be given something to sing.  Although, for reasons that will be immediately apparent to anyone who has seen me in action, I've never really been asked to do any kind of dancing.

Singing and dancing.  That's what musicals are all about, innit?  Yeah.  I don't really like them.  Every time I'm in London, I marvel at the sheer volume of the bloody things and often - with "We Will Rock You" being the prime culprit - at their complete and utter creative bankruptcy.  I'm sure some of these shows are excellent, but why do people pay good money to watch people doing shit cover versions of famous songs with a crappy, contrived storyline tacked on?   Quick!  We must sail across the seven seas of Rye! [cue music].

Anyway.  C. gave me tickets to go and watch "The Book of Mormon" for Christmas, and so this weekend, we went down to the big city and took in a show.  We nearly saw this on Broadway when we were in New York in 2011 and they were doing previews, but it turned out that their day off was the day we could have gone, so I've had to wait.  It opened in London a few months ago, but has remained the hot ticket in town and I was pleased to get a chance to check it out.

I don't like musicals, but if I was going to like a musical, then one written by the guys behind South Park that has Mormonism as it's central theme was always likely to have a fighting chance....

I'm sure you know the story of the Mormons: Joseph Smith, Moroni and the Golden Plates that must not be shown to anyone else under any circumstances?  Yeah.  Ridiculous, right?  The musical takes this religion, with its earnest American missionaries, and it transplants it into war-torn and AIDS-riven Uganda where people have rather more to worry about than something as cheerfully ridiculous as this.

It's very, very funny.  Within fifteen minutes of the start of the show, we have a gloriously blasphemous song called Hasa Diga Eebowai (a kind of profane parody of "Hakuna Matata".  Disney's Africa this is definitely not) and the show is off and running.  If you've watched South Park, then I'm sure you'll have a decent idea of what to expect, and it delivers in spades.  Hats off to the bright spark in the audience I overheard in the interval explaining to his girlfriend that you could really see the influence of South Park on the musical.  Erm.  Yes.  You noticed that Jesus Christ spoke with the voice of Cartman, right?  That wasn't an accident....

It was funny, but my enjoyment was somewhat tempered by the fact that it is, after all, a musical.  No matter how ironic your song and dance routines may be, they are still basically song and dance routines, aren't they?  No matter.

Two things about the show really surprised me:

1) Mormonism comes out of this surprisingly well: they seem like earnest people with a daft set of beliefs who are really only guilty of naivety and of wanting to be nice to other people.  It's a ridiculous story, for sure: golden plates that no one else must ever see under any circumstances? lost tribes of Israel in America?  Jesus Christ visiting them between his crucifixion and his resurrection?  Cattle, sheep and horses in pre-Columbian America?  God changing his mind about the "stain of Cain" on black people in 1978? Nonsense.  Manifestly ridiculous.  But on the other hand, it's not any more stupid than any other religion, is it?  It's just a lot more recent.  They're all nonsense. We can all agree on that, right?  No one who believes in any kind of mystical sky fairy can really laugh too hard at the Mormons.  Why is Joseph Smith's story any harder to believe than what you read in the Bible?

2) Mormons are bulletproof: they actually advertise their religion in the programme for the show.  It's impossible not to admire that, isn't it?  Even if only a little bit.  I'm almost tempted to ask them to send me a copy of the book (which the musical describes as the Return of the Jedi of the Bible trilogy....).  I'm hardly likely to convert, but I am curious.

It's a good show.  How can you not love a show with a leitmotif of a guy singing "I have maggots in my scrotum"?  Scatalogical sacrilege?  Yes please.  I'm pretty sure "We Will Rock You" would be improved by some of that.

Great fun.  For a musical.

dark, dark cellar....

photo of Shirley Windmill by Jon Ellis at Cabaret Roulette

One of my dearest friends is a producer.  She has an actual job that pays her actual money, but producing is her real love.  A year or so ago, she started performing a burlesque act, and it was wonderful watching her blossom and grow in confidence as she found herself part of a wonderfully welcoming community of performers.  Not long after that, she put her own show together.  Perhaps the lure of producing was greater than the lure of the footlights themselves.

Cabaret Roulette was born.  As their website says:

Cabaret Roulette launched in November 2012 with a simple goal: to shake up the cabaret scene by throwing out old ideas, empowering audiences and challenging artists to push beyond their comfort zones - all the ingredients for live performance magic.  Each show has a central theme, chosen in advance by the audience via the Facebook fan page followed by live vote. Eight carefully-curated artists , representing as widely-differing disciplines and styles as possible, then have two months to create a brand new act putting their individual take on that single theme. The show is called "Roulette" because we won't know where the ball lands until the night.  The model encourages creativity and risk: with just a hint of friendly competition, the artists are inspired to dig past the obvious and the done to create something truly fresh and extraordinary. And with no discipline duplicated on the night, the audience can expect an exciting, fascinating evening of true variety.

Previous themes have included things like Apocalypse, Fairy Tales, Asylum, Doctor Who and Ghost Stories, but just wasn't able to attend.  A Wednesday night at Madam Jojos in Soho isn't the easiest thing for me to attend, but I watched and enjoyed the whole thing vicariously through the eyes of my friend and her vibrant Facebook presence.  Perhaps I was there in spirit (GHOST CHICKEN!)

A few months ago, she did one of those startup things, trying to raise some money to guarantee the future of her little show; so that she could commit to pay her performers in advance without needing to wait for the returns from the door.  What started small was becoming bigger and more reknowned, and the quality and reputation of the performers was getting larger too, with bigger and bigger names in the world of Cabaret wanting a piece of it and begging to perform.  After about a second's thought, I decided that I was happy to put some money in.  Various perks were on offer, but much though I'm sure I'd enjoy nipple tassles or a fascinator, I was investing in my friend because I'd seen how much this meant to her and how much being involved had seen her blossom.  Above all, I believed in her and I wasn't afraid to put my money where my mouth is.  So, just like that, I became a patron of a burlesque show.

This week, I took a couple of days off work and went down to London to attend the first birthday show on Wednesday night.  The line up consisted of acts taken from each of the previous shows.  This was my first burlesque show, and I wasn't entirely sure what to expect.  I'm sure we're all familiar with the Dita von Teese style of cabaret with the giant martini glass... but Cabaret Roulette turned out to be so much more than that.  Sure, there was some traditional burlesque (with a trough rather than a martini glass), but we also had a stunning fire act, a comedy singer, puppets, dancers, Marilyn Monroe coming apart at the seams, a bellydancer, a drag zombie, a Weeping Angel, an urchin skeleton rapper....



.... It was amazing and I loved it.  You know what I loved almost as much as the acts themselves?  I loved watching my friend as she took it all in and I saw the joy and the happiness in her face.  That's all the return on investment that I needed.  The rest is just a bonus.

The next show - "Science" - is in February.

You should definitely go.

there ain't a woman that comes close to you....

Earlier this week, my wife was working in London.  In itself, this isn't all that unusual, but instead of spending her evening studying in her hotel room, she broke the routine by getting dressed up in a posh frock, putting on her posh shoes and taking herself off to watch "The Magic Flute" at the National Opera.  She even treated herself to a glass of champagne.

Meanwhile.....

I hobbled my way around a run, iced my knee, put my onesie on and spent my evening in Skyrim levelling up my archery skills being shown how to use a bow by a lady called Angi in a shooting range that I discovered tucked away on the top of a mountain.

Good times.

So, I think you'll agree, when it comes to the question of who in our household is the most culturally enriched, there's a clear winner..... and as if there wasn't enough evidence stacked up in my favour already, I'm also considering a trip to Download in June to watch Iron Maiden.... a band than many wise judges consider to be the musical prodigies of our time.

I might even put a posh frock on....

Honestly.  Who wants to listen to "ghastly scales and arpeggios, whizzing up and down like fireworks at a fairground" anyway?  And in German?  Ugh.  "Italian is the proper language for opera. All educated people agree on that." *

(*with apologies to Peter Schaffer**)
(** ...and to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart)

touch each other in black and white....

We were in London over the weekend.  Amongst other things, we ended up checking out the Man Ray exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery.

Lots of fascinating photographs, obviously.... but two things in particular struck me and have stayed with me since:

During his first stay in Paris in the 1920s, Man Ray hung around with people like Jean Cocteau, Salvador Dali, Jean Arp, Max Ernst, André Masson, Joan Miró and Pablo Picasso.  Surrealists, artists, etc..... and I couldn't help but think what interminable bores they must have been.  Can you imagine the conversations in the coffee shops?  Have you ever been to a party where someone is droning on with mock profundity about death or God or something like that?  I imagine it would have been something like that.  Surrealism was an interesting idea, but it's not something I'd like to have a drink with, I think.

They were mostly funny looking blokes too, doubtless a product of dubious nutrition in their childhood. That brings me to my second thought: Man Ray consistently batted above his average through his life and had relationships with some truly beautiful women.  Many of them - like Kiki, pictured below - were his models too, of course.

The one that really grabbed me was Lee Miller.  She was a model and a brilliant photographer in her own right, but as she appears in Man Ray's photos, she's stunning.  Compared to the bulbous, stunted surrealists pictured in many of the other photographs, she is a breath of cornfed air from the United States.

Just look at her.

She was in her very early 20s when she first met Man Ray, and he was seventeen years her senior.  The photographs he took of her are incredible and I found it really hard to take my eyes off her.  She originally came to Paris to be his assistant, but it's not hard to see - from his point of view, anyway - why she quickly became his model, his muse and his lover.  He took several nude photos of her, but actually I found them a lot less interesting than just these simple shots of her in profile or looking directly at the camera.

Stunning.  Captivating pictures.  Just jaw-dropping.  Not just the model, but the photos themselves.

Lest anyone think me too cultured (we also visited the Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition at the Natural History Museum), I also ate a massive burger at Meat Liquor and browsed some tat on Oxford Street.

As you were.

...just a walking the dog

As always, I’ve been informed and entertained by the New Yorker this week. No grand biographies or political commentaries this time, just an anecdote that seems to me to capture quite nicely how I imagine the role of the author in the publishing business (at least in the eyes of the publishers). It’s a little snippet taken from a long and affectionate tribute by John McPhee to his various editors and publishers, “The Name of the Subject Should Not Be the Title”:

“My grandfather was a publisher. The house was the John C. Winston Company, “Book and Bible Publishers,” of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and on their list was the Silver Chief series, about a sled dog in the frozen north. That dog was my boyhood hero. One day, I was saddened to see in a newspaper that Jack O’Brien, the author of those books, had died. A couple of years passed. I went into high school. The publishing company became Holt, Rinehart & Winston, and my Uncle Bob’s office moved to New York. When I was visiting him there one day, a man arrived for an appointment, and Uncle Bob said, “John, meet Jack O’Brien, the author of ‘Silver Chief.’” I shook the author’s hand, which wasn’t very cold. After he had gone, I said, “Uncle Bob, I thought Jack O’Brien died.” Uncle Bob said, “He did die. He died. Actually, we’ve had three or four Jack O’Briens. Let me tell you something, John. Authors are a dime a dozen. The dog is immortal.”

You hear that, precious creative types?

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; Ian Fleming; Charles Dickens; Agatha Christie; Robert Louis Stevenson; William Shakespeare. Can you hear me William Shakespeare? Get over yourselves already: we're all just walking the dog....and the damn dog is immortal.

It's probably raining too.  It's bound to be raining.  I bet the dog has his own little jacket too....and you left your coat at home.

(dammit.  Am I talking about the weather again, or did I get away with it?  I think I got away with it...)

new york state of mind....

A couple of months ago, I finally discovered a really good use for my iPad.

I've had it for about a year now, since my generous wife brought it back for me from her business trip to the USA. Oh sure, I've used it for all the obvious stuff: browsing websites, playing Angry Birds, reading my email and all that jazz, but I hadn't found the thing that made it really indispensable (although I did very much enjoy watching Jaws sitting next to a mesmerised seven year-old on a flight back from Paris).

Then I subscribed to the New Yorker.

I like the New Yorker. I like the idea of the New Yorker. Every time I've been in the Big Apple, I've picked up a copy, read it from cover to cover and then toyed with the idea of subscribing... only to look into it and realise it's a very expensive and impractical way of getting hold of a weekly periodical.  Given that it's such an obvious idea, it took me a really long time to realise that the iPad might be my answer: one £29 subscription later and I was on my way.

It's a bit of a challenge to find the time to work my way through all the content every week, but it's fantastically stimulating with an array of wide-ranging articles. I've read fascinating articles on some diverse subjects: an in-depth profile of a Mormon Innovation consultant; the story of the hapless American drifter who found his niche in Cuba and ended up as a commandante in Castro's revolutionary army; a detailed analysis of the stunning Republican U-turn over the individual mandate; a look at some of the climate change reversal theories scientists are working on (big stirrers to lift the colder water from the bottom of the ocean to absorb more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere than the warmer water that was above it, anyone?); a brilliant, in-depth review of Mark Ruffalo's performance in the Avengers movie by FILM CRITIC HULK; a terrifying interview with the Tupelo evangelist and broadcaster who is both staggeringly arrogant and staggeringly ignorant - Hitler as a homosexual socialist with an army of gay Storm Troopers who would obey his orders far more readily than heterosexuals, for instance - quite why he thought he'd come out looking good from a profile in the New Yorker, I have no idea... the writing is uniformly pretty good, but the sheer breadth of stuff here is amazing.

Slightly to my surprise, I find that I like the fiction - every issue contains a short story - the best. It's not always to my taste, but it's never boring and several times has almost inspired me to write something myself. Yeah. So it's a great read and I've enjoyed very much making the time to read it every week, putting down my iPad feeling slightly better informed than when I picked it up... which isn't really true when I've been playing Angry Birds. I've even put an entry into the famous cartoon caption competition (my caption, incidentally, far better than any of the winners. Maybe these wise-ass New Yorkers just don't get my sophisticated British humour?)

I truly didn't think that it was possible, but it seems that I really have found a way to make myself an even duller conversationalist....

ashes to ashes...

I have a very clear memory of sitting in the front room of my grandparent's flat above the Hoe in Plymouth around 1985 watching the tv dramatisation of the 1932/33 Bodyline Ashes series.  I would have been about 11 at the time, and I wasn't yet immersed in cricket, but there was something gripping about the drama of the story that it told; a story of a ruthless, aristocratic captain (played by a very young Hugo Weaving) and his determination to neutralise the threat of Australia's hero, Don Bradman, to bring the Ashes back to England.  His weapon of choice, of course, was Bodyline: short, fast bowling aimed outside the legstump at the batsman's body to a packed leg-side field.

I now live in Nottingham, of course, within cheering distance of the Trent Bridge cricket ground. Close enough, certainly, that it's only a short walk to go for a drink in the Larwood and Voce... a pub that was named after two of the guns that fired Douglas Jardine's bullets in that most famous of all cricketing series: Harold Larwood and Bill Voce.  Two of Nottinghamshire's finest... from a time when all of the best fast bowlers seemed to be miners, whistled up from the pit.

Since watching that mini-series, my interest in cricket has grown and I'm now happy to watch pretty much any test match, but my fascination with this series in particular has stayed with me.   I have read an authoritative book on that series ("Bodyline Autopsy" by David Frith) and also a wonderful biography of Harold Larwood by Duncan Hamilton.  I know quite a lot about more a few games of cricket that happened nearly eighty years ago than is probably healthy.

...so obviously when I saw that there was a dramatisation of the Bodyline Ashes series being staged at the Playhouse, I was hardly likely to give it a miss, was I?

Written by Michael Pinchbeck, the play doesn't manage to tell me anything that I didn't already know, but it tells the story of that gripping series mainly from the point of view of Harold Larwood.  Larwood was a magnificent bowler; he was unusually short for a fast bowler, but astonishingly quick.  Archive footage of his action was played in slow-motion during the play, and it was truly a thing of beauty.  Good batsmen, Bradman included, could hardly back away from the stumps fast enough.  Larwood gave his all in the 1932/33 Ashes series, putting his body on the line for his country and his captain, and he hurt himself so badly by the end of the series, wringing blood out of his socks at the end of every session, that he was never quite the same bowler again.  England won the Ashes, but the fallout cost Larwood his England career: he was asked to apologise and refused as he didn't believe he had anything to apologise for.  Ironically, Larwood emigrated to Australia, where he died in 1995.

The play is simply staged: the entire cast of seven are mostly on the stage for the duration, swapping roles as required; the set itself is virtually bare, featuring only a few simple chairs.  The cricket itself is shown in the form of archive footage watched by Larwood's wife at a Mansfield picture house.  It works beautifully.  Jamie De Courcey is fantastic as Douglas Jardine - the architect of Bodyline and another of its victims: he was asked to win the series, but was then criticised and alienated for the manner of that hard-earned victory).   Karl Haynes is very good as Larwood, but once I'd seen the footage of Larwood himself bowling, following that was going to be an almost impossible task.  Paul Trussell was also excellent as Frank Foster, Arthur Carr and Bill Woodfull, and Damien Warren-Smith was also very good as Jack Fingleton, our narrator.  Hell, it was a good cast all round... it seems pretty harsh not to also mention Robin Bowerman, Daniel Hoffman-Gill as an uncanny Bill Voce and Sarah Churm.  They portrayed the gap between the Gentlemen (Jardine, Warner, Carr, Allen) and the Players (Larwood, Voce), and the English and the Empire beautifully.  I especially loved the table-top demonstration of the legside field using pints of mild, a tub of mustard (Bradman) and wine glasses.  Nicely done.

 Once or twice, it seemed to me, the script confused Bill Voce and Bill Bowes, but I very much enjoyed it nonetheless.  Lots of reviews seem to have focused on how it's not really about cricket at all but is instead all about the human drama.  Well, yes... it is about the human drama, but to say that it isn't about the cricket is a lie as the whole drama is centered on the tests and the fallout from the tests. C. quite enjoyed it, I think, but I think she struggled in the second half was the series unfolded.  I thought it was excellent: well staged, well acted and telling a compelling story. 

You've missed your chance to see it in Nottingham now as the run is about to end, but it's almost certain to extend its run somewhere else.  They've been asked by the MCC to put on a performance at Lords... probably the first time in nearly 80 years that they've seen Larwood bowling there.

Best line?  When it's put to Jardine that the Australians seemed to have taken a dislike to him, he spits "It's fucking mutual".  Nice.

There's nothing new here, but it's one of the great stories and still causes arguments today.  Me, I think they played within the rules, and all this talk of the 'spirit of the game' was as disingenuous then as it is now.... 

Recommended.