Robert Wringham – Page 24 – Robert Wringham // Writer-Comedian

Didactic Intentions

Every so often, I receive news from home. This week, I learn that my old headmaster has been arrested for kerb crawling. Hoo!

The story is reported here and here but word came my way via an email from my mum. She writes: “Jeff Williams has been arrested for kerb crawling. He didn’t have to do that. He was such a nice man. He could have had plenty of girlfriends”.

You know when a dog manages to get into a school playground, someone yells “Dog!” and all chaos ensues? Well that was the exact same type of excitement that fizzed up in my guts after reading the news. “Brilliant!!” I thought, my inner child demanding that I squeal girlishly and wave my arms around. I just couldn’t control myself. I almost did some wee.

But then I remembered that, not only had he been arrested and forced to leave his job, but his wife died a couple of years ago. How much bad luck can one fella have? So now his Apollonian and untarnished forty-year career has ended with an episode of lonely shame. Even I find that a bit of a kick in the balls.

My one decent memory of Jeff (or as the locals are undoubtedly calling him, ‘that old perv’) as head master involves him shouting at me from his office window during my first week of school:

I was coming out of the filthy sports hall that passed as the ‘dining room’ when I spotted a couple of boys from my form – Richard and Wesley – standing just outside the main doors. Riich and Wes would later evolve into the closest things a Midlands ex-grammar school had to Jocks and I would eventually become one of the crowd that would be the closest thing we had to nerds. They and I were destined to become natural enemies but it was early days and such roles had not yet been established.

Wanting to make new friends and perhaps curry favour with some of the harder kids, I went outside to talk to them. It was raining torrentially and they were taking shelter under the canopy outside of the main doors.

I started up conversation with them, quite unassumingly, about how the first few days had been going for them, but then they alerted my attentions to a cascade of water running from a broken drainpipe and over the top of the canopy into a rapidly expanding pool on the potholed tarmac of the playground. One of the boys asked me to hypothesise whether it would be possible to run though the weir without getting wet? Of course it wouldn’t, I said. But if you went through quick enough you could probably remain reasonably dry.

So they dared me to go through it.

I said I would if one of them went through first. While I wanted to look cool to the tough kids a la Bart Simpson in that episode where he cuts off the head of the town founder’s statue to win favour with Jimbo Jones and his pals, I didn’t want to be the butt of their joke by being the only one to get wet. I wasn’t stupid, you know.

(Though perhaps I was a little naive. While I didn’t really identify the fact that they were naughty types destined to jockdom, they clearly recognised my position as a natural born goodboy with a desire to show off. In primary school I had been friends with most everyone in the year-group and something of a class clown: high school would beat all of that out of me though and, worldly-wise, Rich and Wes had foreseen it).

Against my expectations, they agreed to run through the waterfall before I did. I’d noticed that they had been a bit wet when I had started talking to them in the first place so maybe they’d already mastered the stunt and the joke lay in the fact that they were hustling me.

So after they had run through the water, getting hardly wet at all, I did the same. But as I did so, the headmaster suddenly shouted from his office window “You stupid boy! You’ll be wet through! Get into my office right now!”

In a strange act of part-cowardice and part-bravado, I pretended not to have heard him and continued in running across the playground and out of sight.

The rest of the day was spent worrying whether or not the headmaster would catch up with me. Surely he would have asked Rich and Wes my name and come to get me during the tutor period. But nothing else came of it so either the two boys stuck up for me by saying they didn’t know who I was, or the headmaster had let it drop.

The event had scared the shit out of me though. I’d never really been shouted at by any teacher in the past and here I was being angrily ordered to the headmaster’s office on one of my very first days in this intimidating new school.

Looking back on it though, I wonder why the headmaster chose to make it any of his business at all. Surely, it was my lookout if I wanted to run through the waterfall and get wet and nothing to do with him. My actions would not affect anyone other than myself. Besides, the point of the exercise was to NOT get wet, which he could surely have worked out by the speed at which I had run through it. And moreover, the whole thing was partly his fault: had his crappy school been maintained properly there would have been no broken drainpipe to cause such silliness in the first place.

(Story recycled from an old blog experiment).

But now his wife is dead and his career lies in ruins. So at least I had the last laugh.

Boris-Based Request

I don’t suppose any of you kids have access to a video of Boris Johnson’s 2003 appearance on Room 101? I ask this with the prospect that you might upload some of it to Youtube or send me a tape/dvd through the post.

Apparently Boris committed Smoking Bans to the eponymous dimension of rubbish things. With a potential comedy-writing project relating to smoking bans I’d love to hear what he said.

Even if anyone just remembers this segment, I’d be chuffed to bits if you could relate to me the gist of it.

TQ!

Time Wasting

STAR TREK VOYAGER‘S ROBERT PICARDO FOUND PRESERVED IN SOME SORT OF CRYSTAL. “Shittest piece of tat ever uncovered” declares top archaeologist.

“CARPE, the Central Alliance of Robert Picardo Enthusiasts, is offering Crystal Bob for a special price of $149.00, which is a great deal — and I’ll tell you why. First, Star Trek: The Experience in Las Vegas is selling these for $245.00. Second, 20% of the proceeds from the sale of these crystal sculptures benefits the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation. So you can purchase a beautiful artwork, benefit children with AIDS, and acquire an impressive holiday gift for the Picardo-Phile in your life — or for yourself!”

It’s all very well declaring Sunday a day of rest, but today for me has taken the biscuit. Instead of working on my MSc Dissertation or writing one of the many articles I’ve promised to people, I’ve been discovering pointless sub-stuff like like this on the interweb.

Today’s hyper-explorations also lead me to some Youtube clips of Peter Cook submitting the British Countryside to Room 101; one of Tori Amos being interviewed by Zig and Zag on The Big Breakfast; and this inexplicable piece of miscellaneous crap.

Ah, TV. We hardly knew ya.

In other news, a picture I took appears on .

The Cons of Pros

Originally published at The Idler

Working as an office functionary a few summers ago for a local university, I was handed a report by my supervisor as part of a performance review. According to the report, my work in the office had been ‘first class’ with the wider implication that I was performing as a respectable member of society at last. Dad would be so chuffed. There was however, one caveat:

“Rob’s laidback, accessible attitude has allowed him to gel well with his colleagues and to fit into the system. He should be advised, however, that in some institutes, his laidback approach to work may be considered unprofessional.”

Unprofessional? But I had never claimed to be a professional. I held no professional qualification, nor was I a member of any professional body. I’d not even held down a job that could be considered a professional one. I was just some kid.

What the hell is professionalism anyway? What is this vague thing that’s supposed to determine all workplace behaviour? It is surely important to understand how the professional mechanism works, given that it permeates every aspect of work culture from staffroom to sales floor. But surprisingly, the disciplines of organisational psychology, sociology and business management have very little to say about it.

The anarchist philosopher, Bob Black writes: “[All ideologies, left- or right-wing] will carry on endlessly about wages, hours, working conditions, exploitation, productivity, profitability. They’ll gladly talk about anything but work itself.” Indeed it seems to be assumed that professionalism is an intrinsically good thing (or else one without a conceptualised alternative) and so hardly anyone seems to have cast a critical eye over the topic.

In order to try to find some half-decent definition of the nebulous thing that dictates our workplace etiquette, I decided to look to the philosophers. While many of these guys lived and died before the modern incarnation of the word ‘professional’ was even invented, their work provides an underlying matrix to the way that organisation works.

Bob Black points out that to define work (“Compulsory Production”) is to despise it and I discovered something similar when I sought to define professionalism. When one gains a clearer image of where professionalism comes from and what its function is, it is quite difficult not to hate it. It is a manipulative, pretentious and individualising technology, incapable of avoiding social segregation. No wonder so many people die from work-related stress disorders.

David Brent, the managerial boob portrayed by Ricky Gervais on The Office, preaches in one episode of the sitcom that “Professionalism is… and that’s what I want.” He reveals that he has not even the vaguest idea of what professionalism is, which is probably why he spends most of his time playing around with ‘Big Mouth Billy Bass’. Brent is an accidental anarchist and champion of unprofessionalism. But maybe his “Professionalism is…” sentence can be completed after a little rumination.

Professionalism is…

Panopticonic

A panopticon is the name given to the architectural design of a prison building conceived of by the utilitarian philosopher, Jeremy Bentham. It consists of a cylindrical or circular building like an amphitheatre with a single watchtower in the centre, occupied by one guard. The inward-facing windows of the main building are tinted so that the guard can see into each cell but so the prisoners cannot see out to the guard: the blackened windows become symbolic of the guard’s supervision and the inmates must assume that they are constantly being watched: it is a near-perfect system of government in which the one can govern the many.

In his 1975 book, Discipline and Punish, the postmodern thinker, Michel Foucault uses the panopticon as a metaphor for how society is self-regulatory, how a culture of fear has been engineered and how the privileged few are in control of the oppressed many. Professionalism, too, I believe, is a technology not entirely unlike Bentham’s panopticon.

One of the key aspects of panopticism is that it individualises its subjects. Bentham, in his 1843 plans of the panopticon prison system explains that the inmates are supervised “by a sequestered and observed solitude”. And of the cells Foucault writes: “They are like so many cages, so many small theatres, in which each actor is alone, perfectly individualised and constantly visible” and that “the major effect of the panopticon [is] to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power.”

When this is applied to the workplace, and we replace the idea of inmates with workers, then, as Foucault writes, “there are no disorders, no theft, no coalitions, none of those distractions that slow down the rate of work, make it less perfect or cause accidents.”

Professionalism in the form of job descriptions, wage scale and level of training is the workplace version of panopticonic technology. In an automobile factory, if there is a problem with the windscreen wipers of the final product, then the one guy who makes the windscreen wipers can be isolated and blamed. So everyone must focus upon their own part of the task out of the threat that they will be caught out as being a fraud or a slacker.

If the guard were to take a prolonged bathroom break or decide not to come into work one day, the prisoners would still maintain obedience. In professionalism, though the architect of the system is long dead, the majority of people continue to observe his authority and so the system of self-regulation goes on and on.

While working at the same university I mentioned at the beginning of the article, it was explained to me that the institute goes through an annual quiet spell: during the summer, the majority of students have little to study for and so there is less demand upon the staff. So finding jobs for every member of the ‘team’ would be a difficult task for the supervisors to implement. There was an unspoken understanding between the supervisors and the staff that we must not work too hard or too quickly, since there were only so many jobs to go around and it wouldn’t ‘look good’ in the eyes of the deceased architect to have people sitting idle.

And this, perhaps, is one of my key arguments against professionalism. When we understand that the architect is dead and that we perform only to memories of memories of his surveillance – to his out-of-time and no-longer-manned sentinels – we must give up the ghost or continue to suffer the consequences.

Pretence

Professionalism is employed as an untrue aesthetic and calls upon us to falsify personalities. It essentially invents what Thomas Hobbes called ‘artificial’ or ‘feigned’ people. Hobbes notes in his famous 1651 publication, Leviathan, that the word ‘person’ derives from the Latin persona: a character portrayed on stage by an actor. And just as an actor acts, so do people in the professional context. Hobbes writes: “Of Persons Artificiall, some have their words and actions owned by those whom they represent. And then the person is the Actor; and he that owneth [the actor’s] words and actions, is the Author: In which case the actor acteth by Authority.”

He goes on to say that the only people who act under authority without their own sense of reason are “Children, Fooles and Mad-men”. Which are you, boy?

This problem is illustrated beautifully by Jean-Paul Sartre in his 1943 doorstop of a book, Being and Nothingness. He describes a waiter whose behaviour in the café is purely theatrical: “his movement is quick and forward, a little too precise” and “his eyes express an interest a little too solicitous for the order of the customer” So what is up with this guy? Sartre explains: “He is playing at being a waiter in a café.”

When he leaves the café after his shift, he ceases to be a waiter and returns to what Hobbes would call his ‘natural self’. So why the need for professional falsehood? Sartre explains it as a battle between facticity and transcendence: the professional ‘waiter’ part of the man competing with his ‘free’ and human side.

The real individual behind the persona is not the person required for the café job, for the true person required for the job can only be the waiter’s employer: the employer after all is the one who wants to get food on the tables and to put money in the till. But the employer is lazy or otherwise engaged and so the employee must act as an agent and perform the master’s deeds in his absence. The waiter does not want to wait; he simply has to be there in order to earn his wages with which to buy food and drink and precious sex jelly. So he is running the errands of the managers: acting out the pre-prepared script just as the employer desires and just as the actor does on stage. Moreover, by acting and not truly entering the spirit of things, he is removing himself from any consequences of his actions: he is, as the old war criminals say, only obeying orders.

How long can this madness go on? How long can a whole society go on pretending to be people they aren’t just so that they can go on paying the rent. Kurt Vonnegut, a true philosopher if ever there was one, writes in his novel, Mother Night that “We are what we pretend to be so we must be careful what we pretend to be.” And he’s absolutely right. People can surely not live on pretence alone and when we’re not actually engaged in work and cowering behind our professional personas, we are recovering from them or preparing to put them on.

Instrumental in creating social rifts

The assumption that social rifts are categorically bad derives from the ‘Five Steps to Tyranny’ idea proposed in the 1990s by the psychologist, Stanley Milgram. ‘Tyranny’ refers to a the path to an all-out final war and the end of civilisation; the first step on which is the forming of social rifts caused by a hatred or fear of ‘difference’ as opposed to the celebration of ‘diversity’. It is happening all around us already in the arenas of race, sexuality, gender and religion and professionalism isn’t helping things either.

From looking at the panopticonic nature of professionalism alone, we can see that social rifts are unavoidable in that the ultimate shattering of a collective takes place as a result of individualising measures.

Rifts occur due to the identification (or invention) of in-groups and out-groups. In professional organisations, there is an undeniable rift between managers and staff where staff consider the various levels of management to be the stuff of out-groups and vice-versa. Even this article has positioned managers and employers as being the bad guys in that managers are the ones who serve as guards in the panopticon without much in the way of a quibble and employers the ones who bring about the problem of agency or pretence.

But neither managers nor staff are inhuman out-groups: outside of the workplace both mangers and staff are unranked, unprofessionalised humans. It is only within the organisation that humans are divided into masters and slaves. Management/Staff or Masters/Slaves is the most obvious example of segregation caused by professionalism. Professional underlings are sick and tied of managers riding their backs: they are oversupervised, underpaid and not given the credit or respect they have been promised by the universally naïve understanding of professionalism. Managers, on the other hand, are fed up with underlings not working to their full potential, stealing from stock, grumbling about their workloads and questioning authority. Hence the rift. But the rift is only a product of professionalism, for it is seen to be professional for a company to have a hierarchy of managers and staff.

A thorn in the side of both work and play

Anarchist philosopher, Bob Black is quite insistent that work is bad for your health: “Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world,” he writes, “Almost any evil you’d care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed for work. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working.”

Such buoyancy is difficult to argue with, isn’t it? But where Black’s famous 1985 essay, The Abolition of Work explains how work is the cause of any social ill you care to name, I’d argue that it’s not ‘work’ per se but professionalism that causes the misery and suffering.

Black subscribes to what he calls a Ludic conviviality: the idea that play is more productive and satisfying and worthy of human attention that work. He writes that “Play isn’t passive. Doubtless we all need a lot more time for sheer sloth and slack than we ever enjoy now, regardless of income or occupation, but once recovered from employment-induced exhaustion nearly all of us want to act”.

Play, Black argues, is not without consequence. It’s just that the consequence does not happen at the end of the process as with work and mostly in the grubby hands of someone else, but rather along the way. He write that in a Ludic Utopia, “life will become a game, or rather many games, but not – as it is now – a zero/sum game. An optimal sexual encounter is the paradigm of productive play, The participants potentiate each other’s pleasures, nobody keeps score, and everybody wins. The more you give, the more you get. In the ludic life, the best of sex will diffuse into the better part of daily life.”

But imagine a professional variation of play. Imagine play confined to specified etiquette and with hierarchies where the microphysics of power are conducted just as they are in the workplace. It would suck. It would essentially be work given that the outcome would not be gratuitous. So it is not necessarily ‘work’ that is bad, for one can assuredly enjoy many modes of work. Work can be rewarding: it can provide direction in life; can help to support worthy organisations; or can allow you to appreciate the good things in life which would be more trivial without the contrasting hardship. In the sex example, one body can ‘work’ to stimulate the erogenous zones of the other and that will most likely be fun: it is work as its own reward. This can only occur after the removal of the professional dimension.

I’m confident when I say that an elimination of professionalism and a promotion of work-as-play will allow individuals to exist as genuine human people rather than as Hobbesian parodies. As a result we can lead happier, more fulfilled and possibly even – mercy me – more productive lives. By extension, I’m certain that an initiative programme of ‘deprofessionalisation’ would allow organisations to prosper and grow. Modern companies were invented by Professionalism and fashioned to be strange machines existing between people rather than as people.

The alternative to professionalism is, I think, ‘collegiality’: a structure of peers in which people can work with other people towards common goals without questionable authority, persona or pretence. When the error of professionalism has been recognised and amended, things can begin to improve.

Absent Corpse

It occurred to me this afternoon that I’ve never seen a dead body. Is that weird?

I’ve never been to an open casket funeral; never been in or near a serious road accident; never discovered a recently deceased old relative; and never been witness to a murder, a drug overdose or a heart attack. I’m like a sort-of reverse Ishmael, who in Moby Dick is plagued by the presence of death. If anything I’ve been plagued by the presence of life, or rather non-death. “Call me leamhsI.”

The realisation of my corpseless life occurred to me after reading a few excellent and moreish chapters of Mr. Gray’s corpse-related 1992 novel, Poor Things, in which a woman is brought back from the dead, Frankenstein fashion. As a bookmark for this novel, I employ a Christian propaganda pamphlet headed with the rather odd question of “Are you Dead or Alive?”

Even horse-faced Harry and William have had the pleasure. I’m sure most of my peers and relatives have seen bodies by now as well. My friend, Adele, grew up around corpses, being the daughter of an undertaker. My sister (a podiatrist) has had elderly patients die in the chair as she’s operated on their feet and has even dissected dead human feet as part of her education. My mother as a nurse saw a million dead bodies. In the war, my grandad saw his share. My constant companion and best friend Stu, as a Catholic, has been to open casket funerals on countless occasions. It seems that everyone has seen a cadaver but your humble narrator.

I’ve never even been to a funeral. I suppose I should consider myself lucky.

I can’t help but think that this inexperience has allowed me to become quite flippant about death. When George A. Romero films and Stephen King novels are the closest you come to seeing dead people, it kinda trivialises the whole prospect. I do make a lot of cancer jokes.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t have a morbid fascination with corpses. A necrophiliac, I am not. If anything I’m a necrophobe: by nature quite squeamish about such things. But I feel somewhat left out.

Have you seen corpses, dear reader? Did it provide you with perspective? Was it beautiful? Frightening? Awe-inspiring? Or just gross?

Service Station

TWO ANECDOTES FROM A MOTORWAY SERVICE STATION. (OR: NEW ADVENTURES IN TRANSITIONAL SPACE).

With Edward Hopper paintings.

Returning from visiting my parents, my friend Stuart and I stopped off for a much needed break at a motorway service station. When you’ve been sitting down for such a long time in a car, it is sometimes nice to get out and do some more sitting down.

When I saw that the service station’s cafe was a Cafe Ritazza (a franchise apparently unique to transitional spaces such as railways stations, airports and motorway service stations), I remembered that the guy at the Cafe Ritazza in Glasgow’s Central Station, a month or so back, had given me one of those rubber-stamp loyalty cards.

I handed my loyalty card to the server but he’d never seen such a thing. In fact he freaked out a little bit at the recognition of his cafe’s logo on an alien document as though it were an artifact from some doppelganger-populated parallel universe.

Of course, loyalty cards and things of that ilk often don’t work at the service station versions of cafes or shops. But Cafe Ritazza is ONLY a service station franchise. It doesn’t exist in town centres! So where am I supposed to use this thing? I suppose I might only be able to use it at the branch I got it from but considering it’s based in a train station and gets its entire custom from commuters who may never tread foot there again, a loyalty card seems like an odd thing to issue.

But perhaps that’s the plan. By giving a loyalty card out that can only be used at the Glasgow branch, one will have to go out of one’s way to travel to Glasgow to use it. The chances are, a commuter coming from London or Birmingham will have to change trains at Preston or Crewe. Of course you may as well buy a coffee from a Cafe Ritazza while you’re there, making them the victors.

Given that such a trip would cost around £60, you would be excused for thinking that a Cafe Ritazza loyalty card may rely upon a false economy.

Fortunately for me, I live in Glasgow. I also kept my receipt from this service station branch and will force them to reward my loyalty upon my return to Glasgow. Pretty soon, the pleasure of gratis coffee will be mine. All I have to do is sacrifice having coffee at one of my favourite comfortable west end cafes in favour of drinking Cafe Ritazza machine-brewed swill from a paper cup beneath the hard lighting and indecipherable tannoy announcements of Central Station. After nine trips like this, I’ll get a free one. Cashback.

We moved over to the comfy brown leather arm chairs to innocently enjoy our coffees and contemplate my unstamped loyalty card.

No sooner had we sat down, an old man approached us from the next table over where his wife watched on patiently.

“Excuse me,” he politely said to us, “but is it compulsory to eat one of those?”

He was referring to the giant chocolate muffins we had bought to go with our coffees.

“No,” I laughed, slightly confused, “it’s just that they’re so good.”

It occurred to me that I was quasi-quoting Vincent Vega from Pulp Fiction – the bit where he is asked by his hitman colleague why he eats pork.

It seemed to satisfy him and he went back to his table where his patient wife rolled her eyes, suggesting that the old man’s antagonising of young people were a regular occurrence.

“What the hell was that about?” asked Stuart, modishly offended by the intrusion.

The old man, of course, was pointing out the absurdity of our situation. Here we were in the middle of nowhere: a strange little bubble of humanity at the side of a motorway where no life has the right to thrive and we were sitting on leather comfy chairs with a pint of black coffee each and our ludicrous chocolate muffins. We may as well have been adrift in outer space, in orbit around Saturn while enjoying a jacuzzi.

Not only did I suddenly feel like a fashionable McSheep, I also felt out on a limb like an Edward Hopper character floating in an uninhabitable abyss absurdly nurturing a grande Americano.

Service Stations are weird places.

Visiting Oxford

With my Masters Degree course drawing to a close, I have begun wondering which city I’d most like to live in and consequently work [as a librarian]. New York, Tokyo, Glasgow and Birmingham all have things going for them (though I have wimpy apprehensions about moving abroad) and I’ve recently begun to think about Oxford too. Currently visiting with my parents in Dudley, we took a trip to the not-far-away city of Oxford for a bit of a look around.

My parents are somwhat Apollonian individuals so today began at the improbably early hour of 7.00am. After a hurried breakfast, we piled into a pre-packed car and set off for Oxford, arriving there before anything of note had had chance to open. I took this opportunity to stroll around the high street area. Remembering ‘s analysis of New York magazine kiosks (“[to] see what kind of glimpse they provide into the American soul”) I idly and in a somewhat unsystematic fashion tried a similar thing with Oxford’s store fronts.

A Starbucks; a Woolworths; a McDonnalds; a Pret a Manger; a WHSmith; an Edinburgh Woolen Mill. What was the point? It has just the same brand name stores as any other city in the country. There was no insight into the Oxford soul here. If I was looking for a city with difference – for something exotic or less blase – I’d probably have to uproot entirely and live abroad. My first superficial glance at things resulted in false impressions of course: an Oxford shopping street does have a few differences to those of London or Glasgow or Birmingham: everything has become kinda “integrated” into Oxford culture. Everything has adopted a slightly-less-vulgar-than-usual tone. The McDonalds for example is wooden-fronted rather than smacky plastic yellow. While the same evil exists here as anywhere else, it has had to adopt a slightly different aesthetic tactic to the other cities I’m familiar with. The semiotics of brandname outlets and tastefully appropriate aesthetics oppose each other somewhat but speak volumes.

We found a Cafe Nero that had opened early and I ordered a round of coffee. When I handed over my Switch card, the Barrista apologised and told me that they took no plastic. I was surprised as much as embarrassed about my having to run out for cash: every Cafe Nero I’ve been to in Glasgow readily accepts payments by Switch. How strangely unprogressive of Oxford. Perhaps another window into its soul had been discovered.

After delivering the coffee safely to the table at which Mum and Dad were patiently seated, I looked for a copy of The Observer at the news rack. The only piece of it that remained was the “Review” (art/culture) section so I took that as well as a News of the World. I realised that the only copy of The Observer had been dispersed between the patrons of the cafe: one guy had the sports supplement, another fellow had the news, I had the review, a grey-haired lady had something else and the Barristas were arguing over the free fold-out poster (depicting various types of freshwater fish – I have the butterfly version they did a couple of weeks ago) that had come with it. The tabloids were piled up in the stand without being touched aside from my News of the World. It’s as though trash culture is trying its best to infiltrate Oxford but the studious population are just not having it.

After our coffee, we looked at the city from above. I can’t remember what it was called (I was too sleepy and suffer mildly from a fear of heights) but money was paid to climb up to what was allegedly Oxford’s highest point – some sort of bell tower (pictured). It was something of a crappy tourist trap and I exclaimed that my work at the University library in Glasgow has me working and studying (for free) at higher altitudes than this but the view of the city’s spires was nonetheless quite pleasant.

There was much walking around the university and its museums to be had and much photographing of Gargoyles and sculptures on behalf of my snap-happy mother (the photos in this entry are all hers). I thought about how universities are intrinsically connected to research and consequently to the military and the government and I wondered about how Oxford’s tidiness and tastefully put together buildings might be funded.

The clash of the ancient and the modern is something that occurs in many cities (Edinburgh and Glasgow spring to mind, as do Prague and Amsterdam and Paris) but often in separate ‘quarters’. In Oxford, however, the ancient and the modern clash throughout like something from an episode of Sliders in which a modern San Francisco is occupied by Wizards. In spite of Oxford’s central institutes being at the cutting edge (The Bodders for instance is one of the best libraries in the country and the world), bicycles assuredly outnumber cars and the classical aestheic is everywhere.

It’s nice. Are there any Occasional Papers readers who live or work in Oxford? Perhaps you can give me an insider’s perspective or at least tell me that my observations are as ill-conceived as they most certainly are.

Phantom Noises

Whenever I return to the old birthing grounds of Dudley in the West Midlands, things usually feel familiar yet oddly different around my mum and dad’s house. Sometimes this is because things really are a little different to how I last saw the place in that new ornaments or fixtures have been bought while old ones have been put away or thrown out. Other times things just seem unfamiliar in a completely untangible way due to my not living here any more, returning only once every few months for the sake of familial adherence.

Late this evening, while reading my late Great Uncle George’s copy of Under the Greenwood Tree in my old bedroom with the window open, I heard a noise from outside which sounded exactly like the noise a child’s bicycle might make when coming to a halt down in the street. It was the sort of dull squeak of breaks unique to those making contact rubber tubes of a junior Raleigh. I don’t know if I’ve ever actually heard the sound of a child’s bike coming to a stop from this room before but that was the answer brought forward after a superfast consultation with my brain’s acoustic database.

The sound, of course, could not have been a child’s bike. The time, after all, was drawing up to 2am. No one would be out cycling at this hour let alone a kidiwink. No. When the sound occurred a second time, I realised that it had in fact originated from the weather vane.

The weather vane has been mounted in that same place – on the kitchen chimney outside my bedroom window – since I was about eight years old. It is in the shape of a witch riding upon a broomstick and was made by my grandfather. For the last ten years or so the vane has squeaked. So why now did I not recognise what was once a strikingly everyday occurence, confusing it insead for something I’d probably never heard of in my life?

My Honours Degree in Psychology invests me with the authority to declare: “The human brain is weird”.

Somewhat Quixotic

On occasion, I travel by car (rather than by rail) in order to visit my parents. Whenever I do this, I pass a massive and beautiful wind farm just off the M6. I always try to take a photograph of it only to have my plans thwarted every time. It is never visible for very long and so whenever I get the camera out, the pesky thing sinks out of existence behind the hills.

Today I was confounded once again but managed nonetheless to get the best picture I have of it so far, partly due to having a better camera this time with a better optical zoom and what I suspect might be described as a faster shutter. But alas even this picture is rubbish; only the heads of these graceful giants were captured.

One of these days I will make a special trip to the wind farm to get some decent photographs. Either that or I’ll plan to have my camera poised and ready so as not to miss the tiny window of opportunity.

A quick Google search for “M6 wind farm” brings up several similar images, blurred and framed with bits of dashboard and fluffy dice. One day I shall put them all to shame.

Harmful Cogitations

Each thing I do I rush through so I can do
something else. In such a way do the days pass–
a blend of stock car racing and the never
ending building of a gothic cathedral.
Through the windows of my speeding car, I see
all that I love falling away: books unread,
jokes untold, landscapes unvisited . . .
– From “Pursuit” by Stephen Dobyns (published in the compilation, Cemetery Nights).

I find that I sometimes think in two rather dangerous or at least undesirable ways. I don’t think in these fashions too often, nor are they are representative of my usual mindset but I’d like to train myself out of them if possible. I wonder if any readers of my Occasional Papers can empathise?

I don’t like to ‘shape’ the way I think usually, favouring instead to engage with peculiar, perverse, impractical or deviant ideas rather than block them out. I think that’s healthy. But in these cases I’d make an exception.

The first concerns the constant feeling that there is something better to be working towards – a new stepping stone in life – and that once this thing has happened, the “real living” can begin. Fun can be put off for another day until this project has been completed. Does anyone else suffer from this? It’s a total fallacy of course. Nothing will change or be much more comfortable if one’s bank account is out of the red. Similarly, nothing will happen once you’ve moved into a better flat or secured a more desirable job. You’ll still be the same dimwitted person wondering about the next selfish existential target might be met and never really reaching the proverbial carrot of “the real living”. There will always be a more desirable job/attractive partner/fashionable flat to move on to and presumably no satisfaction for this desire.

The second dangerous way of thinking, is never 100% enjoying the thing presently happening to me due to the everpresent distraction of anticipating the next. While reading a novel, I’m wondering about what the next novel might involve. It’s true to say that this may seem like a reiteration of the first problem, but I’d argue that, while similar, it’s a definably different problem but may or may not have its origins in the same place.

Both problems are stupid and make me feel a total prick when coming out with them in this fashion. They are the very antithesis of Stoicism and an enemy to anyone who has them.

Regarding the Stephen Dobyns poem, I’m embarrassed to admit that I’ve not actually read Cemetery Nights or anything else by Mr. Dobyns and that I came across the quote in a horrible Stephen King novel a year or so back. Nonetheless, it resonated with me and helped to articulate those weird thoughts. It sounds like a really good compilation though. Wikipedia’s entry on Dobyns describes another poem from Cemetery Nights (‘Missed chances’) in which “the nameless speaker wanders through a metaphorical city in which those who missed their big opportunities futilely rehearse for when that moment will next arrive”.

Artistic Cravings

I find myself going through cycles of wanting to consume different sorts of art in a similar way to how other people get culinary cravings. Sometimes I could want to read so much that I feel I could literally eat pages from my books: just tear the softer pages from their bindings, scrunch them up and shove them into my foaming gob. It’s as though the conventional way of sucking symbols up through the eyes isn’t quite efficient enough a process to satisfy the desire: only primitive devouring and digestion will do the trick.

I’ve never actually tried to eat a book though, you understand. Just imagine the paper cuts.

It sounds weird, I know. But in my defense, William Wordsworth said something similar about nature; that he sometimes loved the Lake District so much that he had the desire to eat vast fistfulls of grass and soil so that nature could exist inside as well as out. I wonder if Wordsworth had been a creature of the suburbs instead of the countryside, he would have felt as passionately about concrete, space raiders and dog muck.

At the moment I’m acoustically fixated: I’m in the mood for music and I know exactly what I want to listen to at given moments. Mostly working from home right now, I have the freedom to do this but I find some of my choices of what to listen to as peculiar as the foods chosen by pregnant women: Tom Waits followed by Art Tatum / Liquorice Allsorts followed by raw onions.

Today I put on a ‘best of’ CD of The Animals. In particular I was interested in listening to ‘House of the Rising Sun’ and ‘Roadrunners’. Why? Beats me. I’m not a fan of the animals. I like Rock n’ Roll just fine but at the end of the day, I’m a jazz fan. But whatever the personal preference, today I wanted to hear The Animals. It’s playing right now as I type this (which is in itself, somewhat uncharacteristic).

So I wonder why artistic cravings take place at all. With food, cravings occur when your body is lacking in whatever vitamin or mineral you crave. But your body doesn’t require art does it? Perhaps it’s some kind of psychological/socially constructed imitation of food cravings: the constructed and natural words getting their wavelengths crossed (like how urban birds are reported to immitate popular mobile phone ring tones).

Does anyone else in my immediate blogosphere have similar cycles and unpredictable intrusions from bands or authors or directors with whom you wouldn’t normally concern yourself?

On wanting to stay alive: Stewart Lee

Originally published at TMCQ

Robert Wringham meets Stewart Lee

Arriving at Crystal Palace’s Cafe ABC after a long journey down from Glasgow, I was surprised to see people smoking at the tables and around the bar. Of course, the ban was yet to reach London but I’d become accustomed to smokers – Scotland’s out-group of the moment – being huddled in the streets while everyone else enjoys the no-longer-filthy indoors air. It was weird then that Stewart Lee and I – two ex-smokers – were asked to take our conversation out into the midnight gutter. Some people are just born to be outsiders.

Mr. Lee, in case you’ve been living under a rock, is the writer and director of the controversial Jerry Springer – The Opera and has been a veteran of the stand-up circuit for some twenty-five years. His comedic persona has developed something of a Maharishi-like status among younger comedians and his subversive, self-referential style is not easily emulated. To the current generation of twenty-somethings, he is probably most famous for his TV work with Richard Herring: twelve episodes of Fist of Fun and eighteen of This morning With Richard Not Judy, but he also writes witty novels and reviews for national press. Oh, and he’s a DJ. And a DVD director. And he’s said to have invented Alan Partridge.

Are you sure you’re happy doing this out here? It’s a bit nippy.

“Yeah, no problem. I like to have a mooch around before I go on [stage] anyway. This is nice.”

How do you feel when looking back on your TV work and early stand-up?

“It’s a mixed bag of emotions, actually. I’m very pleased with all the stand-up, I think, and I still like the first series of Fist of Fun. We tried something different for series two for various reasons. There was a slight change of tack, only I don’t think it worked too well. I’m quite proud of series two of This Morning With Richard Not Judy, which was a show that took a while to become established and get off the ground. The stand-up is weird. Generally, I look back at my early stuff and see a cocky, arrogant, surly young man. And then get all nostalgic. [Laughs].”

Your comedy often has a subversive edge. Do you set out to subvert?

“No. No, not at all. You just write what you’re interested in. I don’t think any of us [try], even [Jerry] Sadowitz or Chris Morris. They just do what they feel works at the time. I think it’s a bit desperate for a comedian to deliberately engineer subversion: it should really just be a by-product of what you’re doing. It’s not in a comic’s professional interest to be controversial. The promoters and venues are less likely to work with you if they think you’re going to be a pain. If you earn a name associated with mischief, it’s not going to work in your favour. I’ve had a lot of stuff blow up because of that. The management at the BBC is weird: even if all the middle managers love a project but the guy at the top smells a rat, it’s still not going to happen.”

Is that what happened to your Cluub Zarathustra* project?

[*Cluub Z was an alternative comedy cabaret co-founded by Stewart Lee in 1993, based around the principal that traditional stand-up be avoided in favour of other, stranger, more inventive ways of performing. In 1995, a TV pilot was commissioned with Lee and Simon Munnery at the helm. But it was never rewarded with a series.]

“No, that was Channel Four. It’s a different situation there, mainly a budgetary one. But all that stuff was channelled into different projects anyway, like a show we did for the BBC called Attention Scum.”

I was going to ask whether you were a rebel by nature or not, but you’ve already sort of answered that.

“I’m really not. But people in broadcasting are difficult. You’ve had it if they just don’t like your tone of voice.”

Do you have a favourite comedy club in which to watch comedy or perform?

“A favourite venue? Probably The Stand, actually in Edinburgh. It’s very intimate and focussed upon comedy rather than having it as a sideline of something else. ABC here is nice too, of course. [Laughs].”

Who do you currently most admire on the circuit?

“Hmm. Can I give you a list of names? Simon Munnery, Josie Long. I think Kevin McAleer has really peaked. Daniel Kitson. John Hegley, of course.”

You’re connected to John through Simon Munnery, of course.

“Yeah, that’s right. He’s part of the same comedy family, if you like. Though he came along much later: I first saw him perform in Southport near Liverpool in 1990. It was a John Peel session featuring John Lee Hooker. I was about 22. I love his work. Hegley has a certain style that I love and think really works. He sees things from this unique point of view and maintains this sense of public indifference. [Laughs]. He’s made a career out of that style, I suppose. It has a certain solvency to it.”

Comedy was important in the satire boom of the 1970s and in alternative comedy in the 1980s. Can it still be important and interesting and subversive enough to change things?

“Things have just changed so much in comedy since then, but I think so. The tone of voice unique to alterative comedy in the 80s has become the voice of XFM and radio one and advertising. It has this slightly detached, smug cynicsm. Comedy has become heavily commercialised: where there were once twenty comedy clubs there are now sixty plus lots of other places with one-off comedy nights. There weren’t as many open mike nights or open bills back then though, which is an area one can’t deny is progressive, but it doesn’t really function as an outside entity any more: it IS popular culture.

“Alternative comedy is mainstream now. I don’t know what the new alternative comedy is – there’s no new tone of voice. There’s The Book Club of course, which is very important but it is hard to find anything that is genuinely ‘underground’. There’s very little now to really identify with in the way that we did with alternative comedy back then.”

What do you reckon will be the name for the current comedy zeitgeist then? Post alternative? Post-9/11?

“I dunno. Not Post-9/11. That mainly goes down in America, which is full of guilty liberals. [Laughs].”

While an atheist, did you consider your trip to the American South-West a spiritual mission?

“Yeah! Absolutely. I think the shaman-clown hybrid is the perfect substitute for religion. With comedy, you can cheer people up and then ask questions. Comedy tends not to oppress: it’s very inclusive.”

On the subject of inclusivity, your comedy refers to itself a lot and to comedy devices generally. Is it important to have a particularly comedy literate audience for this sort of material or can you use it anywhere?

“I’d like to do that less, actually. Though it’s never not worked. It was a bit of a problem in America, I guess. It’s not that the American audiences I had weren’t comedy literate but a lot of the time they just don’t know what you’re talking about because their world view is so horribly limited and fed to them by Fox News. Self reference is just a way of referring to the world, so they just don’t get it a lot of the time.”

[At this point, a member of the house band comes outside to tell Stew that his play-on music is going to be “the imperial march from The Empire Strikes Back.” As the door is opened, I can hear Josie Long on stage and I wonder if Stew is annoyed at missing her set. He doesn’t seem concerned though.] Why do you suppose he chose the Imperial March?

“[Laughing]. I have no idea!”

Talking of that sort of thing, are you enjoying the new Dr. Who?

“You know, I’ve not seen it! I’ve been out of the country. But from what I’ve heard it looks okay. I always felt it was a show that suffered a lot due to decisions at the BBC. They were constantly axing it in spite of popularity and its originality. I suppose it’s a good example of a show that can really take off when it’s given decent production values and proper respect for its subject matter.”

What are you reading right now?

“I’ve just started reading a biography about [jazz saxophonist] Sonny Rollins. It’s very good.”

You often like to juggle a microphone and a cigarette. How are you going to deal with the smoking ban in Scottish clubs?

“I’ve quit! I quit on February thirteenth. No – fifteenth. I’ve been enjoying things a lot lately and decided that I actually want to stay alive. Three years into Jerry Springer [The Opera], I started to think seriously about pensions and stuff: it’s been a long haul so I have to live long enough so as to get the payout. It’s gonna take longer than I thought as well: the DVD didn’t do as well as I hoped and they’re not going to put out a second one. So I have to stop smoking for the sake of longevity. I’ve put on two stone though since I quit smoking which isn’t good! But I’d rather get fat than get cancer. [Laughs].”

Ah, but obesity causes cancer too.

“Aw.”

You pretty much did the direction yourself for the DVD and you directed the Johnny Vegas DVD as well. How do you feel about that medium? Do you think stand-up comedy is an ephemeral thing or does it translate well to DVD?

“Well, it’s always better live, obviously, just as music is. But it depends on how it’s filmed. For example, on a lot of these DVDs, the director shows you the comic and then cuts to the audience laughing. It’s important to get some audience shots because they’re a component of the whole thing but cutting and chopping around like that can really break up a rhythm. With Johnny’s DVD – which I wasn’t completely happy with – I tried to get it all on a flat plane with the audience laughing in real time. Otherwise, it just feels confused and it’s as though the director is daring the viewer to join in. It’s best filmed live and with a bit of thought.

“I did both my DVD and Johnny’s at The Stand [comedy clubs in Edinburgh and Glasgow]. It’s good to do set these things in difficult situations.”

Difficult situations? [I recalled that the Johnny Vegas DVD was set in the quasi-fictional wake of Johnny’s gross selling out as a comedian and that Stew’s was shot shortly after the controversy over Jerry Springer – The Opera].

“Yeah, it’s just that these places aren’t designed to have things filmed in them. Anything could happen, especially when you’re recording live. You need that risk element: for it to be possible that something can be lost. I mean, it’s a real event and you could easily fail or get booed off. I loved that we chose Glasgow to film the DVD, actually because I basically went up there and insulted Scottish people and their heritage right to their faces: it would have been very easy to get booed off with that so we had that sense of peril that made it a real stand-up event rather than something set in a studio – which can be very sterile and have no sense of atmosphere – or something with an audience so big you can’t really tell what their reactions actually are.”

I actually had a friend with me on that night who was both Gaelic and Gay!

“And he was okay with all that stuff?”

Yeah, fine.

“You know I did some gigs on [The Isle of] Skye and the Orkneys?”

Yeah, you seem to be a fan of doing stand-up in unconventional places. I’m sure you said in an interview [on ITV’s Des and Mel] once that you wanted to do a gig on an oil rig.

“That’s right yeah. You get a different audience and so you get that sense of peril and unpredictably. It no longer seems staged.”

Is there a new tour planed or a new project at this year’s [Edinburgh] Festival?

“No. I’m not keen to do Edinburgh this year. It’s been a very long year, actually and a lot has happened. There’s talk of a series though: a Stewart Lee stand-up series, which’d be great. I’m working on getting another book deal because I’ve written a second novel. So I’m touting manuscripts around for that. And I’m pitching film ideas as well: a comedy superheroes thing called American Justice and a thing about the Napoleonic Wars. I’m basically just trying to stay alive out there. [Laughs].”

You must be able to depend upon your past work though to counterbalance being such an awkward customer. Kids of my generation were watching Fist of Fun when we were twelve and now we’re old enough to write these articles about you and stuff.

“Yeah, that’s spot on. People who took to Fist of Fun and This Morning With Richard Not Judy are all journalists and promoters now or working in radio. It’s very convenient. [Laughs].

“I’m just happy not to have done anything dreadful. While I’m marginally ashamed of some of the old stuff and wouldn’t do a lot of that stuff now, at least I’ve not done a ‘We Will Rock You’. I mean, Hegley and Sadowitz have never driven anybody away: as long as there’s a loyal body of fans, each giving you Â£7 a year, you’re okay and you’ve still got some integrity. It’s like one of the bands I like – The Fall – they do well because of a good fan base and having no promotion fees.”

Nice one. I think I’ve got enough to work with here. Can I get you a drink?

“Yeah, okay. I’ll have a pint of the beer.”

As we head back into the cafe, Josie Long is just finishing up. She introduces Stew and he makes his way to the stage. Strangely, there is no imperial march. “So,” he begins, “I recently had the opportunity to interview Ang Lee.”

The New Satire

Originally published at TMCQ

September 11th 2001. American Airlines Flight 11 smashes into the World Trade Centre’s north tower and thousands of horrified New Yorkers are smothered by layer upon layer of toxic dust. As burning rubble falls and TV news crews clamber through gory debris in instinctual attempts to interview, the world watches on in slack-jawed incredulity.

A thousand questions spill from Western mouths: “Who could have organised an atrocity on such a scale?”; “Why wasn’t America prepared?”; and “Would it be inappropriate to still go to Jongleurs tonight? It’s just that I’ve got tickets for that Mitch Benn and I hear he’s quite good”.

It would have been a strange evening to be in a comedy club; to have bathed in the primordial soup that would become the awkward clowning epoch of post-9/11 comedy. Simon Munnery once said that people shouldn’t worry about being modern as that’s “surely the one thing you can’t avoid”. Is the same true of post-9/11 comedy? Is simply existing in the wake of a terrorist attack enough licence to fly that flag or does one have to absorb a certain amount of the zeitgeist in order to qualify? Political climate has always had a knock-on effect on comedy: the 70s brought the satire boom, the 80s gave us alternative comedy and the 90s secreted ‘the new rock and roll’. The 00s, it seems, ushers in the post-9/11 wave: the wave of the new satire.

Among the doomed passengers of Flight 11 was David Angell, co-creator of feel-good television sitcoms, Cheers and Frasier. It was almost as though his presence had been arranged by some higher force in order to provide a symbolic passing of flames in comedy history. The comfortable, moralising sitcom would no longer suffice in a West where death could strike so spontaneously and on such a devastating scale: the world had been shocked and it would take more than Seinfeld’s stories of missing jackets and “goofy-looking” Pez dispensers to get under America’s skin again.

Getting under people’s skin is what good comedy does: even the most inoffensive comedian or conservative sitcom will point out the absurdities of an ideology, tradition or policy. The Hopi Indian clowns (mentioned sometimes by Stewart Lee who, tired of the comedy circuit, went in search of the clowns so that he might experience the primal roots of his craft) are perfect embodiments of comedy’s subversive nature. It is their job as quasi-shamanic community figureheads to attend serious events such as weddings or funerals and to parody them in playfully vulgar ways in order to remind all in attendance not to take things so seriously. The anthropologist, Emory Sekaquaptewa reports an instance in which a troupe of Hopi clowns serving the mourners at a funeral went so far as to throw the corpse from the roof of a nearby building. He writes that “It took the people by surprise. But then everybody laughed”.

In order to survive after the heart of Western civilisation had been attacked so brutally and to continue to function in a suddenly radically politicised world, would comedy stick to its popguns and continue to take leaves from the Hopi? Should it lob the mangled corpses of 9/11 victims from the rooftops? Or perhaps it should just pay its respects and address nice things for a change?

It opted for the latter. For almost three weeks.

The American comedian, Gilbert Gottfried was probably the first person to publicly tackle 9/11 and prick the balloon of America’s mourning. At a televised event hosted by Hugh Hefner, Gottfried cracked a bad taste joke about wanting to catch a direct flight to Los Angeles but having to stop off at the Empire State Building first. “Too Soon!” shouted someone from the audience but it didn’t stop Billy Crystal from laughing hard enough to shoot a meteor of snot into his champagne.

Ever since, we have been looking at a new wave of vulgar but intelligent and knowing comedy. Is this the comedic backlash of 9/11? Partly. Such comedy was around long before the morning that the planes fell out of the sky. But conversely, there is a greater demand now for edgy and unnerving comedy in the mainstream. Seth McFarlane’s Family Guy is seen to be the post-9/11 counterpart to The Simpsons even though it existed in 1999. His American Dad! takes further advantage of this and presents a disturbingly politicised version of the traditional sitcom household complete with a torture chamber in the car-hold and homeland security fridge magnets in the kitchen.

On the other hand, the influx of jokes with sharp teeth has ironically stimulated a market for a brand of ultra-conservative comedy: My Family has enjoyed enduring popularity over the last three or four years as an antidote, welcomed by many, to asinine BBC3 edginess. Similarly, The Catherine Tate Show is so unprogressive in its laughter-track-and-catch-phrase approach to comedy that it feels like an artifact from the previous century. One can only assume that her popularity is the product of a confusing social climate. So perhaps the 9/11 backlash is one of polarised extremes: the ultra-shocking and the ultra-nostalgic.

Almost every comedian on the circuit will have referred to 9/11 at some point in his or her career by now. But why wouldn’t they? The news has always been the number one comedy resource in that it’s a thing that binds us all. It is not the job of the comedian, one might argue, to ‘manufacture’ jokes but to ‘channel’ them from a bubbling comedy stew existing all around us and turn this substance into something with comedic verbal poise: the joke exists already, the comedian merely voices it.

As a former comedy duo who are now performing solo stand-up, Richard Herring and Stewart Lee sometimes unknowingly cover similar ground in their solo stand-up sets. They both like to talk about how 9/11 should be renamed 11/9 in order to correspond to the British form of representing dates. Herring says: “Even if a sobbing woman said to me ‘my husband died in 9/11′ I’d say ‘no, he didn’t’.” Meanwhile, Stewart Lee shouts, “reclaim the calendar! We invented those dates!” and refers to the day as the Ninth of November. Such pedantic commentary superbly makes light of the West’s perception of 9/11 as an important and devastating event.

Perhaps the best thing to clamber out of the wreckage at Ground Zero is Larry David’s cinema-verite-style Curb Your Enthusiasm. Like Family Guy, the seeds of this naturalistic sitcom were sewn before 9/11 but didn’t really come to popular fruition until more recently. While not an inherently political piece (though David often strays into the political arena through his inability to navigate what he perceives to be an unjust labyrinth of political correctness), the show panders to post-9/11 ideals and strikes a cord with even the most casual viewer. There’s an episode (‘The Terrorist Attack’) in which Larry receives a discrete tip-off regarding a pending terrorist attack in downtown Los Angeles. Despite being told to keep this a secret he manages to spread enough mass panic and to stimulate an atmosphere of such paranoia that he’s basically done the imaginary terrorists’ jobs for them. It’s art reflecting reality, kids. It’s clever.

In his televised interview with Ricky Gervais, Larry David motions that his adlibbed situations on Curb Your Enthusiasm derive from his own ‘bad thoughts’. He explains that these bad thoughts normally go unexpressed out of a fear of social faux-pas. In Curb, however, he inverts this. It’s a like a second take on real-world events: fantastic moments of what Larry would have liked to have done in given situations, superego be damned. One might suppose that since 9/11, in our politicised cities, there is a greater number of bad thoughts going around: the censored aspect of ‘should I say this?’ or ‘is that too sensitive a joke now?’. With the attacks on New York and the resulting political shockwaves there came new taboos and the revival of older ones. Larry David, by voicing these things, has enjoyed major success. It’s an old idea of course, beautifully handled in the 90s by Peter Baynham – his ‘mad thought’ variation would usually result in strange nightmare sketches in which middleclass men are forced to wrestle pigs or to pimp disabled relatives. There is probably a seed of ‘bad thought / mad thought’ in the Hopi clowns’ celebrated line-crossing but in the current climate, such humour feels suddenly pertinent.

The political dimension, the ‘under-your-skin’ factor, the clever vulgarity and the monkeying around with topical taboos are all aspects of the post-9/11 comedy repertoire. These comedy tools have existed for a long time but now seem clearer and more relevant. So where should comedy go next? It’s important for comedy to continue to push the limits and to challenge givens, which is no mean feat in the wake of the alternative and post-alternative comedy waves of the 80s and 90s. The main thing it has to do however is to continue to channel the zeitgeist and to remain sensitive to the neuroses currently in vogue.

The Post-9/11 style may not be to everyone’s taste but it’s important for the disinterested viewer to remember one thing when watching Curb Your Enthusiasm, American Dad! or The Thick of It: no matter how uncomfortable it makes you, at least it’s not Catherine Tate.

Strange Larks

Listening to Dave Brubeck’s supremely cool Time Out always makes me think of Otto Lilenthal/Leonardo Da Vinci style flying machines. The second track on the record is called ‘Strange Meadow Lark’ so a flock of flying machines might not be such a terribly disconnected image.

As a result of this, I found a great website called FlyingMachines.org which I heartily recommend checking out if you’re into Victoriana or science or eccentricity or just weird stuff.

I’m sure it’s quite unnatural for humans to fly: whenever I come off an airplane I find that my lips are unimaginably chapped and every muscle tired as though my body, when evolving, simply didn’t take into account that it might infrequently find itself being projected through the sky at a squillion miles per second in a metal tube.

But then, what does ‘natural’ mean? Everything ultimately is a product of nature. From shrinkwrapped lettuces to complex MP3 players, everything began in the Earth and was converted into a usable object via whatever form of alchemy neccessary. I suppose when people are looking for ‘natural’ products, they’re looking for goods with as little of this alchemical process invested in them as possible.

Why do we suppose Lilenthal et al and the Wright Brothers became so obsessed with flying machines? Why is it so important that humans compete with birds? Assuming that there is a psychological, evolutionary or cultural truth to be found buried within any one piece of technology (a plug socket, a pair of shoes, an alar[u]m clock, an iPod), what does the human fixation upon flight tell us?

I’d argue that it’s down to the innate/gradually cultivated desire to escape. Escape! Escape! Escape the humdrum and the benal, the dangerous and the ill-suited in favour of the green grass of some other side.

I think I could get an article out of this for The Escapologist perhaps also with a nod toward the Bird Men of Easter Island. Trouble is, I already have two items plus an editorial in this magazine and I don’t want it to be too Wringham-heavy so if anyone else is interested enough in this area of speculation, I’d be very willing to let them/you take a crack at it.

Pustule Cafe

There is a little cafe in the arse end of Hyndland that I pass on occasion, usually when making a trip to the supermarket. It looks nice enough with its indoor plants and comfortable-looking patio area but the name of the cafe and the typeface in which the name is spelled out above the door reveals that it is being run by and frequented by morons.

For ages I could only imagine that the place was called the “Pustule Cafe”. The ‘brush script’ typeface makes the name of the cafe very difficult to read.

Today I realised that it is actually called “Pasta le Cafe”. To be honest, I think I preferred the pustule variation. The proprietors have clearly tried to convey a continental flavour through the name of their cafe but not done a very good job of it.

Whenever something like this happens, I wonder how it actually gets from the idea stage to being actualised. Everyone they run the idea by – including the sign maker who must surely have some basic knowledge of typefaces, language and grammar and the executives of some kind of professional funding body – must say “Oh, that’s super. There’s no way that’s a bad idea.”

On Superficiality

My first exposure to this year’s Big Brother televisual extravaganza occurred tonight: entirely by accident on the nineteenth day of the run. Is it just me or has there been far less media chatter about BB events this summer compared to those of previous years? Admittedly, I’ve not been in the vicinity of much tabloid press of late so it’s entirely possible that my egocentric world has missed out on it due to simple circumstance. (I did, however, stumble across a massive and notably intrusive ‘eye’ poster after staggering out of a Merchant City bar a couple of weeks back. Deciding that a semiotics-based blog entry might be inspired by its peculiar wordlessness, I took the photo you can see on the right).

An odd-looking blonde girl looked vacantly through me from her bubble world. She was sitting in a radically blinged-up incarnation of the perennially regenerating diary room chair, which made me feel as though I was Captain Kirk on the bridge of the Enterprise and I was looking through the viewscreen at some allegorical alien princess, third daughter of Emperor Boobjob of the Planet Peroxide IX.

The alien princess was dishing the dirt on one of her housemates. She doesn’t like some guy or other because of his being overly “superficial”.

Putting aside the fact that this was probably a textbook reification of a parable involving a noir-tinted coffee pot and a similarly afflicted kettle, what is wrong precisely with being superficial?

Superficiality is used increasingly often as a derogatory adjective isn’t it? A put-down. A garden variety criticism. “He’s just so superficial,” they say, “so 2D”. To be honest, I’d like to spend a little more time with some interestingly superficial people: people without too many secrets or complicated desires. Everybody’s gotta be someone, say something interesting, market themselves as having “layers”, as having so many hidden sides that elevate themselves above the simple skill of ‘being’ that everyone else has. What’s wrong with just being an aesthetic?

Everysoften, I am taken off guard by someone I have known for a long time. My mother, my father, old friends. They decide to do things entirely out of keeping with what I had always perceived to be their character yet they don’t seem to make a big deal out of it. In these situations, one realises that one can live with an individual for such a long degree of time and never really know them. I mean, how easy is it to know everything about a person? How can one ever believe that one has found one’s “soulmate”? Surely it’s easier to achieve this in the case of Mr. or Ms. Superficial. Why can’t we just ‘be’ together instead of spending years figuring each other’s guts out only to realise too late in the game that we don’t like what we find in there.

I like superficial people. I do. Their personalities are not filled with labyrinthine tracts so difficult to navigate and impossible to ever really understand. Instead, they are humble aesthetics who can provide comfortable familiarity and honest company without the conceited fictions that we attribute to “personalities”. Whatever one of those might be.

Charity Muggers

Everyone hates charity muggers it seems. Richard Herring told one to “fuck off” this week and The Guardian reports that the entire enterprise may soon be illegalised.

I have trouble deciding where I stand on this. I don’t want to jump on the bandwagon of hating them like everyone else seems to. Yes, they’re a pain in the ass with their intrusive tactics but they’re probably doing good in the long run and the chuggers themselves are probably in it for morally commendable reasons. Moreover, perhaps we deserve to be antagonised and deserve to feel guilty about our lack of charity. A Freudian might argue that these guys are are probably even doing us a service: by catharticly making us aware of our guilt, it no longer festers cancerously in the back of our minds or comes out in other more destructive ways.

The ethics of it all is quite confusing. There are so many urban legends about how much commission the chuggers themselves receive and concerning how long it takes for any of your donated money to filter through to the people you’re actually supposed to be helping. et cetera. But I suspect these ‘facts’ are just ways of people tangling with their liberal rich person’s guilt.

There’s also the argument that it’s ineffective and that TV campaigns and the likes are better strategies. But (a) TV campaigns are expensive and exclude smaller charities, (b) TV campaigns are also quite morally dubious with their images of fly-covered, skeletal children in the most extreme of third-world environments and (c) if chuggery was so ineffcetive, they wouldn’t do it. I guess the TV campaign alternative, when done right, is able to stimulate a culture of positioning charity as ‘the done thing’, which is undeniably good.

I must admit, however, to finding them extremely pushy and on occasion unpleasant. I am already a member of Amnesty International and Friends of the Earth and I consider myself a morally healthy individual. I recycle. I vote Green. I buy Fair Trade and frequent small shops above large supermarkets despite being on a minuscule income. I’m vegetarian! So why should I be made to feel guilty by the chuggers? It quite often gets to the point where I have to say “I’m not signing up, so fuck off”, which seems crazy considering we’re both on the same side.

So what do people think of chuggers? Do people have a right to get militant and confrontational when it comes to saving the world?

Eating Irons

When exactly did fork manufacturers decide to stop producing sharp forks? Forgive me if I sound like a rubbish observational comedian, but everywhere I go I encounter forks with squared-off prongs.

And I don’t even eat meat. I’ll be trying to spike soft olives out of their briney jar only to have them scoot out from beneath the dull prongs of these inferior eating irons and onto the dusty, hairy, toenail-clippingsy floor.

It’s not good enough and will surely result in Kilroy popping off about the EU legislation that presumably caused this.

Film Remakes

To Glasgow’s UGC hellaplex last night to see ginger Ron Howard’s reification of The Da Vinci Code. It has become a horrible cliche to moan about how lacking in substance this film/novel may or may not be. It’s a crime bestseller, no? A trifle. A yellowback. It should make an OK movie in terms of moving wallpaper. So on entertaining my first exposure to the Dan Brown franchise last night, I was determined to enjoy Da Vinci so that I might not join the ranks of morons slagging off the same harmless thing.

Unfortunately the movie was fairly bad. I must side with the miserable grumpholes who dislike it. The way in which Ian McKellen’s character interprets Da Vinci’s The Last Supper painting is moronic to a Face On Mars extreme and the guy who plays the monk-assassin should be shot at dawn.

But enough of this tot. It is the trailers preceding last night’s movie that I would prefer to discuss.

Now, while everyone knows that Hollywood is now an industry specialising in remaking old films, I must admit to finding it an unlikely possibility that every single mainstream film put out this summer is going to be a remake. Out of the seven or eight trailers I saw last night there was only one film which didn’t seem to be a remake – the new Adam Sandler vehicle: Click. And even that seems to be derivative of Pleasentville and Bruce Almighty and (according to the fora at IMDB) episodes of The Jetsons and Goosebumps.

(On the topic of Click, doesn’t the title suggest a film about a computer mouse rather than a TV remote? Shouldn’t it really be called “The Switcher” or “Knobs” or something? How about “Press the Red Button Now”? I also hate how Christopher Walken has allowed himself to be transformed into a grotesque parody of Christopher Lloyd.)

Casino Royale. Poseidon. Superman Returns. X Men 3. Mission Impossible 3. Omen 666. et cetera.

The fact that so many movies now are remakes, sequels or rip-offs of something else is interesting. It’s as though the film industry has become (or rather has always been) an “advancing parallel”. Where it once made stories inspired by real world events (even science fiction has some real world basis), movies now ARE the real world (or rather a sizable chunk of it in the ‘real’ world of those working in the industry) and so the natural thing for movies to do now is to turn to self reference in one way or another.

Movies refer to the world and in a world of movies all it can refer to are movies. In the case of an integral, interesting film in this reality, a film-about-films would be produced: some kind of metacommentary upon other films. But most of the time Hollywood will just opt for the remake, sequel or ripoff.

I also dislike how a film based upon a novel, comic book or TV Series is considered more original than a remake and in fact exists at all. Shouldn’t a movie be a movie for a reason? Shouldn’t a movie result from a movie script rather than a novel? It implies that (a) the movie is the highest form of art and that novels or comics are just raw material that the movie industry might take to mining and (b) an idea can exist an any form and not be specifically tailored for a given menium.

For example, Pleasentville is necesarily a movie and not a book. As is The Matrix. Jeff Noon’s Falling Out of Cars is a necessarily a novel and not an ice cream sundae. Boo to movie adaptations. Paul Auster, for example, is an author: not a franchise waiting to graduate to movie status.

The best two movie adaptations I can think of are Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation and Michael Winterbottom’s A Cock and Bull Story. The former is about the adaptation process and how it fails. The latter is a a filmed counterpart to a book rather than an adaptation, translating ideas to the screen and working with the book rather than mapping haphazardly selected episode of plot onto a screenplay format.

The Liar

If one conducts a Google search for “The Liar”, the first link in the results list is to Tony Blair’s official biography at number10.gov.uk.

How does that happen? Has someone monkeyed around with the site’s metadata? Or is someone at Google being a naughty anarchist?

In case you’re wondering what prompted this discovery, I was looking for mentions of the Stephen Fry novel.

Fortune Tellers

Heraclitus would have loved Glasgow’s Merchant City. It is in a constant state of flux – seldom can one be in this district during daylight hours without having to listen to a road drill or see a doll’s-house cross section of a building such as this one. I’m not sure why I took this photograph but I must have wanted it quite badly as I had to wait for about six construction vehicles to pass before I could get a decent shot.

On my way home, I was stopped by a young Sikh-looking man. He didn’t seem to speak much English and instead presented a laminated card. My racist brain told me to keep on walking as he was probably after a portion my precious dosh but he wore an impeccably sharp suit and so I discounted this idea and stopped to read his card.

A beggar he was not, but rather – his card announced – some sort of ‘swami’ capable of reading fortunes. This didn’t really make sense to me as ‘swami’, as far as I know, is a Hindu title and this guy seemed to be a Sikh.

If I had money I’d have probably humoured the guy, mainly to see how he could tell me my fortune without the gift of English language. But alas, I was coinless so I told him no thank you and continued on my way. “You are a very lucky man”, he said as I left.

This struck me as a rather nice thing to say considering I’d declined his offer. But then I couldn’t help wondering if “You are a very lucky man” might be some kind of curse or insult akin to the quasi-Chinese “May you live in Interesting Times.”

Following closely behind the young guy was an elderly Sikh man wearing a similarly amazing suit and with the biggest and most handsome turban I think I have ever seen.

The old guy produces a laminated card in the exact same fashion as his colleague had done, despite the fact that he must surely have seen me decline the offer already. “No thank you,” I said smiling and again I was told that I am “a very lucky man”. When he said this, the old Sikh rubbed the bridge of his nose from top to bottom. I am aware that I have a rather ‘defined’ nose: consequently I cannot help wondering whether my ‘luck’ has something to do with my being gifted in the conk department.

A quick google search for the phrase “You are a very lucky man” results in similar anecdotes but in these, the ‘Swami’ starts off with the phrase as a way of getting the traveller’s attention (and not, conversely, as a parting note). Perhaps the guys I spoke to just got their patter muddled up, much as they may have done with the term ‘Swami’.

If anyone actully knows what the phrase “You are a very lucky man” might mean coming from such people, please do not leave me curious.

In other news, points out that my recent Idler article has drummed up some stimulating conversation on the magazine’s accompanying discussion forum. It all looks remarkably critical, which of course I find rather thrilling.

Suitably Grotesque

My copy of the latest Idler arrived yesterday. I’m chuffed to see how suitably and marvelously grotesque is the artwork accompanying my article.

To be honest, I was surprised that they went to the effort of having so much art done for it. There are three full-page illustrations involved; each one depicting a person shedding their professional veneers in the forms of rubbery, besuited and soulless skins.

I don’t know the artist (B. P. Berry) but he or she has done a super job. Three cheers for B. P.!

In other news, I watched Jim Jarmusch’s fairly super Ghost Dog this morning. The soundtrack by RZA is superb and there is some wonderfully moving and funny stuff in it. I hate it when webloggers pretend to be film critics and I vow not to do it too often, but sometimes you enjoy a film so much, you just want to talk about it and Ghost Dog for me was one of those.

Perhaps my favourite motif is Ghost Dog’s relationship with a Haitian ice cream salesman. The ice cream man speaks French while Ghost Dog speaks only American English so neither of them understand a word the other is saying. It makes you wonder how they became friends in the first plce and why they both persist in this relationship. It’s not even as though they are just casual acquaintances either: both describes the other as his best friend.

Perhaps the film is telling us that conversation isn’t all it cracked up to be and the really important element in friendship is being together and keeping good company. Ghost Dog and Ice Cream guy just play chess and hang out together and show each other amazing things (including a neighbour who is slowly building a large wooden boat on the roof of his New Jersey apartment building despite being miles away from the water or even the ground – he’s clearly a modern day Noah).

Another excellent motif is the constant presence of cartoons. The smalltime mobsters Ghost Dog is involved with are forever watching Felix the Cat and Bettie Boop with expressions of quite serious concentration on their faces. Strangely, one of the cartoons they watch is The Itchy and Scratchy Show: a fact which has some serious ramifications in terms of intertextuality. Ghost Dog also wears white gloves, which kinda make him resemble and old-style Warner Bros or Disney cartoon a la Micky Mouse and he can be repeatedly shot and theoretically dismembered (much like a cartoon) due to his spiritual Samurai abilities.

The one thing that annoyed me slightly about Ghost Dog was the use of the Noble Savage stock character. I mean Ghost Dog is much more than that of course, but the fact that he’s an educated and gentle guy, encouraging kids to read books while simultaneously being a wild and casual murderer is a little annoying and reminds one of the horribly racist P. T. Barnum sideshow character, What is it?. I never had Jim Jarmusch pegged as a guilty liberal but I guess 9/11 has a lot to answer for in terms of New York film making.

Blah Blah Blah. Half-baked critique over and out.

Oh, Metatelly

Having watched every video I own to a grim and fuzzy death, I’ve begun scraping the barrel and watching what can only be described as meta-telly: the telly about the telly that you love so much, mainly in the forms of DVD extra features.

Most of it is rubbish, isn’t it? Pure bosh. Uninspiring and resulting only in downtime and the bursting of so many bubbles.

“Never meet your heroes, they only let you down”, sing The Bluetones, “I can see the cracks in yourmakeup the closer you are.” I’ve never put too much stock in that idea: I’ve met several of my “heroes” professionally, casually and as a stalking fanatic, and they’ve usually been nice and worldly dudes. But in metatelly world, it’s easy to discover that many of the people involved in the creative processes of making your favourite shows or movies are clueless boobs.

Watching the documentaries attached to American Dad! this morning, one of the voice artists tells me that “American Dad is just on another level. It can go anywhere. Just anywhere!”

No it can’t. And doesn’t. Family Guy might be able to ‘go anywhere’ with its use of non-sequitur but American Dad! doesn’t do any of that stuff and exists in a highly rigid format which can’t change very much. The characters occupy a unique Post-9/11 world of paranoia and racism and overtly conservative values. It can’t and doesn’t go ‘anywhere’ and that’s precisely why it’s great. It does what it does very well and doesn’t worry about ‘going anywhere’ like some homogenised general ‘TV show’*. Ya gink.

(*There’s a thought: what if, mass conformity and fear of trying new stuff eventually results in one single TV show called “Tv Show” or “The Broadcast”? Hands off it, Mr. Jeff Noon, that’s mine!”)

On a similar note, I remember reading a Guardian interview with Richard Kelly about his creating Donnie Darko. He said that the ‘philosophy of time travel’ story didn’t come about until the last minute and that his writing the book of the same name (or rather the manuscript since it was never actually published and Wikipedia actually describes it as fictional) was what made the film what it was. But without the time travel dimension, what the hell is Donnie Darko? Probably just some rubbish film about a kid with schizophrenia.

It makes you wonder whether the things that are great and the things that you love are only great and lovable by pure accident. Did Seth McFarlane actually set out to write a brilliant satire of American life or did he just want to do a cartoon with a talking fish in it?

Does it even matter? I once met Dr. Alan Rauch who told me that he was fascinated with bobbleheads. Now why the fresh dogturd would a published, respected academic have an interest in these ephemeral trend-inspired pieces of tat? Well, because they present a cultural archaeology. Why don’t they sell many ‘Jetsons’ bobbleheads today but they did in the 1970s? Et Cetera. Each bobblehead is semiotic and intrinsically connected to the culture it was born in.

So even if a show is brainless or only great due to accidental circumstances, it is irrevocably relevant to the ‘now’ in which it came from.

But that’s a digression. The moral of this diary entry is to GO OUTSIDE instead of watching meta-telly. Or at least invite your friends over and tell them to bring as many videos as humanly possible.

Blogging Adventure

After my entry and our discussion the other day on what makes a good blog, I’ve decided that the key is to take a Sartrian approach to things. This’ll allow for personal anecdote, gonzo journalism and funny stuff.

Sartre On Adventure:

“‘What sort of adventures?” I asked him, astonished. ‘All sorts, Monsieur. Getting on the wrong train. Stopping in an unknown city. Losing your briefcase, being arrested by mistake, spending the night in prison. Monsieur, I believe the word adventure could be defined: an events out of ordinary without being necessarily extraordinary.'”
–Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea (1964)

Productive Procrastination

I’ve hardly moved from my position at the computer all day in the hope that I might finish my last ever university assignment due in on Friday. Once it is handed in, I will be Robert G. Wringham BSc MSc and (most importantly) a free man. Forever and ever. Well, actually there is still a dissertation left to write but the subject matter actually interests me and I don’t think writing it will be any shape of chore.

Despite my sitting here for something like five hours now, I’ve written little more than two paragraphs on the project. I keep procrastinating from writing it on the grounds that it’s just such a boring load of jiff. Forcing myself to think any more than I have to about WebDewey is like a sort-of self inflicted intellectual rape.

But in this quagmire of procrastination, I’ve found myself being quite productive in other areas. I fired off an email to Tom Hodgkinson, the editor of The Idler about my writing a regular feature for him. Astoundingly enough, he seemed quite sold on the idea and also remembered to send me a free copy of the new issue and a big pile of money for my last piece. Which was nice.

Incidentally, my last piece made the new cover – it’s the “Death to Professionalism” bit at the bottom, see? The cover on Amazon is slightly different though and doesn’t include me, so we’ll see what it really looks like when it gets here. The article is published in under my real birth name, I think, so if anyone wants to know what it might have been before I changed it in favour of a pseudonym a whapping five months ago, you might want to buy this issue. It has Michael Palin and Adam Buxton and some other people writing for it too, but you should buy it mainly for me.

I also managed to do a pile of admin, which was literally this high, emailed a bunch of people I’ve not spoken to in about two years, played six games of Pacman and killed literally two wasps.