The Occasional Papers – Page 22 – Robert Wringham // Writer-Comedian

Good Blogs

What, in your opinion, dear reader, makes a good blog? Bloggery is such a freewheeling medium, it’s difficult to say, isn’t it? This blog, The Occasional Papers hasn’t really come into its own yet, mainly because I’ve been chimping around with the sorts of entry I write in it. I think I used to want to be Richard Herring and used my old blog to report comically upon the stacks of daily ennui and neurotic detritus that so plague the urban layabout. These days, however, I think the hight of blog perfection has been reached by Momus who uses his blog as a mixing tray for ideas and as a sort of well-informed online gonzo journalism.

Assuming that the number of comments a LiveJournal entry receives is a fair indicator of an entry’s ‘goodness’, I find that the best sorts of entry are the ones that relate to an issue that the majority of the blog’s readers know a bit about already. Trouble is: I hate writing about the news. I’m not in politics and anything I have to say about the news is bound to be a half-baked load of claptrap. If only some other bloggers realised that then the blogosophere could be a better, less littered cyberplace.

I try to write these days about art (visual, televisual, literary, musical, comedic) and the train of thoughts I experience as a result of it. To me, this is what an integral, considered blog should be like. But are other people interested in this? I met Stewart Lee recently who advised me not to go into standup comedy with an agenda (such as to be subversive) but just to talk about what interests me and let the ‘agenda’ be a byproduct. I’m not sure how I feel about this: if a comedian just wanted to talk about things of interest to him, why would he do it on a stage in front of thirty to three thousand people? If I wanted to write a diary of personal memoranda or things that interest me exclusively, then I wouldn’t publish it online but instead write it in one of my many notebooks. If it’s not going to entertain or interest other people then it shouldn’t be on the web.

I recall Dickon Edwards writing on a few occasions about what he thinks makes a good blog (or ‘diary’ in his case). He said that entries are best received when short and frequent. I think he’s probably right. The problem is though, that the reason they are so successful is that people (I strongly suspect) often treat their friends’ blogs like pieces of online daily admin: little chores that they have to get though, akin to checking email or their ebay stock. I know that I’m guilty of this. But there are blogs that I really enjoy (namely the aforementioned journals of Momus, Dickon and Herring and perhaps those of and ) that I actually like to savour and read properly. I’d like my to be like that for other people. Why shouldn’t a blog be an entity in its own right rather than just a piece of metacritical detritus floating around the web, akin to all those bits of debris in orbit around the planet.

Lots of people use their blogs to critique or respond to what a proper critic (in a newspaper/magazine/popular blog) has said about a TV show/film/album/gig. I don’t realy understand the motivation for doing this. The person being written about will never read the opinions recorded here (unless they play the google-my-own-name game and the blog is popular enough or covered with enough metadata to be picked up by Google). So why not write to the critic in question (they are usually quite accessible) or else take part in a discussion on Comment is Free? I realise as I write these words that I have bitched about a columnist in these electronic pages in the past. I guess there is a certain ‘psychological escape valve’ aspect to blogging: our blogs can serve as safe and soudproofed padded cells despite their being on a huge electronic stage for all to see. I wonder what we did to satisfy our desires for a soapbox before we had our webblogs? And what do the vast numbers of the blogless do?

Perhaps a good blog simply depends upon who’s writing it and what they do. Herring and Momus are constantly travelling and attend interesting events frequently enough to always have something interesting to report upon.

So, what makes a good blog? Why do you genuinely enjoy reading some of the blogs in your livejournal friends list and skip past others? What makes you leave a comment?

Loft Living

My friend, Stuart and I used to live in a remarkably average flat in Glasgow’s remarkably average Waverley Gate complex. I think we were initially attracted to it because it had a greater number of modern conveniences than many of the other flats we had seen around that time and because of the large number of friendly Indian families living in the same block, filling the halls daily with culinary smells both homeley and exotic.

After a while, however, we began to find this white-walled, electrically enhanced and overly functional modernist enclave a little too sterile and impersonal for our tastes. Plus, our upstairs neighbour turned out to be annoying twat, earning himself the Nabokovian pseudonym of ‘Mr. Honourable Upstairs’ due to his being a besuited office boy by day and noisy party fiend by night who would keep us awake by playing his 90s nightclub ‘classics’ and playing on his XBox with a hundred yobbish friends in the microscopic hours. When we discovered on top of all this that every single flat in the complex had the exact same interior, we decided to look for somewhere else. This was battery living.

We began to look for a place to live with a little more character, somewhere a little eccentric and more interesting. When we found that an attic had become available in an old Hyndland townhouse and that it was actually a slightly lower rent than we’d been paying in Waverley Gate, we snapped it up. Our neighbours now would be bearded academics and the sterile walls would be replaced by creaking pine panels and friendly single-pane skylights.

I had half-fancied living in a loft ever since reading Jerome K. Jerome’s On furnished apartments in which he writes:

“A good many great men have lived in attics and some have died there. Attics, says the dictionary, are “places where lumber is stored,” and the world has used them to store a good deal of its lumber in at one time or another. Its preachers and painters and poets, its deep-browed men who will find out things, its fire-eyed men who will tell truths that no one wants to hear–these are the lumber that the world hides away in its attics. Haydn grew up in an attic and Chatterton starved in one. Addison and Goldsmith wrote in garrets. Faraday and De Quincey knew them well. Dr. Johnson camped cheerfully in them, sleeping soundly–too soundly sometimes–upon their trundle-beds, like the sturdy old soldier of fortune that he was, inured to hardship and all careless of himself. Dickens spent his youth among them, Morland his old age–alas! a drunken, premature old age. Hans Andersen, the fairy king, dreamed his sweet fancies beneath their sloping roofs. Poor, wayward-hearted Collins leaned his head upon their crazy tables; priggish Benjamin Franklin; Savage, the wrong-headed, much troubled when he could afford any softer bed than a doorstep; young Bloomfield, “Bobby” Burns, Hogarth, Watts the engineer–the roll is endless. Ever since the habitations of men were reared two stories high has the garret been the nursery of genius. […] Huddle them up in your lumber-rooms, oh, world! Shut them fast in and turn the key of poverty upon them. Weld close the bars, and let them fret their hero lives away within the narrow cage. Leave them there to starve, and rot, and die. Laugh at the frenzied beatings of their hands against the door. Roll onward in your dust and noise and pass them by, forgotten.”

At last we could live the Bohemian dream! Living in an attic, we would clunk away on old typewriters while listening to my old jazz records on a crackly gramaphone and taking sweet tokes from a hookah. The Glasgow tour bus could stop here to demonstrate what a cliched West End ne’er dowell looks like.

But now I have discovered the problems with living in such a place. Jerome admits that he would not like to live in a loft due to there being too many steps and “too many facilities for bumping your head”. Both of these things I have found to be true and more.

Most every time I turn on a tap (a cold tap, mind you, for the hot water does not rise this high and must be manufactured using an expensive water heater) the flow explodes out in a combination of water and air, previously trapped in the pipes. The force of this escaping air is so stong that it turns much of the water into a fine and floating spray. It’s one way of getting washed first thing in the morning, I suppose. I’m assured that there’s nothing to be done about this problem: rather than being a fault in the pipework, it is a result of living at such a high altitude and with a system of plumbing not designed to bring water all the way up to the house’s lumber room.

And then there’s the wasps. There must be a nest in one of the rafters our beneath one of the roof tiles outside of the bathroom window. There have been three intrusions so far of gigantic, navally turgid wasps: big enough to have been written into reality by Jonathan Swift. I don’t like killing things (this being the driving force of my vegetarianism) but the thought of getting close enough to these monstrous things in order to trap and release them leaves me far too squeemish for words.

Because our wacky new home occupies what is possibly the highest point in Hyndland it does not have the same protection from the wind as the lower flats do from their neighbours on the same plane. So by night we listen to the wind howling around us and turning the walls into polar twins of the hotplate. It doesn’t matter how stoked the fire is (yes, we have a coal fire rather than any such thing as central heating), the place – through its sticking out into the windy sky and its woeful lack of insulation – will remain in one helluva chill.

But contentment is the enemy of invention, as Lucifer Davies says, so it is my hope that living in this cold, wasp-infested deathtrap will give rise to that first novel.

I should probably mention that I’m grumbling for the sake of it. There are many wonderful things to be said about our lofty dwelling, but those will have to wait for another Occasional Paper.

Beltane Festival

To Edinburgh’s Calton Hill last night to enjoy the Beltane Fire Festival. It was fucking great.

I remember thinking that the music at last year’s Glastonbury Festival was only a secondary reinforcer for our having such an awesome time (after all, I was dancing and singing along to the satan’s-cock-sucking likes of Coldplay and Athlete and Basement Jaxx) and that the coolest thing about it was that so many thousands of people from a kajillion walks of life were all getting along and pulsing as one squillion-headed entity. The same was undoubtedly true of the Beltane event last night. For this reason, I can see myself wanting to get an annual festival fix.

Not just for that reason you understand. There are a whole bunch of wonderful sensations associated with this sort of thing: the feeling of moist grass on bare feet; the turgid, excitable feeling of too much expensive coffee, booze and fatty food; the unique strangeness of holding hands with people you’ve never met before; the smell of smoke from a hundred burning torches; and the don’t-touch-the-fucking-seat-don’t-touch-the-fucking-seat internal mantra of using the chemical shitters.

I think I’d like to get a bit more involved if I’m around for this next year. The fact that my buddies and I weren’t painted blue, didn’t have a flaming torch between us and kept our penises and vaginas inside our pants left us as something of an out-group.

After being thrown out of the fest (this time by a light drizzle rather than confusing men with megaphones), we headed out in the car to watch the sun rise in true pagan fashion before repairing to our place to watch apparently inaccurate The Wicker Man.

I’m quite tired.

(‘Blue Man’ and ‘May Queen’ pics poached from Knoxman).

Interview Technique

I once had a rather odd dream in which there was a reforming of Cluub Zarathustra: a comedy cabaret set up by Simon Munnery and Stewart Lee circa 1993. In the dream I was allowed into the launch event as a journo and given the job of capturing a few interviews for some zine or other.

For some reason, the version of Simon Munnery I’d dreamed up seemed to develop a genuine disliking of me: whether it was specifically me to whom he objected or to my status as a journalist, I’m not sure but he didn’t seem to have much time for me at all.

This was probably inspired by an occasion in which I threw him a friendly heckle at one of his slower gigs in The Stand at Edinburgh, but it seemed to catch him off-guard and throw him off his rhythm entirely. I remember feeling terrible about this. So this must have been his revenge: he was prowling my dreams like a Freddy Krueger, but instead of murderising me with his knife fingers, he just forced me to endure some uncomfortable social faux-pas.

I remembered this dream yesterday as made my way to London’s Crystal Palace district to interview Stewart Lee before his spot at Josie Long’s Sunday Night Adventure Club. What if the same thing happened? I love Stewart Lee. He’s my favourite comedian who isn’t dead. Bizarrely, I’d just bought the DVD of his Jerry Springer – The Opera as research and the booklet that accompanied the DVD included an article written by Stew called “Never Meet Your Heroes”. I was anxious to say the least.

Actually, the interview went OK and I was happy to discover that Stew is a friendly and charming bloke with enough time for idiots like me. You should be able to read the interview in an upcoming issue of The Mind’s Construction.

But throughout the interview, I was regretting my status as a journo. I had to be the press guy, scribbling away on a pad and he had to be the talent, giving as many interesting and publishable answers as possible. In reality, I wanted to say “Stew! I’m a comedian too! I’ve loved your standup since I was twelve. You’re my hero. Show me how to be like you!”

I’m also not 100% happy with my interview technique. The thing about interviews is that you have to learn to be uber-reflexive. I’d planned a list of questions in advance, which I hoped was quite well constructed and not just a rubbish stream of consciousness. But when the answer given to you for Question 1 isn’t quite what you had in mind, Question 2 – in spite of all its relevance originally – now seems like a boring non-sequitor, void of any real significance. It’s difficult to be so reflexive when it’s not a proper two-way conversation and one of the parties is writing everything down. I don’t think my interview had the proper ecological validity I was hoping for due to this. With an email interview, it’s all asynchronous so you can go away and construct a clever next question with all the time in the world.

So I’m not sure I want to be a journo anymore. I’ll stick to theory-writing and librarianship and saying funny things with my mouth. I’m good at those things. Sort of.

Incidentally, the gig itself was pretty good. Cafe ABC is really rather cool and Josie Long has created an excellent little enclave for non-confrontational and interesting stand-up comedy.

Dalek House

Down in London this weekend, I am staying in a house filled with Daleks. Depending on one’s fondness for kitch, this Walthamstow terrace is a fine example of the strangely naff meeting the strangely cool. There is even a lifesized Dalek standing in the corner of the living room. Whatever one’s opinion of foaming-at-the-mouth fandom, one cannot deny that this was the perfect environment in which to enjoy the new episode of Dr. Who airing this evening.

While travelling down on the train, I was sat next to a very interesting South African guy. We mostly talked about alternative energy resources (he being employed in said industry and I having a hippy interest in that sort of thing).

He asked me what I’d got planned in London. “Interviewing some people for a magazine,” I said, “but mostly I’ll end up just watching my friend’s Doctor Who DVDs”.

“What’s Doctor Who?” he asked. He seemed baffled by the titular syntax.

I never really stopped to consider how bizarre an entity this television show actually is. It proved tricky to convey Dr. Who in a casual manner to a stranger who’d never experienced it. I explained the fuzzy nostalgia that the nation may or may not have for the show and the basic premise that its about a guy who travels through time and space in a telephone box, solving mysteries, exploring the universe and defeating alien foes.

The man on the train just about accepted this notion, but then I tacked onto the end “Oh, and he always dies after a few years and sort of… um… regenerates and everyone gets all excited about what the new Doctor will be like. It’s kinda like when you get a new Pope”. Perhaps understandably, the man on the train went back to reading his book.

Sensory Overloads

People on TV like to relax by reading books and listening to music simultaneously. I saw Columbo doing it the other day as well as one of the characters on Arrested Development. Captain Picard is a sucker for it too. He likes nothing more than to chill out with a cup of the old chai while listening to Beethoven and reading a spot of Melville (which is actually a three-way consumption session!).

How the hell do they do that? Isn’t reading and listening to music at the same time something of a sensory overload? On the occasions I’ve tried to consume words and sounds simultaneously, it has felt oddly gluttonous like drinking two types of booze from the same double-beer hat.

Perhaps this is acceptable behaviour for a real culture vulture, but to me (to mix our metaphors now) is is like a cultural spitroast with every major orifice stuffed to bursting point with the throbbing, spunking cocks of music and literature (and maybe film and food as well, if you’re so inclined, you filthy whores). But for me it’s just too much and leaves me rather sore.

I do try. I have this idea that reading Thomas Pynchon while Art Tatum provides the phonics would be the very hithe of sophistication. All of the boring stuff – the self-consciousness and the drag of what my new chums Taylor and Cohen used to call paramount reality – would trickle away. I’d become a piece of still life: “Man on Couch”. But alas I simply cannot adopt this role. I find that the music interferes with my following of the book. Even if I’m just reading a plot-driven ‘yellowback’, I can’t concentrate with the acoustic winds rushing around me. Moreover, how is one supposed to appreciate any piece of music if you’re simultaneously engaged in a printed plot?

Perhaps people who do this are following an observed social script: taking cues from Captain Picard and his phosphorescent fellows. But it’s a script I cannot follow.

Are there really people who can deal with this? Are there any ‘spitroasters’ among this weblog’s readership? There probably are if the “currently listening to…” fields of my friends’ blog entries are truthful.

If so, do you enjoy both the music and the literature as separate things simultaneously (Michael Jackson + Stephen King) or do the two things sort of merge into a third entity or one synchronous experience (JacksonKing)?

I walked around the city centre this morning trying to find a cafe that didn’t play music, or at least one where the music was not so intrusive that I wouldn’t be able to read (currently reading the strangely plotless but wonderfully written Swing Hammer Swing! by Jeff Torrington). I ended up in a Weatherspoons pub: loath as I was to give custom to an invasive chain outlet, the combination of 68p cups of good coffee and only the quiet rumble of lunchtime pub chat as a soundtrack worked very well for me.

On a similar line of thinking, I’ve dramatically gone off using my MP3 player. At first, the novelty of walking around the streets and listening to music at the same time (making a sort of personal music video by looking at the sad faces on the tube one-by-one while listening to something with ‘zipedy doo-dah’ irony) but after a while I just got sick of the sensory overload of trying to listen to the music while looking at interesting things (advertising posters, people, shop window arrangements, rooftop architecture) in the city. Perhaps other people just don’t look at these things or don’t find them as interesting as I do. What of the naturally occurring music of the tube or the bus or the street?

I think sensory deprivation will be a cultural paradigm shift: instead of greedilly shoveling every aspect of culture down their various maws, people will instead pay to sit in darkened boxes with occasional lights or sounds or snatches of music or film clips projected into it. It’ll be called a ‘dark tank’. What the hell, just call it a ‘Wringham tank’ after me. But it’ll happen. You’ll see.

Pamela So

To the Collins Gallery to see Pamela So’s multimedia installation, ‘The Collector’s Landscape’. It’s a combination of new and found pieces, the found pieces being photographs taken by her mother and father and personal affects of each.

Sepia-tinted figures from the Chinese garden scenes of her father’s photographs have been relocated digitally into scenes of the Botanic Gardens and the gardens of stately homes around Glasgow. Other parts of the installation were created using traditional Chinese paper crafts while others were made using new video techniques. The result is intended to be a clash-of-cultures affair and a portrait of the artist’s mixed heritage. As one kid wrote in the guest book: “It is good”.

While there, I asked whether or not I could take a photograph or two for my blog. “Your blog?” asked the chick on the desk. “Yeah, is that okay?” “Sure. I’m just doing mine now,” said she.

Everyone in the art world is a blogger it seems. Perhaps this is due to a neurotic or at least self-fascinated streak shared by arty people (Robert Wringham no doubt included) or at least the idea that all art is in one way or another autobiography. I mused over this idea, as we both stood in what was essentially one massive self portrait.

Tony Hancock

Sidestepping the fact that the above picture of Tony Hancock looks a little bit like my friend Jonhston (not so much in that Hancock physically resembles Johnston but rather that it captures some essential secret about him like a picture of his soul taken with a psychic instamatic), I’d like to talk for a second or two about Hancock’s Half Hour and how the format of it was so freakin’ genius that it almost hurts that there’s nothing along these lines on TV at the moment.

My TV critic friend, Alex, gave me a book of Hancock radio and TV scripts for a birthday present. I’ve been putting off reading it because (a) reading scripts when you’re not a TV executive is sad and shit and (b) I vowed to stop taking Alex’s recommendations after he gave a thumbs up in his column for the Spielberg’s dispicable mincing of War of the Worlds.

But reading them yesterday (and watching a HHH DVD I subsequently went out and bought) made me realise how incredible a series this was for myriad reasons:

Firstly, the format can only be described as an anthology sitcom: one in which there is no continuity whatsoever between episodes and one in which the situation is a roving one. I’m not entirely sure there are any other anthology sitcoms out there at all and it is a format I’ve been thinking about for a while after someone suggested I write a sitcom pilot myself (I’ll write more about that project here when I actually get around to penning more than one piece of dialogue for it). The ramifications of a sitcom with a roving situation are tremendous: the show becomes an experiment in situation comedy, playing with the actual situation of the comedy rather than dialogue or wackiness or reincorporation (a process used by sitcom writers and stand-up comedians which involves the ‘bringing back’ of previously mentioned ideas to “hilarious” effect – Harry Hill is very good at it but in Friends and Frasier it proves sentimental and embarrassing). It takes sitcom to its bare bones and meddles with the most basic elements of it. It also speaks volumes for the respect held by the BBC for Tony Hancock and Sid James et al to let them get away with something so unstructured.

Secondly, the fact that Hancock plays ‘himself’ is bizarre and wonderful. Hancock is a celebrity. Sometimes his celebrity status comes into play such as in an episode in which he’s trying to get a room in a packed out hotel, but most of the time he is presented on the show an unemployed idler or as an untalented nincompoop on his first day in a new job. Yet he is still ‘Hancock’. The fact that ‘Hancock’ and Hancock are slightly different entities is discovered when Hancock fluffs a line: as the shows were broadcast live, mistakes were often made, but when they were made, the studio audience would go nuts as though that was what they had been waiting for all along and Hancock would say something like “now now, let the artist speak”. Wonderful. And strangely reminiscent of certain modern sitcoms (sorry to mention Curb Your Enthusiasm again but it’s a prime example), which are apparently self-indulgent and a uniquely postmodern phenomenon. But it ain’t. Because Hancock was doing it back in the 1950s.

Incidentally, Hancock’s Half Hour was a massive break in tradition when it first appeared on the radio (I’m getting this from the intro of the script book I’m reading) in that it was essentially a sitcom and not a sketch show. Hancock rocked.

It was also awseome that he topped himself. I know this sounds weird, but comedy is all about neurosis and self-status and ‘tears of a clown’ and so the hallmark of a truly good comedian is the taking of his own life either in a roundabout way (as with Peter Cook and his amazing exploding anus) or directly. Larry David will have to do the same thing if he wants to get a statue erected in LA.

I’m not usually a fan of comedy from ‘them days’. I usually find it all a bit laboured and of-it’s-time and comics/writers/shows that are supposed to be the shiz-niz are seldom actually funny or inventive at all and that people who like them now are caught up in some sort of anti-critical web of other people’s nostalgia. But Tony Hancock was the tits. I’m a fan. And he was right to sack Kenneth Williams: in this show he was shit.

Are there any other Hancock fans in my immediate blogosphere?

Realia Problem

What precisely is the difference between librarianship and curatorship?

This was the question rattling round my head this afternoon as I sat in the cafe overlooking the bizarre elephants’ graveyard that is the Transport Museum. It was a game of definitions brought to my attention a nanosecond after discovering the term, ‘realia‘.

The general consensus seems to be that curatorship is about the collecting and arranging of physical artefacts or artworks while librarianship is about the collecting and arranging of information. But when you consider the idea of realia, the vernacular theory doesn’t work. Ned Kelly’s armour is held in the State Library of Victoria while at the same time, the armour of a Samurai warrior is held by the Hunterian Museum. Geology libraries will hold rocks and ore samples and fossils but the Dudley museum of my childhood holds rocks and ore samples and fossils too.

While the ‘handling’ involved in librarianship is undeniably focused upon information, the information is usually reified in some way and librarians will have to take care of physical books, journals or pamphlets. To me, a postmodernist with an interest in semiotics, the physical items held in museums or the artworks of galleries can be ‘read’ and have information extracted from them just as one can do with any book.

Maybe libraries, museums and art galleries should all merge into gigantic postmodern depositories of culture. ‘Leviatha’^TM I think they should be called. Or, what the hell, just call ’em ‘Wringham Centres’. After me.

Perhaps this area of consideration will finally put an end to the bullshit “But is it Art?” problem regarding found pieces such as Marcel DuChamp’s famous ‘Fountain’. While the artist hasn’t made the piece, he has curated it. It is widely believed that curatorship and librarianship are artforms (in spite of professional degrees in said disciplines resulting in MScs now rather than MAs) so the individual promoting a found piece is most certainly an artist.

Now let us never dwell on that again.

This is the problem of realia: that a rock or a suit of armour is considered a piece of library realia rather than a museum artifact or a found piece of art belonging to a gallery is purely an arbitrary matter of convenience (due to where the funding is coming from or to which institute the piece was donated) rather than the product of any intellectual attempt at classification. One might argue that the stuff in libraries is there to be handled by scholars while the stuff in museums is kept untouched for preservation purposes, but I doubt that just anyone can go into the State library of Virginia and try on Ned Kelly’s helmet, possibly saying “Hello, I’m Ned Kelly” while doing so. (You have to be a friend of the head librarian to do that).

This all makes me wonder about my own collections. I collect religious ephemera (specifically the pamphlets that religious hoodlums give you in shopping precincts – the next time you get one, don’t chuck it out but send it my way). I’ve often wondered whether I do this as a librarian or a curator or an artist. As the actual information in these things is pure bumph, no librarian would include them in an objective collection. The ‘information’ rather lies in the ways that they are printed, distributed and in the ways the text positions the reader and the pamphlet’s author: so are these curated pieces, as one might include in a museum? Or can they be considered objet trouvé?

What of the collection of ? Is he a librarian, curator or artist? Or should we not get caught up in such trivialities and just enjoy the pleasure his odd books provide.

That the two disciplines fall under the umbrella term of ‘collecting’ is undeniable but the actual difference to me is hard to pinpoint.

Trance TV

I love TV. I really do. But my relationship with it is perhaps comparable to Morgan Spurlock‘s relationship with fast food. While he made a documentary about his problem, my way around being a passive viewer and allowing every laugh-track sitom to slide off my consciousness like so much cold porridge, is to write articles about it for magazines and to churn out love/hate blog entries like this one. I’ve been away from TV for a while now, in favour of reading books and watching DVDs (which is a different thing all together) but my flatmate and I were recently given a TV license as a gift. This morning, over breakfast, the glass teat and I got reacquainted.

Never have I heard punk rock discussed in such a blasé, airline magazine fashion as on the BBC breakfast news this morning. “Wasn’t it just a load of old noise?” asks Bill Turnbull like some botoxed and curmudgeonly uncle. “And the spitting? Wasn’t that just unhygienic?”

While Uncle Bill is entitled to his opinions on punk rock or anything else (I actually quite like him as a news reader), could he not make his apparently impromptu observations a little less run-of-the-mill? Given that he’s on the television and going out live to millions, one might even remark that he has a responsibility to give us something that we don’t get from our own goddam dads. There seems little point in turning on the TV when you can get this sort of verbal skidmark from making smalltalk with winos at the bus stop.

A little while back on these pages, I criticised television not for being a governing, trance-inducing technology like everyone else does, but for being so fragmented in its presentation. “Is a week not an arbitrary period to wait for a show’s next installment?”, I asked. This was before I started to read Trance: From magic to technology by Dennis Wier. (There aren’t many good reviews of this book online, but here is an article by Weir, which outlines many of the areas described in his book. Most interesting, perhaps are the sections of this article about TV- and Workplace-induced trances).

Far from being a book of TV criticism or even of cultural studies, Weir’s book details a history of trance in health and the occult. My cohabiting buddy, Stuart is using it as research for his new book on Shamanism. Nonetheless, Weir describes an everyday ‘hypnotic trance’ that many individuals are permanently engaged in. It can be brought about, he writes, by repetition and mundanity:

“Repetition of mantras, the whirling of dervishes, the chanting and drumming of shamans, the repetition of TV commercials all induce trance by limiting your attention and overloading your mind with repeated thoughts”.

So what?, you ask. What’s wrong with switching off and going in for a little escapism? Well, the TV-induced trance is bad because it leaves the client open to ‘trance abuse’: they become sedated and overly susceptible to manipulation. When it doesn’t show you or tell you anything new (it really doesn’t – we love television for it’s predictable storylines and template characters) it can drench you with “Buy! Buy! Buy!” messages: not even subliminal, for the trancee is up for anything TV tells them.

The only way out of this, it seems, is to break the repetition cycle and free yourself from blandness. Turn off the TV. Get a Haruki Murakami or Richard Brautigan book from the library instead. See an unusual film at the cinema. Learn to goddam cook properly. Anything! Just turn it off!

I’m currently involved in a project at the University of Strathclyde intended to evaluate the music pages of the BBC website. Consequently, I’ve been consuming far more BBC drivel than usual. Perhaps that’s why I just forked out money for this and this when there are perfectly good copies in the library.

The BBC website is strange. It doesn’t have to exist. People assume it has some sort of authority since it is the institute that makes all media. But all it tells you about TV shows or bands or movies is stuff that can be found in more detail elsewhere. Fuck, even Wikipedia does a better job most of the time.

So don’t bother with the BBC, kids. It’s rubbish. If you need TV, watch Channel 101 instead.

Trance TV is a very relevant concept for my magazine project. More on this soon.

Couch Work

By making me the comedy correspondent of The Mind’s Construction Quarterly, Neil Scott has provided me with far more power and amusement than I’m sure he would ever have imagined.

Watching sitcoms is no longer a guilty veg-fest conducted in secret behind closed doors while wearing women’s underwear. It’s work.

Yes, in this nation of workaholic career heads, watching hours upon hours of moronic pink-walled japery can actually be considered laudable. At last I am an upstanding capitalist citizen. I might even get a haircut. I might even get myself some work clothes: perhaps some sort of power-tracksuit.

Sure, I might not be writing an article about Seinfeld right now, but it’s all connected. Don’t you see? The seven hours of the wacky American sitcom I sat through yesterday was all about research. I’m very thorough like that. I hope that people in other non-comedy-based disciplines (hanging out in transitional spaces all day, no doubt) can learn from my holistic way of doing things.

“Aren’t you going to do the washing up?” asks my fascist, neo-Nazi flatmate.

No. Not right now. I’m working very hard.

The most recent observation I can make about Seinfeld is regarding its apparent non-similarity to Curb Your Enthusiasm. While it was created by the same guy, a lot of people comment upon how radically different the two shows are: one being quite traditional while the other one is semi-improvised and with a style verging on Cinéma vérité. With my amazing Comedy Correspondent’s eyes, however, I can see the similarity. Among other parallels, I’ve noticed that both shows are based around the logic of ‘the eb and the flow’ or ‘what goes around comes around’.

In Seinfeld, Jerry or George (or Larry in Curb) will in some way feed the meter of the universe. They’ll make some sort of offering to the god of sitcom New York (or sitcom L.A. in Larry David’s case) and it will come right back at them in one way or another. The most literal and instant example of that in Seinfeld is when Elaine gives a label maker to a friend only for him to re-gift it to Jerry in the next act. But it happens in every single episode, I think. Next time you’re watching Seinfeld or Curb Your Enthusiasm, be sure to look out for the eb-and-flow factor (as well as comparing Seinfeld to Father Ted and evaluating the stock character qualities of the ‘Wacky Neighbour’).

Class Dismissed.

Transitional Space

I have a current albeit a [rather appropriately] passing interest in transitional spaces. The origins of this undoubtedly derive from a long-held desire to write a sitcom pilot set in an elevator at television centre. But I’ve also been spending more time than usual travelling on the subway so I guess the topic has been perched on my consciousness this week.

While I don’t tend to spend much time in transitional spaces myself, (aside, perhaps from streets on urban strolls but do they count as ‘transitional’ when you’re deliberately spending time in them as places rather than as pure infrastructure?) I’m aware that many, more career-orientated people in the city do. When you’re working, trains and subways and elevators and corridors are as much a part of the soundtrack as offices and the bedroom.

So how does this affect the person? I once met a Muslim guy on a bus back from London who reckoned that the higher up you live in a building, the less chance you have of holding your marbles in that you’re not ‘grounded’ very often. I live in an attic and I think he was probably right. While he wasn’t talking about transitional spaces, he was nonetheless suggesting that the sort of place in which you spend most of your time will have an effect on your psychology.

When spending so much time in these transitional spaces, are you left feeling like a ‘nowhere person’, always between places but never really ‘in’ or ‘out’? Or does it make you appreciate the temporary nature of things generally, as taught in Buddhism?

So this evening, having already purchased a discovery card for the tube, I decided to spend some extra time on said mode of transport, just going around and around while reading a book and thinking about the nature of transitional spaces, their effect on the human noggin and how art and science can take advantage of that. I can’t say that the transitional nature of my surroundings made a tremendous difference to the way I felt, though there was very much a distracting ‘on the go’ feel to things (often experienced in crap coffee houses), which might shed some light on the problem with spending so much time in transitional spaces.

There are a number of schemes in existence which aim to introduce art into transitional spaces, presumably to combat the ‘on the go’ psychology that may well have the potential to warp the grey matter and ultimately destroy all humans. The entrance hall (or Turbine Hall) of the Tate Modern is probably the most famous example and there’s also the wonderful layout of the foyer at the British Museum. I suppose Trafalgar Square’s empty plinth is transitional space in a way (interestingly only transitional for the sake of transitional art). In Glasgow, we have the Subway Stanzas initiative: large printed poems by noted local poets and authors in space that would normally be designated to advertising.

Personally, I find the subway stanzas a bit naff. It feels too much ‘part of a scheme’ to enjoy. You feel as though reading the poetry would make you a part of some council quota. It also overlooks the ideas promoted by postmodernism, semiotics and cultural studies: that there are interesting things to say about the subway station itself, the behaviour of the people within it or about the advertising posters and the way they are positioned.

I’m not saying that there is no room for art in transitional spaces, but as this blog entry verifies, the transitional space itself and the things that inhabit it (either constantly or transitionally) are worthy of consideration.

I recently spent a day shadowing professional storyteller, Michael Kerins. One of the things we got up to was telling stories to commuters on the 09:32 train from Busby to Glasgow Central. I had felt extreme trepidation beforehand, believing that the commuters would find us a Trigger Happy TV-esque nuisance and would want to be left alone with their iPods and magazines and early morning blues. This was the case with many people, but the event was strangely well received so perhaps there is something to be said for impromptu art in transitional spaces.

I once had an idea for a piece of what I now see to be transitional live art, called Jesus in a camper van after the song by rubbish singer Robbie Williams. I used to have long hair and a beard and looked substantially like the Messiah. I would go around the county in the eponymous camper van with a bullhorn, preaching [non-biblical] parables to the masses. Removed of it’s comedy element, perhaps, Momus got up to something similarly bullhorny quite recently at the Whitney Biennial.

The new reference desk in the university library in which I work has been renamed as an ‘information point’ and relocated to just inside the main entrance. It’s new position in transitional space makes it very uncomfortable for a reader to make proper reference enquiries any more. The enquiries we tend to get now are purely directional and along the lines of “Where are the books on X?” rather than the challenging “In what year did Warhol die?” or “Who invented toothpaste?” It’s a shame, but works as another example of how transitional space can be employed as a mind-shaping techné.

Wallpaper Menu

I’ve always liked that sort of wallpaper popularly considered to be gaudy. The Mitchell Library in Glasgow has lots of it, hence the inspiration for today’s attempt at a homepage design.

While the Mitchell’s wallpaper (I’m lead to believe) was all custom-made for the library in the 1970s, I’ve used an original piece of William Morris wallpaper here and gone for an ultra-simple text-based menu (which I reckon is wise considering the in-your-face nature of the background). What do people think? Ace? Bosh?

“wallpaper menu” Originally uploaded by wringham
(and then ham-fistedly re-sized, hence the blurring. Just click the picture to
observe it in its natural habitat).

Incidentally, this entry was created using the clever image-blogging feature at flickr. I never thought I’d be the sort to get a boner over technology but I gotta admit that cool things happen when servers talk to each other.

I promise I’ll get over this boring nonsense soon, settle down on a homepage design and get back to the usual stimulating commentary. It’s all a part of [re]inventing myself before things start to fall off.

Fish Menu

At a seminar this afterlunch on web design, I showcased my silly new ‘fish anatomy’ homepage. “That’s a menu?” someone asked in childish delight. “Incredible!” exclaimed someone else.

The thing is, this design took about ten minutes to do. I just scanned in an old anatomy picture, added bits of text and applied the hyperlink hotspots. Fuckin’ simple. But alas, these web design courses don’t really teach you how to be creative aesthetically or even why you’d want to create anything beautiful or worthy of remark. It’s all just about html tags and defining the ‘correct’ node/link/anchor terminology.

Here’s a little preview of said fish menu:

10/10 for imagination perhaps but about 2/10 for technical knowhow. It’s just an anatomically labeled haddock with a few intrusive links to my pages thrust in for good measure. I do enjoy that the link to my new magazine idea (more on which is coming soon, by the way) is right by the anus and urinary bladder.

Amusingly, one guy asked me whether I think of everything in terms of fish. I replied that while I percieve things mainly within a pondlife or freshwater construct, my worldview – far from being exclusively fish-based – also includes bulrushes, dragonflies and small amphibians.

Domestic Fascism

To St Mungo’s Museum of Religious Life and Art to see the much-talked-about exhibition of Ku Klux Klan portraiture by photojournalist, James Edward Bates. For those of you unable to visit the actual exhibition or afraid to stray from the friendly hypertext streets and applet orchards of Internetsville, you can see most of the photographs online in all of their pointy-hatted wonder.

The photographs are mounted upon stark white walls at St Mungo’s, accompanied by very little textual explanation of the events taking place in them. They provide a chilling contrast to the museum’s usual informative, pro-belief rabbis-holding-hands-with-priests-holding-hands-with-imams fare. The exhibit’s guestbook is filled with emotional comments from visitors shocked at the images of children hanging out at cross-burnings or of the uncensored use of racist lingo.

What struck me most about the images, however, was of how domestic and communal the documented Klan events seemed to be. In fact, there is an eerie sense of familiarity to a lot of the scenes: the inexpertly stitched-together costumes and hand-painted signage parallels the efforts of urban hobby cliques such as am-dram groups, Star Trek fan circles or model train enthusiasts. The fact that these people harbour xenophobic and hate-laced beliefs almost takes a back burner to the sense of community they’ve created around it.

Imagine being part of a group, which unite not out of celebration or appreciation of a given entity but of a deep-seated hatred for it.

The fact that the Klan’s adventures in race-hate are so domestic in nature arouses ideas of its being a macrocosmic parable; of how easy it might be without a strong left wing presence for things to get out of control and for the fear of otherness to get the better of otherwise rational people.

There’s also a strange clutching-at-straws vibe to Bates’ photographed topographies: as though these people almost know that their beliefs are moronic and dangerous. It seems as though it is the upkeep of tradition that is important rather than the logic of the ideology. It’s a phenomenon I often detect in casually religious people: they say they have these beliefs but in reality they are riddled with rational doubt. One of the main ‘Imperial Wizards’ of the Klan to feature in Bates’ photographs describes himself not as a racist but as a ‘separatist’; that he doesn’t hate the foreign but rather thinks that the challenges involved in maintaining multiracial communities outweigh the benefits and can be avoided by simple segregation – a moronic and wrong idea but a crack the original ideology. The demonising of black, oriental or Jewish individuals seems to go on a lot in the Klan: as though the reality of things need not be taught to their children but rather a stilted and frightening version of it in order for the tradition to continue in the fashion it has done for so long, like an ideological game of ‘keepie-uppie’.

Shit Cafes

One of the things I like about living in Glasgow’s West End is that there is certainly no dearth of cafes or coffee shops. These things are important stepping stones in the day of any self-respecting flaneur. They are reasonably diverse as well for a city with a reputation as a stinking filth pit populated by so-called schemies and neds. If you fancy something chilled out and hippy-friendly, there is T’chai Ovna. If you’re a pinstripe city type, there is Cafe Gandolfi, not to mention a multitude of Starbucks doppelgangers.

Glasgow is also home, however, to two of the shittest cafes I have ever seen.

Shit Cafe #1: The Abbey National on Argyle Street is half-bank-half-cafe. The very thought. The juxtaposition is reminiscent of The Thing with Two Heads or the resulting Futurama homage. Don’t the semiotics of banks and cafes kinda oppose each other?

Why would anyone want to sit in a place with a soundtrack consisting of beeping ATM machines and the clickety-clack of pens on chains? A quick Google search reveals that this is a recurring theme with similar Costa/Abbey National mutants opening up all over the country: Chelsea, London’s King’s Road, Brixton. They have our towns, people!

This article reckons that the idea behind such monstrosities was “a way to make banking less tiresome”. Yeah, cos, phewie, I for one draw a sweat pressing those six buttons on the cash point to retrieve a tenner. Better retire to the old armchair there for a double espresso.

Shit Cafe #2: Movie World on Great Western Road opened a few months ago as a video rental shop with an Internet access port on the side. It must have been failing due to (a) people’s reluctance to rent videos any more and (b) the fact that broadband for your home is so cheap and the public library even provides it for free. Their way of turing things around, it seems, was to put a Costa coffee in-store. So now you can sit around in leather ‘gentleman’s-club’ armchairs, surrounded by cardboard display units for Lord of War. No thank you.

I just don’t understand why anyone would pay £1.90 or thereabouts for a coffee in those conditions when you could have the same drink at home for about 10p. It’s the ambiance of the place you’re paying for after all and a video rental shop or a BANK for freak’s sake just doesn’t provide that.

I guess this is what happens when you franchise a company. The most annoying thing of all, of course, is the fact that (financially) it works: further evidence that the world is full of morons.

Toy Soldiers

As the nearest tube station is a good twenty minute walk from my new flat in Hyndland, I decided this morning with an uncharacteristic ‘in for a penny, in for a pound’ attitude to walk the entire way to my lecture at Strathclyde University on the other side of the city.

It’s a bloody long walk and took about 80 minutes to complete, even with my John Cleese/Comedy Nazi stride, but I’m really glad I did it. I don’t know if it was the fresh atmosphere of ‘morning’ (a thing I don’t usually like to get involved with) but I was struck with the realisation of what a strange and beautiful city Glasgow really is. With its eclectic architecture and sporadic greenery, it feels like an experimental mixing-tray for other cities. (the famous incomplete ‘roads to nowhere’ are evidence of this in themselves.)

On my way over the motorway flyover, I kept an eye-out for the strange piece of guerrilla art I had spotted once before: a series of plastic toy army soldiers arranged in battle along some of the railings. The spectacle is undeniably lovely: the presence of such uncomplicated childish innocence in an enclave of stinking post-war functionality. It is also amusing to think that whoever arranged the army men, did so at great trouble or risk of peril, as many of them are positioned in places you simply cannot get to without risk of being run over or falling to one’s splattery demise.

My favourite piece of the arrangement was an army helicopter positioned atop of a lamp-post. But today it had gone. Who on Earth would have stolen it? They would have needed a stepladder in order to get to it.

What am I thinking? It obviously hasn’t been stolen: it must have flown away. After all, how else could it have got there in the first place? Sadly, the helicopter’s pal, the paratrooper, now dangles forlornly and alone.

Nonetheless, the helicopter’s disappearance had been compensated for by the addition to the flyover space of a number of shiny model fish hanging in the trees around the corner. How sweet. Their juxtaposition with the tree and the flyover reminds me of that old Fortean phenomenon, Fish Rain.

Has anyone else in Glasgow noticed the army men? Or am I imagining them like in that Stephen King story?

Wacky Neighbour

After devouring some loaned box sets of Frasier and Seinfeld, I decided to do a bit of reading on the topic of American sitcoms. Their worlds are just so fascinatingly peculiar; quite unlike anything else. In particular, I’m interested in ‘stock characters’ and the ways in which they relate to each other.

I noticed that Seinfeld has a strangely similar feel to Father Ted. Indeed, I’d go as far to say that Seinfeld might be the American counterpart of Britain’s Father Ted. If America were to remake Ted they’d call it ‘Father Larry’ and set it in rural Arizona with all manner of wacky characters popping in and out. That would be a literal remake but not really a translation. The elements shared by Ted and Seinfeld make me think that they are sort of transcontinental doppelganger shows. I seem to recall Graham Linehan saying on the Ted DVD commentary that he admired Seinfeld as a sitcom so maybe this ‘translation’ was deliberate.

It is the similar use of stock characters in these two shows that make them so alike, I think. In particular, it is the Sage, the Holy Fool and the Rake that populate both sitcoms.

According to Wikipedia (and other sources, admittedly), there is a sitcom stock character called ‘the wacky neighbour’ and Seinfeld‘s Cosmo Kramer is the first example of this.

Now, while the ‘wacky neighbour’ is undoubtedly a recurring entity, particularly in American sitcoms, I don’t see how it can really be considered a stock character. It’s not up there with the likes of the Sage, is it?

The reason for wacky neighbours is surely down to the geography of the family sitcom. It’s set in a house and you need a way of getting regular characters in from beyond the walls of the house. A neighbour is the obvious way of doing this and since they are transient characters, you can allow them to be slight departures from the reality of the show, hence their ‘wackiness’.

Stock characters are the result of social archetypes. As everyone is a neighbour to someone or other, how can there ever be an architypal neighbour? Perhaps the role and responsibilities of neighbourliness can become archetypal, but that’s not important to the character of the ‘wacky neighbour’.

So I wouldn’t describe Kramer as being a ‘wacky neighbour’ but rather some sort of idler; a not-quite-human flaneur, to most extents unemployable yet strangely adored by everyone and whose real agenda is seen only by the rest of the central cast and by the viewers at home. In Father Ted, Kramer becomes Father Jack.

Perhaps this wacky neighbour business is an American phenomenon (and conseqentally should always be the wacky neighbor now I think about it) and people actually have these characters living in their in real life neighbourhoods. And perhaps fat, bald men constantly date attractive, classy women and perhaps the furniture in American homes really does all face an empty fourth wall.

The Simpsons

My friends will confirm that I do not watch much in the way of television. However, they will also point out that neither the dancing images of the cinema screen nor the digital contents of DVDs, are included beneath the umbrella of my distaste.

My problems with TV are not that it’s anti-intellectual or a form of mass-government. Believe me, I love the escape value and easy access to what Harlan Ellison calls ‘the glass teat’. There’s very little I enjoy more than vegging out on the couch and catching a few phospordots. My problem with TV lies in its fragmented nature: the ad-breaks are excruciating and you have to wait a whole week for the next installment of your show. DVDs remove these problems. One episode of Frasier isn’t enough for me: I want twelve. I also hate how your entire life will have to be arranged around these TV schedules if you want to catch every installment of your favourite programme but with DVD, you’re in control. There doesn’t even seem to be a good reason for the weekly interval (except for with Lost which has mastered the art of the cliffhanger and cleverly takes advantage of the episodic nature of TV Shows).

The reason for my writing about this bollocks, is connected to my sister’s recent lending to me the first four seasons of The Simpsons on Digital Versatile Disc. They’re shiny. The excite. They do dazzle. Until yesterday evening, I hadn’t watched an episode of The Simpsons for so long, distracted instead by the clever naughtiness of and hard-to-believe-it-got-through-the-censors satire of Family Guy. Oh, Simpsons, how I’ve missed thee. My time away from Springfield has resulted in a grotesque devouring of these DVDs in a series of most disgusting binges.

Occasionally, with these DVDs, you think you have come across an episode you’ve not seen before. But that’s only because the beginnings of episodes of The Simpsons are so different to the episodes’ main storylines that it’s fallen out of your head. They start off with Bart and Lisa’s parent-teacher night and wind up with telling the history of The Itchy and Scratchy Show.

Today, however, by some freak miracle, I saw an episode entirely new to me. It’s ‘Marge Gets a Job’ in which Marge, as the title may hint, gets a job. At the nuclear plant. And Mr. Burns falls in love with her. And Smithers kidnaps Tom Jones. And Groundskeeper Willy has to wrestle a wolf, escaped from Krusty’s Studio. Insane. How did this episode pass me by? According to the commentary, the episode was first shown in 1992. That’s fourteen years with me missing it every time. Bizarre.

The best episode I’ve seen while on this binge is one called ‘Homer the Heretic’ in which Homer decides to stay at home instead of going to Church and winds up having a face-to-face theopany with Big G. It’s a fantastic argument for idling and the apocryphal idea that God doesn’t particularly want you to go to church. Matt Groening points out that when Homer meets God, God has five fingers (where all other characters in The Simpsons have only four). Oh, the theological ramifications.

Valentine’s Day

I learned in a pub quiz (a fantastic source of completely objective knowledge, surely) the other night that 90% of the population dislike or hate February 14th.

It really is a frightful cliche to be anti-Valentine’s Day. Sorry kids. The main reasons for people’s disliking of the event appear to be (a) of the moralising “Valentine’s Day is so commercial – you can celebrate your love any day of the year, y’know” variety or (b) of the resentful “Maw. No one loves ME” type.

To the folk who fall into my first category, I’d question whether they practice what they preach and actually do celebrate love on any other day. Do you really go out for special meals or buy your loved one gifts so spontaneously? Probably not. The pressures of modern life don’t really cater for that, so it’s nice that there’s one day a year specifically designated for it.

In a way though, these people are right. The vampires from Buffy the Vampire Slayer like to murder and/or scare shitless the inhabitants of Sunnydale on any given day, but on Halloween, they stay in their tombs and put their feet up. Perhaps we could treat Valentine’s Day in a similar fashion: ignoring the distractions of romance all day but going out for nice dinners and enjoying adventurous sex every other day of the year.

As for the lonely folk: lose the ego. Don’t worry about what you’re getting but instead think about the epistles or flowers or other gestures you can send to other people. You want what Harry Hill calls ‘ego puff-points’ but you’re not giving any to anyone else. You’re too embarrassed about what they’ll say if they figure out it’s you who sent it. So just send the shit out. To anyone. You don’t even have to fancy them. It’s a nice gesture, you’ll make old Arseface feel good and if you believe in the ‘eb and flow’ model of reality, you’ll get a heap of niceties in return.

Having said all of this, the Valentine’s Day of your humble narrator was a little excruciating. I tried to get flowers sent to two of my London friends (the horror critic, Alex, because he’s an impossibly lonely loser and to the artist/actor, Adele Geddes, because I want to put my penis between her breasts and rub it up and down) but found that it was impossible due to the vast quantity of other flowers being driven around the city today. It sounds silly now to assume that such a service would be available on Valentine’s Day, but I kinda figured that the florists would be expecting last-minute orders from the nation’s dog-house men and would have taken on extra staff and grown extra flowers so that easy money could be made. Like they do with pine trees at Christmas.

I did however, purchase a single red one, from a florist on Byers Road for my cohabiting and lavender-scented chum, Stuart. It made me feel pretty OK, walking around the West End with a rose. It looked sartorially splendid against my tweed jacket as much as anything, but also because middleaged women kept giving me “Awww. That’s sweet” looks.

But, alas, Valentine’s Day (or VD) is over for now. Time to get back to the hatin’.

Deep South

It is true to say that my Glasgow had shrunk to the same surface area as a puddle of urine passed by a dwarfed amoeba. Seldom would I stray from the leafy and macrocosmic West End, save for the occasional commute to the Mitchell Library. One good thing to have come out of the stupid work placement I’m on is an antidote to this incestuous routine. All of the libraries I’ve had to work in are on the city’s Deep South: Giffnock, Clarkston, Thornlibank – all interesting towns in their own rights and would have remained unexplored if it weren’t for these enforced sojourns.

Southside towns are strangely diverse. Giffnock is lovely: plenty of pubs and cafes frequented by handsome and beautiful members of a massive Jewish community. The library building won an award for its unique architecture. Barrhead, on the other hand, should be twinned with the moon. The library can be found in an abandoned pillbox clinic.

Yesterday I visited Clarkston. Alighting the train, my olfactory bulb was suddenly alerted to the vague whiff of animal manure hanging in the air. There were fields. And trees. One of the fields had a cow in it. A man walking in the opposite direction, nodded and said “Good Morning”. Ye Gods. Was it possible? I’d been to some obscure backwater places over the past few weeks but this trip had taken the cake. This time, I was in… the countryside.

I asked a woman for directions to the school (at which I would visit the library – more on school libraries soon, I’m sure). “Just follow the main road,” she said. A ten-minute walk up the so-called main road and only one car and one van passed by me. I could hear blackbirds. It was quite lovely.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote of a personal message from a newspaper dispensing unit. Someone emailed me about this story and claimed to have experienced such phenomena herself. She calls them “messages from the universe”.

While enjoying my lunchbreak in the countryside yesterday, I decided to sit on a bench. No sooner had my buttocks made contact with the wood, I spotted in the distance a roadside advertising board. It said, “Choose Not to Sit on the Bench”.

What the hell? Another dude would have been freaked out about this, surely. But as an atheist, I felt determined to ignore it. Messages from the universe indeed. So I sat there for the duration, ate my lunch and read a good few pages of my library book (Rob Grant’s Vonnegut-esque novel, Incompetence, if you’re interested, dear reader. It’s undeniably funny but I can’t tell what Mr. Grant is trying to say – the story is either a clever parable or a rubbish “political correctness gone mad” satire) without incident.

Hah. Take that, Universe.

But as the day went on, I began to think about what reality would be like if I’d have heeded the Universe’s warning and not sat on the bench. Perhaps I’d have continued walking and found a winning scratchcard on the floor. Perhaps I’d have met my future husband/wife. But no matter – I’m happy enough as things are. I put that thought out of my head.

But the Universe knows all about causality, right? The effects of my sitting on the bench may not be recognisable now but what if I’ve altered reality from the molecular level. What if the wings of my butterfly caused some massive weather problem in China?

These things only happen on the weird South Side of the city though. Maybe it’s built on a ley line or upon an ancient Venusian burial ground something. After next week and the end of the placement, I’ll never have to leave the lovely West End ever again. Perhaps then the Universe will quit bugging me.

Hidden Conveniences

Occasionlly, life reveals to you little shortcuts or hidden conveniences: tiny oases that make your working day more comfortable and don’t contribute to your stress-induced brain tumour. Part of you wants to shout about these things so others can enjoy the same benefits as you now do, but a bigger and louder part of you is determined to keep it under wraps so that your secret loophole in reality doesn’t become oversubscribed. It gives you a slight edge over other rats in the race and when you use it, you can’t help but snigger Mutley-like at their shortsightedness. Haha. They are stupid.

I’ve discovered two such conveniences of late. In way of dispelling some of the guilt I have about keeping these things secret, I have decided to share them with you, my beloved and stinking readership.

One of them is the cleaners’ schedule of the bathroom in my university library. Why not do some research into the toilet-cleaning rota of your own hangout? If you time it right, you can poop into a newly bleached toilet without the worry of some other students’ poopoo sliming its way up the pan, into your asshole and eating you from within.

Instead of the vague uriney pong, only the pleasent whiffs of anti-bacterial cloths will assult your olfactory bulb. That you don’t have to hold your breath means more time to read the witty graffiti:

“Death to all Spurs fans! (I am wanking as I write this)”. Et Cetera

The second thing I’ve noticed recently is how much more pleasent a train journey can be if you manage to bag one of the seats with a table. There’s a hell of a lot more legroom than at the other seats; you are more likely to have a conversation with someone (as the table-seats are usually in groups of four with two facing the other two); and you can put your stuff on the table instead of in the overhead luggage rack, which saves time at the destination. I wouldn’t have thought this was a particularly hidden convenience, but I’ve boarded an excess of EIGHTY trains while on work placement these past four weeks (it sounds a lot but it’s four trains per day – two to work and two back) and I’ve never failed to get one of these seats because everyone just goes for a normal, lonely, cramped one. Weird.

These pointers may not sound like much but I’m reminded of one of the lessons from Premo Levi’s Auschwitz account, If This is a Man. The few Jews to survive the camp, did so by identifying and exploiting little conveniences. One of them, I recall, was engineering your position in the soup queue: those at the back of the queue would receive bigger chunks of meat that had sunk to the bottom of the soup urn. They consequentally survived. I wonder if the prisoners told eachother about these things or whether they kept them to themselves?

Levi killed himself in the end though. Probably out of guilt for the poor saps at the front of the soup queue. So let that be a lesson to ya.

Bad Directions

After leaving the home of Mr. Neil Scott and Miss Laura Gonzalez in the tiniest possible hours of this morning, I decided to take a walk back to my flat rather than flagging a cab. It was a still, cool evening and the alcohol in my bloodstream would protect me from muggers.

Once I hit the West End, I realised that most every building I passed was invested with a poignant memory from the two years I’ve lived here. This was the coffee house I worked at over the summer and autumn. This was the bar where I first went out with staff from work. This was the street I marched with Dave and Siggi, late for the Daniel Kitson gig. This was the studio where I was drawn in the buff. This was the massive chimney next to the hospital, which we theorise is connected to the aborted-baby incinerator. Et Cetera.

Laura had been telling me not hours previously about how at home she felt in Glasgow. I’m inclined to agree: there’s just something about the city – particularly the leafy, bohemian west end – that makes it more habitable than most.

It was a nice evening and I felt for the first time in ages, comfortable with the way things are shaping up.

Suddenly, a small red car (a vectra?) pulled over and a slightly neddish guy stuck his head out of the passenger window to ask for directions. “How do you get onto Argyle Street, Pal?” he asked.

“You’re on it, mate,” said your humble narrator.

Suddenly the guy and his mates erupted with laughter. “Sure!” he nodded and they sped off.

It occurred to me suddenly that Argyle Street was in actuality the next street over. But why did that constitute a joke? I’ve had the piss taken out of me for various things in the past but never has my poor sense of direction been the source of comedy, even to myself.

Why was this funny? It wasn’t even as if I was miles off the mark. Argyle Street and this one ran parallel.

Some people are weird.

Pret Bad

Someone told me last night that the city-centre purveyors of delicious organic smoothies and dairy-free sandwiches, Pret a Manger, is actually a McDonald’s in disguise.

A quick Google search revealed that this is absolutely true. I’m shocked. Not that I ever really ate at Pret but because I’m aware that it’s seen by many people to be a healthy and, by extension, an ethical and down-to-Earth alternative to fast food shit like McDonald’s.

Here’s an item from the Guardian business pages which explains the history of Pret and how it became an annex of the corporation that brought you Grimace.

They say that McDonald’s don’t have any input on the food side of things. But as I see it, if you’re boycotting McDonald’s you’ve got to cut off funding to their niche market units too.

Don’t eat there anymore, kids. Don’t even look at it – you’ll get cancer and die.

The Escapologist

I have so much work to do right now. The deadlines, both writerly and library-related, are bleeding out of my eyes. Things are not helped by the fact that I’m re-reading the excellent and uber-subversive Walden. I can’t help but consider the merits of ‘doing a Thoreau’ but figure I should give this respectable career idea a fair shot first. And anyway, it’d probably take a cod-handed chimp like me at least six months just to sand down the timber.

The theme of escape continued last night with a trip to the Tramway Theatre on the south side to see Simon Bent’s acclaimed play, The Escapologist.

It is too literal, I think. A straitjacket is surely a hackneyed symbol of entrapment. I can’t help feeling that the show would have been better as a black comedy, possibly involving iron lungs like wot I cleverly did back in 2000.

Most reviews of the show make reference to the idea that we all share a desire to escape. Is that what this play signifies? Are we really all so desperately unhappy and unfulfilled that the desire to escape is constantly present? Do we all feel as though we’re failing to keep up?

I’m reminded of the ‘bird man’ pictographs etched into the rocks during the last days of Easter Island – thought by many to be articulations of the islanders’ inability to take flight after their raw materials had been expended on irrational statue-building. Is The Escapologist a modern incarnation of the bird man? Do we all long to flee the mess we’ve made of things?