Hypocrite Minimalist – Robert Wringham // Writer-Comedian

This was written for New Escapologist‘s now-defunct Patreon situation in 2020. It was part of a show-and-tell series called ‘Hypocrite Minimalist’.

Object Number 2 in our inventory is a ticket stub.

It’s rare to regret offloading something in a minimalist purge, but I almost regret discarding a matchbox of ticket stubs dating from 1994 to about 2005.

I stopped saving my stubs when most UK cinemas and music venues moved away from stylish cardboard tickets to scrunchable receipt-like ones evocative of little but corporate efficiency.

I could have kept the old ones though, couldn’t I? The decision to ditch them seems a bit hard-line now. Then again, do I really need physical evidence that I saw The Mask at the UCI Cinema, Dudley in 1994? Probably not.

I now have a tendency to keep a cinema or concert ticket only if I can stuff it into a related book. This takes up no space and it’s nice to chance upon the stub, with the associated memories, when you’ve forgotten about it.

One such retained ticket is from the screening of a documentary picture called Dreams With Sharp Teeth and it lives inside a book of the same name.

Going to see Dreams With Sharp Teeth on 25 June 2008 was an important night out.

First, it was the night I met my friend Unclef. We’d spoken online but had never met in person. We’d appeared on each other’s radars as the only people to list “Glasgow” and “Harlan Ellison” as interests on Livejournal (RIPLJ).

Harlan Ellison, a cantankerous science-fiction writer, was the subject of Dreams With Sharp Teeth and it was going to be screened at the Edinburgh Film Festival. I emailed Unclef to say, “Look, I know you’re not big on meeting strange humans in Meatspace, but there’s a good chance we’ll be the only two people in the cinema and I don’t want to spend the movie wondering if that other creep is you or not.”

We remain fast friends — drinking buddies, collaborators, co-conspirators, a shambolic two-person book club — to this day.

Even more importantly, this was the night I decided to become an Escapologist for reals.

I’d already put together Issues One and Two of New Escapologist, which I saw as a tongue-in-cheek three-issue project. It was a serialised English Opium Eater-like insight into the lives of some idle pseudonyms who refused to tolerate the things I struggled with: work, family, class loyalty, social expectations.

Obviously, the magazine would completely take over my life for the next decade, but so did the idea. After tonight, I decided, I was going to do it properly and escape.

As pipped as I was to meet Unclef, I was feelin’ blue when we went into that cinema. I’d recently met Samara (now my partner of 16 years or so) but she’d returned to Canada a few days earlier and the thought of a transatlantic relationship didn’t strike me as a good time. I’d also been working in an office for over a year on what was initially a three-month contract, was extremely fed up of it, and I was increasingly unsure how I could support my writing habit in terms of time and energy if not money.

Anyway, there’s a bit in the film where Harlan says something like:

“A lot of people ask me how to get published, how do I start out as a writer, and I say to them, I DON’T KNOW, FIGURE IT OUT! Some things in life aren’t easy! Some things in life shouldn’t be easy!”

That’s not a verbatim quote. It’s just the gist of the thing as I remember it. I don’t own a copy of the film. (There’s a moment in the trailer though, where Harlan says “Art is supposed to be hard, art is supposed to be demanding, that’s the way I feel,” so it was probably that.)

Anyway, it struck me like an articulated lorry with EPIPHANY OVERNIGHT FREIGHT LTD printed in exciting red letters on its livery. Some things in life aren’t easy, the man had said. Some things shouldn’t be easy.

I’d bloody do it then. I’d go to Canada to sort things out with the person I wanted to be with. And I’d become Robert Wringham, a writer of (as I defined it there in the darkened room) “unmarketable short works.”

I now live with the consequences of the thoughts I had from an unreserved seat in the Edinburgh Filmhouse.

Well, I may have holes in my shoes today but it beats the alternative. Locally-sourced life partner? Mortgage? Job? Kids? In London? In Birmingham? With a lawn? A car? No thanks. No regrets.

This was written for New Escapologist‘s now-defunct Patreon situation in 2020. It was part of a show-and-tell series called ‘Hypocrite Minimalist’.

Object Number 3 in our inventory is my Kubrick Box. All will be explained. I have written a thousand words here about a cardboard box. No, it’s you who is weird.

Sixteen years ago, I sat in an office canteen on my lunch break and read a story by Jon Ronson in the Guardian. Pre- smartphone ubiquity, the paper was in print and my eyes were on stalks.

Ronson told the story of how he’d visited the English estate of Stanley Kubrick after his death and been confronted by boxes and boxes and boxes.

“There are boxes everywhere,” wrote Jon Ronson, “shelves of boxes in the stable block, rooms full of boxes in the main house. In the fields, where racehorses once stood and grazed, are half a dozen portable cabins, each packed with boxes.”

Kubrick, famously obsessive, had kept almost everything from his life in film.

As well as being a Kubrick fan, I also had a slightly complicated relationship with stuff. By 2003, I already had a tendency towards Minimalism but this had come after an early life of collecting things. I still liked material objects, especially when they were archived or organised in some fussy and logical way. I loved (and still love) libraries, museums, storehouses and collections, so long as I don’t have to own them myself, and I admired Kubrick’s demented, almost religious, maximalism.

A few years passed and I escaped office life. In a bookshop in New York, I picked up a collection of Jon Ronson’s journalism. I wondered if the Kubrick article had made the cut. It had. So I read it again. I bought the book and took to reading the Kubrick piece every so often. I found it soothing. All that nicely-organised cardboard. Ah, lovely.

When I told someone this, they looked at me askance and said, “do you mean the film about Stanley Kubrick’s boxes?” A film? Well, no it was in the newspaper ages ago. But it turned out Ronson had made a film about it in the meantime.

In the film, there’s picture after picture of the boxes. Some of them are opened in what is essentially a really good unboxing video. At the end, the boxes are shown being taken away to the University of the Arts London. I was a bit sad to see this, preferring to think of the boxes in their original home, but at least you can go and look at the boxes now if you want to, without even having to be Jon Ronson.

A filmmaker friend AJ (Hi, AJ!) went to see the archive a few years ago and there’s a Taschen book about it too, full of photographs.

Ronson says in his film that he’d been looking for a “rosebud” in the boxes but that, actually, the boxes themselves were the key to Kubrick’s character. Apparently, Kubrick hadn’t been willing to settle for the standard archive box you can buy from stationery stores (though it’s on record that he loved commercial stationery from his local Rymans) and went to the lengths of commissioning the perfect archive box from a box manufacturer.

There’s a memo from the box maker in the archive with a note about the “fussy customer” who wants the lid to slide off without a struggle but not to fall off by chance. Also on that memo was the name of the box company: G. Ryder and Co.

I wonder if they’re still in business, I thought one day. I Googled. They are. I called them, a man picked up the phone, and I asked if he could make me a box exactly to Stanley Kubrick’s specifications. He laughed at me.

“I’m researching a book about Stanley Kubrick,” I lied.

“Well,” he said, we don’t normally take orders for a single box. We have to make a whole run of them.” And if they did that, he explained, it would cost thousands of pounds for loads of unwanted boxes.

“But since you’re working on a book,” he said, “I’ll do you a box for forty pounds.”

Forty pounds. After embracing and selling off all my CDs one by one, was I really going to spend forty actual quid on a cardboard box?

“Okay,” I said.

A couple of weeks later, the boxes arrived. Two of them! A steal at twenty quid apiece.

I now use them as, well, archive boxes. The box maker, meanwhile, now sells them as a featured product with a clip from Ronson’s film.

Showing my boxes off to Landis one night, (Landis being easily as fussy as Stanley Kubrick and didn’t think it was strange that I wanted to show him a cardboard box) we wondered if one day “a Kubrick” could be a standard measure of stuff.

People could say “yeah, I’ve got 736 Kubricks at home” or “did you know Bill Gates has an estimated three-million Kubricks spread over six different homes?” or “I have whittled my life down to three eminently-portable Kubricks.” It’s a lovely dream.

Inside a Kubrick: