I went to see the Michael Clark Company show Mmm… at the Barbican last night. It was great in all sorts of ways, including the fact that it left me unable to describe how it made me feel or what it made me think so I won’t try.
It couldn’t have been a starker contrast to the production of Metamorphosis that I saw at the Lyric Theatre in Hammersmith a couple of weeks ago. That was the worst show I’ve seen for ages: undisciplined, carelessly directed, full of cheap, meaningless acrobatics and crowd-pleasing jokes that the silly audience found hilarious. I felt like I was watching a school end-of-term production in which the Head of English had done his very best to use the performers’ talents in whatever way he could. “Smithkinson is very acrobatic, let’s have him bouncing on a trampoline and then he can do that thing on those BBC ident films where they kind of roll their body down a long length of fabric.” It was one of those shows where it looks like the performers are having a marvellous time, the audience are enjoying the spectacle and I’m feeling like a gooseberry. I got the impression that many of the people watching had come to hear the soundtrack, which was done by Nick Cave and was occasionally OK but generally pointless. I suppose the management at the Lyric think it’s a Good Thing to encourage ‘young people’ into the theatre. Not like this it isn’t. Go and see Michael Clark, young people, even the music’s better.
Monthly Archive for October, 2006
Some anti-road people hung banners from bridges on the M1 today saying www.nowideningm1.org.uk. When I saw a picture of one it looked to me like it said Now Widen M1. Don’t they know you can put capitals in a URL? BBC News story
Am I imagining it or does the Pope really sound just like Peter Lorre? Pope clip
I was mixing a programme for a slot called Analysis on World Service radio last week. The programme was written by a BBC Correspondent called Kim Ghattas who works in the Middle East and it was about the changing security situation in Saudi Arabia. The programme opened with Kim saying “Two years ago, on the streets of Rijad, a westerner pleaded for his life as he was hunted down by a militant linked to Al Qayda.” She had sent us a sound recording of the man being killed. It had the phasing, edgy quality of poorly recorded camcorder audio that’s been recompressed too many times, but you could clearly hear someone shouting ‘no, no’ and then several gunshots. I mixed it so that it started underneath her last few words and then became clearly audible for the shouting and the first gunshot, then it faded down again under her next bit of script. Have a listen to the final result - Ghattas- Saudi killing
At the time I was thinking that this was pretty strong stuff but it seemed justified by the short duration and the context. She was talking about that particular murder, not using the sound to illustrate a general point, and although it was quite shocking I wouldn’t describe it as a graphic depiction of the murder nor would I say it was being used gratuitously. Here is what the BBC editorial guidlines say about the subject.
We will always need to consider carefully the editorial justification for portraying graphic material of human suffering and distress. There are almost no circumstances in which it is justified to show executions and very few circumstances in which it is justified to broadcast other scenes in which people are being killed. It is always important to respect the privacy and dignity of the dead. We should never show them gratuitously. We should also avoid the gratuitous use of close ups of faces and serious injuries or other violent material.
Yesterday I found out that one of the producers in the Newsroom had cut the start of the programme off because he thought it was too disturbing. He told me “We don’t do that sort of thing.”
This is why I sometimes wish that I worked for Al Jazeera. There are too many people in BBC News who feel that their job is to impartially and accurately report what is going on and that’s all there is to it. They don’t feel that they need to excite their audience, to sell the stories, to make people say “Wow!” I think they’re complacent. It is a privilege to be given access to the 42 million people who regularly listen to the World Service in English. Some of the things we have to talk about aren’t very nice. Some of the things we have to say aren’t very interesting. In both cases we have to be creative in order to encourage people to understand the complexity of the stories we’re covering. We have to be engaging and sometimes that might mean being shocking, sometimes it might mean being silly. But being boring, there’s no excuse for that.
What would you think about someone who had a 70s porn film poster up on their wall? A bit tacky, maybe just a bit shallow, perhaps they just don’t think very much about what things mean? But then there’s no denying that the images are great, cool, even alluring, plus when you look at them you realise that modern design is often just a rather weedy imitation of these soft-core classics. So many things are chic only when you ignore what they really are.
When I first came across this site, a well organised and presented collection of “over 350 original American X-rated movie posters”, I did initially think “Ooh, great Christmas present for someone”. But then, of course, I wondered who, exactly? Nobody I know, that’s who. And would I actually put one on the wall, would I shell out £75 for one? Not really. So why do I still really love these designs? There’s something amiss.
About a month ago the daughters came running in all excited, trying to tear me away from my computer to come and look at something amazing in the street. It was a vaulting horse, parked like a car in the road, just sitting there. None of the neighbours knew where it had come from. Carol, my partner, wanted us to bring it inside, I was opposed to the idea. In the end I agreed, on the condition that we would freecycle it if nobody had claimed it by the end of the week.
It was really, really heavy, we could just carry it between us. With some manoeuvring it fitted through the front-door, it didn’t fit through any other doors. We left it in the hall.
The horse had a maker’s name on it - Niels Larsen and Son Limited, Leeds. I did a search, they still existed. I asked them to send me a price list. When it arrived I discovered that a modern vaulting horse costs over £700 and isn’t half as charming. Maybe, I thought, ebay would be better than freecycling.
Over the next week I started to get rather fond of the horse. It was a charismatic, bulky and reassuring presence in the hall. I started patting it absent mindedly when I came home from work. The children started climbing up its legs, riding on its back and making up games with it.
Carol rang the police to see if any local schools had reported a missing horse. They checked their database and said nothing had been reported. They said we could do what we wanted with it. We didn’t know what we wanted to do with it.
Today I found a page called Guidlines for Training the Vaulting Horse.
The vaulting horse has to be very obedient and trustworthy. Obedience comes from consistent training, using the vaulting whip in a very meaningful way. It is an extended whip with leather thong capable of reaching the hind legs from the centre of a 15 metre circle whilst the lunger stands still.
The following signals are fairly universal so that anyone taking a trained vaulting horse and using the known signals will have a successful session.
Maybe we’ll keep him after all (I don’t know why it’s a ‘him’, but Carol agrees with me about that), we could train him up, maybe exhibit him after a few months. He’s no trouble, apart from the occasional stubbed toe, and although visitors do sometimes look a bit surprised it’s not nearly as bad as the stuffed Afghan Hound who lived in our previous house. She was called Janet.
I’ve been looking for some new boots for months. My brother’s partner gave me my old ones several years ago. She was the wardrobe mistress on 28 Days Later and had a couple of pairs of Jim’s boots left over after the film finished. She gave one pair to the homeless and the other to me. They were made by Ecco and were the best boots I ever owned; really comfortable, light and beautifully designed. I wore them every day for four years.
Unfortunately, inevitably, they started to get smelly this spring and I realised I’d have to replace them. First off I tried Ecco but their shoes were now stunningly ugly and they seemed to have stopped making men’s boots altogether. I realised that I’d have to resort to shopping in shops.
I spent several fruitless lunchtimes and afternoons traipsing around the millions of shoe shops in Covent Garden and the West End. Price was no object, I was getting desperate. My boots were too smelly to wear in a studio and I didn’t own any suitable alternatives. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any boots even remotely like my fantastic 28 Days boots, I couldn’t even find any boots I liked at all.
I went back to the web. I found some quite-nice shoes made by Brasher but I wanted boots and I’ve always been reluctant to buy Brasher boots, not because they aren’t good, some of them are excellent, but because I was once friends with the woman who started the company and it seemed a bit, well, incestuous. Anyway, the only stockist I could find was the Natural Shoe Shop where you can wait hours to be served.
Then I had a break-through. Trawling through search results at some online shoe superstore I saw something very similar to what I was after. Tactical boots made by a company called Magnum. Another search led me to a company called Gladstone Boots, who supply boots for Policemen. Their footwear section is superb, I was spoiled for choice. After a quick phone conversation with the helpful Mr Gladstone about the merits of nylon side-panels I ordered a pair of S.W.A.T. 9″ Tactical Boots. They arrived this morning.
These boots are brilliant. They are lighter than my old Eccos, they are really comfortable, they won’t set off airport metal detectors and the toe cap “has a rubber bumper section designed to aid grip and protect the boot when climbing walls etc.” I can’t wait for their first outing, up to the school to collect my girls this afternoon. Let’s hope the Premises Manager has forgotten to unlock the gates.
The BBC has produced an excellent guide to the several degrees of headscarf that different Muslim women wear. I had a good search through the sites of the Muslim Council of Britain, the Islamic Human Rights Commission and the Protect Hijab site. There was plenty of material on them about fighting bans on the Hijab and some on why women choose to wear it, why it’s not sexist and so on but none of them even make an attempt to explain the different types of scarf. I suppose it would be unfair to suggest that it seems like Muslims are more interested in fighting for their rights than explaining their culture, but have a look around, see if you can find anything.
I did find one article about Islamic Clothing Definitions on a site called Central Mosque. They also had an article answering the question “How is it that Islam allows Slavery?” It starts off with a damming description of the practice of slavery by the ancient Egyptians, Romans and “Western European Nations” before going on to explain that “…under Islam regarded as fundamentally equal, the slaves in Muslim society could and did live in secure possession of their dignity as creatures of the same Creator…” It is a good example of the kind of dishonest sophistry that passes for theological discussion in many parts of Islam. You can find equally hilarious nonsense in Christian literature, of course, but not generally published these days. I think that’s because they know they couldn’t get away with it because they’d be rightly lampooned. Unfortunately satire is still a very dangerous activity in most of the Muslim world and so nonsense reigns supreme.
As far as veils go, I don’t think much of them, as I’ve said before, but I find them much less offensive than SUVs. In fact, if I had to put them on a scale I’d say I like them a bit more than shell suits and a bit less than platform shoes. On the other hand, a well-cut chador or shayla can be pretty damm sexy.
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