The house is a shithole; it is a bombsite, a pit of devastation left by the girls after another night of sloth. The Girlf has been continuing her mission to run my laptop into the ground and the kids have been enjoying another evening devoid of responsibility. Their dinner plates are at my feet and the floor is strewn with the crisp packets and chocolate wrappers that they leave in their wake.
I’m debating whether or not to ignore it and let them sort it out tomorrow or to clear up just so I don’t have to look at it.
The Girlf is publishing a book a month at the moment, so along with her editing work she has no time left to clean my house or wash my clothes. The Youngest has started secondary school and is full of gossip and stories, so much so she wrote her first blog on Saturday; her life is now full of new friends, evil teachers and homework, all which has to be documented. She has gone from annoying little brat to fashion conscious abo-teen in two short years. She informed us yesterday that we knew nothing about pop culture; I informed her that pop culture actually started 40 years before her conception and we could juxtapose and compare different eras. I’m pretty sure she knows what juxtapose means.
The Eldest is now at college which means she’s awake at 6am every morning to get made up; subsequently she’s in bed by nine every night. There is a hint of boyfriend, but seeing as they’re both teenagers they are doing a perfectly good job of fucking it up.
O, to be young and unconfident and crap again.
She’s turned seventeen; her party consisted of an eat-as-much-as-you-like Chinese buffet followed by hanging around outside pubs trying to look cool. This nearly broke up the sleep-over as her sensible mates didn’t want to do that, opting instead to hang out on a train station platform for an hour. Luckily her slutty mates were up for it, so she got stand outside Dragon kiss with the smokers, not smoking and no doubt looking like an underage girl.
Me, I’m skint and probably will be for the foreseeable future. Saving for the wedding plunges me into poverty by Wednesday every week. There is money then very, very quickly there is none. The wedding fund grows, the Girlf takes my contribution to the household expenses then after a quick trip to the bank I’m living on beans for the rest of the week. This will carry on until April. Then we will be married and hopefully I can have some liquidity again.
On the subject of marriage, I bumped into my Ex tonight who blanked me completely. She walked past me without as much as a word. This put my nose right out of joint as I’d just said hello and congratulated her on her nuptials. I thought this was quite magnanimous of me seeing as she starting dating her bloke only a couple of weeks after we split up, which makes you wonder. Whether there was an overlap or not is irrelevant, I was more than happy to be rid of the morose cow, but still, I expected to remain on good terms.
Clearly I must have been a bigger bastard than I thought because the girl’s ignored me every time we’ve chanced upon each other over the last three years. Well, it appears I’m the bigger person, I hope she’s happy. I wonder if he’s got a job yet.
Luckily I still fit into the suit I bought last year, because if I didn’t I wouldn’t be going to my cousin’s wedding in two weeks. The jacket fits like a glove although it’s quite snug around the shoulders and chest. It was with some pride I noted that it’s a 42 regular which means at some point soon I’ll have a 44 inch chest. Ten years ago I was wearing a thirty eight.
I didn’t try on the trousers, they’re a thirty six and they had better fit me. There is no way I’m going out and purchasing a pair of thirty eight inch trousers, I’d rather starve myself for a week. I’ve never had a thirty eight inch waist in my life and I never intend to have. Part of me still reckons that Burtons mislabeled them and they’re actually a thirty four.
The Girlf was delighted to have squeezed into her size twelve work trousers today; she hasn’t got into them in over a year. Office workers and writers live sedentary lives and unfortunately for her she’s both. Every night she cranks up the Wii had does twenty minutes of Just Dance. She’s quite self conscious so I’m not allowed to watch her jiggle away to the music, but I have had a couple of sneaky looks. It is funny… but it appears to be working so I’ll let her off.
Monday, 19 September 2011
Sunday, 12 June 2011
Book worm
I’m finding it hard to find time to write these days having re-discovered my love for reading. As a child my literature intake was phenomenal; I always had a book at hand. It helped living around the corner from the library; I was never that sporty and there was a lack of green spaces around where we lived. Obviously there were parks but none near enough for me to be trusted too at the age of nine. Anyway, why would I want to go and knock around a park on my own in the rain when two minutes away there was a high ceilinged Victorian building crammed full of shelves and shelves of books?
The children’s sectioned bored me. All the books on offer seemed somehow infantile although I was tempted by Watership Down. Ironically that one intimidated me. It was a monster; thick with dense, tiny printed prose. I was young and my muscles weren’t yet sufficiently developed enough to attempt it. It would of taken me months. Anyway the adult section looked far more tempting. It stretched off in all direction, sub section and categorized and I had to stand on tiptoes to reach the top shelves. I felt like I was stepping into uncharted, forbidden territory and was, initially, surprised that I wasn’t escorted out of it by the librarians.
The revelation that the library didn’t obey the same rules as the video shop set me off with gusto. I could take out any book I wanted and embarked on borrowing the most inappropriate titles I could find. Carrie started me off. I was aware of the film, which I hadn’t seen and the cover whetted my appetite; a girl’s wide eyed, staring, face dripping blood; it was rude not too.
Another thing going for Carrie was that it was quite a slim tome. It didn’t look like a lot of work. That book got me started. I was always a bit of a morbid child; I loved horror films and I lived in that short window of television history when very little got edited for broadcast. I loved it and I loved it gory. I have a memory of watching a strange black and white film, the title of which I probably never knew, early one morning; probably around four in the morning as the sun was coming up. My mum was sleeping on the sofa and I was perched on the edge of it. The bad guy in the film had a false hand that he attached various implements to and in one scene he fitted a cleaver. He raised it high into the shot and held it the there as the music rose but before he could slam it down my mum put her hand in front of my eyes and I missed the money shot. In hindsight I doubt I missed anything, after all it was a fifties film but at the time I couldn’t help but feel cheated. All that suspense and build up has to be rewarded. I whined and moaned to my mother but she was un-repentant; I was too young.
But squirreled away in my room sunk deep into Carrie I could enjoy the pay off. I was reading; my parents couldn’t complain about that, literature being a higher art form after all. Over the next few years I devoured thousands of pages of horror novels. Nastier and more graphic that any film; my warped, impressionable little mind ran wild. I loved it and managed, somehow, not to grow into a serial killer.
In the next two or three years I was prolific I never had my nose out of a book. My father’s dreams of me becoming a professional footballer withered and died as I grew fat and bookish. I wolfed up thousands off pages of print washed down with side dishes of highly calorific food. I was fat fuck, speccy geek and as you can imagine it made me highly popular and attracted the interested of many, many girls.
I’ve always read on and off over the years, the subject matters often changing to suit my mood and reflect my mutating interests but until recently I’ve never matched the volume of those first few years. I’d go through periods of reading one or two books back to back then not reading again for months, sometimes years. Only now am I feeling the same need and obsession I had in those early days; hidden in my bedroom, resenting any interruption.
I’ve set myself an impressive task. I’ve managed to get hooked on the George RR Martin Ice and fire series and they ARE monsters. I’ve eased myself in on various non fiction books that I’ve been meaning to read and I’ve caned the Claudius books as well but they are dwarfed by the Ice and fire books. I’ve read more in the last two weeks than I ingested in the previous two months. And they’ve only just started. Two down, five to go. Out of the seven books only five have been published so far. At this rate I should be up to speed by august but they are BIG; million word monsters, dense and complex and in no hurry to explain themselves. Martin expects you keep up. Minor characters develop into major characters; history, and geography and mythologies are drip fed you; plot developments are hinted at but not explained for hundreds of pages. Slow but never boring; dense but colourful, the detailed descriptions are necessary or there would be diminishment.
I’m fifteen hundred pages into what could easily become a six thousand page story. It makes Lord of the Rings look like a pamphlet yet slowly, slowly he ties up loose ends as he simultaneously sends the story off in a dozen new directions. You never know where you stand; you think you know what’s going to happen and then the story goes the opposite way and the character that you based your theory on suddenly dies.
However I think I’ve put my finger on a major plot reveal. I think I’ve got this one but it seems evident that the pay off won’t be for several books. I’m pretty sure I have it. I think I know the secret of one of the major players. Only time and thousands and thousands of pages will prove me right. I’m going to be so pissed off if I’m wrong.
The children’s sectioned bored me. All the books on offer seemed somehow infantile although I was tempted by Watership Down. Ironically that one intimidated me. It was a monster; thick with dense, tiny printed prose. I was young and my muscles weren’t yet sufficiently developed enough to attempt it. It would of taken me months. Anyway the adult section looked far more tempting. It stretched off in all direction, sub section and categorized and I had to stand on tiptoes to reach the top shelves. I felt like I was stepping into uncharted, forbidden territory and was, initially, surprised that I wasn’t escorted out of it by the librarians.
The revelation that the library didn’t obey the same rules as the video shop set me off with gusto. I could take out any book I wanted and embarked on borrowing the most inappropriate titles I could find. Carrie started me off. I was aware of the film, which I hadn’t seen and the cover whetted my appetite; a girl’s wide eyed, staring, face dripping blood; it was rude not too.
Another thing going for Carrie was that it was quite a slim tome. It didn’t look like a lot of work. That book got me started. I was always a bit of a morbid child; I loved horror films and I lived in that short window of television history when very little got edited for broadcast. I loved it and I loved it gory. I have a memory of watching a strange black and white film, the title of which I probably never knew, early one morning; probably around four in the morning as the sun was coming up. My mum was sleeping on the sofa and I was perched on the edge of it. The bad guy in the film had a false hand that he attached various implements to and in one scene he fitted a cleaver. He raised it high into the shot and held it the there as the music rose but before he could slam it down my mum put her hand in front of my eyes and I missed the money shot. In hindsight I doubt I missed anything, after all it was a fifties film but at the time I couldn’t help but feel cheated. All that suspense and build up has to be rewarded. I whined and moaned to my mother but she was un-repentant; I was too young.
But squirreled away in my room sunk deep into Carrie I could enjoy the pay off. I was reading; my parents couldn’t complain about that, literature being a higher art form after all. Over the next few years I devoured thousands of pages of horror novels. Nastier and more graphic that any film; my warped, impressionable little mind ran wild. I loved it and managed, somehow, not to grow into a serial killer.
In the next two or three years I was prolific I never had my nose out of a book. My father’s dreams of me becoming a professional footballer withered and died as I grew fat and bookish. I wolfed up thousands off pages of print washed down with side dishes of highly calorific food. I was fat fuck, speccy geek and as you can imagine it made me highly popular and attracted the interested of many, many girls.
I’ve always read on and off over the years, the subject matters often changing to suit my mood and reflect my mutating interests but until recently I’ve never matched the volume of those first few years. I’d go through periods of reading one or two books back to back then not reading again for months, sometimes years. Only now am I feeling the same need and obsession I had in those early days; hidden in my bedroom, resenting any interruption.
I’ve set myself an impressive task. I’ve managed to get hooked on the George RR Martin Ice and fire series and they ARE monsters. I’ve eased myself in on various non fiction books that I’ve been meaning to read and I’ve caned the Claudius books as well but they are dwarfed by the Ice and fire books. I’ve read more in the last two weeks than I ingested in the previous two months. And they’ve only just started. Two down, five to go. Out of the seven books only five have been published so far. At this rate I should be up to speed by august but they are BIG; million word monsters, dense and complex and in no hurry to explain themselves. Martin expects you keep up. Minor characters develop into major characters; history, and geography and mythologies are drip fed you; plot developments are hinted at but not explained for hundreds of pages. Slow but never boring; dense but colourful, the detailed descriptions are necessary or there would be diminishment.
I’m fifteen hundred pages into what could easily become a six thousand page story. It makes Lord of the Rings look like a pamphlet yet slowly, slowly he ties up loose ends as he simultaneously sends the story off in a dozen new directions. You never know where you stand; you think you know what’s going to happen and then the story goes the opposite way and the character that you based your theory on suddenly dies.
However I think I’ve put my finger on a major plot reveal. I think I’ve got this one but it seems evident that the pay off won’t be for several books. I’m pretty sure I have it. I think I know the secret of one of the major players. Only time and thousands and thousands of pages will prove me right. I’m going to be so pissed off if I’m wrong.
Tuesday, 24 May 2011
Ryan Giggs
I don’t have the right to know anything about Ryan Giggs’ private life. Neither do you. What Ryan Giggs or any other footballer, for that matter, gets up too is none of our business. In the same way that your indiscretions are no concern of mine nor are mine any concern of yours. Just because a person is known or famous or in the public eye doesn’t change any of this and the media can tart it up as a freedom of speech issue all they want, it isn’t. The bottom line is wherever Ryan Giggs sticks his cock is between Ryan Giggs, the recipient of said cock and his wife.
However... That didn’t stop me Googling until I’d found out it was him. O no, when I read that the mystery footballer had been named in the Spanish, Italian and Peruvian press I jumped on the computer. We all love gossip and we all want to hear the gossip; none of us want to be the last to know.
The press have been pulling their hair out. From day one commentators have solemnly informed us that they knew who it was yet, regrettably, they couldn’t tell us. Our ‘right to know’ had been blocked by 'out of touch judges' in the pay of wealthy men. Wealthy men who could sate their depravity without fear of discovery in exactly the same way we couldn’t.
This of course is bullshit. No one cares who we fuck. If I appeared on the front page of the Sun with a highly detailed list of my debaucheries no one would buy it. What I get up to only concerns a very small percentage of the population and although I’m sure they’d lap up any dirt on me I doubt very much it would sell much copy nation-wide. I wouldn’t need a super-injunction whether I could afford one or not.
Subsequently no tabloid in the land has any interest in me. Ryan Giggs does sell copy. He sells a lot of copy. As does Wayne Rooney (the gift that doesn’t stop giving). As does Ashley Cole who is always good for a laugh (he’s fully clothed, there are no women around, he’s not even on his phone… so he shots someone. Brilliant)
So for the last month the tabloid hacks have found them selves in an absurd situation. They knew before anyone else but they’ve had to watch as the foreign press broke the story; they’ve had to sit on their hands as the information floated around cyber-space and was lapped up by anyone who cared to know; lapped up by potential customers. All they’ve been able to do is keep the story alive, turn it into a freedom issue and in essence tread water until either the courts changed their minds or something major happen. All in the interest of selling more papers; the cause being our baser desires rather than our freedoms.
How infuriating. The jokes are getting old; everyone knows the football chants (singing ‘you’re not secret anymore’ was probably the only fun Blackpool fans had on Sunday) and generally having to watch the story go cold and not being able to say or print or sell anything.
So it was starting to look like Ryan Giggs was going to get away with it. If you ignore the fact that most of Europe and anyone with an internet connection already knew. He could consul himself that despite all that at least he’d stopped the British media making any money off his name. Then he shot himself in the face.
Just as it was starting to drop off the radar he upped the ante. He tries to sue Twitter. Very well done; you take the story off page four and make it headline news again. You alert a whole new group of tweeters and bloggers who haven’t even heard of you. Geeks take stuff like this very seriously; if you tell people they can’t talk about something, what are they going to do Ryan? They’re going to tweet, repost, joke and make your cock an internet trend. Very well done.
Giggs’ legal team was probably going with the assumption that the original tweeter was someone in the media therefore sue-able under the terms of the injunction. So a request for the page to be taken down and the name revealed probably didn’t seem out of the question. Personally I doubt the original tweets came from a journalist for the simple reason all journalists knew as did all politician and probably everyone in the legal hierarchy. Not to mention the whole of Man United and most footballers in the country and Europe. Therefore it’s safe to assume so did all their friends, spouses, children, extended families and people they talked to in the pub.
It could have been anyone!
So at exactly the point where he should have just kept his head down and wait for everything to blow over he launches a perceived attack on everybody. People are tribal, especially people online, it’s not called an online community for nothing; an attack on one is an attack on all. People with no interest in football, Ryan Giggs or the story up until that point suddenly felt obligated to re-tweet, re-post and send it into the stratosphere. Ryan Giggs had finally made it a freedom of speech issue. To stop the press selling the story is one thing but to try and prevent the sharing of jokes, gossip and banter between ordinary people is something completely different.
This action only served to make him appear arrogant with that premiership-footballer-sense of entitlement that the press so love to shove down out throats. A spectacular own goal. Very well done.
With the news of legal proceedings the clock was ticking; it was only a matter of time. If you look at the papers today you’d be forgiven for thinking the injunction had been lifted; it hasn’t. MP’s have parliamentary privilege but the press hasn’t. All the papers are doing is reporting what was said in parliament yesterday. Although the Sun headline comes perilously close to a breach of the order (‘It’s Ryan Giggs’) when you open the paper up it’s a straight forward report on an MP naming him. There’s another article on Imogen Thomas in one corner yet they don’t go as far as to link them both. In fact Ryan Giggs isn’t even mentioned in that article.
We all know. He knows we all know. But still his privacy is protected. The information has been out there for two weeks. It’s been published and reported in Spain, Italy, Peru and Scotland. No doubt the legal action on Twitter has brought the affair to the attention of America who, unlike us, does actually have a right to free expression. We have his name on the front page of our papers but what we don’t have are the details, all the sordid, mucky fineries of the affair all of which are absolutely none of our business. But we don’t want to know about them do we? We don’t need to know the where’s and when’s and how’s of what Ryan and Imogen got up too. Do we?
Do we?
However... That didn’t stop me Googling until I’d found out it was him. O no, when I read that the mystery footballer had been named in the Spanish, Italian and Peruvian press I jumped on the computer. We all love gossip and we all want to hear the gossip; none of us want to be the last to know.
The press have been pulling their hair out. From day one commentators have solemnly informed us that they knew who it was yet, regrettably, they couldn’t tell us. Our ‘right to know’ had been blocked by 'out of touch judges' in the pay of wealthy men. Wealthy men who could sate their depravity without fear of discovery in exactly the same way we couldn’t.
This of course is bullshit. No one cares who we fuck. If I appeared on the front page of the Sun with a highly detailed list of my debaucheries no one would buy it. What I get up to only concerns a very small percentage of the population and although I’m sure they’d lap up any dirt on me I doubt very much it would sell much copy nation-wide. I wouldn’t need a super-injunction whether I could afford one or not.
Subsequently no tabloid in the land has any interest in me. Ryan Giggs does sell copy. He sells a lot of copy. As does Wayne Rooney (the gift that doesn’t stop giving). As does Ashley Cole who is always good for a laugh (he’s fully clothed, there are no women around, he’s not even on his phone… so he shots someone. Brilliant)
So for the last month the tabloid hacks have found them selves in an absurd situation. They knew before anyone else but they’ve had to watch as the foreign press broke the story; they’ve had to sit on their hands as the information floated around cyber-space and was lapped up by anyone who cared to know; lapped up by potential customers. All they’ve been able to do is keep the story alive, turn it into a freedom issue and in essence tread water until either the courts changed their minds or something major happen. All in the interest of selling more papers; the cause being our baser desires rather than our freedoms.
How infuriating. The jokes are getting old; everyone knows the football chants (singing ‘you’re not secret anymore’ was probably the only fun Blackpool fans had on Sunday) and generally having to watch the story go cold and not being able to say or print or sell anything.
So it was starting to look like Ryan Giggs was going to get away with it. If you ignore the fact that most of Europe and anyone with an internet connection already knew. He could consul himself that despite all that at least he’d stopped the British media making any money off his name. Then he shot himself in the face.
Just as it was starting to drop off the radar he upped the ante. He tries to sue Twitter. Very well done; you take the story off page four and make it headline news again. You alert a whole new group of tweeters and bloggers who haven’t even heard of you. Geeks take stuff like this very seriously; if you tell people they can’t talk about something, what are they going to do Ryan? They’re going to tweet, repost, joke and make your cock an internet trend. Very well done.
Giggs’ legal team was probably going with the assumption that the original tweeter was someone in the media therefore sue-able under the terms of the injunction. So a request for the page to be taken down and the name revealed probably didn’t seem out of the question. Personally I doubt the original tweets came from a journalist for the simple reason all journalists knew as did all politician and probably everyone in the legal hierarchy. Not to mention the whole of Man United and most footballers in the country and Europe. Therefore it’s safe to assume so did all their friends, spouses, children, extended families and people they talked to in the pub.
It could have been anyone!
So at exactly the point where he should have just kept his head down and wait for everything to blow over he launches a perceived attack on everybody. People are tribal, especially people online, it’s not called an online community for nothing; an attack on one is an attack on all. People with no interest in football, Ryan Giggs or the story up until that point suddenly felt obligated to re-tweet, re-post and send it into the stratosphere. Ryan Giggs had finally made it a freedom of speech issue. To stop the press selling the story is one thing but to try and prevent the sharing of jokes, gossip and banter between ordinary people is something completely different.
This action only served to make him appear arrogant with that premiership-footballer-sense of entitlement that the press so love to shove down out throats. A spectacular own goal. Very well done.
With the news of legal proceedings the clock was ticking; it was only a matter of time. If you look at the papers today you’d be forgiven for thinking the injunction had been lifted; it hasn’t. MP’s have parliamentary privilege but the press hasn’t. All the papers are doing is reporting what was said in parliament yesterday. Although the Sun headline comes perilously close to a breach of the order (‘It’s Ryan Giggs’) when you open the paper up it’s a straight forward report on an MP naming him. There’s another article on Imogen Thomas in one corner yet they don’t go as far as to link them both. In fact Ryan Giggs isn’t even mentioned in that article.
We all know. He knows we all know. But still his privacy is protected. The information has been out there for two weeks. It’s been published and reported in Spain, Italy, Peru and Scotland. No doubt the legal action on Twitter has brought the affair to the attention of America who, unlike us, does actually have a right to free expression. We have his name on the front page of our papers but what we don’t have are the details, all the sordid, mucky fineries of the affair all of which are absolutely none of our business. But we don’t want to know about them do we? We don’t need to know the where’s and when’s and how’s of what Ryan and Imogen got up too. Do we?
Do we?
Thursday, 31 March 2011
Line learning and character construction
Line learning is a drag, one of those things that you’ll do anything to put off. You’ll clear up, you’ll wash up and you’ll make deals with yourself to find time for it tomorrow. The irony is once you sit down and start the process, crowbar-ing all those words into your head actually brings the play to life. More to the point, it being the self-centred, egocentric, world of acting, it brings your character to life.
Today has been productive; I’ve learnt about fourteen pages of script and in the process my director’s notes are beginning to make sense. The last rehearsal was a bit of an ego-boost although I was receiving criticism at the time. I wasn’t getting the character because I wasn’t overcoming my innate Alpha male-ness; this was exacerbated by my naturally seductive voice. I’ve never felt so flattered while being told I was shit.
My status as an Alpha was mentioned during the last production; if I’m not careful I’m going to start believing it. All ego-massaging aside this is a personality trait I’m going to have to overcome and suppress in playing Stuart. Stuart is the antithesis of Alpha-ness.
The boy is a moron, a word that has faded from everyday use but in its literal meaning describes many people eloquently. It’s simply the Greek word mo-ron (accent on the ‘ron’), it means child and Stuart is most definitely a child.
He is a stock comedy character, the idiot whose workings are played out on his face. He’s immediate and in the moment; he does think but only after the words have left his mouth and he’s forced to back peddle his way out of trouble. He’s comic, and my task as an actor is to capture his endearing innocence than some how steer it through the darkness of Act Two.
It’s possible to play him for laughs all the way through but I’m starting to grasp one of the themes of the play; he’s a likeable character, a clown and my job is to get the audience onside in Act One before he starts to do highly questionable things in Act Two. You have to like him at the beginning because as the play progresses you are asked to take sides and question your allegiances. Is it possible for nice people to do bad things and even if those things are bad do they deserve their fate? Who is innocent and who is guilty and who is just plain fucked up?
I think I’m bringing down his status quite well now. I need to formulate some physical characteristics, I feel he’s a mover, a twitcher and like I said before his subtext is there for everyone to see; like in all good comedy characters. So slowly, slowly I’m going to try and get all of Act One down by Monday night. I won’t be word perfect but I’ll have the freedom to explore the physicality and look my fellow actors in the eyes.
No play starts to work before you can do this. It might sound ok but it certainly doesn’t ‘live’. And you aren’t likely to discover anything new in the text while reading it out-loud no matter how counterintuitive that statement sounds.
Today has been productive; I’ve learnt about fourteen pages of script and in the process my director’s notes are beginning to make sense. The last rehearsal was a bit of an ego-boost although I was receiving criticism at the time. I wasn’t getting the character because I wasn’t overcoming my innate Alpha male-ness; this was exacerbated by my naturally seductive voice. I’ve never felt so flattered while being told I was shit.
My status as an Alpha was mentioned during the last production; if I’m not careful I’m going to start believing it. All ego-massaging aside this is a personality trait I’m going to have to overcome and suppress in playing Stuart. Stuart is the antithesis of Alpha-ness.
The boy is a moron, a word that has faded from everyday use but in its literal meaning describes many people eloquently. It’s simply the Greek word mo-ron (accent on the ‘ron’), it means child and Stuart is most definitely a child.
He is a stock comedy character, the idiot whose workings are played out on his face. He’s immediate and in the moment; he does think but only after the words have left his mouth and he’s forced to back peddle his way out of trouble. He’s comic, and my task as an actor is to capture his endearing innocence than some how steer it through the darkness of Act Two.
It’s possible to play him for laughs all the way through but I’m starting to grasp one of the themes of the play; he’s a likeable character, a clown and my job is to get the audience onside in Act One before he starts to do highly questionable things in Act Two. You have to like him at the beginning because as the play progresses you are asked to take sides and question your allegiances. Is it possible for nice people to do bad things and even if those things are bad do they deserve their fate? Who is innocent and who is guilty and who is just plain fucked up?
I think I’m bringing down his status quite well now. I need to formulate some physical characteristics, I feel he’s a mover, a twitcher and like I said before his subtext is there for everyone to see; like in all good comedy characters. So slowly, slowly I’m going to try and get all of Act One down by Monday night. I won’t be word perfect but I’ll have the freedom to explore the physicality and look my fellow actors in the eyes.
No play starts to work before you can do this. It might sound ok but it certainly doesn’t ‘live’. And you aren’t likely to discover anything new in the text while reading it out-loud no matter how counterintuitive that statement sounds.
Tuesday, 29 March 2011
Masculinity
Alcohol dissolves the body and leaves only the mind intact. It floats around the room musing at itself, grinning and gurning with a smug look on its face; filled with self- importance.
Lately the urge to write has only welled up in me when I’ve been inebriated. Actually to be fair to myself the only times I’ve have had the opportunity or inclination to write has been in the wee dark hours of the morning and whisky just happens to be the catalyst.
Tonight my musing is on man-hood. A lot of my intellectualising is often spent on documentaries of times long past, Romans and Greeks and what-not. I am something of a geek. My geekiness only stretches to a few subjects. Generally these are physics, astronomy and of course ancient history. Although my mind can be pulled in different directions inadvertently I find myself returning to these disciplines. I’m lured back to the cradle of civilization or the quantum world or the glorious magnitude of the universe.
These glories capture my imagination. I wonder at the philosophies that are inspired by the laws of thermodynamics or special relativity. I’m humbled by the concept of infinity and the modern theories of physics that elevate maths into the stratosphere; giving it the un-attainability of a religion, demanding a faith in the numbers, knowing that a tangible proof would be impossible.
But more often than not I return to the classical world; the Roman emperors, the Greek generals and the Hebrew leaders of Biblical legend. These times are shrouded in myth and third generation hearsay. Story-telling, finally put down on paper after being passed on, word of mouth, for decades or sometimes centuries. Exaggerated self-interest and in later times retrospective politicising. These tales are our histories, these people are our forebears and more importantly these people are us; stripped of our sensibilities and good manners, they show us ourselves in simpler times. They show us ourselves in times when people knew themselves. Their place in the world, the limits of their aspirations; what they could hope to achieve within the confines of their particular reality.
The Roman emperor was a God and could be worshiped as such; the lowly slave had to content himself with his life of servitude. He lived on his wits and the philanthropy of others for his success. Winning one's freedom was possible. You could buy your way out of servitude or in some cases fight your way out of it.
The Gladiators of old were slaves. Bought and traded but within the arena they could become Gods earning more than a soldier yearly salary for a single fight. Scarcely more than animals, vermin in civil society, they were lusted after by noble women. A bit of rough yet idolised for their bravery but more to the point their masculinity; their manliness, their man-ness.
We have nothing to compare nowadays. Fighting in the street is shameful, chavy. Nowadays we are above that. We should know better but we are still weighed down with the concept of being a real man. How now do we prove our worth?
In days gone by we could have fought in the arena or on the battle field; sword to sword, nose to nose and claimed our honour. Today the battles are mired in political controversy, hindered by rules and concepts of humanity. We can fight but we become political pawns or charity cases when the worse comes to the worse. Sob stories cast down at the feet of politicians. The art of war, of manly pursuits reduced to apologetic sound-bites of respect and regrets.
What have we left? We can still fuck. We can be that guy, the conqueror of innocence and chastity. We can dominate the pussy if we so choose. We can be the cock, the romantic hero, the lover. Or we can strut and barge and brag; blast the world with our confidence and alienate others that way if that is our preference. Bluster our way through, clinging to our manhood by our fingertips.
How, in this complex feminised world, can we re-establish ourselves; regain our status as protector and pillar, breadwinner and foundation.
The question really is... are we really needed anymore?
Have we just become a shoulder to lean on? Have we become merely an ear to listen silently to our women’s fears and needs? Are we only sounding boards as they talk themselves into a decision or play out their psycho-babble? What is our role now? No more are we the hunters or protectors; brow beaten and chastised we question ourselves; question our man-ness. We dismiss it as macho bullshit.
From beneath my weights I don’t want to dismiss it. We are men, we are man! This world is built on our shoulders and our legacy has brought us to this sanitised, feminised, moment in history. Our success is in danger of rendering us obsolete and bringing us to the brink of extinction. We’ve managed to fashion a world that scarcely needs us and now we have the daunting task of finding our place in it.
Yes, I can fuck. Yes, I can fight if need be. My muscles are strong and in them is a cultural memory of toil and hardship. My DNA has fought to be here today. Countless generations of battles and victories have preserved my essence. The blood that flows through my veins, in times gone by, has soaked the earth as it’s wrestled for its survival. These victories aren’t forgotten; they pulse inside of me. They fuel me. They wait for the moment when they will be called upon again. Ready, as history turns, and we, once again, can rise to our birth rite.
Lately the urge to write has only welled up in me when I’ve been inebriated. Actually to be fair to myself the only times I’ve have had the opportunity or inclination to write has been in the wee dark hours of the morning and whisky just happens to be the catalyst.
Tonight my musing is on man-hood. A lot of my intellectualising is often spent on documentaries of times long past, Romans and Greeks and what-not. I am something of a geek. My geekiness only stretches to a few subjects. Generally these are physics, astronomy and of course ancient history. Although my mind can be pulled in different directions inadvertently I find myself returning to these disciplines. I’m lured back to the cradle of civilization or the quantum world or the glorious magnitude of the universe.
These glories capture my imagination. I wonder at the philosophies that are inspired by the laws of thermodynamics or special relativity. I’m humbled by the concept of infinity and the modern theories of physics that elevate maths into the stratosphere; giving it the un-attainability of a religion, demanding a faith in the numbers, knowing that a tangible proof would be impossible.
But more often than not I return to the classical world; the Roman emperors, the Greek generals and the Hebrew leaders of Biblical legend. These times are shrouded in myth and third generation hearsay. Story-telling, finally put down on paper after being passed on, word of mouth, for decades or sometimes centuries. Exaggerated self-interest and in later times retrospective politicising. These tales are our histories, these people are our forebears and more importantly these people are us; stripped of our sensibilities and good manners, they show us ourselves in simpler times. They show us ourselves in times when people knew themselves. Their place in the world, the limits of their aspirations; what they could hope to achieve within the confines of their particular reality.
The Roman emperor was a God and could be worshiped as such; the lowly slave had to content himself with his life of servitude. He lived on his wits and the philanthropy of others for his success. Winning one's freedom was possible. You could buy your way out of servitude or in some cases fight your way out of it.
The Gladiators of old were slaves. Bought and traded but within the arena they could become Gods earning more than a soldier yearly salary for a single fight. Scarcely more than animals, vermin in civil society, they were lusted after by noble women. A bit of rough yet idolised for their bravery but more to the point their masculinity; their manliness, their man-ness.
We have nothing to compare nowadays. Fighting in the street is shameful, chavy. Nowadays we are above that. We should know better but we are still weighed down with the concept of being a real man. How now do we prove our worth?
In days gone by we could have fought in the arena or on the battle field; sword to sword, nose to nose and claimed our honour. Today the battles are mired in political controversy, hindered by rules and concepts of humanity. We can fight but we become political pawns or charity cases when the worse comes to the worse. Sob stories cast down at the feet of politicians. The art of war, of manly pursuits reduced to apologetic sound-bites of respect and regrets.
What have we left? We can still fuck. We can be that guy, the conqueror of innocence and chastity. We can dominate the pussy if we so choose. We can be the cock, the romantic hero, the lover. Or we can strut and barge and brag; blast the world with our confidence and alienate others that way if that is our preference. Bluster our way through, clinging to our manhood by our fingertips.
How, in this complex feminised world, can we re-establish ourselves; regain our status as protector and pillar, breadwinner and foundation.
The question really is... are we really needed anymore?
Have we just become a shoulder to lean on? Have we become merely an ear to listen silently to our women’s fears and needs? Are we only sounding boards as they talk themselves into a decision or play out their psycho-babble? What is our role now? No more are we the hunters or protectors; brow beaten and chastised we question ourselves; question our man-ness. We dismiss it as macho bullshit.
From beneath my weights I don’t want to dismiss it. We are men, we are man! This world is built on our shoulders and our legacy has brought us to this sanitised, feminised, moment in history. Our success is in danger of rendering us obsolete and bringing us to the brink of extinction. We’ve managed to fashion a world that scarcely needs us and now we have the daunting task of finding our place in it.
Yes, I can fuck. Yes, I can fight if need be. My muscles are strong and in them is a cultural memory of toil and hardship. My DNA has fought to be here today. Countless generations of battles and victories have preserved my essence. The blood that flows through my veins, in times gone by, has soaked the earth as it’s wrestled for its survival. These victories aren’t forgotten; they pulse inside of me. They fuel me. They wait for the moment when they will be called upon again. Ready, as history turns, and we, once again, can rise to our birth rite.
Thursday, 3 March 2011
Hound of the Baskervilles and the rest of the world
It’s business as usual in the household. The Girlf’s wisdom teeth are playing up, the Eldest is distraught and stressing over a boy and the Youngest is still immensely gay. The house is tidy, clean and cozy so my day off is exactly that, a day off. The weights have been pumped, the body throbs and I am having dinner cooked for me tonight so I’ve absolutely nothing to do, which suits me nicely.
This is a stark contrast to the last few weeks. We’ve had the insanity of Christmas, a heavy workload and of course Hound of the Baskervilles. My return to the stage is complete and finally I can sit down, relax and take stock.
With hindsight I went straight back in at the deep end. As parts go the stage time of Sir Henry was huge, pretty much up there with Holmes and Watson. I suppose his lines were concise by comparison but as per-usual I didn’t consider any of this and just said yes to everything. How hard could it be eh?
Something I realized eventually was I hadn’t worked hard enough on the character. Learning the lines isn’t the be-all and end-all, merely the first step. This didn’t really dawn on me until after the first night, a mixture of tension, stuttering and corpseing that the Girlf pointed out in no uncertain terms afterwards.
The accent was certainly a distraction, but a poor excuse if I’m honest. I totally overlooked the physicality in rehearsal, for a character to not merely be you standing on stage and reciting you have to imbue him with habits and physical characteristics that set him apart from you. At the very least this gives the actor the sense that he’s working harder on stage and this settles the nerves and increases the confidence.
My Thursday night notes were dually absorbed and Friday and Saturday were a great improvement. Work I’m genuinely proud of. All in all I couldn’t have hoped for a better group to work with, easy going and talented they helped ease my re-introduction to theatre. It’s still hard work but it’s nice to feel all those old synapses firing again after a decade long sabbatical. Still a work in progress, I’m looking forward to the next project, totally modern, funny and dark it will be a completely different experience. Hound as been a gentle route back into acting and now I can use all I’ve learnt from it on the next thing. I’ve still got to do a bloody accent though.
The world has continued to turn during my intellectual absence. The depressive cloud of reality still hangs over humanity; it’s getting to the point that I don’t bother watching the news anymore. It’s becoming evident that soon none of us will be able to afford to eat, drive or generally do anything. I’m sick of hearing about austerity, the lack of growth and cuts. We’ve gone from a prosperous country to a third world state in under three years. This perplexes me because nothing has actually changed. We have the same amount of people and the same amount of stuff yet because a few naughts have fallen off some-ones computer screen we’re all fucked.
We now think are houses are worth half what we thought they were worth. They’re still there, still keeping us dry and warm yet they have less value. It doesn’t matter anyway, the banks aren’t lending to anyone so even though your house is nice and cheap no one’s going to buy it. The horror is we’ll just have to content ourselves with living in them. Shocking.
What does interest me is that the Middle East is currently over-brimming with optimism, dictators are being over-thrown or in the process of being over-thrown. On the brink of real change endorphin levels in North Africa and Arabia must going through the roof. Providing one survives all the turmoil this could be the best few weeks for these people in living memory.
Of course this excellent news can’t pierce the fog of our depression. It is in fact yet another reason to be pissed off. With the prospect of change imminent we’ve latched on to the possibility that it will be a change we don’t like. Those nasty Muslims could take over… in Muslim countries. Our favorable status quo is teetering and we’re coming over all Daily Mail at the prospect. This has a lot to do with that fact that these horrible dictators were installed by us in the first place. Totalitarian partners with our interests at heart, mutual back-scratching with Satan himself, we struggle with democracy at home let alone in far flung, oil rich areas abroad.
The big fear is whoever gets control in the end won’t like us very much and make life awkward, democratic or not, what might be good for them could possibly be very shit for us. It’s not a surprise that any fledgling ‘democracies’ in the region are being set up in the wake of our armed forced blitzkrieg. Who’s going to get overly stroppy with an invading army sat in their living room?
Certainly, as Libya smolders, there is a real threat of another war. Our special forces are over there right now trying to get British nationals out. Kaddafi is being investigated over any possible crimes against humanity and that in its self posses the question, what do you do if he has committed these crimes?
Saddam Hussein and Iraq have set a precedent.
This is a stark contrast to the last few weeks. We’ve had the insanity of Christmas, a heavy workload and of course Hound of the Baskervilles. My return to the stage is complete and finally I can sit down, relax and take stock.
With hindsight I went straight back in at the deep end. As parts go the stage time of Sir Henry was huge, pretty much up there with Holmes and Watson. I suppose his lines were concise by comparison but as per-usual I didn’t consider any of this and just said yes to everything. How hard could it be eh?
Something I realized eventually was I hadn’t worked hard enough on the character. Learning the lines isn’t the be-all and end-all, merely the first step. This didn’t really dawn on me until after the first night, a mixture of tension, stuttering and corpseing that the Girlf pointed out in no uncertain terms afterwards.
The accent was certainly a distraction, but a poor excuse if I’m honest. I totally overlooked the physicality in rehearsal, for a character to not merely be you standing on stage and reciting you have to imbue him with habits and physical characteristics that set him apart from you. At the very least this gives the actor the sense that he’s working harder on stage and this settles the nerves and increases the confidence.
My Thursday night notes were dually absorbed and Friday and Saturday were a great improvement. Work I’m genuinely proud of. All in all I couldn’t have hoped for a better group to work with, easy going and talented they helped ease my re-introduction to theatre. It’s still hard work but it’s nice to feel all those old synapses firing again after a decade long sabbatical. Still a work in progress, I’m looking forward to the next project, totally modern, funny and dark it will be a completely different experience. Hound as been a gentle route back into acting and now I can use all I’ve learnt from it on the next thing. I’ve still got to do a bloody accent though.
The world has continued to turn during my intellectual absence. The depressive cloud of reality still hangs over humanity; it’s getting to the point that I don’t bother watching the news anymore. It’s becoming evident that soon none of us will be able to afford to eat, drive or generally do anything. I’m sick of hearing about austerity, the lack of growth and cuts. We’ve gone from a prosperous country to a third world state in under three years. This perplexes me because nothing has actually changed. We have the same amount of people and the same amount of stuff yet because a few naughts have fallen off some-ones computer screen we’re all fucked.
We now think are houses are worth half what we thought they were worth. They’re still there, still keeping us dry and warm yet they have less value. It doesn’t matter anyway, the banks aren’t lending to anyone so even though your house is nice and cheap no one’s going to buy it. The horror is we’ll just have to content ourselves with living in them. Shocking.
What does interest me is that the Middle East is currently over-brimming with optimism, dictators are being over-thrown or in the process of being over-thrown. On the brink of real change endorphin levels in North Africa and Arabia must going through the roof. Providing one survives all the turmoil this could be the best few weeks for these people in living memory.
Of course this excellent news can’t pierce the fog of our depression. It is in fact yet another reason to be pissed off. With the prospect of change imminent we’ve latched on to the possibility that it will be a change we don’t like. Those nasty Muslims could take over… in Muslim countries. Our favorable status quo is teetering and we’re coming over all Daily Mail at the prospect. This has a lot to do with that fact that these horrible dictators were installed by us in the first place. Totalitarian partners with our interests at heart, mutual back-scratching with Satan himself, we struggle with democracy at home let alone in far flung, oil rich areas abroad.
The big fear is whoever gets control in the end won’t like us very much and make life awkward, democratic or not, what might be good for them could possibly be very shit for us. It’s not a surprise that any fledgling ‘democracies’ in the region are being set up in the wake of our armed forced blitzkrieg. Who’s going to get overly stroppy with an invading army sat in their living room?
Certainly, as Libya smolders, there is a real threat of another war. Our special forces are over there right now trying to get British nationals out. Kaddafi is being investigated over any possible crimes against humanity and that in its self posses the question, what do you do if he has committed these crimes?
Saddam Hussein and Iraq have set a precedent.
Wednesday, 2 February 2011
Insomnia
Insomnia robs you of your creativity; you borrow the minutes from tomorrow to frivolise away today. Wasted moments, ticking away your life, tick tock, tick tock, trapped in the quiet, pointless moment of now when the world sleeps and you stare at the wall lost in your darkest thoughts as they carousel around your mind, maddening you.
Tomorrow half the day will be lost. I’ll be rushing around to do the things I need to do, squeezing everything in to deadlines because right now I’m awake, alone, half-cut and without a glimmer of a chance of sleep. The wine hasn’t helped, if anything it’s woken me up even more. My mind burbles and hums to itself and I’m lumbered with it. All I can hear is the fan in my lap top and the clank of the keys as I talk to myself on the screen.
What happened to my youth? I still feel young, but I’m not. Not by anyone’s standards. I’m thirty eight. I know thirty eight year olds, they look so old and yet I don’t feel old.
Should I? Should I feel my age? If so what should I feel? Surely age is the cruellest abstract concept that we put upon ourselves. Self imposed dictates of, where I should be, what I should have done, what I should have accrued and how I should act.
Physics tells us that time is relative. Time passes slower for a moving object relative to a stationary one. Could it be that a life time of quick fire thoughts and intense emotions have slowed my aging, freezing me in some kind of permanent boy-hood? Peter Pan-ing me in perpetual adolescence, feet stampingly obstinate and stubbornly refusing to grow up?
Why should I grow up, to become what? Stayed, cynical, bored and comfortable? Should I become resolute and acceptant of the world? Should I not thank my lucky genes for my boyish good looks and blag it a little longer? Or maybe I should just fuck it and do what ever I damn well choose, take the one life I have and stop worrying about it. Crowbar it into all the nooks and crannies of possibility just to see. Just to see.
After all, in hundred years who will care? Life is so short, almost shockingly short in the eternal scheme of things. Fifty generations separate us from the Roman Empire in all its glory. Only fifty.
Newton is only ten generations away from you. The father of science, who made the modern world possible, the man who set down the laws of motion, conjured gravity from mathematics and explained the moon’s orbit. He was rubbing shoulders with your great, great, great grandfather’s great, great, great grandfather. We are stood on the shoulders of giants but there isn’t much of a drop.
What of a mere two hundred generation? You fade into the back waters of human history. You predate the written word. You are one of the men that built Stonehenge. You plot the course of the moon as it glides over head. You have an inkling of its significance. You wonder at it, you set your year by it but you don’t know what it is.
A million generations and there you are, walking up right for the first time. You clutch a rock and you run from a dozen predators that could kill you with a single bite. You’re covered top to toe with fur, you speak in grunts and even though you use the moonlight to see at night you have never contemplated it, why it’s there or how it had become. It’s just light and your belly needs to be filled.
Day by day, one by one we all eventually become history. Our days and our insomniac nights, our heights of passion and depths of despair, all lost to time. It chips away at us, age-worn and spent we fall into the grave, still confused, still wondering and still bathed in moonlight as our eyes dim and finally we’re done.
When they dig up my bones in a thousand years and they measure my remains, when they count my teeth and sort through my grave goods, my choices won’t be relevant. Neither relevant nor in-fact evident save for maybe the odd scar on a bone, some tell-tale sign of disease or quite possibly a chipped tooth that would tell a tale of stupidity, reckless abandon or foolhardy childishness.
Tomorrow half the day will be lost. I’ll be rushing around to do the things I need to do, squeezing everything in to deadlines because right now I’m awake, alone, half-cut and without a glimmer of a chance of sleep. The wine hasn’t helped, if anything it’s woken me up even more. My mind burbles and hums to itself and I’m lumbered with it. All I can hear is the fan in my lap top and the clank of the keys as I talk to myself on the screen.
What happened to my youth? I still feel young, but I’m not. Not by anyone’s standards. I’m thirty eight. I know thirty eight year olds, they look so old and yet I don’t feel old.
Should I? Should I feel my age? If so what should I feel? Surely age is the cruellest abstract concept that we put upon ourselves. Self imposed dictates of, where I should be, what I should have done, what I should have accrued and how I should act.
Physics tells us that time is relative. Time passes slower for a moving object relative to a stationary one. Could it be that a life time of quick fire thoughts and intense emotions have slowed my aging, freezing me in some kind of permanent boy-hood? Peter Pan-ing me in perpetual adolescence, feet stampingly obstinate and stubbornly refusing to grow up?
Why should I grow up, to become what? Stayed, cynical, bored and comfortable? Should I become resolute and acceptant of the world? Should I not thank my lucky genes for my boyish good looks and blag it a little longer? Or maybe I should just fuck it and do what ever I damn well choose, take the one life I have and stop worrying about it. Crowbar it into all the nooks and crannies of possibility just to see. Just to see.
After all, in hundred years who will care? Life is so short, almost shockingly short in the eternal scheme of things. Fifty generations separate us from the Roman Empire in all its glory. Only fifty.
Newton is only ten generations away from you. The father of science, who made the modern world possible, the man who set down the laws of motion, conjured gravity from mathematics and explained the moon’s orbit. He was rubbing shoulders with your great, great, great grandfather’s great, great, great grandfather. We are stood on the shoulders of giants but there isn’t much of a drop.
What of a mere two hundred generation? You fade into the back waters of human history. You predate the written word. You are one of the men that built Stonehenge. You plot the course of the moon as it glides over head. You have an inkling of its significance. You wonder at it, you set your year by it but you don’t know what it is.
A million generations and there you are, walking up right for the first time. You clutch a rock and you run from a dozen predators that could kill you with a single bite. You’re covered top to toe with fur, you speak in grunts and even though you use the moonlight to see at night you have never contemplated it, why it’s there or how it had become. It’s just light and your belly needs to be filled.
Day by day, one by one we all eventually become history. Our days and our insomniac nights, our heights of passion and depths of despair, all lost to time. It chips away at us, age-worn and spent we fall into the grave, still confused, still wondering and still bathed in moonlight as our eyes dim and finally we’re done.
When they dig up my bones in a thousand years and they measure my remains, when they count my teeth and sort through my grave goods, my choices won’t be relevant. Neither relevant nor in-fact evident save for maybe the odd scar on a bone, some tell-tale sign of disease or quite possibly a chipped tooth that would tell a tale of stupidity, reckless abandon or foolhardy childishness.
Thursday, 20 January 2011
Telly day
I’m dying. My illness has been hasn’t been helped by the Girlf leaving the window open all night. Her comfort apparently out-weighed mine. I didn’t know it was open, I assumed it was shut. After all I had constantly text her all night from work telling her how ill I was. I didn’t think she’d have a window open on me when I went to bed. I actually thought I was getting worse as the night progressed. You’d assume my protestations of how cold it was would have spurred her onto her feet to close it.
But no, she just left me to shiver all night long. What a selfish bitch. To compound my discomfort she’s picked today to come on. So now I can’t even enjoy an ill-day moan-a-thon as she’ll deflect my pains with her own bleating about stomach cramps, hormonal overloads and the suchlike. All this and it’s my birthday tomorrow. Happy birthday me.
I’ve done my best to get a little service before she went to work. I had her running around fetching me water, vapor rub and Night nurse, intent on making her work for the window incident. To be fair to her she did get me all those things and only moaned quietly about man-flu under her breath. When she gets home, though, I will be getting my moneys worth. I expect dinner and plenty of pampering. It would be great if she has a little tidy-up as well because I’m not doing shit today. I’m ensconced on the sofa under a duvet and I have no intention of moving.
I’ve double dosed on Night nurse so I fully expect to be nodding off like a smack head in the next couple of hours. I do enjoy the Night nurse nod, it creeps up on you. You think oh, I’ll just lie down for a second because that’ll make me more comfortable then, bang, you’re gone. Very, very nice. There’s nothing wrong with a drug induced nap every now and again.
The Eldest is watching Glee so that’ll send me off into slumber. She’s probably the cause of my malaise, she been rough for a couple days. Well, rougher than usual anyway. I’ve been assured she’s lost her voice and so far so good, she’s barely spoken. It’s the little things you need to be thankful for. She does occasionally rasp at me but I can handle it, just about, and she keeps shushing me for every mediocre cover in the show but it’s the coughing that’s doing my head in. That forced, exaggerated, teen cough. Disgusting.
Their voices are definitely enhanced and I’m sure over exposure to this programme can result in homosexuality. These plot lines are actually atrocious. They make Eastenders seem believable. If I don’t put my foot down all I get is Glee, Skins, Grand designs and Fat Families. Fat Families has got to be the worse. An entire hour of fat people crying because they’re fat. Sixty minutes of self hating, self enabling kinship units, chugging down the calories by the tens of thousands and wondering why they’re so big. I could tell them.
I’ve never liked Skins, being neither a kid nor a pedophile. I always find myself agreeing with their parents and wishing national service on them. I understand it’s not aimed at me but still, utter balderdash. Youth telly always brings out my inner Thatcher. Five minutes of either Skins or Glee and I’m calling for the reinstatement of the birch. There’s nothing wrong with these kids that a good whipping wouldn’t cure. Two songs in and I’m wishing I lived in Iran. Sharia law was devised for these cunts.
The coughing and the Britney Spears episode is beginning to bite. My man brain wasn’t designed to cope with this. I can feel it melting. Pretty soon it’s going to start leaking out of my ears. My constitution can’t deal with this today. I’m going to have to reclaim the telly. What I need is some History channel or maybe Discovery. What I need is an hour of biblical battles or perhaps an in-depth explanation of the smelting process of steel. Man telly, it’s universal, the other day I caught my dad watching a programme on the manufacture of Wellington boots.
Ah, I have the Roman invasion of Briton in ten minutes. Nice, I’ll have to go get some provisions and bed down for the duration. Sooner or later the meds are going to kick in and I want to be completely comfortable when they do.
But no, she just left me to shiver all night long. What a selfish bitch. To compound my discomfort she’s picked today to come on. So now I can’t even enjoy an ill-day moan-a-thon as she’ll deflect my pains with her own bleating about stomach cramps, hormonal overloads and the suchlike. All this and it’s my birthday tomorrow. Happy birthday me.
I’ve done my best to get a little service before she went to work. I had her running around fetching me water, vapor rub and Night nurse, intent on making her work for the window incident. To be fair to her she did get me all those things and only moaned quietly about man-flu under her breath. When she gets home, though, I will be getting my moneys worth. I expect dinner and plenty of pampering. It would be great if she has a little tidy-up as well because I’m not doing shit today. I’m ensconced on the sofa under a duvet and I have no intention of moving.
I’ve double dosed on Night nurse so I fully expect to be nodding off like a smack head in the next couple of hours. I do enjoy the Night nurse nod, it creeps up on you. You think oh, I’ll just lie down for a second because that’ll make me more comfortable then, bang, you’re gone. Very, very nice. There’s nothing wrong with a drug induced nap every now and again.
The Eldest is watching Glee so that’ll send me off into slumber. She’s probably the cause of my malaise, she been rough for a couple days. Well, rougher than usual anyway. I’ve been assured she’s lost her voice and so far so good, she’s barely spoken. It’s the little things you need to be thankful for. She does occasionally rasp at me but I can handle it, just about, and she keeps shushing me for every mediocre cover in the show but it’s the coughing that’s doing my head in. That forced, exaggerated, teen cough. Disgusting.
Their voices are definitely enhanced and I’m sure over exposure to this programme can result in homosexuality. These plot lines are actually atrocious. They make Eastenders seem believable. If I don’t put my foot down all I get is Glee, Skins, Grand designs and Fat Families. Fat Families has got to be the worse. An entire hour of fat people crying because they’re fat. Sixty minutes of self hating, self enabling kinship units, chugging down the calories by the tens of thousands and wondering why they’re so big. I could tell them.
I’ve never liked Skins, being neither a kid nor a pedophile. I always find myself agreeing with their parents and wishing national service on them. I understand it’s not aimed at me but still, utter balderdash. Youth telly always brings out my inner Thatcher. Five minutes of either Skins or Glee and I’m calling for the reinstatement of the birch. There’s nothing wrong with these kids that a good whipping wouldn’t cure. Two songs in and I’m wishing I lived in Iran. Sharia law was devised for these cunts.
The coughing and the Britney Spears episode is beginning to bite. My man brain wasn’t designed to cope with this. I can feel it melting. Pretty soon it’s going to start leaking out of my ears. My constitution can’t deal with this today. I’m going to have to reclaim the telly. What I need is some History channel or maybe Discovery. What I need is an hour of biblical battles or perhaps an in-depth explanation of the smelting process of steel. Man telly, it’s universal, the other day I caught my dad watching a programme on the manufacture of Wellington boots.
Ah, I have the Roman invasion of Briton in ten minutes. Nice, I’ll have to go get some provisions and bed down for the duration. Sooner or later the meds are going to kick in and I want to be completely comfortable when they do.
Thursday, 13 January 2011
New Year, love and the representations of love
It’s with great aplomb I can announce the start of a new year. Today it has become official. For today, at last, my laptop has been fixed. The accident that was waiting to happen for over a year happened last week. I stepped on the bloody thing and it was all Jane Austen’s fault. If the girls hadn’t of been swooning over Mr. Darcy, if the DVD hadn’t been used as a coaster and had not frozen every eight seconds then I wouldn’t have taken the computer upstairs, I wouldn’t have left it on the floor and I wouldn’t have fucking stepped on it.
Damn you Austen, from now on we are enemies, you and I.
When it comes to women and their view of romance I’m constantly being told that ‘I just don’t understand’. I admit romantic fiction certainly isn’t my forte, I kind of get it, but he smacks of woman porn to me, female emotional-masturbation. Austen is the grand mummy of it all but, for the life of me, all I can see in Pride and Prejudice is a protracted argument that ends with two people fucking.
In my opinion that’s what makes romance such a pointless genre. As a man I can’t see how reading about two people, who aren’t me, getting laid would be the slightest bit interesting. In real life this is a recognized fact. There is nothing more boring than someone banging on about their new boyfriend or girlfriend. None of us care because none of us are fucking them. Also, a self respecting romantic novel has up the ante; inject a bit of conflict and adversity into the situation. So now you’re reading about someone else’s dysfunctional relationship. Joy heaped upon joy.
In most romantic novels the male lead has to be a prick. The dashing Mr. Darcy is Austen’s prick. Now, don’t think for an instant I have any problem with a man’s God given right to be a prick. I myself have profited immensely from being an arsehole. Truth be told my life took a considerable up turn when I gave in to my inner wanker and allowed him to flourish.
My problem with Romantic fiction is the interpretation by its readership, more to the point their interpretation of ‘the prick’. The Girlf, who is now published in the genre herself, goes to great pains to explain it. However what she fails to recognize is I’m ACTULLY a bloke so I view the complex inner subtext of the hero with a great deal of skepticism.
What I don’t get, I’m told, is even though he spends the first seventy percent of the book treating the heroine like shit, even though he’ll pop up, fuck her then disappear for weeks on end, even though he’s arrogant, officious and dismissive of her for the majority of the story the truth is he really, really loves her. This is often explained to me with wide eyed sincerity as if I’m an idiot not to get it.
This is perplexing because this is exactly how I’ve treated the women in my life that I didn’t give two shits about. Women who had difficulty with ‘fucking off’ once I was finished with them. It seems as if I was completely wrong with my appraisal of the situation. I was laboring under the assumption that I was being a grade A twat where as in actual fact, although I didn’t know it, I was emulating the classic male romantic lead and was in fact deeply and head over heels in love with these women. If I had known I wouldn’t have felt so bad about using them (That’s pretty much a lie. I didn’t feel bad about using them).
Romantic fiction goes wrong at the start because it assumes men have a subtext. Essentially we don’t. We don’t keep are thoughts to ourselves, we don’t craftily manipulate situations to get our own way. We rumble through life observing with wide eyed fascination the changing smells and colours around us and cooing. The Girlf disagrees. Apparently I’m always at it, sneakily steering her with complex subterfuge so she’ll subconsciously obey me.
Am I?
Really?
Clearly I’m cooler than I thought I was. From my perspective I’m merely childishly sulking or stamping my feet and pretty much kicking off like a five year old. Little did I know it’s actually a clever Machiavellian ruse that I use to shape the universe around me.
God I’m good.
Reading and writing about love, the Girlf has started asking me to talk about my feelings. This unnerving habit is probably just research yet it unsettles me. Slowly, slowly I’m coming to the realization that I haven’t got any.
This needs clarification, I do actually feel stuff. I’m not a sociopath. However feeling something and needing to talk about it are two separate things. Any feelings I have that require discussing I’m happy to discuss, such as my feelings for her. I’m totally comfortable talking about them. However she mines for those hidden, secret fears and desires that I’m quickly discovering don’t seem to exist. Unfortunately she’s not having it. Clearly I must be hiding something.
I think the main difference between the sexes is women feel stuff and men know stuff.
I know I love her more intensely than anyone I’ve ever met in my life. I don’t feel this, I know this. I know, also, she’s the loveliest thing I’ve ever clapped eyes on. This is a realization, a hard fact, not a fluttery nuance in my stomach. I know what her body does to me when I touch it, the desire I feel every time I do so is an indisputable reality not an airy fairy confusing angst inside me. It doesn’t take me by surprise, I don’t question it, it’s there, it’s real and I’m good with it.
This in a round about way brings me back to my initial point. The men in the books all seem to be taken by surprise by their emotions. They don’t realize they’re in love with the heroine until the last twenty thousand words. They are shocked by the revelation and this, in my experience, never happens.
I knew I wanted her the first second I saw her. There was no confusion, no doubt, no soul searching. I looked at her and thought ‘I’m having that’.
Damn you Austen, from now on we are enemies, you and I.
When it comes to women and their view of romance I’m constantly being told that ‘I just don’t understand’. I admit romantic fiction certainly isn’t my forte, I kind of get it, but he smacks of woman porn to me, female emotional-masturbation. Austen is the grand mummy of it all but, for the life of me, all I can see in Pride and Prejudice is a protracted argument that ends with two people fucking.
In my opinion that’s what makes romance such a pointless genre. As a man I can’t see how reading about two people, who aren’t me, getting laid would be the slightest bit interesting. In real life this is a recognized fact. There is nothing more boring than someone banging on about their new boyfriend or girlfriend. None of us care because none of us are fucking them. Also, a self respecting romantic novel has up the ante; inject a bit of conflict and adversity into the situation. So now you’re reading about someone else’s dysfunctional relationship. Joy heaped upon joy.
In most romantic novels the male lead has to be a prick. The dashing Mr. Darcy is Austen’s prick. Now, don’t think for an instant I have any problem with a man’s God given right to be a prick. I myself have profited immensely from being an arsehole. Truth be told my life took a considerable up turn when I gave in to my inner wanker and allowed him to flourish.
My problem with Romantic fiction is the interpretation by its readership, more to the point their interpretation of ‘the prick’. The Girlf, who is now published in the genre herself, goes to great pains to explain it. However what she fails to recognize is I’m ACTULLY a bloke so I view the complex inner subtext of the hero with a great deal of skepticism.
What I don’t get, I’m told, is even though he spends the first seventy percent of the book treating the heroine like shit, even though he’ll pop up, fuck her then disappear for weeks on end, even though he’s arrogant, officious and dismissive of her for the majority of the story the truth is he really, really loves her. This is often explained to me with wide eyed sincerity as if I’m an idiot not to get it.
This is perplexing because this is exactly how I’ve treated the women in my life that I didn’t give two shits about. Women who had difficulty with ‘fucking off’ once I was finished with them. It seems as if I was completely wrong with my appraisal of the situation. I was laboring under the assumption that I was being a grade A twat where as in actual fact, although I didn’t know it, I was emulating the classic male romantic lead and was in fact deeply and head over heels in love with these women. If I had known I wouldn’t have felt so bad about using them (That’s pretty much a lie. I didn’t feel bad about using them).
Romantic fiction goes wrong at the start because it assumes men have a subtext. Essentially we don’t. We don’t keep are thoughts to ourselves, we don’t craftily manipulate situations to get our own way. We rumble through life observing with wide eyed fascination the changing smells and colours around us and cooing. The Girlf disagrees. Apparently I’m always at it, sneakily steering her with complex subterfuge so she’ll subconsciously obey me.
Am I?
Really?
Clearly I’m cooler than I thought I was. From my perspective I’m merely childishly sulking or stamping my feet and pretty much kicking off like a five year old. Little did I know it’s actually a clever Machiavellian ruse that I use to shape the universe around me.
God I’m good.
Reading and writing about love, the Girlf has started asking me to talk about my feelings. This unnerving habit is probably just research yet it unsettles me. Slowly, slowly I’m coming to the realization that I haven’t got any.
This needs clarification, I do actually feel stuff. I’m not a sociopath. However feeling something and needing to talk about it are two separate things. Any feelings I have that require discussing I’m happy to discuss, such as my feelings for her. I’m totally comfortable talking about them. However she mines for those hidden, secret fears and desires that I’m quickly discovering don’t seem to exist. Unfortunately she’s not having it. Clearly I must be hiding something.
I think the main difference between the sexes is women feel stuff and men know stuff.
I know I love her more intensely than anyone I’ve ever met in my life. I don’t feel this, I know this. I know, also, she’s the loveliest thing I’ve ever clapped eyes on. This is a realization, a hard fact, not a fluttery nuance in my stomach. I know what her body does to me when I touch it, the desire I feel every time I do so is an indisputable reality not an airy fairy confusing angst inside me. It doesn’t take me by surprise, I don’t question it, it’s there, it’s real and I’m good with it.
This in a round about way brings me back to my initial point. The men in the books all seem to be taken by surprise by their emotions. They don’t realize they’re in love with the heroine until the last twenty thousand words. They are shocked by the revelation and this, in my experience, never happens.
I knew I wanted her the first second I saw her. There was no confusion, no doubt, no soul searching. I looked at her and thought ‘I’m having that’.
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