For those who enjoyed the last post, this is awesome – same thing, but in front of a live audience!
Archive for March, 2010
More chatroom improv man
Monday, March 22nd, 2010All hail Lizzie & Sarah
Sunday, March 21st, 2010Nice to see the Guardian berating the BBC for failing to make a big enough noise about one of its best writers and comedians, Julia Davis, and for putting Lizzie and Sarah in a graveyard slot at 11.45 on a Saturday night. Lizzie & Sarah is brilliant, and as with the best comedy (as the writer points out), you don’t know whether to laugh, cry or join a protest group. It’s dark humour, but in my view, there is nothing so dark, offensive and vile as, well, just about anything else on TV that fails to take a critical or comical look at itself (reality TV, ‘talent’ shows, double-act ‘news’ shows).
Send yourself to sleep with your own sleepy track
Sunday, March 21st, 2010Totally the wrong thing to be trying out at coffee time on a Sunday morning, but it’s hypnotic and wonderful: over at www.soundsleeping.com you can choose, mix and pan five channels of various relaxing sounds such as birdsong, rain, oceans, drumming and mystical flute into your very own continuous, sleep-inducing soundtrack. As long as the act of mixing and trying out different sounds doesn’t keep you awake, I can vouch for the effectiveness of the results, because I’m starting to fall asl…..
How to write
Wednesday, March 17th, 2010From the Guardian, Ten Rules for Writing Fiction starts off with Elmore Leonard’s 10 rules, and then lists 10 do’s and don’ts from another ten authors. Leonard’s are the most entertaining. Advising against using adverbs, he says ‘I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances “full of rape and adverbs”. Annie Enright says “The way to write a book is to actually write a book. A pen is useful, typing is also good. Keep putting words on the page.” I like Roddy Doyle’s advice about using a thesaurus: “Do keep a thesaurus, but in the shed at the back of the garden or behind the fridge, somewhere that demands travel or effort. Chances are the words that come into your head will do fine, eg “horse”, “ran”, “said”.’
In fact, I like all of it. Anything that keeps me from actually writing for a bit longer.
Chatroom improv man
Tuesday, March 16th, 2010This made me laugh: Merton, a guy with a piano improvises songs in realtime about the people who appear in his chatroom window on Chat Roulette. I could sit and watch this for hours except I have to go to work. Damn!
The not so swinging 60s
Sunday, March 14th, 2010Gypsy Creams (via Metafilter) is a collection of scanned articles and adverts from women’s magazines of the 1960s with commentary by Tanya Jones. I can’t wait for her to post more, as I’ve now read every single entry in the site. It’s strangely addictive looking at fragments from a past that is so remote and ludicrous at times that you’d think someone made it up, except of course, it’s actually my past. There are so many gems it’s hard to choose a favourite, but Drink!, Amplex ‘internal deodorant’ pills, and Skinny are just a few of mine. Also worth reading the article on Tonic Wines from the Pharmaceutical Journal that a reader left a link to under the ‘Drink’ entry. Meat and Bovril wine anyone?
More sexist crap about ballet
Sunday, March 7th, 2010I was looking for a sentence in Rupert Christiansen’s article in last week’s Telegraph (‘The New Recruits to Ballet’s Boot Camp’) that might serve as an example of a new kind of sexism and homophobia that I see embedded in so much journalism about ‘boys’ ballet’. I gave up, because I might as well quote the whole article, starting with the title.
The title says it all: you can talk about ballet as long as you couch it in masculine terms: discipline, boots, camps, recruits. Bye bye to all that girly stuff, ballet is for men. If you knew how hard it was, how abusive the training could be (I’m not making it up, the word ‘abuse’ is used further down in the article as a positive term), you might not worry about your son wanting to take it up. “It’s not effete, it’s not wimpy,” says Christiansen, in a paragraph which includes the words “Billy Elliot”, ” highly athletic”, “energised”, “testosterone”, “physicality”, “competitive sport” and “nifty backflippers”.
We move on, predictably, to Balletboyz. Guess what, Michael Nunn and William Trevitt are “visibly and audibly regular guys. Married with children, they radiate a likeably lippy attitude”. Oh well, that’s all right then: as long as they’re not gay or anything. I’m intrigued to know what ‘audibly regular’ means: I guess it means they don’t have a lisp, they swear a bit, and can usefully erase any trace of the plummy accents they might have picked up in Floral Street, and don’t talk about art or anything effete like that. Likeably lippy. Regular guys. Good for them. And, continues Christiansen, “they have popularised the idea of men dancing with an intense physical intimacy that doesn’t automatically radiate homoerotic overtones”. I think they have a while to go before Balletboyz could be classed as popular culture, but aside from that, what’s so wrong with homoerotic overtones? What was Stonewall for?
In any case, the point about overtones, if the metaphor is borrowed from acoustics, is that they’re overtones, not fundamentals, the things that give a note its timbre rather than its pitch: I wouldn’t mind betting that it’s the homoerotic overtones that make it interesting, otherwise you might just as well watch wrestling. In fact, I’d rather watch wrestling than watch two men dancing without any erotic overtones.
Why do I think this is sexist crap? Well, all those words that envelop male ballet with respectablity such as athletic, physicality, competitive sport and energized are equally true of female dancing, if not more so: after all, in classical ballets, men get an easy ride while the women are dancing away on pointe – it may look pretty, but it’s harder work than gesturing nobly from the side of the stage. There are at least two solos in the ballet repertoire where the music now used for male solos – big ‘butch’ and loud – was originally written for a woman.
But this is to miss the point again: we shouldn’t have to defend ballet by saying ‘don’t worry, it’s all quite masculine really’, or try to butch it up by aligning it with athletics, machismo, discipline, (sports) science and taking all the eroticism and vulnerability out. That’s an archaic model of masculinity which is as dull, oppressive and misleading as the ultra-pink and sparkly patina of ballet as seen in popular culture. Celebrating the ‘manliness’ of ballet – and this article is only one of many – is insidiously sexist and homophobic in its implicit denigration of everything conventionally regarded as ‘feminine’, or not conventionally masculine. It’s the small change of hate and violence and it leads nowhere. Oh, and it’s completely untrue, too. Ballet may be tough, it may be physical and challenging, but there’s nothing ‘normal’ about men who do it, whether they’re straight or gay. That’s why they’re interesting and wonderful people.
If ballet dies as an art form, it will be this that kills it. There is a side of ballet which disrupts and challenges, offers alternatives to mainstream machismo, and celebrates the beautiful, the exotic and the unusual, femininities and masculinities. Take that away, and what’s left? Me, I’ll be watching Beautiful People, thank you very much.
