Worthy Highlights

So last weekend I was right in the middle of this year's Glastonbury Festival in all its mad muddy glory (though actually it was only a bit sludgy and wet on Friday), and I got to see plenty of good stuff in between working on the glowpot stall - which was remarkable fun and came with certain priviliges (cleaner lavvies, central and comparatively quiet camping location, nicer wristbands, etc.). So here's a top 10 rundown of sorts of some of my personal festival highlights...

1. Wall-E - a special preview on Sunday night some three weeks before its UK release, and an absolute treat it was indeed. Full review over at my reviews blog.
2. Pivot - I had seen the Australian three-piece perform at Royal Festival Hall supporting Yellow Magic Orchestra as part of the Southbank's Meltdown Festival curated by Massive Attack. And although they were now on the tiny G Stage in the Dance Village on Friday afternoon, they still blew me away thanks to the up close and personal setting. Some monstrous drumming too - the drumkit kept falling apart thanks to the punishment it received during the performance. Stunning.
3. Smerin's Anti-Social Club - while making my way between Saturday headliners Jay-Z and Massive Attack, the bandstand had pulled in a sizeable crowd for this band, a brilliant brassy ska band who got the audience jumping about like loons. Their closing cover of the Doctor Who theme was a winner.
4. The Raconteurs - a swell selection of tunes from both of their albums performed impeccably well, yet filled with a raw live energy lacking from other bands at the festival. Great songs that feel like you've somehow always known them - in a good way.
5. The Actor Kevin Eldon - a great chance to see one of the finest comic actors, who has appeared in pretty much every great British comedy of the past 15 years, do some of his stand-up in character as political poet with delusions of grandeur, Paul Hamilton. The must-see of the Cabaret tent this year.
6. Goldfrapp - not sure why the rest of the crowd didn't seem to be feeling their performance - maybe it was the slot, or the heavy dependence on material from their latest album (I guess people wanted more of the glam-electronica, but I like it all, so was happy with all the song choices) - but I certainly thought they delivered one of the most engaging and beautiful sets of the festival. And the weird Wicker Man-esque folkiness was scary and sexy in equal measure, complete with May-pole pole-dancing and bikini-girls with werewolf masks.
7. Neon Neon - one great thing about festivals is stumbling upon stuff you'd not make an effort to see but happen upon as we walk from place to place. But when Har Mar Superstar appeared as guest vocalist for Neon Neon on the Other Stage, he certainly held my attention. It's not often you see a rapping cross between Jon Lovitz and Ron Jeremy singing a verse while doing one of those shoulderstands with his legs in the air. Made me giggle anyway.
8. Lightspeed Champion - caught the end of his rather pleasant set, which featured a rocking rendition of the Imperial March followed by a Star Wars medley. The ultimate festival sing-a-long.
9. Kings of Leon - I don't doubt their place as Friday night headliners because I think they're a terrific band and their most recent album, Because of the Times, was my favourite released last year. But I expected to be a little more wowed by their performance. It was good and all, but didn't blow me away like it should have done.
10. Taiko Meantime - a taiko-drumming group based in Greenwich, they offered some typical taiko banging, but their best performance actually came with the four main musicians knocking out a clock-like percussive number with little cymbals before launching into a ping-pong-esque to-ing and fro-ing of sound between them. Great to listen to and watch in action.
    

HONOURABLE MENTIONS: Elbow, Hot Chip, MGMT, Young Knives, Charles Hazelwood, Will Gregory and Adrian Utley...

"Do You Have Your Student I.D.?"

With examinations long gone, dissertation handed in and term time officially drawing to a close, so begins my gradual ebbing away of studentdom. Through as I am with academia, I now must accept that I will soon shift from nominally being a "student" to "unemployed", which isn't really a good thing. I am no stranger to holding down an occupation or two but whereas previously I had summer jobs and gap year fund-raising jobs, now it's a "work until you retire or die" situation I have lined up ahead of me. And simultaneously the priviliges I have enjoyed the past four years have started to vanish.

Yesterday, I handed in my SOAS card, as it was essentially property of the university. Now if I wish to enter the school's hallowed doors, I will need to sign in as a visitor. Similarly, if I ever want to borrow a book from the library, I'll need special outsider access, with all kinds of extra limitations and fees, while gone already is my Senate House Library validity.

However, my student status is still intact for a few months yet. I can still use SOAS computers and keep all my files for another three months, and my SOAS email address is still active three months after that. More useful is my NUS card, which I'll keep on using until I am literally turned away from a point of sale (they change the colour and design every year to make sure it's obvious I'm out of touch with the youth of today). I've been making a concerted effort to catch as many films at the cinema as possible just to wring every last drop of ticket discountability it offers. A couple of quid here and there soon adds up, and you can then go spend it on seeing another film. Bonus. With even more longevity is my student Oyster card, which gives me a third off travelcards until 14th October. And then there's my Young Persons Railcard which doesn't expire until 3rd September 2009, so there'll be plenty of cut-price travelling for months to come.

Cards and tickets are one thing, but I'm already starting to feel old - recent university open days and tours for prospective first years highlighted just how young and fresh-faced these new whipper-snappers are. I don't think I could cope sticking around for a masters or postgrad degree with so many youngsters around; I'd just get horribly depressed. At least in the world of work I'll still be considered something of a young'un. A trainee of sorts. Nothing's worse than being asked by a first or second year "What's it like being a fourth year?", not because it's impolite or annoying, but rather because it's just plain upsetting. Suffice to say, tales of mid-mid-life crises have a certain substance to them.

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Listening to: Masami Ueda, Shusaku Uchiyama, Syun Nishigaki - The Library
via FoxyTunes

95 Noises

The plot thickens in the ever-interesting "Loathe My Neighbour" saga. Recently, there has been a dearth of entertainment from their quarters - just turgid choons ad nauseum. I'm more clued up on the contemporary R'n'B, rap, hip-hop, garage and trashy dance scenes than any other musical genre at the moment thanks to their 100+ decibel-level speakers in incessant use. There's the odd telephone conversation about going to court, and a few arguments, but mostly mawkish noisy ear-sewage. I don't like the term 'chav' - I think classing any social group with a tag they haven't chosen to adopt themselves is a dangerous thing to do - but they're only a few steps down (or shoul that be up) from Devvo. Need I remind you, these are people with 'WANKAS' scribbled in blue above their front door (not my handywork, I'm afraid).

I'm starting to get a handle on the set-up now - I believe the family downstairs rents the rooms upstairs to college students, as the bitch next door seems to have moved out (or at least moved rooms) after she fell behind on payments (or at least the argument she had with the father of the family out in the garden seems to suggest). Instead, my new adjacentee is an irksome ruffian with delusions of rapping grandeur, as he tries his best to rap his guts out but ends up tripping over his words, giving up rather sheepishly. On seemingly permanent replay is "Apologise", which just might be the whiniest, wettest song in the history of the musical arts; yet I'm deluged by its various iterations, coupled with the cretin next door screeching the drippy chorus, on a daily basis.

It got so bad that the other week I was woken up at about 3am on a weeknight to some horribly distorted rap claptrap at a heinously excessive volume. I phoned the council's 24 hour noise nuisance enforcement service, but before someone could come round, the music ceased. I waited and waited, then called the council to cancel dispatching someone to come over. But as soon as it had been called off, the music rebooted and my soul fell apart. Next time. Next time!

Other times I've taken matters into my own hands, singing along loudly and just as badly (if I know the tune), or just banged on the wall. It's not particularly thin, so the best method is to tilt my wardrobe against it repeatedly or smack my hand against a poster to create the loudest slap against it. Sometimes I get primitive return knocking; once he kicked the wall a couple of times and said to himself "Dickheads! Stop hitting my wall!". Tee-hee.

However, all this anguish finally paid off a few days ago. I had just gotten out of the shower and was drying off in my room when all of a sudden through the wall I hear: "AH! NO! MOTHERFUCKER! FUCK! NO!" There was banging and crashing and shouting. "HELP! I CAN'T GET OUT MY ROOM!" Turns out he locked himself in somehow or the door was stuck, but hilariously he was trapped. Help came (someone apparently with the great moniker Ruben), and they told him to turn his music off so they could hear him. "IT WON'T WORK!" He repeatedly pulls and pushes, bangs and swears but to no avail. He then announces he's going to climb out the window, get onto the roof and clamber through his friends window. Part of me wanted to suddenly open my window and scare him by making a loud noise in the hope it would result in a nasty fall...but a manslaughter trial would really hinder my dissertation. So he starts to put his leg out of the top window, but the hinge is such that there wasn't enough room to get through. As his leg dangles over the side, "I CAN'T GET OUT THE WINDOW! NNNRRRGGHH! NAH, CAN'T DO IT! If I fall, will I get compensation?". He pulls himself back in and it soon turns silent - I assume the door was soon opened or he just gave up and accepted incarceration, but I suspect the former is true. Anyway, it was an entertaining half an hour from the Cirque du Retards.

NOTE: While typing this up, his CD started to skip. "FUCK! FUCK! FUCKING WORK!" BANG! BANG! BANG! More skipping. "FUCK!" SLAM! Out the door...baby.

Dying Standing Up

This week has been pretty eventful. In between not working on my dissertation, I went to see both Juno (overrated) and Be Kind Rewind (underrated) back to back, visited the Royal Pharmaceutical Society to look at opium artefacts and whatnot (ornate jars of bear grease to combat baldness, apparently) amid a police-cordoning-off of Lambeth Bridge area, had a trip down the local to celebrate Jona's birthday, and have seen Richard Herring do his "Oh F*ck, I'm 40!" stand-up show which was very funny and vulgar indeed.

But perhaps the most eventful event of the week (if that makes any sense) was trying my hand at stand-up comedy on Tuesday evening. I went to Kingston University to compete in the regional heat of the Chortle Student Comedy Award 2008. In case you didn't know, Chortle is basically the UK Comedy website, with gig listings and daily news updates of the comedy scene, and has been running a nationwide search for the UK's best student comedian for the past few years, the final being held up in Edinburgh during the festival.

Now, I've never done stand-up before, but I thought that this was perhaps my only shot of giving it a go, and what the hey! You're only young and stupid once. So I applied. I got in. I'm on the list of acts. And now I'm standing in a student bar waiting to go on stage and recite some barely rehearsed material in front of a bunch of strangers, experienced comics, and industry know-it-alls. It was perhaps made a tiny bit more nerve-wracking that the head of Chortle looks a lot like Gregory Itzin aka President Logan from 24 / The Mayor of Eerie, Indiana.

I got chatting to a few of my competitors who were very amiable and supportive individuals. One was actually doing an MA in Stand Up Comedy, another did a couple of gigs every week, for one it was his first gig in 4 years (a final shot at the title belt, so to speak), and another who organised his own comedy night and had done about 100 gigs since September. And then there was me. But hey - everyone's gotta start somewhere.

I was to go on 4th out of 10, and I couldn't really have picked a better slot - not going first, but getting it over and done with before the interval. We had a professional MC warm up the audience of about 30/40 local students, the first few acts came and went with varying degress of laughter from the attendees, and there it was my turn.

Now, I wouldn't say I died on my arse, but during the 5-6 minutes of my act I probably got 5-6 laughs. Here is a two minute extract of my performance; unfortunately they picked the two minutes that included the joke that died the worst death and a long-winded set-up and spiel that didn't pay off (I should be sent the whole thing at a later date).



It was strange because there was no tension in the room and I wasn't really nervous; the audience sat there smiling but not laughing, so I think I held their attention and they were mildly entertained, but they just didn't find any of it actually funny. I got some better response towards the end, and a joke I only resorted to when I needed to fill up more time got the biggest laugh of my set, so what do I know? I think my main flaws were...

1. Too much set-up, not enough jokes. My running theme could have lasted a whole headline act, but I tried to squeeze it into a 5 minute framework.
2. The delivery. I didn't rehearse enough, forgot a few bits and tripped over myself a few times. Timing the right moment to drop the punchline, seguing smoothly, and emphasising the right words were also skills I fail to possess.
3. Not enough dick and fart jokes. Perhaps my approach was too clever clever, more of a referential rant than trying to point out everyday foibles that would resonate better with the audience, or better yet, using more swears and gags about sex and poo. And less bad puns - I expected at least a chucklesome groan, but got silence instead.
   
4. Be myself. Perhaps I was too scripted - really I should be making jokes that would make me laugh, and I love dark horrible humour, so maybe I should be just a bit sicker in the head.
5. Perhaps the most crucial - I just wasn't that funny.
   

Anyway, the very fact that I'm picking apart my routine is probably testament to my desire to give it another spin. The other experienced stand-ups said it was good for a first try, and those that didn't know I was a beginner were impressed in a Faking It sort of way. It was clear though that I had no chance of winning, but I was just happy to have survived. In the end, the winner was a member of the Cambridge Footlights, had competed in this competition the past 4 years, and was already signed up by Avalon. So it was a forgone conclusion for all involved. You can watch clips from all the acts in that heat here.

Still, it was a good learning experience, I got some helpful tips and advice, and I've popped my stand-up cherry. The thing is now, do I dare go on a second date?

The War Next Door

So, my final essay for a while is finished. Done and dusted. No longer do I need to think about Japan's pharmaceutical industry and their production and distribution of cocaine between the two world wars - a fascinating topic, but it almost killed me. I typed about 2000 words in 24 hours, staying up to 4am on Thursday night, waking up at 9am the next morning and ploughing through it until just before 2pm to meet the 4pm deadline. Not only that, but my main source was one of the most cack-handedly written texts I've seen throughout my university career (including my own work). Spelling the same name three different ways, non-sequitur paragraphs, little sense of a threaded argument - Steven B. Karch, MD: you are a dolt.

The weekend is my reward. But the jerks next door seem to be having none of it. After the incessant loud music (they've added bad Pink Floyd dance remixes to their repertoire now; there should be a law against radios playing songs that are designed to be 'played loud'), frantic alibi-setting-straight telephone calls, macaroni-window-flinging and shouting matches that would make the cast of Eastenders flee in fear, their ouevre has expanded.

I assume their inquisitive cat (which would regularly peak out the window and stare at us in the kitchen or lavatory) has died, because it its stead they seem to have acquired a dog. A tiny yapping puppy of sorts, and I guess the girl in the room adjacent to mine is its appointed owner. Every time they have an argument (which is pretty much all the time - most recent exchange: "Get the f**k outta mah layf!", "Get the f**k outta mah hause, yeh f**kin' mug!"), the dog won't start yipping and yupping like a flustered chicken. I blame its master. So far her commands have consisted of "Stay there!", "Sit down!", and "Shut up!". Crufts beckons.

But just as this all gets intensely irritating, something hilarious happens and all is forgiven. Couple of nights ago, she had some friends over listening to some godawful music, and the dog was yipping from time to time. Then, all of a sudden, there was shouting and panic: "OH MAH GOT! HE PISSED ON MA DVDS!".

Bless that dog.

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New Year means New Telly, and a chance to catch the second series of two similar shows that hit at roughly the same time when I was in Japan. Charlie Brooker mode activated.

First off is Doctor Who spin-off Torchwood, an absudly silly sci-fi rompathon that plays like an episode of Scooby-Doo in which Shaggy has been replaced by, well, shagging. Much has been written about its bewildering tone and how the very existence of an adult version of a kids programme that retains the same level of scripting and acting but with blood and sex is strange enough in itself (Lazy Town Sleepless Nights? Postman Pat: Off Duty Package Delivery? Rosie & Jim Unleashed - With Extra Hot Dickings?). I managed to catch the first two episodes of the first series, but when I wasn't baffled, I was just plain bored. If it didn't have the Who connection, I doubt anyone would have bothered in the first place.

Yet, here comes another helping. The BBC have uploaded the opening of the first episode of the new series onto YouTube and it seems more of the same. A man with a blowfish for a head driving a sports car being pursued by the Torchwood team in their S&M Ice Cream Van with tinkly blue LEDs. A delerious hostage situation, the hilarious sight of Welsh people holding guns with all the confidence of an archer afraid of targets, some raspy hammy alienspeak and Captain Jack (John Barrowman) dropping in from nowhere to save the day. Surprised they didn't shoehorn in a big gay snog (though I believe you're promised one later in the episode). Touch wood, it'll get better...groan. May I suggest they have a man with a different animal for a head each episode. That's right, not a different animal head, but his all head comprises a scaled down creature with all its appendages attached. A tiger? Or an earwig? Or maybe a bat?

More interesting-looking is ITV's CG-filled family entertainment answer to Doctor Who, Primeval. 'Back for Seconds' scream the trails (surprised Torchwood hasn't gone for 'Second Coming'), as a band of young pretty scientists battle dinosaurs that rip through the fabric of space and time to eat M&Ms (no joke) and feast of Jeremy Kyle's intestines (joke, but one can dream can't they). Starring Ben Miller and that one from S Club 7, its perhaps because it doesn't have the baggage of 45 years of Doctor Who that both hinders and helps Torchwood that it looks like it could be more entertaining, but perhaps not quite as hysterically ludicrous.

Although Primeval starts tonight, I'm afraid I'm going to plump for an evening with Captain Jack instead. Torchwood may not start until Wednesday, but I have rented a DVD classic starring John Barrowman himself...Shark Attack 3: Megalodon...