jasonbstanding.com

Tags:   insightful · reality · sleepy · xkcdNo Comments.

It’s not as often as I’d like that I get the chance to do a random quick dash out to Europe based on a wafer-thin premise, however Big Pete’s insistence that we go to an Iron Maiden gig provided just that impetus! Admittedly we could have gone to Twickenham, but they only had shite seats left and it takes about the same time to get from Camden to Twickenham as it does to get to Paris, so the decision was practically made for us!

The whole getting up (extremely) early to get our train thing sucked a bit, as did the fact that I couldn’t get a marmite & cheese crepe at Crepe Affaire due to them being out of marmite. As a substitute Pete ordered me a Brazilian (ham, cheese, pineapple - not sure how that conjures up memories of Rio, but hey), and if nothing else I’ll always have the memory of the look on her face for that fleeting instant before she remembered a Brazilian was a flavour of crepe.

I’m torn on the Eurostar beer issue whether they simply dont stock enough, or whether I drink too much - as once again we drank the Eurostar out of beer.

After I’d pushed my conversational French to its very limits to facilitate checkin (”un chambre s’il vous plait - nous avons un reservation pour ce soir”) we legged it off to or first point of sightseeing interest - Pere Lachaise cemetery.

I’m not really into graveyard tourism in a big way, but Pete wanted to see the last & final resting place of Jim Morrison, and it seemed too nice-a day to be cooped up indoors, so off we set! It wasn’t so hard to find, and clearly it’s a big tourist attraction as there was a girl handing out maps standing outside the gate. Presumably it’s better to show people where to go than to leave them searching all over the place and possibly leaving markers for other pilgrims to follow. As it turned out we could have done without the map, and just followed the other people.

People are a bit funny, and different people seem to find certain behaviour appropriate for registering their enthusiasm for the works and significance of another.  I tend to work more through the medium of procuring t-shirts with the individuals’ likeness or name emblazoned on them, and other people - so it seems - think it a more personal connection with their idols to jump the security fence around their tomb and graffiti their name and a message upon it.  It didn’t seem the best or most properly thought out plan, to be honest - if it had been me I’d have stationed a lookout or two - and within next to no time the guy had been collared and frogmarched away, protesting loudly and enthusiastically in whatever language he was speaking.

Next port of call was Notre Dame Cathedral, which I’d visited before back in 2004 however didn’t actually go inside (favouring instead for some reason to sleep on a bench outside and read my book… righto).  Ever have one of those moments where you discover what would have happened if you’d made a different decision at some point in your life and once you see what you could have had feel like kicking yourself repeatedly in the arse?  Yeah, well, that.  Dawkins was absolutely right in that you don’t get this kind of architecture in the name of atheism - wow.  An awesome building, in the sense that it inspires awe to be inside.

Being a nice sunny day we thought the next thing to do would be to wander around an air-conditioned art gallery for a bit, and after hiking across to The Louvre we discovered an important fact: The Louvre is closed on Tuesdays.  As a substitute we walked up towards the Champs Elysees (which I thought I’d show Pete, and once we arrived at the start of it we discovered another important fact: my memory sucks, and it’s a lot further away than I think it is), and then got the Metro out to the Arc de Triomphe.  Unsurprisingly, we couldn’t get near that either, as there was some kind of European ceremony going on and the whole area was blocked off.  Beer o’clock.

There was still a couple of hours to kill until the gig and we were getting a bit peckish, so we couldn’t see any reason not to head across to Pigalle for a bite.  Once again my recollection of Parisian layout was faulty, as there were fewer places to get food and far far more porno stores than I recalled.  We ended up settling for an over the top looking American burger joint type of place opposite the Moulin Rouge, and it was only as our meals were arriving that we spotted a warning that a previous punter had felt so strongly about giving that he’d carved it into the tabletop with a knife.  And he was absolutely right, too.

By now the pair of us were absolutely shattered, and it seemed silly to have to go and battle through a heavy metal gig… but that was why we were there, so off we went.  It’s more or less a compulsory dress code at this thing that you wear a black band t-shirt, and in the absence of any others in my wardrobe I’d plumped for my faithful Spinal Tap shirt.  In the queue to get into the venue this proved to be a source of amusement for 2 French metalheads - one waved at me and said “Speenal Tarp!”, and I nodded, unsure of how best to respond.  His mate made rock-horns with his fingers and let loose with a very Gallic sounding cry of “HRrrrrock and hrrroll!”.  Hilarious.

Say what you like about Iron Maiden, but you can’t deny that they put on a hell of a stage show.  The next 2 hours were a masterclass in hard rock excess, and to their credit the energy level of the band (and therefore, the crowd) was electric throughout.  Plenty of costume changes, plenty of amazing huge set changes and effects (including a massive animatronic mummy, which conjured up Spinal Tap-like mental images for me - then again, this sort of thing was what Spinal Tap was based on, so it’s probably wrong for me to describe it as Tap-esque), loads of fire effects and loads of bombastic guitar driven power.  Far and away the number which grabbed me the most was the epic 13 minute “The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner”.  From the minute the gig started to when the lights came up the front half of the floor level was a thrashing writhing morass of testosterone & violence, and I wondered as we all poured out of the doors at the end how in the hell they were ever going to shift that distinct smell from the venue.

That’s all there is to say really - the only other memorable thing was when a tramp came up & tried to bum a cigarette off Pete as we were reclining with a post-gig beer in the summer evening air at Gare de l’Est.  Pete had taken to smoking Gitanes for the afternoon, and evidently this wasn’t to the fellow’s liking… “Cigarette monsieur?  Oh… gitanes…  merde…  non monsieur, merci”.

Tags:   hiking · Iron Maiden · Jim Morrison · Paris · sighteeingNo Comments.

This morning whilst preparing to go to work (obviously, about 30 minutes later than I should have been) there was a knock at the door.  I bounded up the stairs, muttering swearwords about who would be disturbing my preparations, and was greeted upon opening the door by none other than a Royal Mail delivery man.  He was holding a parcel with my name emblazoned across the front, and requesting a signature.

That’s right readers… A PARCEL WAS DELIEVERED IN LONDON, AND SOMEONE WAS ACTUALLY AT HOME TO RECEIVE IT!

I’m so overcome with excitement that I’m having trouble thinking of a suitable way of celebrating this once-in-a-lifetime occasion.

Tags:   incredulous1 Comment

Yesterday was the UK release of the new 3G iPhone.  This, on the O2 website:

Now the thing is, for quite a while now O2 have been taking pre-registrations of interest from people wanting an iPhone.  I understand there’s all kinds of issues that could arise from availability of stock from Apple, and so on, but the demand surely couldn’t be described as “unprecedented”.

In a logical world they’d take pre-orders, then fulfil those and not release any more until more stock had arrived… but then I guess as they know that there’s only one source in the UK to get these things, and the people who want them are more than likely Apple fanboys, it doesn’t really matter how much of a cockup the process becomes - the demand will remain static.

Am I cynical in thinking that the global economic situation isn’t as bad as the media portray - the mortage market’s knackered, oil is at an alltime high which is adding extra cost on to pretty much everything, there’s global food shortages and the environment’s stuffed…  but things aren’t so bad that it’s possible to sacrifice being at the cutting edge of mobile phone technology.

Oooooh I’d like an iPhone.

Tags:   danger - world in crisis (bom bom bom bom bombom!) · iphone · pedantry1 Comment

The multi-million pound musical spectacular that is Lord of the Rings (the musical) leaves London on July 19th (one review hinted that it might be going to New Zealand at one point - the words “coal” and “Newcastle” leap swiftly to mind), and when it became apparent that I could score a ticket-and-dinner deal for 20 squid I thought “Why not, indeed!”.

Anybody familiar with Tolkien’s magnum opus (either in printed form, or the outstanding series of films by Mr Peter Jackson & friends) would immediately think “Hang on, Peter Jackson managed to pack it into 9.5 hours of film, but only by leaving out chunks of detail - surely it will prove an enormous challenge to tell this tale in the time constraint traditionally afforded to a musical theatre performance?”.  That’s exactly what I was thinking too, trendsetters.

I’ll get it out of the way now - this show was an absolute technical masterclass.  The sets, costume, and lighting design were stupendous.  From my seat (up in mid-nosebleed-land - what do you expect for £20?) the stippled lighting rotating on stage often gave an impression of motion, as well as creating incredible depth and texture.  The auditorium was already dressed with an impressive thicket of treeroots to give the place a suitably organic feel.  Far and away the most striking fixture of the staging was the rotating stage with multiple hydraulic lifts, so that sections of it could rise and fall and create all manner of landscapes & set features (bed, table, walls, etc).  During a few points in proceedings Sam & Frodo on their journey to Mordor would walk around the rotating and undulating set, giving a quite theatrically effective impression of traversing a landscape - I couldn’t help but think of how they produced a similar effect at Spamalot for about £999,500 quid cheaper and almost as convincing.

The main difficulty I had with this show was the pace, and the editing of the storyline.  I guess I’ll never know for sure, but I’m reasonably certain that were you to be an audient who hadn’t read the books or seen the films, you would have left the building with a faint suspicion that you didn’t really understand most of what had just happened.  Any story can usually be distilled & simplified down to a shortened version - memorably, Book-a-minute summarised the  trilogy quite concisely - however I guess it seemed a little disingenuous to not have entitled the show “The Lord of the Rings (expurgated version)”.

To give you an idea of the cracking pace it shot along at, the show started about 19:45 in The Shire, which the Hobbits left, encountered some Black Riders (which were extremely well done & quite scary), and with the aid of some big pieces of spandex found their way to Rivendell.  By 20:29 the entire Fellowship of the Ring were at the Pass at Caradhras.  By 20:30 they had solved the riddle of the gates of Moria, and were inside the mines.  The Balrog showed up about 20:41, and by 20:45 it was intermission.  In one hour they’d pretty well encapsulated the first book, and had time to throw in a catchy & well choreographed (matter of fact, the best song/sequence in the show) 10 minute pub knees-up in the Inn of the Prancing Pony.

When the curtain raised at 21:05 I wondered how on earth they were going to cram the rest of book 1 and the remaining 2 books into the 1 hour & 25 minutes or so that was left.  As it turned out, the answer was Leave Out Most Of It.  Ringwraiths - on stage twice.  Old Forest/Barrow Downs - out.  Galadriel’s Mirror - out.  Men of Rohan / King Theoden / Grima Wormtongue - out.  Consequently, Helm’s Deep - out.  Ents & Fangorn Forest - covered in about 6 minutes by a stilted bloke who resembled a French Shepherd and sounded like a BBC Radio Vogon.  Out also were the Palantir, the Dead Marshes, meeting Faramir, the army at Minas Morgul, Sam & Frodo getting captured after leaving Shelob’s lair, the defence of Osgiliath, the Paths of the Dead, the siege of Minas Tirith and the Battle of Pelennor Field (and the killing of the With King of Angmar), and the one omission I agreed with was that of the Giant Eagles at the end.  Tolkien must’ve been smoking crack when he thought of that ending.  In fact, so much of the last 2 volumes were left out that the 2nd half of the musical had a disproportionate amount of sitting around doing nothing.  Very strange.

I wouldn’t want to give you the impression that I didn’t enjoy it though - the plotline that remained was far denser than that of most operas, and the effects were bordering on mind-blowing.  The 2nd half opened with Gollum spider-crawling headfirst down the curtain, then scurrying off across stage such that he couldn’t have been wired in.  Shelob the giant spider was suitably creepy and massive, if only onstage for a few seconds.  Lots of it was tacky, like the orcs on crutches - I suspect it was a device employed to give them a less human-looking presence and gait, however it constantly made me think “Hey, it’s blokes on crutches”.  The singing was also a bit naff - apparently most of the principals didn’t get renewed contracts, so now it’s all understudies… talented enough people, but not crowd-pullers.  Galadriel’s voice seemed a bit whiny and had the “woo-woo” qualities of if you’d asked your Mum to pretend to be a fairy to amuse the grandkiddies, and I have no idea where Gandalf’s accent was meant to come from.  I thought perhaps he was trying to over-Christopher Lee up his voice with “Morrrdorrrr”, and then just keep ludicrously rolling his ‘r’s - as well as throwing in an impression of John Cleese as Tim the Enchanter.  I had trouble pinning down whether the hobbits were meant to have Irish or West Country accents, as I suspect did they.

So in summary, I’m glad both that I went along, and that I only paid £20 for it.  The meal afterwards was nice.

Tags:   lord of the rings · musical · tacky · west endNo Comments.

The other day I was having one of those existential crises that rears its ugly head from time to time - it was my 32nd birthday on the 28th of June, and my life at the minute consists primarily of mucking about and having a good time.  Society insinuates this millstone-like character on the age of 30 years… presumably it’s about having been 12 years since you were given the legal right & responsibility of doing grownup stuff and now being a point to scan your memoirs to see if you’ve actually commenced behaving like a grownup yet, but before a point where it’s too late to do anything about it.  You’re meant to have a career, a house, a station wagon and at least 1 of your 2.4 kids by now.  I’ve got a shelf full of single malt whisky, one hell of an impressive t-shirt collection and a shoebox full of concert ticket stubs.

The 30 milestone is much on the lips of my contemporaries at the minute - K’s 30th is this weekend, and my housemate James hit “the big 3-0″ on Saturday just gone.  My younger brother is 30 in October, and my update list in Facebook is a seemingly endless toilet-roll of frettings from friends & colleagues from around the world taking stock of their lives as they head towards the Management Years.

James turned up home the other night with a couple of masks he’d bought from a stand out the front of the Mexican Wrestling event taking place up the road from us.

Perhaps age isn’t worth obsessing over after all.

Tags:   mexican wrestlers · midlife crisis · thirtyNo Comments.

Well done by the way to thelondonpaper on Friday for their incredibly sensitive and well-executed false front-cover advertising feature.  On the same day that the actual lead news story is about 2 French biochemistry students being stabbed over 200 times in their South London flat, the advertising feature was for the new series of Dexter - therefore you get a “front page” mocked up to infer that there’s a serial killer about to be turned loose, and then the actual front page… well, more of the same I guess.

(I can’t tell if I’m being overly sensitive here - I didn’t think I was, as it’s not something I’m ordinarily accused of)

Tags:   london · media · newspaper · tubeNo Comments.

I’m a big fan of careering off on illogical adventures at relatively short notice, so when my housemate James asked me about a fortnight ago if I wanted to come to Reykjavik for a free Bjork gig I mightily hit the “YES” button with mahoosive portions of enthusiasm.

The first thing to hit me about Iceland upon landing was the sunshine. Not because I live in England and there is none, but more that there was a late-dawn/early-dusk level of light about and our plane had landed at 1:30am. As our hostel literature suggested check-in closed at 10pm it seemed in our best interest to get to it as swiftly as possible, and the transport option therefore was a taxi. Hence, the 2nd thing to hit me was the expense of the place. Without wanting to harp on incessantly about it, the cab ride from the airport was 10,000 Kroner. 10,000! I steeled myself for a weekend in a country where anything routine could cost 10,000 of something. Checkin was pretty painless, and it could have been a trick of the light on my exhausted eyes, but the girl who checked us in seemed to do so without moving her lips at all.

On Saturday, being my birthday, we ambled down the main drag for coffee, a spot of t-shirt buying, and a look around the centre of Reykjavik. It was a clean, friendly place, with not too many people around and loads of statues (I thought). I’d say that there was a disproportionately large number of statues & sculptures about for the size of the city, but then maybe we’d inadvertently found ourselves in the statue district.

For a special birthday treat James & I decided to go to the restaurant across from the tourist centre. It looked a nice place, and it offered an “Icelandic Feast”, comprised of salmon, lobster bisque, and lamb entree, then a main course of whale and puffin. We found out later that it’s also one of the priciest restaurants in the city. Ah well, you’re only 32 once, right?

For the evening we made our way down to the park for the event which was in fact the reason we were in Iceland - a concert by Bjork & Sigur Ros. The event was to raise awareness of environmental issues, and specifically to protest about the increase in aluminium mining which is going on in Iceland at the moment. Many of the people are upset that their unique and beautiful eco systems are being harvested for mining, and clearly Iceland’s two biggest musical exports were right behind the cause. The gig was heaving, with an estimated turnout of 30,000 - 10% of Iceland’s population! The wind was whipping up a fair gale that evening as well, but we huddled in there like penguins (which only served to remind me of our afternoon meal) as Sigur Ros took stage. One girl appeared to be suffering from particularly horrific windburn, or perhaps she worked in a spraybooth - very hard to tell from our vantage point.

One slight disadvantage to not speaking Icelandic was that we had little/no idea what anyone on stage was saying, however we periodically showed our commitment to the cause by shouting “Down with smelting!” at moments we felt were probably appropriate. We weren’t thrown out, so it can’t have been too far from the mark. And in spite of our lack of Icelandic, all Icelanders apparently speak English, so we were a bit exposed there. They speak Danish too. And some speak German as well. 4 languages - not bad for a small island… the “no land borders” defence that we tend towards in Australia really doesn’t hold up after seeing this.

The night finished with Bjork’s set, and it was nothing short of exceptional. She started to a bombastic trumpet fanfare and was led on by a brass band, and absolutely owned that stage. As the wind whipped around she looked every inch a sorceress, gyrating and waving her hands as the sub bass thundered and echoed around us. The gig reached a brief hiatus as Bjork encouraged the crowd to sing Happy Birthday in Icelandic to one of the brass players - I know they weren’t directing it at me, but I can honestly claim that I had 30,000 Icelanders singing on my birthday.

We hiked back into town after the gig and went in search of tucker, finding a pizza place which had taken the unlikely decision to surface the floor of their shop with bitumen! Why not, eh?

(You may have noticed at this juncture that I’ve omitted any kind of detail about the music played at the gig - the chief reason for this is I’ve no idea what any of the songs were called. Even if I did, I’ve no idea how to make the weird viking characters appear on the screen, so NME can do the hard yards for me.)

Sunday morning called for some breakfast, and after pottering around about 6 cafe’s of which none had any food (although one had the best latte I’ve had in years) we resigned to asking at the tourist centre where a nice/cheap breakfast place was. Now, when asking a place name in a foreign country, it’s often advisable to get the direction-giver to write the name of the place down (and preferably scratch out a map of some sort) in order to give you a ghost of a chance of finding the place. She probably didn’t even tell us a place name - she probably just said “f*** off” in Icelandic knowing full well we’d have no idea or recollection of what she’d said. With the help of 2 more tourism offices we eventually found what amounted to a soup kitchen in the dock area - assuming that our low-rent appearance had precipitated our being directed there. The soup, however, turned out to be the most flavoursome lobster soup, as well as a shishkebab of halibut to share. Not bad for £14 each!

Returning to the city, we popped in to The Culture House museum: I’ve long been interested in Viking mythology, and this museum housed the Elder Edda - the 13th century text containing much Norse legend. I was quite caught up in the whole thing, having read about this thing since I was about 17. The opportunity to see firsthand the actual ancient texts made me giddy with excitement. My joy was shortlived however, as I looked at the pages and the reality that I can’t speak a word of Old Norse really set in. As well as the ancient sagas, the museum also housed an exhibition about the protected volcanic island of Surtsey - an island which formed as a result of volcanic eruption in 1963 and is now being studied by scientists as a model for bird & plantlife progression.

That evening (although really it was only the clock that gave away the fact it was evening) we went on a bus tour with possibly the world’s most introverted tour driver. High point of the trip being where he dropped us at a roadside cafe and said “Grab a bite and in 40 minutes I’ll pick you up at the bottom of the stairs”. James & I had a ham & cheese sandwich each & chatted with the dudes working at the place, then made our way down when there were 5 minutes to go - discovering only then that at the bottom of the stairs was Gullfoss - one of Iceland’s most beautiful and popular waterfalls! The bloke never even mentioned it…

We also stopped at a geyser system, which provided a naturally occurring way to spray thousands of litres of hot sulphurous water into the air every 6 minutes or so.

Upon our return to Reykjavik and with the sun still well & truly up we thought we’d grab a pizza. When the bitumised pizza shack proved to be shut, we thought maybe beer was the option, but then found our favourite bar on the trip (where James fancied the girl who worked there) was also shut. Throwing caution to the wind we bowled into the first remotely open-looking place we could find (not VERY open - there were only 4 people there, obviously involved in a private soiree). Never ones to be constricted by social convention, we got chatting to the people in the bar, and wound up drinking & chatting with them til about 2:30am. You can’t imagine the mix of guilt & confusion one feels when one sees the sun peeping in around the pub curtains, only to realise that it’s not actually breakfast time after all.

Finally on Monday morning the time to relctantly set off was upon us. We were way cleverer this time though: rather than spending ISK10,000 on a taxi to Keflavik Airport, we spent ISK4000 each on a bus trip & admittence to The Blue Lagoon - a geothermal spa & generally cool place to chill out & relax. I haven’t got any photos of this, primarily because I didn’t want to risk drowning my otherwise indestructible camera, but also because I found myself in the unenviable position of having to rent a pair of shorts for the afternoon. I suspected the shorts were too tight when my testicles shot up and settled behind my ears. A nice relaxing place to spend a couple of hours though - lounging around in the 40 degree nutrient-rich water, as well as getting a back/neck massage from the waterfall, and availing ourselves of the sauna & steam rooms as well. Seemed a shame to have to leave the place.

So that was Iceland. Beautiful place, would love to go back.

Tags:   bjork · cultural enrichment · eels · holiday · iceland · puffin · sigur ros · travel3 Comments

Two things tend to spring to mind when I hear the word “ventriloquist”:

1) the ancient art of making one’s voice appear like it’s coming from somewhere other than where it is.

2) a prat wearing a bow tie systematically and creepily grinning at an audience while the lips move on the puppet up whose arse his hand is currently wedged.

I went to see a show in at the Arts Theatre entitled “The Two And Only” by Jay Johnson, which received a series of glowing reviews - all of which sounded like the sort of things a publicist might write rather than a critic.  However I’m a reasonably open-minded type so I thought I’d give it a go.

I’m definitely glad I did - in spite of the relatively high cheese factor, what we have is an incredibly talented artist delivering a show which is part memoire, part lecture, and the rest is good old fashioned old fashioned entertainment.  The historical context of ventriloquism is fascinating, and people who sought to understand or explain it dubbed it all manner of things, from demonic possession (the prophecies of Oracle of Delphi could have possibly been delivered by ventriloquists!) through to a mental illness.  I internally cringed a little at the tale of the wide-eyed boy who made his way in showbiz, although the tale was quite emotionally charged. Johnson’s description of the highs and lows of his life, coupled with the excitement, respect and tenderness he feels for his puppet-making mentor and his hand-built puppet Squeaky really reached out to you, and you genuinely felt the sadness in the moment when Johnson got his big break in TV but the producers didn’t want him to work with Squeaky because Squeaky was too cute for the show - a ventriloquist makes their puppet a real character, and to see Jay explaining to Squeaky that he couldn’t work with him was so genuine you really forgot you were looking at painted wood.

Johnson’s talent as a ventriloquist is immense, and his sense of rapid comic timing and interplay with his characters draws you right in to the point where on the few occasions you do remember you’re looking at one performer on stage you think even moreso “How the hell DOES he do that!?”.  As well as Squeaky, Jay had a vulture called Nevernore, a Monkey (whose catchphrase has its own website), a tennis ball, a fuzzy snake, and Bob - Squeaky’s TV replacement, who came out almost as malevolent as David Strassman’s “Chuck Wood” character (complete with gag about having to get out straight after the show to score with some of the babes from Avenue Q).  My favourite exchange between Bob & Jay was when Jay put tape over his mouth so his lips wouldn’t move, then tape over Bob’s mouth, then took Bob’s tape off and Bob was speaking with Jay’s voice, while Jay’s lips were still taped shut.  Believeable, seamless, and brilliant!

Johnson continues his run into September at The Arts Theatre, and it’s worth a look at.

Tags:   cheese · puppets · ventriloquistNo Comments.

So there I go telling everyone my blog’s back up & running, and since having done so I haven’t written a bloody sausage.

And now’s not the time to start, either.  Got to dash to Stansted - I’m off to Iceland for the weekend.

That’s the country, not the supermarket.

Tags:   travelNo Comments.