Carl D. Patterson

Eddie Izzard at the MEN

2009-11-08T12:00:00Z

Certainly the first time that I've seen a single, solitary, stand-up, performer in such a large venue. Eddie Izzard was ‘playing’ the second night at the MEN on his Stripped tour and apart from seats on the upper tiers the placed seemed sold out. Comedy is the new rock ‘n’ roll and has been for a few years now. I'm amazed that he is playing such vast spaces, I honestly didn’t think that he was that well known. Remember the days when he would only do stand-up and wouldn’t be seen dead gracing our television screens?

It is, more or less, impossible to distill his act into a few ‘jokes’. There won’t be many people at work tomorrow trying to re-enact the show for their work colleagues. In fact I'm amazed that Eddie manages to remember it all, I can only recall a few segments, the rest just passed by in a blur. Maybe that’s the joy of it, laughing at the time, forgetting most of it, then remembering bits in the weeks that follow.

The interesting thing is that when he does two or three characters you can see that they’re there. You know where on stage they are, your mind just fills in the blanks, even if Eddie confuses the voices or positions, which he makes a joke about and becomes another part of his act. When he does an impersonation of a giraffe, or shark, it is just a short, stocky guy in tails, but the voice and the mannerisms are spot on.

For such a big show there were lights, screens, back-lit panels with hieroglyphs on them (I've just remembered another joke) but the major let down was the sound. I've heard people complain about the sound in these ‘sheds’ before but I thought that only applied to concerts. It seemed that the only speakers were the ones up in the lighting rig. At a gig these are usually the ones to fill in the sound for the people on the tiers, because bands will have rows of Marshall cabinets on stage. Tonight Eddies disembodied voice only came from those speakers up high near the ceiling and so was no where near loud enough for those down below. Why didn’t they have speakers on stage, behind the light panels, for the punters on the ‘floor’?

And talking about ‘the floor’, are they supposed to be the more expensive seats because you are looking directly at the stage? All I could see was the back of the bloke on fronts head. I spent at least half the show watching Eddie on the big screen in all his pixelated glory. When I did get a chance to see the real thing it was a pleasant surprise. This is all because ‘the floor’ isn’t slanted, obviously, that'd make Disney On Ice a real treat, so you can never see over the person in fronts head. The tiers, albeit at the sides, must give you a better, uninterrupted view, of the stage.

It looks as if the Eddie Izzard Live Stripped DVD is already available for pre-order, just in time for Christmas. I personally prefer the older discs, Unrepeatable and Definite Article.

London

2009-10-22T12:00:00Z

My last day in London. Travelodge, being forever helpful, won’t let you leave your bag at the hotel for the day so you have to either carry it around with you or rent a locker at Euston station. At least my feet and my legs didn’t feel as bad as they did the day before, so it’s off to my usual haunt for breakfast, along the Thames to the millennium bridge and Tate Modern.

I will always find Tate Modern and it’s contents completely fascinating and I'm not entirely sure why. Most of the items inside you couldn’t really call art, they aren’t the kind of pieces that you can stare at for ten minutes and see something new for that length of time. It’s more a case of the logistics of making it and setting it up in the gallery. The turbine hall contained the How It Is piece at the far end. You cannot possibly call it art at all, it is just a huge shipping container that is open at one end. It hasn’t been sculpted or moulded by hand in any way it has just been manufactured. You can walk up the ramp and go inside but there is nothing to see, it is completely black. You can hear kids running around, banging on the walls and screaming but that’s it. Possibly that is the point, how much more black could you get! There is a great sign near it which forbids flash photography in the exhibit.

I certainly wasn’t going to walk around carrying my bag so I left it at the cloakroom, purchased a ticket for Pop Life and started to wander. Pop Life was more interesting than the other exhibits, I think that most of the other stuff is static. The kind of pieces that can’t be moved because of their size and weight. One gallery contains a VW camper van and a huge metal slab that is hanging from a girder that mustn’t have been moved in years. Lots of cool stuff by Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons, a piece or two by Anish Kapoor and a few items by Damien Hirst that I hadn’t seen before. The strangest of which was not the white calf with gold hooves in a gold framed tank but something much more alive. I was walking around one gallery and saw two young ladies, both blonde, both identically dressed and both twins. Strange to see twins that are dressed the same, surely that is just something that parents do to make their lives easier. Once they get a sense of independence, possibly around the age of 5 or 6, they want to dress differently. Anyway, I didn’t see them again until I was near the Damien Hirst exhibits, when I saw a member of the public talking to them. They were just sat on two chairs about 6 feet apart, any closer and it would have just looked strange. Later when I walked around for the second time they were just talking to each other. I think the description of the ‘piece’ just said Dixie Jo, but I may be mistaken.

It is such a great place that I always contribute the required amount at the cloakroom for looking after my bag and also at the donation boxes on the way out.

Back over the Thames again and down the Embankment, past the Houses of Parliament to Tate Britain. Again leaving my bag at the cloakroom. I did consider going to see the Turner Prize 2009 exhibits but after seeing them in Liverpool a few years ago I decided that paying for the privilege isn’t really worth it, unless you know what is being shown and have some appreciation of the artists. The other items were just as interesting, exhibits by Bridget Riley, Gilbert & George and some huge paintings by David Hockney. The other stuff I'm not really a fan of, the old masters I'm not all that interested in. Some of the oil paintings are interesting because of their size and the detail that goes into them but even the works in the Turner galleries, for me, weren’t worth more than a passing glance as I walked past.

Downstairs for a sandwich £3.50 and a cappuccino £2.20 and to collect my bag. The shock at paying so much for a butty and a drink made me forget to make a contribution. Oh well.

Walking back, in the general direction of Euston station, I had to stop off again at the Apple Store to see if they had any Magic Mice in stock. They were still just selling the Mighty Mouse that I had seen the other day, but I did get to try one on a new iMac and was quite impressed, both with the size of the iMac and of the new mouse. It just didn’t look as if they had any in stock.

My train back wasn’t until 8:00pm so I did have an hour or so to kill beforehand.

Pondering the events of the past few days I don’t think stay in London again. The expense of an overnight stay is too great, that and the lack of rest because you never sleep as well in a strange bed, just isn’t worth it. The journey from home to London is just over an hour and a half on the train. Booking in advanced the trip there and back only cost £30, even a return to Manchester costs about £15 and that’s only about 25 miles away. If there is something in the capital that I want to go and see I can book a ticket ahead of time and go down on an early train and return on a late one. It just isn’t worth staying over.

London

2009-10-21T12:00:00Z

My legs ache, my feet still hurt, I have another day of walking ahead and to cap it all it’s raining. Not the water running down your neck kind of rain, just that fine drizzle that blows around instead of just having the decency to fall vertically.

Breakfast first then I decided to take the tube from Holborn to Tower Hill. I certainly couldn’t face walking the full distance again. A single ticket in zone 1 is now £4. On my first London trip it was, I'm sure, just £1. At least I bought Carnet tickets 10 for a tenner and that was it, all of my travel in London paid for. There was a change at one station and I ended up surfacing before realising my error and going back down underground to find the correct line. Getting through the barrier at Tower Hill was fun, as the machine took my ticket the gate snapped open, but I wasn’t quick enough on my tender feet and almost got stuck. The alarm went off but no one stopped me.

By the time I arrived at the Design Museum I was slightly damp to say the least. Thankfully they were open and I purchased my ticket by handing over £8.50. The first floor was filled with architects models and photographs of buildings, some actual, some proposed, including a few designs for Tate Modern that didn’t make the cut. Not all that interesting. The second floor seemed to be closed off. I don’t know if this is usually an exhibition floor, this being my first visit, but I'm sure there must be something there. The third floor had more architects models of futuristic houses as well as some artwork done by someone who did the design for one of the last Olympic games… and that was it. Talk about being completely underwhelmed! After seeing all the great stuff in the shop I thought that the museum part of it was going to be more of the same. Chairs, furniture, gadgets, iPods anything that is well designed and serves it’s purpose, but there was nothing like that. I'm sure I've been to the art galleries in Manchester that have had more ‘design’ items than that. Yes, bitterly disappointed having visited the place twice on consecutive days. I just had another walk around the shop, which was infinitely more interesting, and free, bought my pack of Field Notes memo pads and headed back across the bridge to Tower Hill tube.

On the underground again to Euston Square and a trip to the Wellcome Collection, which I had only passed the other day. I've always had a fascination for medical artefacts like this and admission is free. It is just wall to wall science. A printout of the human genome, that isn’t something that you’ll see every day and certainly isn’t something that I think you could replicate with a bubblejet printer. Guillotine blades, hair and teeth of those long since left us. Amputation saws, shrunken heads, male anti-masturbation devices, chastity belts, artificial limbs, dentists chairs, it’s all just wonderful intriguing stuff and did I mention that it’s free? The café was packed so I just had a little wander, more of a limp really, around the shop and then outside to decide what to do next.

I still had places I wanted to go to, Hyde Park in daylight might be nice and it had stopped raining. In the end I decided to head back to the hotel via M&S for something to eat. Walking was still painful to say the least so back down to Euston Square tube I went. At a ticket window I asked for a single to Tottenham Court Road, the bloke behind the glass said that I just needed to go up the stairs and left and that was Tottenham Court Road… and like an idiot I did just that. I guess it did save me another £4 tube fare. So I ended up walking back to the hotel. By this time I was limping quite badly, so much so that passersby were checking my left leg to see if it looked wooden.

Back in room 721 of the Covent Garden Travelodge I lay, under the duvet, eating my sandwiches, watching afternoon TV and I really noticed how grubby the room was. The ceiling was false, which is fine, but they always seem to be made from the same substance that egg boxes are made out of, that really course cardboard that has just been loosely mashed together. So there’s a brown stain on the ceiling, a light bulb no longer works over the door, the window frames are metal and have fixtures missing, this allows cold air and any outside noise easy passage into the room. There is both a vast air-conditioning unit, which looks as if it was fitted in the seventies, I didn’t try it, and a Dimplex heater, again untested. One wall had a large bubble in the wallpaper, another had scuff marks from a boot, it was certainly a boot as there was also a clear print of it on the wall. I counted 4 electrical outlets that must have been in use at some point but now just had covers on them. The bathroom was in a similar state of disrepair. Caps that should have been covering the heads of screws were missing, fixtures like the toilet roll holder had been broken, replaced with new holes drilled without filling in the old ones. A bath was completely out of the question as there was no plug. Four drill holes in the tiles didn’t seem to perform any purpose and lastly, the one thing that never seems to work in hotel bathrooms, the ceiling extractor fan didn’t work. Or possibly it was so efficient and well made that it was inaudible. A snip at £120 a night for a room with only a single bed.

It doesn’t stop there – the other annoying thing was that the two lifts had indicator numbers for the floors, so that you knew if it was your floor. The LED indicator numbers didn’t work, so twice when the lift doors opened I got out. Thinking that that was my floor. There isn’t even a sign on the wall where the lifts are showing which floor it is. The only way you could tell that you'd hit the ground floor is to look for a tile pattern on the floor instead of carpet.

I had been sending text messages to my niece Zoe, telling her what I was up to. She had sent me one back asking if I'd go to the Apple Store on Regent Street and get her a Magic Mouse. I thought that she was mistaken and that it was called a Mighty Mouse and that there had been rumours of a touch sensitive mouse with no scroll ball. I said that I'd only been in there the other day looking for one myself. Little did I know. You don’t check the internet for a couple of days and look what happens.

London

2009-10-20T12:00:00Z

Another day and up and out before 9, off towards St. Paul’s with a stop at the nearest Pret A Manger for breakfast.

I'd been a fan of the David Cronenberg film Eastern Promises since it came out. In fact I had even paid a rare visit to the cinema to see it when it was released. Of course I bought the DVD when that was available a few years ago and have watched it a few times since. There is something about it that appeals to me, possibly the alien culture, the earthiness of it or the violence, I don’t know, I can’t quite put my finger on it. When I found out where the “Trans-Siberian Restaurant” exterior scenes were shot I decided to pay a visit to St John Street and see it for myself.

I think the main difference that I noticed when I arrived is that the street is very quiet. In the film it’s like a main street. The main door would have been changed but the gated doors to the right look the same. Then to the right of them there is a passage way to a loading bay which may have been the one used in the film. According to Film London it’s the 6th most used film location in London. From what I could tell the main door was unlocked but there wasn’t any sign that it was occupied.

From there it was around St. Paul’s Cathedral, towards the Tower of London and Tower Bridge, to the Design Museum. I wandered in and had a quick look around the shop and spotted the Field Notes books that I wanted and the Objectified DVD which, for me, still hadn’t arrived. Lots of other cool design books and bits and pieces. Trim phones, for those who remember them, and Eames Elephants which are stools made out of one sheet of plastic shaped like an elephant. I remember one being on the stage at the TED talks a few years ago and didn’t know what it was, except that it was a stool of some kind. I certainly didn’t know that it had been designed by Charles and Ray Eames. This was all wonderful interesting stuff exactly the reason why the Design Museum was first on my list of places to visit. I walked up to the desk and asked for a single ticket and was told that the galleries were closed today. Bugger. But that they would be open tomorrow. Thank goodness. A little disappointed to have to make the trip out there again but at least I’ll be able to visit during this trip.

So from there it was back along the Thames to City Hall. Not exactly a stroll in the park I assure you, especially when there are detours to consider.

It is in City Hall that The Movieum of London is located. As words go ‘movieum’ isn’t one of the best, I guess it’s a cross between ‘movie’ and ‘museum’. What didn’t bode well was the fact that there were people outside trying to drag people in that were walking past. Anyway, another £12 ticket purchased and I wander around. I'm asked if I have a camera with me, I was expecting to be told that no photography was allowed, but instead was encouraged to take photos, just not in the Beatles section. Heaven forbid that photos of the Beatles be released without permission or consent. A few things were interesting enough to photograph, a glass studded coat from Hellboy, a purple suit from the first of the new Batman films (I did read that Jack Nicholson kept all the suits that were made for him, I may be wrong) and not much else really. It certainly wasn’t filled with visitors. There must only have been about 8 people in the place. Some Star Wars stuff, some 007 props and things. That’s about it. I think I tried to wander around twice, to get my money’s worth, but trying to be interested for that amount of time was difficult. I started taking photos of Harry Potter items just because it was a novelty. And this is me, a pretty big movie fan. Oh well.

From there I think I wandered back to the hotel for a nap. You never sleep well in a strange bed, certainly not a single one. Then I went out later to take some night photos using my little Velbon tripod that I'd packed just in case.

The heels of both feet and my left leg were hurting. I was only thinking on the journey down that on the first visit to London I'd managed to get both blisters and leg pain… and yes, I'd had them again now. Only a day and a half into my ‘holiday’ as well, with another trip out to the Design Museum tomorrow. It’s not going to be fun.

London

2009-10-19T12:00:00Z

Considering that my last holiday was back in September 2006 I think I've done well to last this long. There was a few years when I would always go to London and spend 4 nights or so in a hotel spending the days wandering around, visiting galleries, museums and generally soaking up the culture. Then I think one year I went down, which is always expensive for just one person, and didn’t really have any thing in mind to go and see. I must have seen it all. Any visits after that had to have a purpose, Nine Inch Nails at the Astoria or the opening of the Regent Street Apple store.

Over the last year I've kept a list of places that I'd like to visit if I paid a trip to our nations capital. That list grew quite large so a 4 night stay was planned for October, my favourite month for such trips.

The train to Euston arrived at about lunchtime but the Travelodge reservation said that check-in had to be after 3. I arrived about an hour early having walked down Tottenham Court Road carrying my bag. With there being a queue at reception I thought I would be fine to check-in early so that I could leave my bag in the room. No such luck. Had I paid the extra for an early check-in? No. It might have been helpful of them to check to see if my room was ready, instead it was a case of having to pay an extra £10 to check-in an hour early. My room could have been ready and waiting for me but instead I had to wander around waiting until after 3 to check-in. Not the best of starts but there you go, rules are rules. They also won’t let you leave your bag so I had kill time carrying it around with me.

I wandered towards Trafalgar Square and Saint Martin-in-the-Fields, managed to get lost a little, then made my way back to the hotel to check-in.

Once I'd dumped my bag in the room it was back to Trafalgar Square and Piccadilly to the Royal Academy of Arts where Anish Kapoor had an exhibition.

The person who sold me the ticket, £12.00, asked if I was aware that the gallery closed at 6. Yes, I had checked the closing times the day before on the web and it was only 4 now so 2 hours should do it easily. I knew what was coming, more or less, as I'd seen a video on the BBC web-site. The most interesting pieces were the ‘wax train’ that went through two doorways and the ‘wax cannon’.

At one end of the ‘wax train’ line there was member of the galleries staff who had a broad cockney accent who was saying to a few inquiring visitors that it was made of wax, a wax type substance. It certainly can’t have been sold wax as it would have been too heavy to move. Apparently it takes an hour to move from one end of the line to the other.

I did manage to see the ‘wax cannon’ being fired, which is primed and loaded every twenty minutes. Over the length of the exhibition it will fire 3 tonnes of this red wax into a blocked off doorway. It’s amazing that the gallery allowed it. The building must be old enough to have a preservation order on it and the doorways, and the plaster moulding in the cannon room, were splattered with this red wax. Let’s hope it doesn’t stain. The other exhibits, piles of coloured powder (or were they?), piles of blobbed clay/mud, the horn and the dimples where really nothing to get excited about. I think I must have been in and out in less than an hour. Bargain.

From there it was off to M&S for something to eat and to queue up for 15 minutes in the quick checkout area with some apples and a drink. Then with the sun slowly setting a quick walk in, and then out of, Hyde Park walking down Park Lane. A wander around the Hard Rock Cafe store then around Buckingham Palace, down the mall back to Trafalgar Square and back to the hotel.

When I'm Dead All This Will Be Yours!

2009-10-17T14:55:00Z

When I'm Dead All
This Will Be Yours!

Joe Teller: A Portrait by His Kid, Teller
Teller

Being such a fan of Penn & Teller buying this book was an easy decision, but instead of learning more about Teller, the magician and the person, this book is about his parents, more specifically his father. It reads as if it's based upon a visit that Teller made to his parents house in Philadelphia. His Pad and Mam start to bring out boxes of letters, photographs, cartoons and other artwork that has been kept over the years. This starts Joe and Irene reminiscing about their youth, Joe's trips around the country and how they met. The book includes lots of cartoons that Joe had drawn, hoping to make a living from it, and oil paintings by both Joe and Irene. The Kid, Teller, even tries his hand at painting to see if the artistic gene has been passed down to him.

Looking back at my grandparents the only psychical records we have are albums of photographs. As far as I know none of them kept journals of any kind. When they died all their tales and experiences passed on with them. But for the next generation all they'll need to do to find out what Uncle Carl got up to is to do a Google search or look at photos on flickr. The question is would they want to?

Programming Collective Intelligence

2009-10-04T16:14:00Z

Programming Collective
Intelligence

Building Smart Web 2.0 Applications
Toby Segaran
Web Applications

If you've ever wondered how web-sites can suggest other books, music or movies that you might enjoy then this book will tell you. It's packed with code for grouping, clustering, filtering and analysing information. If you use Python and you either understand, or want to learn more, about Bayesian and Decision Tree Classifiers, Neural Networks, Support-Vector Machines, k-Nearest Neighbours, Clustering, Multidimensional Scaling, Non-Negative Matrix Factorisation and Optimisation then this book could well be for you.

But, if you're like me and use Ruby and aren't a maths wizard then most of the content may well pass at great height over your cranium. Yes, I did read it all, if only to try and glean more of an understanding of the techniques involved. It started well, discovering groupings in RSS feeds, then the concepts became trickier to grasp. I think the only thing that kept me going was one of the last chapters on evolving intelligence. Being a developer of software I've often wondered how you can write something, given specific rules, that can develop it's own intelligence. Especially when these things can play games with themselves and learn as they go.

The only chapter that I'm certainly going to re-read and look into is the one on discovering groups. My idea is to add a related posts, and possibly even unrelated posts, section under each post on this web-site. From what the book says this would look at the text of each post and find ones with similar words and counts of words. I may even be able to plot a dendrogram showing clusters of topics.

Huffduffer

2009-10-02T08:01:00Z

Huffduffer

Why oh why haven’t I used this web-site before.

Since buying an iPod nano, a few years ago now, I've become an avid listener to podcasts. When I'm walking, cleaning, cooking or washing-up I'm listening to podcasts that I've subscribed to. Some feeds I've stuck with for years and listen to every show. Others I've unsubscribed from mainly due to the fact that there are only so many listening hours in the week and they started to pile up in iTunes.

Recently I've wanted to listen to the odd Boagworld podcast or I've found an interview in an MP3 file on a web-site that looks interesting. Before Huffduffer I would have to download the one show via the podcast section, then remember to delete the feed afterwards, or download the file manually, add it to iTunes, listen to it and then delete it.

Being a Web 2.0 stalker of longstanding I read a tweet from Jeremy Keith saying that he was huffduffing himself, which is considered illegal in some countries and is hardly a spectator sport. He was huffduffing the dConstruct ‘09 podcasts which I'd listened to in previous years.

After mentioning it 3 times and ‘it’ also being the title of this post, I'd better explain what it does.

Huffduffer allows you to create your own podcast stream using MP3’s that you've found on the internet. So, in my case, I'm surfing around web-sites and I find a download link to an MP3 file. All I need to do is use the bookmarklet to huffduff it. I have already subscribed to my feed in iTunes so the next time the feeds are refreshed the MP3 file will get downloaded.

It works in a such a way that anything is a podcast feed. You have your own feed, of items that you've huffduffed, you can subscribe to someones else’s feed, a feed of the most popular additions or a feed particular tags. If only there were more hours in the day to listen to it all.

Jeremy said that it was just a ‘scratch your own itch’ project and that it’s possibly too geeky to go mainstream. It’s certainly inspiring to see a niche site like this created just for the love of it.

I would have been at the MEN...

2009-09-16T20:10:00Z

Yes, tonight I would have been at the Last Night Of The Poms at the MEN in Manchester but alas it was not to be. Through no fault of my own you understand because the date was cancelled back in July with ‘unforeseen circumstances’ being the reason given.

I had been dying to see Sir Les Patterson and Dame Edna in the flesh and had booked the ticket back in January. In my official capacity as curator of a web-site dedicated to Uncle Les I felt it my duty to attend. Even the ticket price of £53.50 didn’t dissuade me. That is a considerable amount of money in anyones currency for two, possibly three, hours entertainment. It would have been the first appearance by Sir Les on a UK stage in many years.

On a side note: when the cancellation was announced Ticketmaster.co.uk managed to get the ticket out the next day. This was so that they could still charge me the £2 booking fee and leave me with a souvenir ticket that was worthless. £2 for a piece of flimsy card. They did refund the £51.50 but considering that they had my money for six months, that the date was cancelled and that they hadn’t even sent out the ticket, it was robbery.

Last night was the first Last Night Of The Poms so my Google Alerts were firing with multiple links to various reviews. You can read the selected high-lights over at Sir Les Patterson’s web-site. From all accounts, the word isn’t good. The monologues by Sir Les and Dame Edna certainly seem to have been well received but when the band and the huge choir strike up that’s when things take a dive.

From what I've read the musical passages just aren’t that funny, witty or humorous. These musical sections have been performed before and, again from what I've read, most people wanted to forget them.

With the country digging it’s way out of a recession I can’t see that that many people would have paid £50 or more, each, for one night out. And that doesn’t include meals, parking, drinks or a stay in a hotel.

The tour should just have been in theatre sized venues, of which there are at least 4 or 5 around the centre of Manchester, with Laurie Holloway on the piano, a few songs (hence the pianist) and buckets of phlegm and gladdies. Possibly do two nights at each venue, one for Sir Les and the other for Dame Edna (I think I've missed my calling, I should have been a tour manager).

There is a possibility that the tour will return to the UK next year after a stint in Australia during December. Here’s hoping that Sir Les leaves the band behind and plays a show near here.

Dave Gorman at The Lowry

2009-09-13T15:00:00Z

Dave Gorman

Tonight’s trip to The Lowry was supposed to be an exercise in secret keeping for my niece Zoe. She cannot keep a secret for very long before feeling compelled to blurt it out. We can’t quite decide if this is an positive trait or not. Of course I am the former olympic champion at keeping secrets (yes, I even keep secrets from you gentle reader) and had to be, having bought the tickets back in March.

But after catching up with The Dave Gorman Podcast (on iTunes) last week I was starting to feel that maybe an evening with Mr. Gorman wouldn’t be entirely appropriate for a young woman. Now, this may well be some sort of kinky comedian thing, it could be that he lives in the South or it may well be just a personal fetish but he confessed, on Absolute Radio, that he owns a duvet cover with a zip. Shocking I'm sure you’ll agree. He also has a pierced nipple but I have no doubt that in celebrity circles it’s compulsory.

Of course Zoe wasn’t shocked and surprised when Dave Gorman’s name was read out over the tannoy. It must have been like Mission Impossible. She had already sent a text message to her mother who was sat waiting in front of an iMac with a high-speed internet connection. Knowing our location Dave Gorman’s name could only have been a few Google links away.

Naturally, based on previous experience, we didn’t expect Dave to just do a ‘normal’ tour. He is playing 32 consecutive nights in venues of various sizes across the land without utilising a Bon Jovi size tour bus. With cycling being more than a means of transportation around London he is getting on his bike to travel between gigs. In fact he is touching all four points of our little island, north, south, east and west, but not necessarily in that order. This is why Glenfinnan Railway Station and Inverness The Ironworks are on this tour that has been christened, “Sit Down, Pedal, Pedal, Stop And Stand-Up”. Always advisable to stop before standing up.

I wouldn’t want to spoil it for anyone who hasn’t seen the show already. You just can’t distill two hours entertainment into a few malformed sentences, so I won’t even try. Just to say that everyone in a packed Lowry left feeling as happy as a horse in trousers.

Zoe had said earlier that she was starting with a cold, so by the trip home she was probably feeling as rough as a pumpkin.

Tomorrow Dave Gorman will be on his bike again heading towards Preston, because that’s how he rolls.

The Complete Barry McKenzie

2009-09-02T12:00:00Z

The Complete
Barry McKenzie

No so much a legendary strip more a resonant social history per se
written by Barry Humphries
drawn by Nicholas Garland
Humour

Barry McKenzie's Song
"The Old Pacific Sea"

I was down by Bondi pier, drinkin' tubes of ice-cold beer
With a bucket full of prawns upon my knee
When I'd swallowed the last prawn,
I had a technicolour yawn
and I chundered in the old Pacific Sea

Drink it up, drink it up,
Crack another dozen tubes and prawns with me
If you want to throw your voice,
mate you won't have any choice
But to chunder in the old Pacific Sea

I was sittin' in the surf, when a mate of mine called Murf
Asks if he can crack a tube or two with me
The bastard barely swallowed it
When he went for the big spit
and he chundered in the old Pacific Sea

Drink it up, drink it up,
Crack another dozen tubes and prawns with me
If you want to throw your voice,
mate you won't have any choice
But to chunder in the old Pacific Sea

I've had liquid laughs in bars and I've hurled from moving cars
And I've chuckled where and when it suited me
But if I could choose the spot
To regurgitate me lot,
then I'd chunder in the old Pacific Sea

Drink it up, drink it up,
Crack another dozen tubes and prawns with me
If you want to throw your voice,
mate you won't have any choice
But to chunder in the old Pacific Sea

It was this delicate pean to the liquid laugh, to crying Ruth, to parking a tiger that stuck in my head whilst perusing the cartoons. Chug-a-lug! Chug-a-lug! Originally it was the fact that Sir Les Patterson wrote the preface that lead me to buy this book. I didn't have much of an interest in reading a book of cartoon strips, but the one thing that kept me going was trying to decipher all the slang contained in the speech balloons. Thank goodness for the comprehensive glossary in the back. The one omission seems to be 'the hard word' which I still can't quite figure out.

Looking at the artwork over the ten years you can see a progression from the fine black lines, through the lighter grey shaded era and back again. Barry still has the same chin, wide-brimmed hat of course and always sports a tie and a double breasted suit. To think that such a book was considered so risque that it could have been banned in Australia. Reading it today it does seem quite tame.

Reading it from cover to cover possibly isn't recommended. It's more likely to be something that you should just dip into. Although having read it all I can certainly see where Uncle Les got some of his sayings from.

My oath I'm Australian. It's the greatest little humdinger of a country in the world. You poor old poms don't know what you're missin'. Beaut sandy beaches, lovely juicy steaks, big shiny cars, decent church-going buggers all over the place, and gorgeous clean livin' sheilahs, who root like rattlesnakes and can't pass a prick!Barry McKenzie - on his homeland

Isn't it funny when you come to think of it? A bastard tucks away a few jars of ice-cold, it's only in his ned kelly for a few jiffs, and then, when he has a decent hurl, it comes out all thick and different somehow. Isn't nature bloody marvellous!Barry McKenzie - on his favourite pastime

Whacko-the-diddle-oh!

Kong and a Vampire

2009-08-24T12:00:00Z

Yes, I've just finished watching King Kong. It had been on my LOVEFiLM list for a while before ITV1 screened it last weekend. So you can tell that it wasn’t a film that I was simply dying to see. It was just one of those films where the bonus extras, if I had seen it on disc, would have been more interesting to me than the main feature. The CGI effects were stunning, and remarkably easy to spot :– Naomi Watts' juggling rocks, Andy Serkis' mustache and I'm pretty sure the chimp was just Weta pixels. This must have been mentioned at the time of the films release but it is arse numbingly long. Even on TV, with the damn adverts during the good bits, it ran at 3.5 hours. That’s at least 1.5 hours over the boredom threshold for an adventure film like this. We've seen dinosaurs in movies before Pete so that whole segment could have been removed. I mean what did it add really? That would have moved the story along a little quicker. Of course I would have liked to have seen how they, the 10 survivors from the boat crew, managed to get Kong to New York, but thankfully that is left to our imaginations.

The other film I watched was Let The Right One In. A delightful little tale of a modern day vampire who obviously had a thirst for human blood, was a dab-hand with a Rubics Cube and lived in a block of flats. Not your typical vampire abode but then they can’t all live in Transylvanian castles now can they. Again CGI was used but, unlike Kong, not so you'd notice. A drop of blood here, a dilated pupil there, all very subtle stuff. In fact I think the only other pixel manipulation I spotted was the snarling cats and for a while I did wonder how they made the felines spit and snarl like that.

Henry has a Girlfriend

2009-08-23T12:00:00Z

Henry Rollins

This, according to the man himself on his KCRW radio show, is a fact. Yes, the eternal bachelor, Henry Rollins, has a girlfriend and has recently had to meet her parents.

From what Henry has said in the past we can only assume that Miss Right is a reader, of adult books (not Harry Potter), and also that she has a sense of humour. Considering Henry’s locale that must narrow it down somewhat. No porn stars, no models, no valley girls. Someone who is in the film industry maybe. From what he’s told us about his personal life he could only have met someone he was working with. I think that Janeane Garofalo’s name would have been high on the list but she is a NY girl which would make dating difficult.

Considering the breadth of subject matter Rollins fans have been privy to (spilling the seed in the sink of a rented NYC apartment and the mental image of a multi-stained futon) I can think of only a handful of times when female companions have been mentioned. Once was during the first time I saw Henry’s spoken word show back in 2003 and is too painful to recount.

I would just love to be a fly on the wall when these words were spoken :– “Mom, Dad, this is Henry”.

I doubt that photos are going to be splattered across the internet and the tabloids, but then it does depend on who this mystery woman is. As long as he is happy that’s the main thing. It could provide interesting material for his shows early next year.

Update …and she enjoys listening to obscure Black Sabbath tracks played really loudly.

Related Links
Henry & Janeane at the premiere of Walt Disney and Pixar’s “Ratatouille”

Man's Search For Meaning

2009-08-21T12:00:00Z

Man's Search For Meaning

The classic tribute to hope from the Holocaust
Viktor E. Frankl

Viktor Frankl spent three years in Auschwitz, Dachau and other concentration camps during Second World War II. The first half of the book describes his experiences. The brutality of the Capos, who were prisoners themselves but on a level slightly below the SS. Because Viktor was young he was spared a visit to the gas chambers. If you looked fit enough to work then you would stay alive. Not that life was easy, walking miles in freezing temperatures, digging the solid earth to create ditches, trenches and to lay water pipes. Such physical labour fueled each day by only bread and thin soup.

He was moved from camp to camp during this time. Once transfered by train through Vienna past the street where he was born.

Being a doctor he was given a chance to look after the sick in the camp. Certainly an easier life than working outside and on one occasion he had a chance to escape with a fellow doctor. Viktor chose to stay with his patients. Before he tried another escape a delegate from the International Red Cross arrived and all the sick were moved to hospitals in Switzerland.

The second half of the book describes logotherapy, which is considered to be the "Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy" after Freud and Adler, and focuses on the 'will to meaning'.

It's the first half of the book that I enjoyed the most. Certainly the two halves are linked. If a prisoner had a firm belief that his wife or children were still alive then that force of will would keep him alive. It is only when you read a book like this that your life is put into perspective. Yes, you may dislike you job, but you aren't starving, you aren't being physically and mentally abused each day. At least I hope not. You still have enough to eat, sometimes too much, and yet we rarely have something concrete to aim for. To give our lives meaning.

Anvil! The Story of Anvil

2009-08-15T12:00:00Z

Amazon.co.uk

Rock documentaries, or rockumentaries if you will, just don’t get any better than this.

Yes, of course I was a fan of Anvil back in the early eighties. They had Kerrang! covers, rave reviews and multi-page spreads. Hard N Heavy, Metal on Metal and Forged In Fire were the albums that I bought, listened to repeatedly and read all of the song lyrics and the liner notes. At the time I was possibly only buying one album per month out of my pocket money. I remember buying either Hard N Heavy or Metal on Metal just before Christmas when I should have been saving money for presents. They were just one of many favourite bands that I had at the time. Even though I was still reading Kerrang! magazine they seemed to disappear from my radar, from everyones radar for that matter.

When I heard that a documentary was being made about them I was surprised to say the least. Surprised that they were still going, thirteen albums and counting, and dumbfounded that they could warrant being the subject of a film documentary. Not just a TV special on some obscure cable channel but a full blown cinematic release.

They are essentially a ‘real life’ Spinal Tap, except Tap never had day jobs and extended families. Anvil get a chance to tour Europe, they get lost in cities with foreign road signs, club owners don’t pay them, they miss trains, but they play in front of any thing from 10 to hundreds of fans and that is all they’re doing it for. Not for the fame or the money, they don’t actually make any money on the tour, but just for the love of the music. Corny I know. When the tour is over they go back to their families and their day jobs. Cue shots of Lips wearing a hair-net and their bald bass player also wearing the same head-gear because that’s the rules when preparing school meals. They get to work with C.T., the record producer, but only if they can cough up £12,000 (I think it was pounds sterling). It’s Lips' sister who gets them the money and, a few twists and turns aside, they make their thirteenth album. That’s the easy part. Going ‘round record companies in this day and age trying to get it distributed was a thankless task. So they decided to get it made and sell the CD via their web-site. That’s when they get asked by a Japanese promoter if they want to play in Japan.

What occurred to me, watching all this unfold, was why didn’t they just ask their fans to contribute to the making of the album. It worked for Jill Sobule and she made California Years. Any fan making a donation over a certain limit would get a name check on the liner notes and a copy of the CD when it was made. They certainly have enough enthusiastic fans. Even some of the rock musicians interviewed could have given some money. I'm sure Slash, Lemmy and Lars would have given a buck or two. Possibly there just wasn’t enough time to organize that kind of thing if studio time needed to be booked.

One very odd thing on the disc was part of the special features. It’s the full interview with Lars Ulrich of Metallica, which is about 30 minutes long, during which he mentions Geoff Barton and Xavier Russell and that they were both working for Sounds and then for Kerrang!. He says that usually whatever Geoff said was good really was worth checking out because he would rave about obscure bands like Silverwing (MySpace). Lars says that these bands would hail from towns like Macclesfield and all the band members would work in chip shops. Now that is certainly not something you hear every day, the drummer of a huge rock band mentioning your home town.

Towards the end of the interview Lars says to Sacha Gervasi, the director, that he has never actually met Anvil. Their paths must have continually crossed during the eighties but a meeting never took place. Lars says that he'd like to buy them a beverage of their choice and sit down and talk about music. I really hope that happens. Maybe one for a follow up documentary.

So Anvil fly to Japan to do this festival which, unlike European festivals, is inside a huge concert hall. The camera zooms in on the bill for the day and Anvil are first on at 11:35 in the morning. You just hear Lips saying that no one is going to come, they've flown all that way to play to a handful of people in a huge hall. The only thing I could think about was Jeanine saying in This Is Spinal Tap, “Oh, no! If I told then once, I told them a hundred times: put Spinal Tap first and puppet show last”.

You’ll just have to watch the film to see what happens.

Related Links
Anvil! The Story of Anvil – on Amazon.co.uk DVD & Blu-ray
This Is Thirteen – Pre order on Amazon.co.uk
Forged In Fire – on iTunes
Metal On Metal – on iTunes
Hard ‘N’ Heavy – on iTunes