Viewed Askew

I may have already pointed people to this one, but if you want to see "Mae Day", the short that Kevin Smith made in film school, you can download it here. It's not very funny, but, well, whatever.

Have you noticed how many of these posts are done late at night?
In this case, it's because I'm reading a book on Confucian ritual music in Korea and will do anything - anything - to alleviate the boredom.

You Know, The One Who Wasn't Graham or Damon

Alex James writes about drinking.

We Must Extend the Hand of European Friendship...

... because if there's any justice in the world, Turkey will receive the go-ahead to join the EU.
They may not have a great human rights record, but they have a least ripped off Star Trek in an amusing fashion.

Selfish Sloanies

Just what is up with those chinless wonders in their Range Rovers and Isuzu Troopers and whatnot?

Apparently, this is.

Oh Yeah, They Die Hard

Eerily enough, two things relating to the film Ronin happened recently.

1) I got the Ronin DVD, which was on sale, mainly for the John Frankenheimer commentary.

2) The girl sitting next to me in my music class on Thursday dropped her coffee cup and caught it before it hit the ground, just like Gregor with his super-fast reflexes. Scary.

An Elite Crime-Solving Cabal

I don't know about you, but I think these guys are cooler than frost.

I Don't Know What A Terraplane Is, But It's Giving Me The Blues

Over the last couple of weeks, I've been in contact with a girl called Danielle about forming a group to play early blues music - '20s and '30s sort of thing.
She's a third year Chinese student, quite coincidentally, and today I finally met her. We made a rendezvous after class at SOAS and went up to her house in Highbury. Danielle's a singer, and a good one at that, with a voice that really does remind me of the classic female blues vocalists. Also there was a keyboard player who's actually a professional musician, and a guy called Lorne (not too sure how you spell that), who is an absolutely demon harmonica player.

I mean, really, he dives in and out of a song as harp players are wont to do, and he plays with such assurance and capability that it makes you feel like you're playing better yourself.

This group has promise. On a similar note, I've been invited to join a different band as well. I think two groups might be too much, but I'll meet this new guy and see what develops from there. Right now, I've got a load of songs by Leadbelly, Bobby Johnson and Bessie Smith to listen to. It's kind of like having homework.

What's With The Trick Pool Table, Goldfinger?

Check this out - it's a "poor man's official james bond megalomaniacal super-villian world domination mission control video wall".

I am sooooo going to do this to my desktop.

I Just Made A Bitchin' Omelette

Seriously, this was one kick-arse specimen of omelette-dom.
For one thing, it had to be at least thirty, thirty-five per cent cheese. I used the last of my Cheddar on it (having bought Wensleydale and Camembert today) and man, it was nice.

It broke up while I was taking it out of the pan, but all of my egg-based foodstuffs have done that this week, so I'm getting used to it.
I partially blame the eggs.

But anyway, great omelette.

I just thought you'd like to know.

Happy Birthday Eike and Zang

That's about all I can manage at the moment, being drunker than the late Oliver Reed.

[hic]

Welcome To My Underground Lair

Saw a copy of Heroes and Villains in Playin' Games today (at last - my comp copy still hasn't turned up).
Excellent stuff - my name in the front, which is always nice, and then all those characters I wrote up, done up as mock dossiers, with paperclips and coffee stains and everything on them. Very nice. I noticed one of the characters I did as a one page write-up got expanded to two, which probably means another page went missing somewhere. Still, it's all good.

Heroes and Villains is a supplement for Gear Krieg, which is published by Dream Pod 9.
Notice how I avoided having to look up what the direct link was there.

Da da de dadada, da da da dadada

I just saw Die Another Day. It was cool. Except the CGI surfing bit halfway through. That was rubbish.

But the swordfighting and the car-chasing and the going to Cuba. That was all good.

Bond: "You're cleverer than you look."
Q: "Better than looking cleverer than you are."

This makes me feel better

Which Recurring Kevin Smith Character Are You? Take the test here

If I were a Dead Russian Composer, I would be Modest Mussorgsky. I am a Romantic period psycho who's drunk more often than not. I died of this affliction, not surprisingly. My famous works include "Night on Bald Mountain" and "Pictures at an Exhibition." Who would you be? Dead Russian Composer Personality Test

I'm suddenly having flashbacks to First Orchestra's rendition in school of "The Gnome", from "Pictures at an Exhibition". Gaaahhh.

Well, this is slighty depressing...

... though I'm not sure why.

In a moment of ennui, I put my own name into Google, and on the third page or so, found the Roll of Honour for 49 Squadron, RAF Bomber Command, including this:

Page: 132
Name: McGRENERY
Rank: Sgt
Forename: Thomas H
Number: 1052525
Age: 23
Trade: WOP/AG
Date: 11/04/42
Burial Information where known: No known grave.

I mean, I know it's not me, but there he is.

Recovery

Yesterday was a complete wash-out, really. Having got home at about five in the morning (from, amongst other places, the Walkabout, where I also bumped into Leo and Henry), I found myself completely unable to move until about half past one.
My body-clock's still out.

However, I did get up in time to see the rugby match on the TV in the Golden Lion, where England dealt Australia a crushing 32-31 defeat.
Apparently, Scotland completely hammered South Africa, but the important thing is that we're better than Australia.

In Your Face, Space Coyote!

I just scored a review copy of Jools' Holland's latest album, "More Friends". Ha!

LS has not, in fact, printed my vicious, bile-ridden account of "A Black Thread". Apparently, though, this was because of a communications mishap rather than because it was rubbish. Excellent.

FEED ME!

London Student has published my short review of Little Shop of Horrors.
It was a good show, but I saw it for free. The tickets were £12.50, or £8.50 concessions, which is a little over the top for an amateur dramatics group.

I'll never complain about the QMT again. Maybe.

Well, on the Fifth of November, I went to the Chisenhale Gallery to see a video installation entitled "A Black Thread".
Bethnal Green was like Beirut that night, with fireworks exploding all around, most of which seemed to have been launched by the kids in the parks either side of the road. They're the Kray twins of tomorrow.

The installation was appallingly bad. Here's the review I submitted for London Student, though I'll be surprised if they print it:

---------------------

“Edward Stewart and Stephanie Smith’s powerful videoworks explore physical and psychological experience”, burbles the press release. That’s sort of true – every minute or so, when all the lights in the gallery turn on, you can see everybody there looking at each other with a what-the-hell-am-I-doing-here expression somewhere between perplexity and embarrassment. That may not have been the psychological experience they were shooting for.

Burdened with an aesthetic only a mother could love, “A Black Thread” exemplifies the kind of thoughtless half-conceptualised dross that gives modern art a bad name. It exhibits neither craft nor depth, settling instead for trying to be ‘edgy’. The colour black is about as edgy as Smith and Stewart get, which is, frankly, pathetic.

Then again, you can recreate some of that Smith/Stewart magic pretty easily in your own home (saving you the trip to Bethnal Green), by following a simple procedure. Make a fist. Wrap your fist in black masking tape. Hit a table. Repeat. For best results, video this and sell it to an art gallery with more money than sense.

Given a choice between seeing “A Black Thread” and being poked in the eye, go for the poke in the eye. At least it’ll be over more quickly.

--------------------

On a happier note, the next morning I went to a preview of "Dirty Pretty Things", the latest film from Stephen "High Fidelity" Frears, starring Audrey "Amelie" Tautou and Chiwetel "Nothing you've ever heard of" Ejiofor. I've got a 600-word feature to write on it and the press conference that went with it.

I've optimised my DVD player to improve the picture quality. Raging Bull is okay, but raison d'etre still strobes a bit. Too much lateral motion. Oh, well.

It's another one of those days hovering between bright and overcast. Cloud covers the whole sky, but it's a pale shade of blue-grey for the most part, and it's not too gloomy.

I've had a grand total of three lessons so far. Classical Prose has been called off due to the Tube strike. It's all going to be Just Fine.

Everywhere around the ULU area is bustling with people from the different colleges. Most of the new arrivals seem to be working on the principle that if they keep moving, they're more likely to bump into wherever it is they're trying to go. When I came down here in the summer, it was like something out of a Western. The streets were devoid of life and the sun bounced back at you from the burning tarmac. Now it's back to the student-packed crowds of termtime, just the way I like it.

SOAS is much the same as ever. For sure, there a few new faces painted on the Common Room mural, even worse than the old ones (I didn't think that was possible, but there you go). As I walked down the stairs into the SU bar for the first time, a wave of familiarity and emotioncame over me. Or maybe it was just the smell. Little, if anything, seems to have been done to the bar, and that includes its smoky, vegetative atmosphere. Also, its clientele are as ever, proving SOAS' dependable and possibly unique ability to be simltaneously global and petty. On one side, clustered around a table are some (literally) wide-eyed first years. A girl breezes through on her way to the cafeteria dressed in clothes appropriated from a culture her ancestors never even heard of. Hey, over there, isn't that that girl who had her picture in the paper as an example of a typical pot-smoking student? The jukebox plays a bizarre mixture of Morricone and Morrisey. Near the bar, an older student waxes lyrical about his Master's thesis, in which he will be writing the definitive study on the acceptance of Billy Ray Cyrus among Kazakh spoon vendors.

This all might sound embittered and cynical, but it isn't. No, really. The fact is that while some (okay, quite a lot) of the people at SOAS can be faintly ridiculous, perhaps unknowingly insulting to the 'cool' cultures they idolise than anything else, there is a genuine enthusiasm and earnestness in all of them. The kids will grow up, the trendies will move on. And I suppose someone has to write about achy-breaky mullet wearers and their continuing impact on Central Asian silverware vendors.

I'm getting closer and closer to actually being signed up for all my courses. My actual undergrad tutors are very hard to get hold of, though, so I'm having to bide my time for their signatures and strike when they least expect it.

Happier times have included, oh, yesterday evening from about six till seven o'clock. Less good was the rest of the night. At six-ish, though, I got a free dinner, courtesy of the Christian Union. Well worth turning up to that, I think. The restaurant was interesting, being a vegetarian curry house. That's not terribly interesting in and of itself. What is weird about the place is all the posters around and about, telling you what a great idea vegetarianism is. I think the placard most likely to sway people towards veggiedom is the one with a big list of celebrities who have chosen to stop eating meat. I mean, if vegetarianism is good enough for William Shatner, it's good enough for the man on the Clapham omnibus. Unfortunately, during the meal I seem to have accidentally offered to maintain the CU website for them. Curses.

After dinner (which, I'd like to point again, was free AND all-you-can-eat), there was a SOAS do at a place call "93 Feet East" on Brick Lane. It was rubbish. Not the venue, but the SOAS party. In fact, if we'd known how poor a showing it was going to be, we'd have gone to the room of the bar that SOAS hadn't booked, instead of shelling out a fiver to get into our party. I should have done what Sam did and tried to make an impromptu drum. For some reason, entry was free if you brought a drum. SOAS, eh?

I got a letter forwarded from Arizona a couple of days ago - it's from Chris Schaller, and contained a money order for $60, my pay for the Heavy Gear books. He'd rounded up from $59.12 for convenience. I don't know what the purchasing power of 88 cents is, but I suppose this means that if I ever actually meet him, I owe him a chocolate bar or something.

My cheque from SJ Games (for the book reviews) had been sent back to me - it hadn't been endorsed on the back. Not being a frequent user of banks, I didn't know it was me who had to endorse, and had anguished visions of having to get another cheque sent out of Austin, with Steven Marsh's squiggly signature on the reverse. As I thought of this possibly, I temporarily entertained the possibility of attempting to forge Steven's signature, but gave up on it. Of course, in the end I didn't have to.

The bank teller was very helpful, but when I asked if there was anything special I had to do about paying in money orders, she replied "You can't pay in money orders."

"Well," I said, "What do you do with them, then?"

"Pass them both through," she replied, and I did so. She arranged Chris' money order above the SJG cheque and stared at them for a while. She didn't say anything.

"I mean, are they sort of like Travellers' Cheques?" I suggested feebly.

She didn't say anything. Then she showed the money order to the teller next to her. The other teller didn't seem to have seen one before either. I began to suspect that neither of them actually worked for HSBC. Were those names just labels stuck onto the badges?

Eventually, the first teller passed both the slips back.

"Sign your name on the back of both of them," she said, "That should work."

On the plus side, I was able to use the same paying-in slip for both, which should minimise the exchange fee.

It's all go around here, it really is.

Woo! Yay! Houpla!

Thanks to Mark for leading me to the indispensible wisdom of Dr. Alex Chiu, at www.alexchiu.com.
You too can build your own immortality device.

It's looking like raison d'etre will soon be available on the web. John Tynes is going to upload it to singlereel.com, while I'm going to look at putting it on the Atom Films site. Singlereel.com is easier but less popular, while Atom Films might take some time to get going. Failing that, I'm also looking at indie.hollywood.com - Singlereel is something of a stopgap measure so that both John and I can point people towards the film.

I've uploaded the Unknown Armies promovideo to the website. You can get it from the main page, or go straight to the download page.

The car has been playing up. The engine keeps cutting out under deceleration, which makes cornering hilarious fun. Unfortunately, I'm meant to be driving to London and back on the 22nd, moving into halls. Could be an interesting journey once I get into the city.

I note with fascination that the Queen Mother Theatre is putting on "Dark Corners", starring Richard Whitmore. One man's struggle to humanise the barbaric prisons of the nineteenth century etc. etc.

I can't help but feel that they may find this kind of impassioned "one man can make a difference", exploitation of history drama a rather overcrowded niche. At least, as long as BBC2 keep showing repeats of Doctor Quinn: Medicine Woman.