Saturday, October 06, 2007

Calling America

Calling America is a brand new UK based site with little content at the moment, but I highlight it here because I love the concept: using stories submitted by real people from real place all across the States, the site aims to form an alternative view of life in North America to the main stream media portrayal, which frankly for most non-Americans tends to usually focus on the negative (which of in some cases is of course justified).

I’ll be watching this site closely to see what sort of contributions it gets, I’d very much like to see entries from everyday people. I think it could be quite popular if it’s kept open minded. Why not contribute a story of your own, they run an open submissions policy, so check it out!

Speaking of open submissions policies, don’t forget that we also run a similar setup here. If you’ve want to draw our attention to a cool site you run or something you’ve found on the web that rocks then don’t hesitate to get in touch via this form. Thanks.

Sunday, November 26, 2006

London Theatre Blog

ltb2.jpg
London Theatre Blog is an exciting new weblog that aims to stimulate discussion, interest and analysis on contemporary performance practice in London and beyond.

Open invitations to guest writers for the submission of short performance-related articles will play a key role in transforming the blog into a rich and engaging resource for anyone interested in performance.

In addition to the weekly blog entries and feature articles, there will be frequent interviews with practioners, performance reviews, information on up-coming performance events, opportunities for collaborations in performance and a chance to network with the growing international online theatre community.

Thursday, April 06, 2006

Desperate Curiosity



I have moved my blog to a personal domain. Check out the new and vastly improved version at:

www.writerspace.net

It is now officially a theatre and writing blog.

Wednesday, August 24, 2005

Where do the doves go?

Symbols of peace - no doubt - but where do the doves go once they're let off? Do they fall to the ground like fizzled-out fireworks?

Wednesday, August 10, 2005

Clacton-On-Sea the new Ibiza?


So Tony & co have authorized the relaxation on alcohol licensing making the 24hour drinking dream of Britain's 'lad' culture a sad and desperate reality. So what does this mean at ground level? Well if you have ever been to the Iberian Peninsular, one of the Balearic Islands, the Canary Islands or any other destination where the detritus of Britain festers in its much-loathed yet seemingly de rigeur estival pits of sour sweat, hair gel, Kappa t-shirts and greasy chips, then you know that when they emerge at night the most dire display of humanity since...well since colonialism occurs, this may include anything from wall-to-wall vomitting to cheap clubs and even cheaper laughs, and to top it all off there are the many, many instances of Shazza and Gazza (that's Sharon and Gary in usual tongue) rutting like rabid dogs in semi-dark corners, showing about as much respect for the people who actually live in those places as they would for a coil of steaming dog shit in the side alley of their housing estate back home. Of course your average English town like Slough, Braintree, Clacton or Basingstoke lacks the benign climate and exotic fizz of the summer destinations mentioned above but essentially these new government laws will incite much the same thing. Well done Tony, I'm so glad you're hell-bent on defending 'our way of life'.
(Photo courtesy of Ginte)

Tuesday, August 09, 2005

Oh...about the end of terror

There is no end to terror just as there is no end to violence, there is at best a change of form. Terrorism is the current trend in violence but by the afternoon of the day it is extinguished, its replacement will have arrived, fresh and cunning, with a new plan and a new name.

Monday, August 08, 2005

Tokyo Nights


Click here to view the movie

This is a short 3 minute film put together from some old odds and ends of DV footage taken last winter. The location is Tokyo's Arakawa ward.

Coffee or angel of the morning

日本の夏大変暑いですね!Tokyo summer nights, and the heat is more stubborn than a goat. And as it hangs over me like a thick feather duvet, I watch the fluorescent green numbers on the clock by the window, hoping that they will soon fade away...I get up to drink a glass of water with the vague memory of someone once telling me that water helps you sleep. I go back to my futon with new hope...waiting...turning...sweating...nothing yet. I get up again, this time I turn on the lights. I sit at my computer not really knowing why and I stare at the luminous glow of the screen. It does no good so I return to the pit, dump myself in its sticky embrace and wait in silence. 6 hours later and the sound of the nursery school teacher from the ground floor of the building wakes me up. She's ordering the children to hold hands 2-by-2 as they get ready for their routine walk to the park. It's 9am. The children's voices are fresh and unfettered by tiredness, in fact they've already forgotten the night before. What I wouldn't give to be a toddler again. I get up and feel haggered as hell, my body aches and I blame it on the futon and its secret ability to constrict the unaccustomed western body. And so I'm drained and reduced to this: a bloodshot-eyed matinal wretch, marauding the cupboards for the last packet of coffee...coffee or angel of the morning.

iOne Letter / REDASHELLGraffiti exclamation


In the entanglement of letters above is a short phrase describing my feeling after waking up this morning. Whoever deciphers the phrase first will get a link to their site...not much of a prize, I know, but hey its better than nothing! And in case you are wondering how I went about making the letter art above, thinking damn he must of spent ages doing that, actually it's quick and simple. Just type in the word you want here and it does it for you.

Sunday, August 07, 2005

Why cats are cool


A statement: It is my belief, not as a pet fanatic or a cat lover but as a petless 3rd party observer, that cats are the coolest animals to have ever walked the earth. And I hereby challenge anyone to proove me wrong. If you dare take up the challenge then I expect at least one good reason against cool-cats, and several good reasons in favour of the challenging animal. Here are some of my reasons to bolster my statement:

  • The ability to jump higher than one's imagination.
  • The long drawn-out flexing of the spine after a nap.
  • Acute attention to personal hygiene.
  • Purring, the feline equivalent to the Buddhist mantra.
  • To survive falls from high places (cf Wampi for proof)
  • Owning land at the brush of a whisker.
  • To love all human laps regardless of gender, race and sexuality.
  • Eyes that glow in the dark.
  • Sleep, sleep and never grow tired of sleep.

blogs & verbosity

Thinking back to an old school essay, year 1 in high school, when I encountered for the first time the word 'verbose'. There it sat in fat red ink, occupying all of its allocated territory in the margin and even overlapping my writing. My first reaction was candid delight. To read someone else's thoughts, and serious thoughts no less, on intellectual property that is finally your own, not the former amalgam of parents, teachers and friends' minds that was all too common in junior high and before, was both a daunting and exciting experience. My classmated had of course all received their graded essays and there was a buzz about the classroom with whispers firing off this way and that, demanding to know scores and averages. Fortunately it did not last long since the bell rang and swept the frenzy aside. The only way to fully savour the experience of somebody else's comments about your work is to be alone and silent. So there I sat in the library scanning the margins, deciphering the squiggles, working through the lines and crosses until 'verbose' came into sight. "Verbose?" I said to myself, "what does that mean?" At that point there was a 50/50 chance of it being an elogy about my person, becacsue let's face it, in high school anything said about what you do is a direct comment on your person. Distance, if at all, creeps in later in life. So there was only one judge who could pronounce a proper verdict on the 'verbose trial' and that was The Pocket Oxford Dictionary. Delight ended on page 1433 of the POD with the following entry: "verbose. adjective using or expressed in more words than are needed." A profound blow to my ego indeed.

Alas, those high school days are long gone, drifting along the long river, under the proverbial bridge, amongst everyone elses' collective flotsam. However the issue of verbosity is still firmly rooted in the present, and with the advent of blogging perhaps it has never been more relative, this particular entry in omnitude being a prime example. I have read thoudsands of snippets on blogs that I knew absoltely nothing about and frankly didn't want to know anything about because the writing was as verbose and mundane as the daily routine I carry out every morning: get up, pee, put kettle on, make toast, check email, eat toast, drink tea, poo, wash, dress and leave. Furthermore, I think I must have read the words 'ramblings' and 'blatherings' well over a hundred times by now...all this leads me to the conlusion that there is a great deal of verbosity going on in blogging. So much so that blogging may well be taught some day, in the classroom of our children's children, as one of mankind's most monumental exercises in verbosity.

Now comes the mini-bomb, so to speak. All of the above presupposes that verbosity is a bad thing, that everything written down should be clear and concise. This tendancy for reducing things to their clearest form extends to other areas of life too, trimming lawns and hedges is one example that comes to mind, urban planning is another. But when you go out, wherever you are, stop and look for a second at what's happening around you: sheer chaos. Chaos seems to have worked for the world until the first human civilization came about, why can't it still work now? Ah we're back at binary choices again, binary fascism, and i detest it with the most bitter scorn. Verbose or not verbose is your choice, I'll let you be the judge of the path I have taken.

Thursday, August 04, 2005

A propos de la mort

We misunderstand death, culturally we have misconstrued its value.

Many of us hold death as the sum of all human fears and because of that we condemn killing as the most horrendous human act possible, arguably the most horrendous cultural act possible. But what if killing were like death, a natural phenomenon? I fear death as much as the next person, but I fear it while fearing life too. Like life, death has an ecstasy and an aesthetic quality that I can draw inspiration from and find solace in. Though it is clear that death remains unknown to the living, I speculate that all the elements of death are already known in life and that many of us will have already experienced them before we die, what is lacking is a narrative to join those fragments together, a roadmap of sorts, like the current narrative we apply to life: I am born then I die. And even if there is no narrative in death, and I sincerely hope there isn't, I will still enjoy death as I have been able to enjoy life thus far.

Tuesday, August 02, 2005

Art in the grass?


When out and about on my trusty 2 wheeler, heading along a quiet road, I suddenly saw this lady in the grass. To say 'suddenly' is an exaggeration actually, what really happened was that I saw a man pick something up way ahead in the distance. He'd dropped the object and moved along by the time I reached his spot, he'd left it there in the grass, as though his intention was for others to persuse it too. Anyway the whole thing felt sudden to me. The picture itself, as you can see (click to enlarge photo btw) is very mundane soft porn showing a large breasted Japanese woman standing in the doorway of some 'exoctic' location. As with most Japanese 'AV girls'(AV=adult video) their 'managers' kindly take them on trips to places like Bali, Saipan or Hawaii where the girls spend half the time shooting the porn sets and the other half indulging in the main reason behind doing porn in the first place: shopping. British playwright, Mark Ravenhill made a smiliar phenomenon the title of a now quasi-legendary play: "Shopping & Fucking". If you're wondering how I know what these AV girls do in their daily lives by the way, actually I don't, it's pure speculation and I am probably very wrong but I'm not a journalist and I'm not concerned with 'the truth', so I'll let you be the judge of that.

So there lay the torn picture of a Japanese lady, a modern-day geisha of sorts, bathing in the sun, lounging on a grassy bank by a quiet road only to be disturbed by a passing 'oyaji' (old man with connotation of having pervert tendancies). For the 30 seconds or so that he looked at the image did it turn him on or was it painful? Was he plunged back 40 years to the time he too had had his chances of courting some young lady? I'll never know. Then I came along and looked at the picture and it brought nothing but mild monotony to mind. Don't get me wrong I still have lots of desire left in me, but perhaps when it comes to porn I have reached saturation...As a boy, I made furtive glances at the top shelves in paper shops as a boy, lured in by the glossy covers and the oiled-up women posing in odd positions. I went out on walks in the park sometimes hoping to find a fragment of erotica to stir my new-found teenage lust. Then later into my teens and beyone I have browsed porn on the Internet like everyone else, always with that great expectation of finding the 'one' picture that will take my erogeneous mind straight to heaven...still searching for that one (i'll post it here if ever I find it though).

By taking a photo of this found object was I immortalizing it? Elevating it to the realm of art? Or was it art already, even before I arrived at the scene? How many other passers-by had stopped to look at the image before me? Becasue isn't that what makes art art? The gaze. The gaze of the spectator? It used to be the gaze, the gallery space and high society that made art art. Well high society's reign on the nomination of art is long gone and in the last half a century or so artspace has been blown out of the gallery into the 'anywhere' of the world. This grassy bank by the side of a quiet road somehwere in Tokyo, was clearly anywhere, so maybe this was art. An urban installation, unwittingly constructed by the person who ripped out this modern-day geisha of sorts from the book of geishas and left it lying in the grass. In either the case the debate=open...

Sunday, July 31, 2005

Tale told by a friend in London

Dark skin, dark hair, brown eyes, black suit, blue tie, white shirt; a man, whose roots most likely came from the sacred sub-continent that has been such an incredible source of culture and knowldege in this world for longer than we'd care to imagine, steps onto the train. It's the 8:05 bound for Elephant & Castle. Prior to his entrance the usual dreary mixture of half-asleep commuters, agonizing over large cups of coffee, hiding behind broadsheets or trying hard to get those extra 15 minutes of shut-eye to ease the all-too-long day at the office, were doing what they usually do. The man enters at Queenspark. Like the match-point at a Wimbledon final the heads swerve in his direction and with Greek-choral timing scrutinize his every move as though the devil himself had appeared. The man, quite obviously taken aback by this austere greeting, moved as close to the alcove by the doors as possible in a feeble attempt to evade the blatant persecution. His movements were monitored all the way to his destination at Waterloo, and when he reached his office that day, I can only think that he must of felt low, hurt and unfairly condmened. The moral of this story? As always, it pays to be white in this sick world.

The sea of leaves


This is the 'infamous' forest close to Mt Fuji in the Fuji five lakes district covering a wide area of both the Shizuoka and Yamanashi prefectures. Its arboreal constitution is mainly of cedar, oak and Japanese hemlock. It is a dense and largely untouched forest region making for very hardious trekking. It is 'infamous' in the sense that it is nowadays (since the publishing of a popular novel depicting a romantic love suicide in the 1960's) associated with suicide. The local community police and fire brigade along with public associations and volunteers ogranize an annual 'sweep' of the forest, meaning that they form a human chain and comb the rugged, hostile terrain for remnants of the dead. It is also an occasion at which shinto priests perform an exorcism of the forest, driving out the evil spirits that are said to call the vulnerable to the forest. Legend has it that once you leave the lights and roads of civilization behind and penetrate deep enough into the forest there is little chance that you will return - lost forever in the sea of leaves.(photo by Ohyama Yukio all rights reserved.)

Saturday, July 30, 2005

Doing your hobby


I have been in Japan for nearly 4 years and arguably I've come to know daily Japanese life fairly well. Last weekend, I was cycling along a road on my way to watch boat racing on a nearby river when I happened across the man in this picture. I pulled over and watched him for a minute before riding by and snapping the picture. Besides the fact that the guy had the musculature of Bruce Lee, that he was wearing a headband reminiscent of Karate Kid and that he had been sustaining this gymnastic feat for seemingly quite some time, besides all that it brought to mind the thought that whatever your hobby is in Japan, no, I should say no matter how extravagant your hobby is, so long as you are devoted to it and display that devotion openly and proudly then it is quite acceptable to pursue such extravagance in public space without anyone batting an eyelid. What I would like to know, becasue here I have encountered personal doubt on the matter, but what I'd like to know is whether anyone reading this has had the same thought about hobbies in other countries. If so then feel free to use the comment link to write about your stories. Perhaps you even practice an extravagant hobby yourself? In any case I would love to hear about them.

If I were a fish


Have you ever wondered whether you will become a fish after you die? I do, in fact I confess that I often do...
As somebody else already said, we know nothing about death except that the dead lie rigid and motionless, cold and pale. Only the dead know of the experience of death. All we see in a dying person are the last signs of life as we know it. But that doesn't mean that I cannot speculate, hypothesize, fantasize and write about my time after death. I say 'time' though I'm not entirely sure I want to belong to a world run by time after I die...forgive me, i digress. So what if I were a fish? Well then I'd want to be the kind of fish that swims in space, navigating by the stars, floating towards bubbling suns that keep me warm and, by the clarity of their radiant light, allow me to see the outer reaches of the galaxies, the limits of my territory. No, I don't think i'd want anything to do with the cold, dark oceans on Earth. Of course I'd have to devise a very deft method of adaptation to the black soup around me. I would need to grow galactic gills for one, they'd stop me from choking to death, another death, after which I might become a squid. I'd have to learn to avoid the inevitable predators too, becasue yes, even in the placid void of space there are predators who would give a great deal to snap up a humble floating fish. And then there's the problem of what I would do. Would floating from place to place suffice? Would feeling the complete weightlessness of being nothing within nothing be liberating? Yes, I can see already that there are many parameters to take into conisderation, life as a fish after death is no laughing matter, no simple venture...mmm...what if I were a bird?

Friday, July 29, 2005

Manga


When you think 'Manga', you think Japan. Indeed, I see spent manga everywhere in my Japan. From fluffy animal manga to hard-core panty-ripping alien penetration manga, from children's bookshops to convenience store shelves, manga play a decisive role in Japanese popular culture. But where do they all go after they've been read? Well, there are the obvious places: the luggage racks in underground trains; the waste paper bins on the platforms; the motorway roadsides where severed pages become one with city detritus; the communal waste-disposal areas where you might see towers of spent manga bound together with kitchen string, waiting patiently for the next rubbish collection. But there are also the less obvious places, the kind of spots you wouldn't usually associate with manga: river beds at low tide; the small plastic pouch behind the taxi driver's headrest; half a page hanging from a washing line; on a seat in the inner chamber of a buddhist temple; soaking in a rice field amongst the summer harvest; and there are more, many more if you're willing to open your eyes and look. So what is it about manga anyway? What's all the hype about? And why bother reading printed matter now that we have ultra-portable electronic devices at our recreational disposal? Perhaps it's somethign about the rough grain of recycled paper, or the blank smell of factory ink, perhaps you might agree that its worth paying tribute to all that time spent by drawers and script writers, cigarettes smoked, nights spent in small rooms to deliver the next big hit. But beyond all that is the powerful means of escape that manga offer to their readers. And although we are already 2 or 3 generations into the screen age, there is still an unbreakable transformation that occurs somewhere between the eyes viewing the print on a page and the brain passing that image on to the imagination and from thereon out the sky's the limit.

Thursday, June 30, 2005

Looking at the world through a window


How distorted is our view of the world? I mean our immediate view, the naked eye to the live subject. Don't we spend most of the time looking at the world around us through windows? Windows in the bedroom, the office, the car, the train, the reading glasses, the camera glass etc etc. "Ah, but my windows are clean" you might say, but even the cleanest of glass detracts some measure of clarity and detail from what the eye is capable of seeing when it comes one to one with its subject. What about the eye itself? Would it be so extraneous to consider the eye as its own window? After all, ophthalmologists refer to the glazed section between the cornea and the fovea as the 'lens' and that lens comes between the subject around us and the optic nerves that carry the visual data to our brains where the ultimate image is stored. So is our view of the world doubly distorted? How about triply distorted? It's possible isn't it? With everything that revloves in our minds, things we've heard on the tv, voices around us, thoughts and ideas, books we've read, teachings of others and so on, all help to form another layer of distortion over our view of the world. So as I sit here at my computer and turn to the window on my left, gazing out into the world, I wonder, what am I actually looking at?

Wednesday, June 29, 2005

Welcome to omnitude


welcome to omnitude or the interconnectedness of most things - a blog by Andrew Eglinton. (Photo by Martin R.W.)