Kill Your TV

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!

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.

I have moved my blog to a new location: www.writerspace.net

This is a candid and somewhat awkward poem (in hindsight) I wrote while I was still living in Japan, the Japanese translation is largely by me though with a little help from someone special. I added the furigana for ease of reading. [click the post title to see the image]

I have listened to a few of the Guardian-hosted Ricky Gervais Show podcasts, and I must admit that I found the first two or three to be quite funny, though sometimes I think I laughed more at Ricky’s own raucous laughter than at the jokes themselves.

After the first couple of rounds the formula for the show began to emerge and it stayed more or less the same throughout: a ‘hate’ triangle in which Steve Merchant and Ricky Gervais double up against Karl Pilkington. The whole thing is supposedly done tongue-in-cheek style and thus fits the hallmark of ‘good’ British comedy, but whilst listening to the 12th final installment of the show I realised that beyond all the tomfoolery and wot-not, parts of the ‘real’ Ricky Gervais had begun to transpire and revealed a bitter and angry man, as was expressed in the bout of swearing and subsequent silence during the broadcast. As usual Karl bore the brunt of Ricky’s onslaught and as usual it washed over him like water on a beach.

Though it was announced as the last installment in the series, they are actually going to continue recording but it will no longer be free of charge. Needless to say, I will not be taking part in financing Ricky’s journey for rage for power and attention.

I find it curious that while demand after demand from WP.com users asking for ads and customization on their blogs are being turned down, Mr ‘Scobleizer’, gatekeeper of great uncle Bill, is allowed free reign with Amazon ads promoting his own book and a customized blog. This is obviously nit-picking, a sport that I rarely go in for, but this time I think there is some cause for concern, especially when thinking in terms of the ramifications of the Microsoft Empire, which I would imagine to be part of the reason behind the privileges he seems to have been given here. Of course I could be wrong, so please what’s the deal? Have I missed something somewhere?

Confucius (551-479 BCE) said…

How can I understand death when I do not understand life?

And I’m still wondering how can I understand life or death when I do not understand ‘understand’?

Biometric ID cards, a 31 billion pound initiative in the name of stopping terrorism, now that has got to be the biggest joke since Thatcher unleashed poll tax on this puny island. Setting up ’steel borders’ is impossible without a physical wall, the US-Mexico case makes this clear. Even when boundaries are ’solidified’ there are still ways and means for trafficking, sabotage and infiltration. Quite frankly I find British political ethics to be more and more sinister as the days go by. As usual, what is most frightening is that ultimately whatever the government chooses to do will be law. Take the recent example of the ban on smoking, where was the referendum on that? Smoking is the habit of 1 in 4 Britons, that is an enormous portion of the population, yet the decision was made from above. The ideals of democracy in this age of the war on terror, or should I say ‘the Long War’ to keep up with the parlance of our times, look like the concotion of a madman’s dream. What can we do? Does this mean ‘plan b’?

Plan b: buy a plot of land in one of the most remote places on earth and set up a self-sufficient farm, cut off all ties with the ‘civilized’ world and live according to the seasons again? Oh but I’m forgetting something, global warming and the deterioration of the planet, noone escapes that. Ok well I give in, I’ll just have to be a good abiding citizen and hold my hands out in line for the shackles…Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation may have been a noble act at the time but little did he know that while one set of shackles was slowly being lifted another set was forming, one that is immune to race and gender.

Total Information Awareness (TIA) was (or covertly still is) a US department of defence-funded project, led by John Poindexter, appointed to the job in 2002, whose main goal was/is the collection and centralisation in a large database of information on the US people after 9/11. On the left here is the original logo used on the IAO website, but after it came under heavy criticism for its Orwellian/Masonic symbolism it was quietly removed and thereafter the names and bios of the people involved on the project were also removed. I was wondering what has become of this initiative, whether it has permutated into something similar with a different name. If anyone has any info, i’d appreciate it if you left links in the comments.

[Edit] Perhaps the British bought the idea off the Americans and used it to develop the biometric ID card system…Science is power.

Is freedom of speech as important as freedom of image? Prince Harry was made to say ’sorry’ for his media cameo appearance wearing a replica Wehrmacht suit and now Omar Khayam, a British muslim, grovels on tv for his rash antics in sporting mock suicide bomber attire at an anti-Danish cartoon demonstration in London. Both iconic uniforms are represent ative of western-condemned militancy but clearly the latter rings closer to home. We are the generation who will have consumed the ‘war on terror’, whereas our grand fathers and great grandfathers were the generations who fought in wars of terror.

Clarity comes incongruously,

at moments,

when the world is crippled

but the body is beginning

to mend. Clarity

comes with fire when freedom

has handed over its last body

to the flames,

and the world is getting drunk.

These are some old pictures that I dug out and put into flash galleries. The loading time in the galleries may not be lightning fast but if you use broadband it shouldn’t be a problem. Check them out:

NYC

Montreal

Calamari Killer Jane lived a strangely satisfying life on the little island of Ibiza. She used to say that she was known by islanders and holiday-makers alike for all the wrong reasons, and that if God would be kind enough to grant her another chance she would make a point of changing her ways. She stands now at the gates of heaven and we join her live as the head gatekeeper gets the trial under way.

Gatekeeper: Jane Calamariana you stand before us at the altar of God, do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth so help you God?

Jane: I do.

Gatekeeper: First of all, let us state the charges held against you.

(He clears his throat.)

• Cutting off the head of a passing cat and feeding it in a burger bun to a homeless man on the sea front.

• Guzzling a gallon of diesel fuel then setting light to your posterior in an attempt to prove that Newton’s law of gravity was a mistake.

• Selling two week-old squid rings to a British couple on their honeymoon, and assuring them that the bad smell is part and parcel of all delicacies.
• Famously walking naked down the beach with a harpoon in one hand, declaiming to all and sundry that there was absolutely no cause for concern because you were going to take complete control over the deadly shark that you had just sighted ten metres out to sea, which in fact turned out to be a man bathing in a grey sun hat.
• Secretly sticking pins in your restaurant seats, shortly after opening a pharmaceutical establishment next door, where you installed a large sign that read “first aid”.

[to be continued...]

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 formed of cedar, oak and Japanese hemlock trees. It is a dense and mostly untouched forest region making for very inhospitable 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 volunteer organisations do an annual ’sweep’ of the forest, a human chain that comb sthe rugged terrain for remnants of the dead. It is also an occasion for local shinto priests to perform exorcisms, driving out the evil spirits that are said to lurk within and beckon the weak of mind into their lair. 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.)

“The audience has been treated as a child even by the best theatres. It has been led to the meaning, as if truth were a lunch. […] In a time when nothing is clear, the inflicting of clarity is a stale arrogance.” –Howard Barker in Arguments for a Theatre