Archive for February, 2010
A Change in the Temperature?
Posted on Wednesday, February 24th, 2010 in London | 9 Comments
Was walking home today, and for the first time in… too long… it was before 5 p.m… and for the first time in too long, the sun was still up. On the way out, the sky a non-descript 10/10 grey with a hint of bruising around the edges, but daylight, not sodium light, was the rule. And for the first time in… memory fails… I could actually hear birds singing. You don’t really associate London with the sounds of birds singing, but at dawn and dusk a surprising collection of sparrows, pigeons, yellow tits and blackbirds turn out for a bit of a chorus, and if you listen, and the traffic is a few streets away, you can hear, perhaps, the first signs of spring coming. And not a moment too soon.
That said… for all that snatches of birdsong heard when the traffic falls briefly silent cannot fail but to be evocative, the kind of feeling that gets evoked when that damn pigeon that’s decided my window sill is a fascinating place to coo in at 6.30 a.m. every damn morning, is probably best not put down in words.
A New English-Chinese Dictionary
Posted on Sunday, February 21st, 2010 in Misc. | 2 Comments
So, I’ve been learning (with abject results) Mandarin, and to help me on my way I’ve been given a Chinese dictionary. It was bought in a second hand book shop and judging by the copyright page (which is all in Chinese) was published in 1979. It is very clearly geared towards Chinese speakers learning English, and huge swathes of it thus remain utterly unintelligable to me. However, browsing through its stained yellowed pages I kept coming across passages that the author of the dictionary had felt would be useful to translate into English for the well-equiped traveller. As well as how to say the actual word in both English and Mandarin, there were extensive musings on how to use the word within other phrases that you could wittily deploy in conversation while on your trip to the West. As a history student, I’ve always been interested in the Cold War, and just quite how the ideologies of capitalism and communism managed to entrench themselves to the point where people on either side were quite prepared to die – in fact, for all of humanity to be wiped out – just to prevent an alternative economic model taking over their homelands. (Or other people’s homelands, as luck would have it.) And as a writer, I’m always fascinated by language in general, particularly how it can be abused to the point where it influences thought, rather than the other way round. With this in mind, I have a few useful phrases for the everyday traveller considering a trip to the decadent West in 1979…
Communism: The ultimate aim of the Communist Party of China is the realisation of communism.
Capitalist: remnant forces; see Imperialism.
Imperialism: is the monopoly stage of capitalism
Industrialization: bring about socialist industrialization.
Industrious: the brave and industrious Chinese people; run the communes in an industrious and economical way.
Intellectual: must integrate themselves with the workers and peasants.
Intelligent: the lowly are most intelligent; the elite are most ignorant.
Lead: Chairman Mao leads us from victory to victory. A local poor peasant led the guerilla fighters through the forest. In grasping revolution and promoting production, this commune lead the county.
Leadership: March forward heroically under the leadership of the Party. Give correct leadership to the struggle.
Nuclear: smash the nuclear monopoly and nuclear blackmail of the two superpowers.
Propagandize: Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought.
Religion: the pursuit of super profit is a religion to the monopolists.
Revisionism: It is revisionism to negate the basic principles of Marxism and to negate its universal truth.
Revolution: revolutions are the locomotives of history. The theory of continuing the revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat.
March 4th pt.2
Posted on Sunday, February 21st, 2010 in Writing | 1 Comment
We be light, we be life, we be fire!
We slither blood blue burning, we sing neon rumbling, we dance heaven!
Come be me and be free.
Me be blue electric angel.
- Anonymous graffiti, Old Street
Londonist
Posted on Saturday, February 20th, 2010 in London | 1 Comment
I’m sure there’s a better way to link to another website from a blog, but with the alarm beeping and supper on the go, now is maybe not the best time to explore it, so I’ll just say…
To all and sundry who live/love London, visit here!
www.londonist.com
I mean it!
Go now!
Pericles – What Happened Next
Posted on Saturday, February 20th, 2010 in Misc. | No Comments
So, did I mention Pericles? (Or Perididdles, as for some reason is has become known in the course of a technical period that I can only really describe as breathless.) That thing I ended up lighting… I blogged about it before, saying ‘this thing is coming’ and now that it’s been and gone I figure, well, I may as well put up the pictures. It was an educational experience… not without its blips, let’s face it. There were many things about the Perididdles experience that will hopefully not go down in history, not even in pictogram form… but there was also lots to be very proud of and with this in mind, I’ll throw up some pictures. There are also plenty of acknowledgments to be (retrospectively but truly) given – to everyone who helped me rig and focus in exchange for nothing more than eternal gratitude and the chance to boogie beneath a 2000W strobe (while it worked); and to the one person who helped me de-rig for only half of the above! To the gentleman who still labours under the belief that the Strand 500 series is greater than the Ion, and who was yet civilized enough to tell me how to apply effects to the same, and the kindly member of the lighting department who tried to knock together a pair of animation wheels out of a set of motors that hadn’t yet seen the dawn of the new millennium… and full credit and thanks go to Fran Reidy, whose photos these are that I’m putting on display!
The Dictionary of Bullshit
Posted on Monday, February 15th, 2010 in Writing | 2 Comments
This post is a shameless plug.
It is a shameless plug for my Dad.
Now… as you may have gathered from previous posts, I come from, heaven help us, a family of writers. We did not, by the way, set out to be a family of writers! Oh no! When I was 7 years old, in fact, my mother took me to one side and made me promise never, ever to be a writer.
‘It’s a ridiculous job. Unreliable, badly paid, you never get out of the house enough… be a doctor instead,’ quoth Mum.
My Mum, whose professional name is Susan Moore for anyone wondering, has pretty much done it all. Publisher, editor, novelist and ghost writer. As a child, I liked the title ‘ghost writer’ the most – it had an aura of mystery about it, the sense that here was my Mum, secretly making the words of others better behind the scenes. I learnt the secret of editing from her at a swimming pool when I was 10 years old. Climbing out of the pool to get a towel, I found my Mum sitting on the side of the pool with a manuscript she’d been hired to edit and a pencil in her hand. As I approached, she frowned at the page and then, with a single decisive stroke, crossed out the entire thing with a triumphant swish of blue pencil on messy page.
Saying this, my Dad has been the victim of some nasty editing… an entire chapter was struck by an over-enthusiastic editor from his biography of Douglas Adams, to much wailing in the house. I’ve generally been very lucky with my editors, although will always cherish the editorial query I once received to a particularly fantastical bit of writing… ‘Are you sure that would happen?’ My Dad started writing after me, to my great delight. A publisher since time began he’s always been the voice of steady commercial advise since I’ve been a kid. When I was about 12 years old, he left publishing and by the time I was 18 he was writing. What personality changes raced over him! As a publisher, my Dad had always told me that authors are difficult, wingy, moaning gits. As a writer he suddenly came to realise that 35 years of experience lied and in fact, authors were under-rated, misunderstood, underpaid and under-regarded lambkins tossed between the merciless hands of evil editors. As Douglas Adam’s publisher, he was in a good position to write the official biography – feel free to flick through the photos, dear reader, to discover exactly what I mean when I say that as an 8 year old I had that haircut known as ‘mother did my fringe’. He later went on to write the Dictionary of Bullshit and is in the process of publishing its updated version in expectation of the great surge of oily manipulation that will be the 2010 general election. I am proud to report that I am the dedicatee of a dictionary of bullshit… as well as an avid contributor.
Anyway, point of all this is… my Dad is my Dad, and this is a shameless plug for his books, as is frankly, a good daughter’s duty as well as a sensible writer’s pleasure…
My favourite definition (reproduced without permission but in the fervant hope that my Dad won’t sue me)…
Growing as a person: This is Good. Growing as something else would not be so good.
Long Time…
Posted on Monday, February 15th, 2010 in Misc., Writing | 2 Comments
So, once again, it’s been an age since I blogged.
Here’s why….
RADA! (Ate my life.) We have been putting on a production of ‘Company’ by Stephen Sondheim which featured among its many lighting features… deep breath… UV cannons, mirrorball, 18 moving lights, 2 robocolours (thank you Royal Opera House), 1 glaciator (thank you National Theatre), 150m of festoon and 300 lightbulbs (thank you Sparks) two hazers, two wireless dimming lamps, twelve practicals and…
… and you know, a set, props, costumes, actors, musicians etc. etc. etc..
It’s been a little bit bonkers. One of those experiences where you work 12 hours a day and then wake at 3 a.m. wondering what happened to supper. Boritos! How I have been dreaming of boritos! Guacamole and grated cheese! In the last weekend after the show went up, I’ve hardly stopped eating; it’s as if my body is attempting to compensate in 24 hours for the abuse of 15 days. In an odd way, I haven’t really had any major, major jobs to do in the last two weeks, just a continual series of small jobs which have added up and added up until all I can dream about is DMX and the chorus line of ‘Side by side’. (One of the camper moments in this otherwise surprisingly un-camp musical. Glowing hula hoops? Oh yes…)
And tomorrow, it all kicks off again, as we go into rehearsal for Measure for Measure where I am, again, you guessed it, Production Electrician. But! Prod LX for one of the coolest lighting designers in the country, on a play by Shakespeare The Dude, which so far promises to be nothing but an adventure from start to finish, so let’s keep those fingers crossed…
In other news, the Midnight Mayor publication date does indeed rush upon us. Currently I’m a little bit concerned that I’ll be in a focus session on the great day itself (which is, in case you’re wondering, advertised on amazon.co.uk as 4th of March) but I herein solemnly swear that upon that day I will at the very least have a take away curry in celebration. Lamb bhuna – is there anything in the world that lamb bhuna cannot make good?
It’s a peculiar thing being both a student and a writer at the moment. At LSE it wasn’t something that really bothered me, since as a student I was in classes maybe 6 hours a week and the rest of the time I was reading, writing, in the theatre or with friends who cared as about as much for my literary exploits as they did for the Battle of Lepanto. But at RADA, being a student is a relentless experience, a continual ritual that next to nothing is permitted to disrupt. A phrase was thrown at me… ‘people who do lights professionally, take it seriously, live lighting’. Well, here I am, taking lighting seriously, but live lighting? I would no sooner live lighting than I would live writing, since both are equally important to me and, let’s face it, only one is paying my electricity bill.
There’s a lot to say about being a student at RADA, none of which I will say now! It has its amazing moments, it has its absolute downers, (as radio 4 would put it… ‘and that’s like life…’) but I think all things considered, no matter how good or bad things are or may be or get, I’m ready to stop being a student now.