Urban Magic

The Power of Public Copyright

Posted on Wednesday, July 28th, 2010 in Misc., Writing | 3 Comments

Was anyone else really, really frightened when they heard that the BBC was making a 21st century version of Sherlock Holmes?

Was anyone else really, really relieved to discover that actually, it was good?  Oodles of fun, and strangely both respectful and innovative.  Full marks!

Authors, you see, are starting to be dead long enough.  When a writer dies, a clock starts ticking, and 70 years after their death, an alarm bell sounds that proclaims ‘here is their work!  Have it for free and go crazy…’  Thus in the last 12 months the world has gone a bit Sherlock Holmes-tastic as across the globe people wake up to the realisation that not only can they now go treading all over these characters, but they can make them do kung fu too and get away with.  Thankfully, in the case of Holmes it’s currently been a mixture of huge fun and surprisingly reverent… in a strange sticking-to-the-spirit-if-n0t-the-plot kinda way… although needless to say no movie will ever exceed Basil the Great Mouse Detective for sheer adventurous/detecting kaplunk.  (Not a real word.  But a good one.)  But hang on in there and soon other estates will start coming up too as authors start being dead long enough… D.H. Lawrence (be afraid), T.E. Lawrence (also be afraid, but in a better way) and George Orwell (respect) could wake up in the next few years to discover that their amorous characters are conducting epic love affairs against the background of world war one in the Arabian Peninsula while totalitarian powers chase them with rats through an underbelly of socialist dissent…

Let’s just hope that Steven Moffat is there to catch them when that moment comes…

Henry IV (Pt.1!)

Posted on Sunday, July 25th, 2010 in Misc. | No Comments

Oh my god I love this play.

Henry IV was, according to 1066 And All That (the book I never quite had the guts to reference in my historiography essays…) a Bad King who wisely resigned half way through his reign in favour of Henry IV Pt.2.  There is my one and only medieval history joke out of the way.  Now read on.

Now, so far, I seem to have loved every single production of Henry IV that I’ve seen.  This means one of three things:

1.  I’ve got very, very lucky.

2.  I’m easily pleased.

3.  The plays are just that damn good.

Pick whichever one seems most likely…

… and I am thrilled to report that the production (so far of only pt 1) that I saw at the Globe on the South Bank fits perfectly into my catalog of plays-what-I-have-loved.  The Globe is in many ways a hard taskmaster, if only because by Act 5 your knees and lower back are generally in so much distress from standing that if what’s happening on stage isn’t of the highest bloody order then your mind is just not going to get off your own physical distress enough to care.  (If it happens to rain as well, then you’re seriously screwed.)  Therefore!  All praise to this season’s production of Henry IV in that by Act 5, as various kings/princes/wannabes were bashing away at each other with swords and various soldiers/drunkards/dukes/knights were dying/feigning death all over the place, I was still hooked.  For obvious reasons, the Globe just doesn’t do theatre like other companies, and at the point where Hal was high-fiving the audience anyone left hoping for a little sonorous intoning of sacred texts is probably going to have to leave.  It’s a play about oodles of stuff, but mostly about Falstaff and Hal, the fat knight and the heir apparent, and in the case of this production they were absolutely brilliant.  When you can go from laughing so much it hurts to feeling a shudder down your spine at the promise of things yet to come, then you know there’s something excellent happening on stage.

Go spend five pounds.

Go see!

Why History?

Posted on Wednesday, July 7th, 2010 in Misc. | 1 Comment

So, I got asked a few days ago – and I get this now and then – how I ended up going from studying history, to doing technical theatre, via writing fantasy books.  And I give a variation on the same basic answer – history rocks!

First up, the history-technical theatre link.  Okay, simply put, I ended up running a lot of technical stuff for the student societies at LSE for two basic reasons.  1.  I really liked lights.  (And still do, who’d have guessed?)  2.  I was the only person in the student union who knew the secret of accessing the dimmer room.  A secret which can only be passed down from technical munchkin to technical munchkin, and which, for reasons of honour and legality, I will not herein repeat.  Sorry.  Anyway, at the end of three years of doing that, I kinda figured, ‘hey, I’ve spent three years doing lighting with a bit of history on the side… maybe I should look at doing this a little more seriously?’ and here I am now.

As for history-writing… let’s not beat about the bush, history is the greatest story ever told.  I’ve said many times that I have a thing for the Shakespeare Dude – I particularly have a thing for his history plays.  Give me kings killing queens and visa versa!  Give me battles and the stake being the safety of the realm, give me adventure and sword fights and questions of politics and honour and betrayals!  History is full of the most wonderful, amazing, implausible, incredible stories!  And not just that… it’s full of the same story told a thousand different ways by a thousand different people, each one pushing an agenda.  It’s full of little bits of human tragedy and great sweeping cataclysmic events, sometimes at the same time.  Take Chernobyl – I was born the day after Chernobyl happened, so have a lot of time for the story.  The firemen who were sent to put out the fires were given a shovel full of sand – and we’re talking nuclear fuel burning here – a shovel full of sand and told that they had 4 seconds to get their sand onto the flames.  More than 4 seconds and they’d have received so much exposure to radiation that they’d die, and these firemen in the middle of a nuclear blaze in the middle of a collapsing empire that had ruled half the world for 45 years with its bonkers ideology – they went out and threw on their shovel fulls of sand.

On collapsing empires – only in history can you sit back and watch the slow crumpling of an empire, the sickly march of decline that at some point, and boy there will be arguments about when, becomes irreversible.  I love collapsing empires (not a phrase I say every day) – the Byzantines, the Romans, the Ottomans, the British, the Soviets – I also have a big fondness for political and military history, for stories of battles that were won or lost because of the wrong kind of rain or because someone drunk too much ale the night before or because – as in the best dramatic traditions – the cavalry really did turn up at the last minute.  Read about the second siege of Vienna – one of the most dramatic sieges ever.  I mean, you’ve heard of an 11th hour intervention… this was more like a 5 minute job…

One of the best things about history is the bits we chose to tell ourselves.  Take the Spanish Armada.  As I was taught it in school, it was a tale of plucky English courage prevailing against lumbering Spanish arrogance.  Our great naval heroes harried and pestered those ignorant Spanish tyrants and finally scattered their fleet with brilliant fire ships, stroke of genius, saving us all and Good Queen Bess hurrah!  And oh yes, the weather may have helped.  No one really mentions the part of the story where Francis Drake managed to misplace the entire Armada… or discusses the nature of piracy vs. privateering in Spanish waters or the thorny issue of shallow waters and the Dutch fleet… absolutely no one mentions the 1589 English Armada, Gloriana Regina’s particularly disastrous attempt to capitalise on the Spanish defeat by sending her own ships to burn what was left with theirs.  (An episode best summarised up by the incident where the women of Coruna – the women, let’s just note – drove the English back to their ships with domestic tools.)

So yes.

I love history.  I loved studying it, I loved reading about it and arguing about it.  For the sake of posterity I should probably also add that I especially loved my dissertation supervisor, whose lectures in the first year of my study on piracy in the Mediterranean and the foreign policy of Suleyman the Magnificent single-handedly converted me to the wonders of early modern history.  I wouldn’t have traded those three years for anything.

In Praise of… Dr Who

Posted on Wednesday, June 30th, 2010 in Misc. | 3 Comments

So, as anyone who’s been muddling along with this blog for a while will know, I love Dr Who.  And it’s taken me an age to admit it, because, let’s face it, there was a very long while when loving Dr Who was sorta like saying that you kept a comic book about farting hidden inside your copy of War and Peace.  I mean, it was tragic, it was sad, it was, all things considered, really nerdy without any hint of redemption to love Dr Who, particularly if you happened to be a woman born after 1980 (which I am).  And then came along Russell T. Davis and suddenly I found myself in the same room as my Dad watching plastic monsters rampaging through London and, for reasons I can’t quite put my finger on, I wasn’t totally ashamed!  And the more I watched, the more the sneaky suspicion dawned on me that actually, maybe Dr Who isn’t total rubbish and you know what, there are other people watching too…

By the time David Tennant took over as the Doctor, I’d discovered a whole corps of people at LSE who were quietly addicted.  We were, admittedly, a group of people at the technical theatre crew/Dr Who lovers/Cluedo playing end of student society, but, and this is the bizarre thing, we weren’t ashamed of it… I mean, if nothing else, let the new series of Dr Who go down in history as making it practically acceptable, maybe, and this is a big maybe, but maybe even kinda cool to be a nerdy science fiction/techno-geek… which is a blessed relief to me, because, really, I was never really going to shape up to be anything else.

I have no quiver of cultural shame when people say ‘it’s a kid’s program’.  Sure, it is, but it’s a kids program with jokes for adults, and huge ideas, and witty scripts, and great big rollicking story lines and, frankly, a lot more craft in its big toe than the average 9 p.m. weekday fare has in a whole fist of themes.  I mean, at its most basic level, the setup of Dr Who allows you to do pretty much anything.  Any place, any time, any situation, any species, any state of mind – anything.  I’ve been meaning to write this blog entry for a while, but it was the fact that last weekend the plot of Dr Who included – and please avert your eyes if you haven’t seen this already – the entire universe going phut and then some – that really kinda nudged me into thinking that the time had come to mentioned how much I enjoyed this series.  You gotta love the combination of tragically geeky and utterly cool, of ridiculously domestic and world-shatteringly big.  Your average episode of Dr Who jumps in with forty something minutes of space to play with and an idea to dabble in and just charges.  It’s funny, hugely entertaining, (huge in general) and I love it.  More, please!

(And if anyone finds themselves reading this the day after I wake up to discover that any of my works, as either Kate Griffin or Catherine Webb have soared to huge international success… then yes please, do hire me as a writer.  I mean, there’s being cool… and then sometimes there’s just plain, unashamed, unabashed being a nerd…)

Midsummer Nights Dream Pt.2

Posted on Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010 in Misc. | 5 Comments

So, remember how a few months ago I lit a production of Midsummer Nights Dream?  I got some photos now… full credit to Ian Latimer for taking them!

I feel I should mention our tech crew... as a lampie, it's after all my duty to do so! Thus, meet Louis, ASM, designer and to his surprise, sound op.

And meet our photographer, Ian, also an ASM and designer.

And somewhere in the shadows here, you'll find myself and my fellow LX nerd, Sam. Regrettably, I have no photos of our Production Manager, Pele, or our DSM, Sinead, for the simple reason that techies are just not the stars of the show...

Election 2010

Posted on Friday, April 30th, 2010 in Misc. | 4 Comments

So, I’m not what you’d call big on politics.  I mean, I care, and get very pissed off about the whole business, but I’m not what you’d call a believer.  I’m a wishy-washy liberal, which by definition means someone who is prepared to sit down and consider the other guy’s point of view.  (This naturally makes liberalism a rather difficult doctrine to sell, since when asked to say something charismatic and powerful about your rival’s political stance the best you can usually come up with is ‘well, that’s a very interesting view, would you care to have a rational and reasonable discussion about its implications sometime and perhaps provide me with your evidence and references for the same?’  Unlike, say, a less liberal political doctrine in which you can absolutely say ‘no, you’re wrong and I’m right hah!’ and thus if nothing else achieve a certain punchiness in presentation.)  I guess if I believe anything at all it is that wealth does not equal entitlement, that poverty does not equal failure, that nuclear missiles started off a bad idea and haven’t changed much, that continual setting of educational targets does not create learning, that the NHS is a Good Thing, that Britishness is not a fixed absolute that should be imposed upon society, (and even if it were, it is again not another Good Thing) and of course, that power does not equal aptitude.  (Witness the MP’s expenses scandal, sigh.)  And of course, like a good sometime-history student, I believe that all ideals are tempered by viability – thus the sacred protest chant – ‘What Do We Want?’  ‘Reasonably Agreeable and Mutually Beneficial Change For The Overall Good!’  ‘When Do We Want It?’  ‘Within a Practicable Timeframe, Please!’

All of which largely leaves me without a party to support in the coming general election.  I mean, my instinct is to vote Green, simply because when all other issues are stripped down, the continual survival of the planet really kinda tops them all.  But in the first past the post system, I do find myself playing an amateur’s strategic voting game.  I live in a marginal constituency, and the Greens don’t even seem to be trying to win here.  What good are my ethics if they have no political consequence?  (I ask myself.)  I won’t beat about the bush – I find the idea of a Conservative government rather horrifying, as it seems that they either have no ideas, or their ideas are founded on a doctrine of get power first, get a plan last.  Douglas Adams had it right when he suggested that those who wanted power should absolutely be the very very last people to get it.  That said, Labour’s main intention seems to be the retention of power, and again, past that there doesn’t seem to be a plan, although I can at least sympathize with some of their basic principals, even if the past however many years seems to have twisted and corrupted the core ethics to squat.  As for the Lib Dems… I couldn’t even recognize Clegg until two weeks ago and I still don’t know what they stand for.  They have some sympathy from me in that they haven’t done anything that seems absolutely inane these last few years – their MPs were reasonably not-too-corrupt-overall compared to some of the obscene corruptions that have emerged from 2009, and they were opposed to the Iraq War which was quite clearly another obscenity that shall go down in the history books as one of the most politically stupid and morally reprehensible acts of the British government in the last 50 years.  Then again, they were a 3rd party in a parliament of two parties united on the war and thus had very little to lose by opposing the war, not least when 2 million protesters were marching through the streets of London on this very theme – quite what they’d do in government when idealism met practicality who knows?  Perhaps it is just an innate truth that power always corrupts, that the brightest of idealists when they decide to become MPs will soon find themselves so lost in the combat of politics that ethics gives way to survivor’s instinct.  Democracy, as Winston Churchill put it – the least bad form of government.

It is also possible that I am basing my decision on seriously iffy information.  The newspapers are hardly squeaky clean in their election reports – some are so blatantly pro one party or another that there’s no point even pretending that journalistic neutrality exists.  When did we reach a point where a newspaper could ‘declare’ itself for one party or another?  And the BBC, my usual source of all knowledge, is in such a hurry to deliver information that often the depth can be hard to find.  It makes a murky contest even murkier, not fully knowing what information to trust.

Some things I can soundly declare myself to be opposed to.  The British National Party causes me nothing but fear and offense; fear because they seem to be getting better at putting a slick mask on what is an inherently offensive operation.  Even if the BNP denies that it’s a racist party, their core doctrine seems still to be the imposition of one culture – a fantastical ‘British culture’ – on everybody.  I don’t recognise this Britishness that the BNP seems to describe; to me, there is nothing more British than having a lamb bhuna while watching American TV in the company of friends from across the world, knowing that tomorrow morning I can get baklava from across the road run by the man who watches epic Hindu drama on a tiny TV screen above the cigarette counter, before getting on a bus in which the common language of conversation is Arabic, Farsi, Russian, Polish, French, German, Cantonese and as well as English.  What is London if not a city of everyone and everything; and is this not something that makes it great?  To impose a culture on anyone or anything automatically implies the absolute superiority of any culture, and that I cannot accept.  And yet to watch the BNP at work… it reminds me of student union debates, in which everyone had to come armed with a battery of statistics and examples and figures plucked from who knew where to prove god knew what, sounding incredibly impressive until you noticed the lack of footnotes.

It would be politically correct of me to say that I respect people who hold other political views from mine.  And certainly, some I can; that which is supported by argument, by reason, that view which can hear the views of others, recognize the broader picture, base its views on evidence and understanding; that political view which has at its heart the needs of others, regardless of race, creed or colour, sure I can respect that – our political aims are the same, even if our methods for achieving all of the above are different.  But I see no sure sign that the BNP fulfils even this ambition, let alone holds methods I can respect.  So I guess that even if I can’t guarantee which party I’ll be voting for in the coming election, I can at least tick a few off the list.

Midsummer Nights Dream

Posted on Monday, April 12th, 2010 in Misc. | 1 Comment

So, I’m sat at RADA on my lunch break, having just finished cutting colour for a production of Midsummer Nights Dream.  It’s a holiday job, in which RADA and the New York University join forces to produce a bit of Shakespeare, and I did the last NYU/RADA production as well… Pericles… and since it was fun and I figured since this is paid, I signed up as Lighting Designer for this production too!

It’s one of Shakespeare’s sexy plays.  I mean, in narrative terms, we’re not talking about profound art.  The plot involves two sets of romantically dubious lovers, a gang of squabbling fairies and a magic potion, which should put any sane person on their guard immediately.  But the language is Shakespeare at his showing-off sexiest.  Frankly, the speeches where the fairies go about describing their environments and events and stuff that has happened is pretty much the Tudor era’s answer to the non-existence of lighting rigs – if you can’t do it with wattage, Mr Shakespeare seems to suggest, then damn well do it with words!

Which, naturally, as a writer I’m entirely cheering for, and as a lighting designer I have mixed feelings about.  I mean, sure, it makes it easier to create an atmosphere is the script is doing it for you, but the language is in its own way so sexy that it just kinda ups the stakes for the lighting designer to try and achieve the same level of magic as the words imply.  From a practical point of view, this often means that Midsummer Nights Dream is not cheap on haze fluid. 

We have yet to have a dress rehearsal… hell, I have yet to get my rig in the air and see if it even works… but it’s a cool play to light and, for that matter, a cool play to read, so, fingers crossed… watch this space…

The 39 Steps

Posted on Thursday, April 1st, 2010 in London, Misc. | 1 Comment

So!  I went to the theatre a few days ago, for the first time in ages.  The ironic thing about learning how to work in theatre, is that you never really have time to go and see the real thing… but anyway…  we found discount tickets to go and see a show in the West End, which is something I haven’t done for a while anyway, and after much negotiation we settled on the 39 Steps at the Criterion Theatre.

I’ve read the 39 Steps… I enjoy it… it’s part of a series of books by John Buchan in which his hero, Richard Hannay, fights conspiracies and unearths deadly, usually German, plots involving military secrets and occasionally illicit uses of hypnosis.  And I promise you, the upper lip has never been stiffer.  Danger and daring-do are the words,  and if the works can be summarized in any way, it’s probably by the sentiment ‘oh jolly gosh, I seem to have been shot’.  Only much, much better than that.

The phrase ‘oh jolly gosh’, while I’m sure it never actually appears in the works of John Buchan, does seem to have been the idea that was seized upon by the powers behind the theatre adaptation of the 39 Steps, with brilliant results.  The play is a rip off of all things Hitchcock, performed by 4 actors in 40 hats and the strategically materialized arm of one ASM, with a set for which the word versatile was really created.  It is honestly hilarious, exciting and basically, at the end of the day, just tonnes and tonnes of fun.  And for £10 a throw, all I can really add to this is… GO!

Measure for Measure

Posted on Thursday, March 18th, 2010 in Misc. | 1 Comment

So, it’s that time again, the end of one of those cycle of weeks in which the washing doesn’t get done and the flat gently declines into squalor and trousers get torn and you find yourself with more LX and gaffer tape stuck to your clothes than you realise you had clothes to stick to and…

… in short… it’s the end of another production week.  As per tradition, I’ve been Production Electrician on a play at RADA – this time, Measure for Measure by Mr Shakespeare the Dude.  And oh my goodness it’s been different from the last show.  The last play I was Prod LX on  – Company, by Stephen Sondheim – was an all singing, all dancing, hoola-hooping spectacular featuring more snazzy equipment in the rig than the retinas can comfortably conceive, as well as a range of American accents, jazz-club atmosphere and recurring themes on the value of knowing lost of people and getting married.  This time round, the set is quite literally made from a scrap yard, and all things are shades of black, white and steel grey, with interval music torn from the operas of Vienna and costumes cut to the early 1900s, complete with spectacles and a collection of spectacular moustaches.  And it’s really, really good.  I mean, obviously, I’m a bit biased, because I did a lot of the cabling for this show and thus have a certain sentimental attachment to it, but honestly, it’s really, really good.  If you knew what the set was made of you wouldn’t believe the things that it can become; the lighting is both dramatic and subtleplaying tricks on the eyes that again, you wouldn’t spot unless you’d been actively involved in rigging it, but which manages to make everything sort of glow and suggests times and feelings without ever screaming ‘this is so’.  The acting is absolutely brilliant – and as a techie it is my job to be automatically sniffy about any acting, but I kid you not, it’s grand – and all things considered, I am dead proud to have been a part of this play.

Measure for Measure is one of Shakespeare’s ‘problem plays’.  It’s not a tragedy because no one snuffs it, and it’s not a comedy because, while in places it’s very funny, there’s not one set of identical twins to be found in it.  But yes, for those of you who are wondering, it does have a nun in it, and a Duke who pretends not to be a duke and a great deal of lusting and a riff about being hanged and a number of rather dubious cases of mistaken identity and a lot of chit chat about prostitution.  I mean, I’ve always been of the ‘come on guys, have a man with a gun come in’ school of narrative craft (as immortalized by Raymond Chandler!) but I gotta say, without any weapons of any kind getting flourished at any point, I was still sat in the front row being gripped through the dress rehearsals.  (Which isn’t bad for a dress rehearsal!)  You can sense intelligence dripping out of every word – my god, but the director is a bit clever!  It’s reached the point now where every time he speaks, my Assistant Lighting Designer grabs me by the arm and tells me to write it down because when he does speak, there’s such a great deal of casual intellect casually being brilliant that you can fairly much guarantee there’ll be something worth writing down as it happens.  I have never yet heard any other man inform his cast that actors must develop photo-tropism (in order to find their light!) or to request a lighting designer to make their cues less bi-phasic.  This is, for that matter, the first show I’ve ever worked on where the production desk, as well as having ridiculous amounts of chocolate on it, has a book on biological morphology lounging around between the toffee wrappers.

All in all… a fantastic experience!

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.