fringe benefits

The Edinburgh Fringe is one of my favourite places in the world. Although that statement does come with the caveat that there are a bunch of places in the world I still haven't been, it cannot be denied that the Fringe makes me so excited I do that thing where my hands wave about and my voice goes all high-pitched; let me tell you, the internet, that is MIGHTY EXCITED. I've been every summer for the last four years, either watching or performing, which I suppose makes it my annual holiday destination in much the same way that some people visit the south of France every year or whatever, except that it rains a shit ton more in Edinburgh than on your average holibags location of choice (I got back yesterday morning and some of the things I own are still damp). When I think of the best and the worst theatre and comedy that I've seen in my life, so much of both have been at the Fringe - trapped in tiny hot rooms where the door's too near the stage and there's too much audience on either side of you, thinking, 'can I leave? no, no, I can't possibly, but when will this end'; packed into venues that used to be conference rooms and backs of pubs and myriad other things, crying with laughter; stuffing my face with too much pie. I include the bad as well as the good in my remembrances because in a lot of ways they're just as important. I like that I've seen terrible, terrible things in Edinburgh because I like that it exists as a platform for Anyone Who Wants to Make Theatre to just do it and it's right that inevitably some of those things don't work. If theatre was easy, there'd be no point slogging away at it, would there? It should be hard. It should fail sometimes. That's why it's art.

This year I went to the Fringe for six days, travelling up with my boyfriend on Thursday night, on the overnight coach from London to Edinburgh, which was a little bit rough, because how can it not be, but better than I expected. We arrived at 7.30am and saw shows pretty solidly for two days. Some had been made by our friends, some by people we were fans of and with some of them we had absolutely no idea what to expect; in addition to this, we socialised, had a few drinks, ate pie (how many times can I mention pie in this blog? Let's get a tally going: ii), got flyered a LOT and went on and on about how beautiful Edinburgh is. I have been known to shriek "look at the VISTAS" almost constantly in that city. Look at them though!! After he went home to do Real Life Stuff (i.e. earn money like a grown-up), I stayed on for a few extra days with my friends, who are working at the Pleasance and being put up in student halls. I've been a punter and a performer at the Fringe but I've never been staff, and I've got to say that while it looks awesome in lots of ways it also looks super tough - my friends are flyering for sometimes twelve, thirteen hours a day on the Pleasance's street team and I am amazed they're not dead. Be nice to the flyerers, guys; you've been in the rain for ten minutes between venues, and yes it's shit, but they've been in it all day for the last million days. The older I get, the more I realise the extent to which hungover students are the glue holding the Fringe together.

Anyway, I could go on and on and ON about how great Edinburgh is and how much I love it - you may have guessed this - but that won't get us anywhere and, contrary to appearances, I do actually have stuff to get done. So I'm going rely on the preserve of the blogger, i.e. some arbitrary self-imposed rules, and instead name my Top Five Fringe Shows 2011. Although I've talked about theatre a lot here, I'm actually a massive comedy fan too - I just find the former easier to talk about because I know more about how it's put together and works, whereas I love comedy in the same way I love magic, in total ignorance of how they have managed to do this thing - so I was almost tempted to do three comedy and three theatre. But five is the perfect arbitrary self-imposed number, I'm afraid. So, in no particular order (and entirely subjectively), here are my five favourite shows from this year's Edinburgh Festival:
1) Translunar Paradise, 15.40 at the Pleasance Dome, then touring the UK I think? A beautiful story about love and bereavement told entirely without words, using only mime, live accordion music, masks and movement, and it made me cry lots. There are only two actors (and one accordionist) on stage, playing a couple who have grown old together - the actors use incredibly realistic hand-held masks in the old-age sequences which can easily be removed to show that the line between youth and age is actually not a huge one. It was just stunningly performed and all I can say is that if you have the opportunity to see it, you should take it. Aside from being charming and ridiculously well staged, rehearsed, directed and performed, it is genuinely one of the most moving pieces of theatre I have ever seen.
2) Alex Horne: Seven Years in the Bathroom, 20.20 at the Pleasance Courtyard. Alex Horne has a very likeable manner and I was pretty certain that I would enjoy the show even before it began, because just watching him talk is enjoyable. I've been aware of Horne for a little while; I'd seen We Need Answers, his BBC4 forgotten sports programme and was generally aware of his involvement with the Cowards/Mark Watson ex-Footlights set. But this show far outstripped my expectations - in addition to his engaging persona, Horne's chosen conceit works really well. It is that the average man will live for 79 years and spend 7 of those in the bathroom, and he then breaks down not only the average amount of time spent doing most things (sleeping, eating, driving, whatever) but also divides the hour of his show into the equivalent percentages of time spent doing these things. If that makes sense. So, 5 minutes in the bathroom, however many minutes 'working' or 'dreaming'... He eats a Rustler's burger, gets an audience member to paint his portrait and another to do the housework, a panda talks with his voice - it's really quite something. And the main thing, of course, is that it's very, very, very funny. Also on the night we saw it he accidentally covered two audience members in sauce and I nearly fell off my chair.
3) Swamp Juice, 14.00 at the Underbelly. A very charming, weirdly exhilarating show, ostensibly for kids, but also for wide-eyed grown-up kids like me. Bunk Puppets, the company, had a piece up last year called Sticks and Stones and Broken Bones, which was also very beautiful and even made me do a little cry (this list is making me look like a wussy, but in reality I am extremely tough and manly and in my defence I was quite hungover that day); both are one-man shows performed by Mr. Bunk himself, a semi-mute clown character played by Montreal's Jeff Achtem. In both shows, he brings a bunch of shadow puppets to life; Swamp Juice is more narrative-based than its predecessor and the finale is stunning - first he brings the puppets out into the audience, with various audience members having to hold things up to create the scenery, and then HE MAKES THE SHADOWS GO 3D. I think Swamp Juice is my favourite for that reason (you've never heard a room of so many adults go "ohhh my gooooodddd" with such pure amazed happiness), but Sticks and Stones is returning to the Fringe for a brief run at the Udderbelly towards the end of the month and is also very, very worth watching. In conclusion: I love puppets so so much and Bunk Puppets shows are better than real life.
4) Humphrey Ker is Dymock Watson: Nazi Smasher!, 19.15 at the Pleasance Courtyard. All three members of my favourite sketch troupe The Penny Dreadfuls have gone solo this year, which is sad in some ways (no Penny Dreadfuls show!) and great in others (three hours of Dreadfuls instead of one!), but mostly it is Interesting. I've been a big fan of theirs since 2008 - can't recommend their Brothers Faversham radio show highly enough - and seeing the very different directions all of their shows have gone in is fascinating. Thom Tuck's confessional Straight to DVD show, in which he discusses straight-to-DVD Disney films and heartbreak, and David Reed's Shamblehouse, off-the-wall one-man sketch comedy featuring a moving doughnut acrobatics tale, are both very funny and very much worth watching, as well as being admirably different to what I think of as characterising their previous work. But Ker's show is just so silly, so tightly written, packed with ridiculous accents and a tiny Romanian dog that it was one of the highlights of my Fringe. It's slightly Milliganesque in its pure beautiful silliness and it made me laugh so, so much.
5) The Behemoth, 16.45 at the Pleasance Courtyard. I'd seen John-Luke Roberts and Nadia Kamil do a few bits and pieces at Latitude 2009 and 2010 and couldn't wait to finally see their whole show because they just make me laugh so much; I saw John-Luke Roberts' solo show last year and loved it, but seeing them together is even better. Much like my last recommendation, it's glorious silliness throughout, right from the beginning, which features a truly special rendition of Stand By Me. After we left, my boyfriend was like, 'You know when you can tell from the first minute that you're going to like something...?' In addition to the show being generally hilarious, Roberts and Kamil have a fantastic rapport and make each other laugh a lot on stage, which I LOVE. I adore the transience of comedy, the feeling that the performance you see is special for you as an audience, so when something goes awry or people adlib it is just my favourite thing, and they were great at it. Also (and here's a shallow extra point for you), ALL of Nadia Kamil's outfits are super awesome. Ugh it's hard to talk about comedy, isn't it? Because just saying "it was really funny!!" doesn't really sum up why that is true, but we quoted this show a lot throughout the rest of the Fringe because it is packed with good stuff and I can't wait to see future offerings from them.

Some honourable mentions of things that very nearly made the list go to Death Song by You Need Me theatre company (I've seen and adored everything YNM have done after stumbling across How it Ended in 2008 and definitely not crying everywhere because, as we have discussed, I am So Manly), the brilliant Max and Ivan are Holmes & Watson and high-energy one-man-show Bane. Also I wanted to mention LUDS' Cagebirds, 13.35 at Greenside, which everyone should definitely see, but I felt this blog post had come a little late to do so properly, as it closes tomorrow; nonetheless, it's full of my friends and they're all bloody great in it, so GO if you can.

In conclusion: Edinburgh is great, I love lots of stuff, my body is still trying to process all the pie carbs I put into it (pie tally: iii) and I'm not sure my brain has recovered yet from two overnight coaches and lots of late nights. Bring on the next Fringe please.

a week in the life of the lady lozopus: day seven

ALL DONE. Today marked the end of the last weekend before we all go home for easter, so we decided to celebrate/commiserate with a day of deeply wholesome activities. We baked a pie, went for a meal, played some cards and then ate the pie with custard and felt deeply smug. Victories all round I reckon.

Sunday, 21st March.


17.24; Tom Makes A Very Low-Effort Apple Pie


17.52; Pippa Working Pastry Magic


18.12; An Arm Wrestle To Prove Who Is Stronger


18.54; Serious Apple Production Occurs


19.35; Daina And I Create This Creepy Wee Man Out Of The Remaining Pastry


20.03; ...Dreadful Things Happen To Him


20.11; Our Amazing Fucking Pie


21.00; Lovely Meal Out While We Wait For It To Cool Down

The seventh day of my week in the life business is over, so now I shall go back to posting only every once in a blue moon. Hooray possibly?

a week in the life of the lady lozopus: day six

Today I basically did nothing more exciting than see my housemate's show, because I am super knackered and injured and ever so slightly unwell. SEXY SQUEAKY VOICE yes that's right! Also, the show was really good & I was retardedly proud of said housemate, despite obviously not having been directly involved in any way. Also I tried a Daim Milka today. amazing. It's the simple things in life.

Saturday, 20th March.


14.45; As Of Last Night, Pretty Much All My Flat Shoes Have Fallen Apart


15.05; Spoils Of The Shop


15.28; Solidify, Egg, So I May Consume You


17.13; Attempting To Find The Best Ever Recipe For Apple Pie


18.22; Removed Lenses From My "Up 3D" Glasses To Create Hipster Specs


18.30; They Are Passed Around To Drive Daina Mental (Daina Hates Hipsters)


20.56; Shifty In The Interval


22.57; Depressed About The State Of The Kitchen

a week in the life of the lady lozopus: day five

I HAVE LOST MY VOICE. It's pretty much entirely my own fault but very irritating nonetheless. I shouted very loudly at a very shouty/amazing gig, then shouted over lots of music in some loud bars, then sat up talking until half four even though it was already painful to speak. So, top marks to me essentially! UGH.

Friday, 19th March.


11.00am; Bye Bed I Love You


17.40pm; Getting Ready To Go Out


21.00-ish; Support Act Rips Off T-Shirt Etcetera To Reveal Evel Knievel Jumpsuit


21.05-ish; ...Then Leaps A Member Of The Audience


About 21.30pm; The Stage Is Set


21.50-ish; Dan le Sac Needs A Biscuit Before He Will Sing


22.15-ish; Scroobius Pip Has "A Fucking Side Parting"


04.19am; Too Tired To Find A Glass So I'll Just Drink From This Jug

a week in the life of the lady lozopus: day four

This one is late, i.e. it's now Saturday and all the photos are from Friday, but by the time I got back to my room at half three this morning I was just like ughhhhh sleep please. Ended up seeing a Beatles tribute act in the cavern with flatmate/halls friends, which was mad and surreal and far, far more fun than it had any right to be. oh yes.


9.53; Dan Le Sac vs. Scroobius Pip Ease My 10am Lecture Pain


15.32; Eating Some Lunch, Listening to Ben Goldacre Talk About Rentokil


19.01; Red Onion Puff Pastry Tarts And Roast Potatoes, Victoryyy


21.24; Rehearsing Again, Roisin Looks Coy With A Ladle


23.10; Briefly Home To Dump Stuff & It's Time For Some Pro Plus


00.39; Somehow End Up In The Cavern Watching The Mersey Beatles


01.25; You Know You Twist So Fine


01.52; Pile-On In The Street I Don't Even Know

Off to see Dan le Sac vs. Scroobius Pip tonight. Exciting!

a week in the life of the lady lozopus: day two

I'm back again! Slightly more exciting day today; I had rehearsals, so there are actually pictures from bits of the day after the sun had set. Yeahhh rock and rolllll

Tuesday, 16th March:


9.34; Awake But Not Happy About It


10.42; Blurry, Pre-Tutorial Photo of My Unexciting Haircut (Finally)


11.59; My Shadow & I Are Home For Lunch


14.08; Tea, Cake, Vonnegut


20.38; Time To Rehearse/Alex Puzzled By Absence of Eggs


22.05; Let's Run Part Two Again


22.50; Post-Rehearsals Drinks in Guild

admit that the waters around you have grown.

Well, I hope everybody had a good Valentine's weekend? Slash chinese new year, slash any other holiday I've forgotten, etc. Mine was generally lots of fun, but distinctly odd.

For the first part of it, I went to stay with my best friend, who lives in London, and we had a lovely couple of days of milling about in the capital, which we filled mainly with drinking, comedy and excellent Japanese food. Joy! The always-excellent Karaoke Circus was a particular highlight; I'm never normally a fan of karaoke, but I love every inch of this charming and rambunctious bi-monthly evening, and cannot recommend it enough. Love Will Tear Us Apart (as performed by Robin Ince, with some Smiths lyrics thrown in for good measure partway through, because, as Judge Dan pointed out, Joy Division clearly aren't depressing enough alone) and Two Princes (from Thom Tuck, one third of the Penny Dreadfuls) were perhaps my favourites of the night. Absolutely class.

Got back up to Liverpool in time to be thoroughly puzzled by the state of our kitchen, which took up a lot of my time/energy yesterday. Two of the ten people in our flat are international students from China, and one of them had a gigantic party for new years, which is all very well and good, and we ate dinner at the pub round the corner so we wouldn't have to get in their way trying to cook (the kitchen's our only communal space), which is a whole other story in itself, probably. Still: less cool the next day when nobody cleared anything up, including the vomit on the other corrior's bathroom floor. HMM. A party's a party, but my god, this was something else! There was food everywhere, there were stains over all the worksurfaces, cigarette butts and seeds all over the floor, which itself had been stained black somehow (??), a fish head in a bowl on the windowsill and some very odd smells coming from the bin. So me & two flatmates spent an interesting half-hour or so mopping/sponging/spraying etc, because otherwise we wouldn't have been able to eat in there. An unusual way to spend the afternoon of Valentine's Day, but we're all single anyway so none of us particularly minded, and in the evening I made a jolly good bean & vegetable stew to celebrate.

Valentine's Day's causes a lot of discomfort to a lot of single people, but I'm quite lucky in having several close friends up here who are also, as I said, also single, and we plumped for a terribly wholesome night, not of getting drunk & weepy, but rather of popcorn and Casablanca. It was lovely. Valentine's Day is, if nothing else, a perfect excuse to watch good films with good people.

So that's my incredibly shallow thoughts on the day of love, and now on to this week's piece of writing! I realised today that I have literally never posted anything up here by a female writer - and frankly, what the hell is that about? It just won't do. So have a poem I'm rather in love with by an excellent American writer.

Intensive Care
by Heather McHugh

As if intensity were a virtue we say
good and. Good and drunk. Good and dead.
What plural means is as everything
that multiplying greatens, as if two
were more like ninetynine than one,
or one were more like zero than
like anything. As if
you loved me, you will leave me.

You (are the man who) made
roadmaps to the ovaries
upon his dinner napkin.
I(‘m the woman who) always forgot
where she was— in a state,
in a sentence. Absently stirring
my alphabet soup, I remember
childhood’s clean white calendar
and blueprint of the heart.

As if friends were to be saved
we are friends. We talk to ourselves,
go home at the same time.
As if beds were to be made
not born in, as if love
were just heredity
we know the worst, we fear
the unknown. Today we were bad
and together; tonight
we’ll be good and alone.

The last stanza, and the closing lines in particular, give me chills everytime.

and instructions for dancing.

It's Monday again! Further to last week's post, I wanted to put up some Larkin today; it seemed fitting, because Patten was influenced by him, and also this is my own damn blog and I'll talk about my favourite poets if I want to. Part of me was reluctant to immediately go for it with More Poetry, to be honest, and felt that I should look out something else, but I only really got into it as a form within the last few years and I suppose it's something that I feel I can - as me, now, the way I have become - really...hum. I've tried several times to phrase what I mean and can't seem to manage it. What I'm trying to say is that I think more subjective inferences can come from poetry than most other forms, that I think you put a little of yourself into them just by reading them, and that-- That doesn't really explain it either. I don't know.

Anyway, it's all a moot point because I've left my copy of The Whitsun Weddings in Liverpool: I only own Whitsun and High Windows, and prefer the former (so if anyone has any books of his they want to donate to the cause of Me, do get in touch). Anyway, I didn't want to locate a poem through a combination of my own memory (poor) and The Internets (giant), & thought it better left until I'm back at uni.

I got my predilection for Larkin - and, in fact, the book itself; an eighteenth birthday present - from an ex of mine. We used to talk about literature a lot, although he was far more widely-read and a lot better educated on the subject than I was; I'm embarrassed to think how boring & stupid I must've sounded, looking back. But thinking about him and those conversations, and what I was going to blog about today, made me consider the other very literature-y relationship I have had in my life - although this one isn't a Relationship-with-a-capital-'R', but a friendship.

My friend Celia is one of the cleverest and most interesting people I have ever been priveleged enough to somehow, inexplicably, be liked by and friends with. We've known each other for a little over a year now but only really got close around May 2009, and would send each other these long, rambling messages and emails (to complement our long, rambling, every-Sunday-like-clockwork telephone conversations), full of poems, quotes, bits and pieces of ephemera we thought the other might take a fancy to. Life's gotten in the way a bit of those every-Sunday-like-clockwork telephone calls, though we miss them and still make an effort to stay in touch, but the good thing about emails and messages and letters is that you can kind of - hang on to them.

So! I thought today I would find & post a poem that was sent to me by my good friend Celia. I could have picked any of several, but this one struck a chord with me today; she didn't know the title, so I don't either, but let's imagine it's something pithy. It's by Charles Simic:

"Incurable romantic marrying eternal grumblers.
Life haunted by its more beautiful sister life--
Always, always... We had nothing
But words. Someone rising to eloquence

After a funeral, or in the naked arms of a woman
Who has her head averted because she's crying,
And doesn't know why. A hairline fracture of the soul
Because of the way the light falls on these bare trees and bushes.

Sea-blackened rocks inscrutable as chess players...
One spoke to them of words failing...
Of great works and little faith, of blues in each bite of bread.
Above the clouds the firm No went on pacing.

The woman had a tiny smile and an open umbrella,
Since now it had started to rain in a whisper,
The kind of rain that must've whispered in some other life
Of which we know nothing anymore except

That someone kept watching it come down softly"

yep.

edit:
after several attempts and a bunch of failing, I just managed to locate the poem somewhere other than in an email from my friend. And would you look at it! It has a title (Promises of Leniency and Forgiveness) and stands a whole stanza and three quarters longer than it is replicated here. I thought for a long while about whether or not to edit in the additional parts, but in the end I decided to leave it as it is, as I first read it and have always read it. You see, as so much of this post is about subjectivity and ownership and defining my relationships to people by writing that isn't mine, it would seem oddly, I don't know...hypocritical, or something, to sacrifice the truth of my interaction with the poem for the truth of the poem itself. That's right, Charles Simic, I went there. Suck it.

(no don't)

Anyway, but I've linked it here as a concession, and I must say that I adore the last few lines. "Serious children at play" - that's Nietzsche, I suppose? A reference to Nietzsche, I mean. "A person's maturity consists in having found again the seriousness one had as a child, at play," and all that sort of business. What a nice idea.