My poison was always booze and it was one one boozy night that the sudden urge to change my ways struck me. This unexpected moment of clarity came when an old friend of mine took me to what must be the dirtiest, sweatiest, seediest gay bar in all of London. Not that I have much experience of gay bars — all I know was this one was pretty seedy, the windows blacked out like an old bookie’s, the thudding sound of techno beating from outside. First of all I was astonished that everyone on entry took their shirt off. I’d never seen anything like it. I’m reminded of the Homer Simpson quote: everyone else came with a six pack, I’m the only one who showed up with a full keg.

For me, the opposite was true. The girl of my dreams (I thought — how wrong I was!) had abandoned me and, in silent protest, I’d refused to eat for several months. I weighed somewhere under ten stone. With my pale skin, waxy complexion, and ill fitting clothes, I looked like the skinniest white boy (barely) alive. Blake Fielder-Civil looked like a paragon of virtue, vitality, and health in comparison to me. A virtual skeleton, my body had given up the ghost — and though I didn’t realise it, I was in danger of becoming one.

I wasn’t anorexic. I was on hunger strike. My body demanded change.

The next day I woke up with a habitual hangover and (unsurprisingly) no girl beside me in bed. I looked at myself in the mirror. I thought back to the writhing mass of exquisitely carved male bodies I’d seen the night before. I laughed at the irony. It’s typical. We spend our teenage years making fun of the gays and the geeks, yet they’re the ones who end up inheriting the earth. I was never going to be an investment banker — oh no. A lazy arts grad, I was stuck peddling words for my crust. But it wasn’t too late to do something about what remained of my body. I had two choices. Accept mediocrity, or join the gym. I joined the gym.

Determinedly, I threw myself into my new role. With my geek glasses, wiry physique, and permanenet aura of bacherlorism, I was like an ad for Mr Muscle. Unsurprisingly, my right arm was stronger than my left. Had it really been that long? I guessed so. Every time I felt like giving up, I looked in the mirror. And so I set to work.

Of course I never expected instant results, but results came quickly enough. After the end of the first month I’d slowed down my drinking. I’d started eating better. I’d put on weight. More importantly, for the first time in my life, I felt strong. No longer needing to resort to the withering putdown or the silent snarl (the practised look of contempt) I found myself feeling more comfortable in my own skin. I offered to help people lift their furniture. I playfully arm wrestled my friends. I got into fights, and won.

At three months girls began to notice me or — should I say — a different kind of girl began to notice me. Previously, I’d only ever been able to attract extremly small girls (usually the sort with an eating disorder, a drug problem, or both). After all, what girl wants to go out with a man who weighs less than them? What woman wants a man who can’t put his arms around her and make her feel safe? What woman wants an emaciated wreck? I’d been in the dating paddling pool. Now I was in the ocean. And it’s true what they say. There’s plenty more fish in the sea.

The trouble with fishing is it’s no use having an enormous rod if you’re not strong enough to reel them in.

My work life started to improve as well. I went to bed earlier, I got up earlier, I felt tired less often. Sure, I was spending up to two hours a day, every day, in the company of a combination of muscle-bound posers, butch bears, and muscle marys — all to the pounding beats of balearic four to the floor — but (headphones in) for the first time in years, I felt good about myself.

I began to wonder what had kept me from the gym so long. Was it pride? Was it insistence that it was my mind, not my body, that mattered? Or was it simply laziness? A refusal to admit that results demanded hard work? Personally, I think it was the latter. Before I started working out I always assumed that eventually I would earn something for nothing, that my life would improve without me working at it. Working out made me realise that improvement is gradual. Improvement is painful. But improvement is worth it.

These days I’m healthier, happier, a more rounded individual. I look back at photos of myself from those days and I wonder just how close I was to just disappearing. I became so light, so ethereal, a breeze might have swept me away. Now I weigh a little bit more but I think the most important thing is this — I’ve got both feet planted firmly on the ground.

“The Incredible Sulk”

I’m guessing you’ve seen the old drawing about the two paths a girl’s life can take –either virtue or dissolution. Well, it turns out there’s a boy’s path too. And while I really didn’t expect either image to have a “clubbing, ketamine and co-dependent relationship with drug addict” phase (although a modern version might) I definitely think both images are missing something from the virtuous path: the dinner party.

At first, I thought the arrival of dinner parties in my life was a sign of creeping old age. Then I thought it was a reaction to the £4 pint. Sure, young people don’t go out any more. But who wants to sit in the living room with a four pack of Skol?

Then I realised my descent into the world of dinner parties was far more sinister. Lots of other twenty seven, twenty eight, twenty nine year olds are going out clubbing, taking ketamine, and stealing shoes. I’m not. That’s when it hit me. Far from being on the road to ruin, I’m on the railroad to respectability.

All aboard: why do people switch tracks?

It’s funny. Most of the people I knew from my teens and early twenties who were into hard house or spiral techno or sticking acid up their bottoms are much happier these days ‘unwinding with a glass of wine after work’ — while the work hard, study hard contingent have discovered the ‘work hard, play hard’ lifestyle, pulling 14 hour days with ritalin, going out on a gramme, knocking back a couple of valium to help them sleep. Good luck to them.

I don’t really fit into any of these categories. In fact, I’m a nightmare dinner party guest, because as a robot-like INTJ, I’ve never learned how to do small talk. Which means if you’re lucky, I’ll bore you to death about work. Or I’ll sit in the corner silently. If you’re unlucky, I’ll pick up on one of your opinions and start an argument with you.

This weekend, for example, I had dinner with a champagne socialist. He wound me up so much at the end of the dinner I found myself saying “You believe in redistribution of income, fine. You earn twice as much as I do, you’re paying for half of my dinner.”

Saturday night was a little better. Mainly because it was completely unplanned. I’d arranged to meet up with an old uni friend for a pint (to chat about work!). ‘Oh, xxxxx is having a party,’ he said. ‘Bring a bottle.’

What he didn’t tell me was that the evening was a wine-and-canapes tasting evening. Some people had spent a whole week researching their choices. So naturally I showed up with a dusty bottle of corner shop wine that had invariably been kept next to a radiator for the last six years. Luckily, we all saw the funny side.

“When he said bring a bottle,” I joked, “you’re all lucky I didn’t bring gin.”

I’ve averaged a dinner party a week so far this year. And while my investigation is unscientific, I can definitely suggest there’s anecdotal (pun intended) evidence to suggest that dinner party conversation is, 9 times out of 10, about one thing: food.

What do people talk about at dinner parties?

If it’s bad form to talk work and even worse form to talk politics, what’s left? One doesn’t discuss the x-factor, my big fat trailer trash wedding, or whatever else it is the lumpenproleteriat are discussing in the dole queue this week. So you go for the obvious and talk about food.

Recently, I got in a half hour debate about whether or not putting a stone with home baked bread improved the flavour. And I had a rather earnest discussion about whether or not rhubarb crumble was comfort food or a real dessert.

It seems every dinner party needs a centrepiece. Maybe because people realise how intrinsically dull they are. At one recent event, the host took out her milk snake and let it writhe around the table. Oh, how we laughed when it went up one of the guests’ skirts. Well, it’s better than talking about the thousands of innocent civilians getting slaughtered in Libya.

I started to wish I was getting slaughtered myself.

Cheese

This weekend, the centrepiece was an unpasteurised, potentially lethal cheese. The centre oozed out of the protective rind like pus from the open wound of a repressed Tunisian citizen. Bravely, I grabbed a bit of brioche and dived right in. And I have to admit, it was pretty delicious.

I do still find myself yearning for the old days. We used to have dinner parties back then, only they’d be held around midnight and various lunatics would drop in through the course of the night, usually wired on one drug or another. They rarely ate the food, but at least they made interesting conversation.

And that’s when it hit me. I asked myself — where are they now, those crazy people? Well, they’re: not holding down jobs, they’re in and out of mental hospitals, they’re dating other crazy people, stealing shoes, making a mess out of the rest of their lives.

And suddenly I breathe a sigh of relief. When you put it that way, spending the rest of my life making small talk around the dinner table doesn’t seem so bad after all.

Al Allday is a freelance copywriter based in London.

Well, folks, the inevitable has finally happened: the Neo-Burlesque Movement is now fully mainstream.  This initially underground movement started in the early 1990’s with the founding of Dixie Evans’ Miss Exotic World pageant, and has been growing and growing to the point that now Burlesque is everywhere. Neo-Burlesque has finally crossed the mainstream threshold with the release of the movie Burlesque starring Christina Aguilera and Cher.  To complicate the situation, stripper-turned-burlesque instructor Jo Weldon just released The Burlesque Handbook, which spills the beans on most of burlesque’s trade secrets and lowers the bar for practically anyone who wants to do burlesque to jump in. There’s nothing wrong with being mainstream unless you can’t handle it, and there are many problems within the Neo-Burlesque Movement where they have set themselves up for their own failure now that the spotlight really is on them. One of Neo-Burlesque’s problems is inherent in its very existence: Neo-Burlesque is part of the very problem that it is trying to be a solution for. How?  Read on to find out.

In 2007, the American Psychological Association released the 68-page Report of the APA Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls. The report seeks to demonstrate academically something that women in Western culture already know—that women are subjected to an ongoing and never-ending sexualization contest that values them solely on their “sexual appeal or behavior, to the exclusion of other characteristics.”  This comes largely from the media, but to exacerbate the problem further, women become obsessed with the sexualization contest themselves to the point that they objectify themselves and each other, using a few impossible-to-obtain body types as their reference points for performing well in this competition.

There is really no better way to explain the rise of Neo-Burlesque than as a response to this appalling sexualization contest. The stories about how women get into burlesque generally follow this pattern: They were already obsessed with the sexualization contest, depressed because they were losing it, or both.  They went to a burlesque show, saw the wide variety of body types parading across the stage and being cheered unconditionally for it, and wanted to get in on the action.  They were nervous and scared before their first strip show, but when it was all done, they too got their own unconditional adulation.  It forever changed their lives, and now they are happy and gleeful in the burlesque community, regularly taking it off for other women and being praised for—sexualizing themselves. In other words, the Neo-Burlesque Movement still buys into the Western Culture Sexualization Contest’s ever-present message that a woman’s value is primarily based on her performance as a sex object. Their sexualization of each other continues on, only in a “soccer mom” kind of way where everyone gets a prize.

Over and over again in burlesque, women will use word “empowered” to describe how they feel when they perform.  But is this really “power”?  If she were the only woman alive, the argument that a woman has acquired “power” by causing men to helplessly lust after her would hold some water.  But what if this man is bored with the “empowered” dancer’s act and falls asleep during her performance?  Or, let’s assume that while our “empowered” burlesque dancer is putting on her show, another woman came along that was a little more willing, and the man the dancer has “power” over trots off to bed with the other woman.  What happened to her “power”?  What we see is that her “power” is not tangible power at all, but rather an illusion of power. She may feel like she rules the world, but what she feels and what exists in reality are two very different things.  The 30% of the burlesque audience that are men and who smittenly watch our “empowered” woman are consensually giving her the “power” that she possesses, and can shut it off at any time.  She cannot collect lust from them the way that the government collects taxes.  So how exactly is this “power”?

In the previously mentioned The Burlesque Handbook, author Jo Weldon tries to explain how burlesque dancers differ from strippers: “As a strip-joint stripper, I usually looked for one individual to perform to, and that individual paid me.  As a burlesque performer, I play to the entire house, and the house (show producer or venue owner) pays me.” She then recalls the pain when “As a…stripper, my appearance was constantly evaluated and commented upon openly…it was a rollercoaster for my ego.” As dehumanizing as it is for conventional strippers to be scrutinized like they are, at least they have the strength to get up close with men.  Burlesque dancers, on the other hand, have a wall of separation between them and the audience, and have rigged the show to where the audience can only give positive reinforcement. In this environment, all the “power grabs” and attempts and being “daring” end up being, as Roger Waters put it, “the bravery of being out of range.”

The Alternative: The Vintage Movement

So you’re an audience member that’s getting bored of burlesque and tired of saying “Woo!” to everything they do.  Or you like older styles of clothing and ways of doing things, and really want to get away from the sexualization contest. Where to you go? The answer: check out the Vintage Movement, which had its breakthrough year in the UK in 2010.

The Vintage Movement looks to the larger culture of the mid-20th Century, with the intent of bringing the better ways of life from the period to the current day.  It is welcoming to newcomers, features real gentlemen that are kind to ladies, and ladies who come in all sizes and shapes who are appreciated as whole people.  The ladies in the scene are genuinely loved and appreciated for who they are and what they do, and don’t even have to take their clothes off to receive that love and appreciation.

Here’s an overview of what has been going on so far.  The tradeshow-sized Vintage At Goodwood festival made the biggest splash of the year, followed by the traveling event Judy’s Affordable Vintage Fairs. Vintage resellers fuel much of the movement, some running their own shops on Etsy, and others, such as Sadie Boon Vintage, running handsome online boutiques.  Vintage fashion blogs like Va-Voom Vintage also drive the scene, and hard-copy magazines such as Vintage Life support it further. The men come in with blogs like Manly Vintage and magazines like The Chap.

The Vintage Movement’s music looks to be what will gather people together and perpetuate the movement even further.  Dutch chanteuse Caro Emerald broke this territory open in 2010 with her multi-platinum selling Deleted Scenes From the Cutting Room Floor. Expanding the musical vocabulary further is the upcoming compilation This is Vintage Now, which features Miss Emerald, living saxophone legend Big Jay McNeely, exotica revivalists The Waitiki 7, classic jazz singer Beverly Kenney, and many others.

With so much excitement and so many nice people in the Vintage Movement, who needs the same old trite Cherry Bettie Kitty Bottoms taking their clothes off whilst holding the PC gun at the audience, demanding unconditional applause?  The sexualization contest is tragic, but obsessing about it further in a narcissistic way and seeking “I win you lose” answers and imaginary “power” acquisitions is not healing, but a continuation of the problem.  And this is only one of many issues inherent within the Neo-Burlesque Movement that suggest that the show is almost over.

David Gasten is a Vintage enthusiast and producer of the soon-to-be released compilation This is Vintage Now.

• It’s a giant iPhone.
• It doesn’t have a camera.
• Or multitasking.
• Or USB.
• Or flash.
• It costs twice as much as a netbook,
• it does half as much,
• and it doesn’t have a keyboard.
• It’s got a 4:3 aspect ratio…
• and a 90s-tastic 1024×768 native resolution.

In other words, it’s a barrel of shite with a rather nice touchy-feely interface. But somehow every other reviewer in the land is being paid stacks of cash or freebies or blow jobs or whatever to rave about this overpriced digital doorstop. Lucky for you then that someone at apple forgot to grease ol’ Chad’s palm or spit-shine his cock, so I’m gonna tell it to you like it really is.

If you buy an iPad, you are buying into a fundamental power shift in the user / device paradigm.

You are no longer a creator. You are a consumer.

Apple founded its reputation on being the creative’s choice. Long before it became the machine to be seen posing with while sipping your non-fat latte and working on your god-awful rom-com screenplay lovingly based on your own life, Macs were machines for graphic designers and musicians and other creative types who wanted to get shit done.

Then Apple turned evil. It started out small, with the iPod. But make no bones about it, this is where it started. The iPod is solely a consumption device. It’s to consume media. More than that, it’s a feed to encourage you to buy media. Remember when everyone used to just share music on tape or CD or Napster or Soulseek? Well, now you’ve got the shiny Apple iTunes store selling tracks at a ridiculous price for something that isn’t even real, taking an enormous cut, and basically dictating the direction of the music industry.

The iPad is Apple’s attempt to dominate the publishing industry in exactly the same way. Think about it. These fuckers want you to consume your books and your magazines on the iPad. That’s what it’s been designed to do, supposedly, if you believe the reviews, more or less perfectly. But do we really want Apple controlling our digital futures?

People rail against Murdoch for being monopolistic and attempting to dominate markets. Doesn’t the iTunes store now have more or less a stranglehold on the music industry? Apple aren’t the good guys any more, folks. They’re the evil empire pushing the little guy around. Just because they make shiny quasi-futuristic devices that look great and are easy to snort coke off, doesn’t make them the nice guys.

Think about digital bookstores. No more sharing your favourite book with your friend. You can’t just lend them your dog eared paperback. How’d you lend a DRM protected, encrypted file? Heck, knowing Apple’s track history, you probably won’t even be able to cut and paste.

The iPad is a device designed to get you to spend more money.

Think about the “app store” and the “app” revolution. What a crock of shit. You’re all a bunch of fucking asswipe dummies. 90% of “apps” are just a repackaged way of requesting, receiving and displaying data from the internet. And you’re paying through the teeth for the “convenience” of it.

Apple is a closed platform, folks. That means they’re in control of it. They control what gets uploaded to the app store and what gets deleted — if it’s got questionable content, it’s gone. If Apple had a similar stranglehold on the publishing industry, what else might get deleted? Would Lady Chatterley’s Lover be facing a new obscenity trial in the digital age — with judge, jury and executioner being some faceless suit at Apple HQ?

Basically, the iPad is shit. It’s a shit expensive portable monitor designed to encourage you to buy more shit, like apps to view newspapers and magazines that are available for free right now online anyway. The iPad isn’t designed so you can create. It’s designed to encourage you to consume. It’s like having an advert in the palm of your hand all the time.

Oh, and it can’t do Flash.

Chad Fanstor

Further reading: http://ipadmakesmesad.blogspot.com/

]]> http://thethingis.co.uk/2010/04/08/apple-ipad-sucks/feed/ 4 http://thethingis.co.uk/2009/12/07/shitty-shitty-copenhagen/ http://thethingis.co.uk/2009/12/07/shitty-shitty-copenhagen/#comments Mon, 07 Dec 2009 10:12:45 +0000 admin http://thethingis.co.uk/?p=477 Hippies. If there’s one thing that pisses me off, it’s all of you lazy, self-righteous, uninformed, piss-ignorant hippies. You know, the sort of prick whose heart strings get tugged every time they see an Action Aid ad of some tree getting cut down in Africa. Well, It’s the first day of Copenhagen today and the hippies are out in full force.

To them, this is the first day of setting right the world’s wrongs. Of saving the world from global catastrophe. To the rest of us, it’s just another way for the politicians to rip us off.

Unless you’ve been sleeping under a rock you must have noticed the huge scandal about the CRU — the scientist boffins who’ve been cooking the books to make it look like climate change is more of a threat than it really is.

Now they’re trying to say it’s the Russian security services smearing the name of our good scientists. Well, frankly, whoever it is, they’ve done us a favour.

They’ve put these tree-hugging, pot-smoking, save-the-world-types back in their place.

The fact is, I’m gonna drive my car, eat red meat, and smoke chimney stack cigars. And I don’t give a toss what you think about it. I’ve got news for you, hippies. The world’s already going to hell in a hand cart. You’re just using “climate change” as the latest excuse to get all self-righteous on the rest of us.

And the politicians are using you. It’s in the interest of the political class to impose more laws on us. To control us, as people. The green lobby is giving politicians the chance they’ve always wanted — to have a legitimate excuse to clamp down on our personal freedoms.

Today they come for the car drivers. Tomorrow they come for the meat eaters. And don’t even think about setting foot on that plane. That’s bad. You’ll take the rest of your holidays for life in Skegness.

Science offers progress. Science offers civilized solutions. We should be researching ways of using science to improve our biosphere. We shouldn’t be using research as an excuse for returning civilization to a pre-industrialized dark age.

Sneer at me now, but see how you like it when the hippies make you give up your car for a daily commute on a bus that takes twice as long. They’d have you in a pony and trap if they could.

Fuck you, hippies. Fuck you and your carbon trading passports. Fuck you, celebrity hippies, who endorse us mere mortals brushing our teeth and pissing in the shower to save water, yet think nothing of hopping in their private jets to go stage some fucking celebrity concert about saving the world.

Most of all fuck you George Monbiot, and your shitty cabal of “green” (hardline, left wing) followers. To equate scepticism about an unproven scientific theory with holocaust denial cheapens the memory of millions of dead. It’s a cheap semantic trick used by the left. The same trick they always use. Smear your enemy as a murderous, egomaniacal bad guy, a racist, a denier… a comic book villain. It just doesn’t work any more.

I believe in individual freedom. The freedom to choose. The hippies would limit our freedom, would limit our nations’ growth, would limit industrial progress — that’s the reason you’re reading this right now instead of living in a mud hovel — in the name of saving the environment.

Well I say it’s time for science to pull its finger out of its arse and start saving the environment for us. Because turning the clock back isn’t an option.

Make no mistake. The Copenhagen summit is nothing more than a bloodletting excuse for bleeding-heart liberal guilt. It’s a wallet-lightening experience where rich nations will be forced to shed bucketloads of their citizens’ cash just because some phony doctors have cooked up a statistical model that says industrialization might cause some sort of harm to the environment. Maybe. Possibly. We’ll have to check the figures. Which we won’t show you. Which we’ve accidentally destroyed.

Fuck off, hippies. On your bike.

Chad Fanstor

This thought occurred to me after reading about a project that uses hard disks to detect earthquakes. The project relies upon the fact that hard disks have vibration sensors so they can shut themselves down when they experience forces that might otherwise damage them. Individually, a hard disk’s vibration sensor isn’t sensitive enough to detect earthquakes, but if they are connected to a network of computers that all share vibration information the collected data can be used to locate the epicentre of an earthquake, and even possibly give warning that an earthquake or tidal wave is coming.

In the future a similar idea might allow the detection of cosmic rays, because of the way they affect memory in computers. It’s always hard to know how the public will react to privacy issues, as Facebook demonstrated when they tried to introduce their ‘Beacon’ advertising plan. I would be happy to share any information my computer gathered on earthquakes or cosmic rays: in both cases the information would go to a worthy cause (saving lives and science) and no useful personal information is given away.

Mobile phones with GPS may soon become similar sources of data — Nokia has a speculative design for a mobile phone that would gather information about the weather, and a phone with a radiation detector that could be used to alert authorities to possible terrorist activity has also been mooted.

Another example of this is a sat-nav system which transmits information about vehicle speed back to a central point. If several cars are seen to decelerate in a particular place then it’s likely that there’s a traffic jam and the system can then relay this information back to drivers so they can avoid it.

Of course there is a correlation between how revealing information is and how likely people are to share it, so this kind of data sharing is always going to be limited in scope. My decision to share data is also affected by how it will be used. For example, I wouldn’t be prepared to share anything that might be commercially useful unless I received money for it, and event then I’d be reluctant.

This will probably limit the application of the concept of gathering large amounts of data from personal electronics to science but some more frivolous applications come to mind.

For example, it’s possible to detect a person’s mood by using software to analyse the tone of their voice. If mood data (gathered during phone calls) were transmitted to a central mood processing centre it would be literally possible to “capture the mood of the nation”. To get a statistically relevant model only a tiny fraction of phone users would have to agree to have their mood anonymously reported.

Obviously most of the time, and in most places, it would be very random. However, it might be possible to see a small community that had suffered something tragic, or to map fear in an area of a city that had experienced a crime wave. Politicians might watch the national mood graph to see how announcements went down; economists might take the national mood into consideration making predictions.

I’m sure there are many other potential uses that are too bizarre to even imagine, and I’m not sure I want to be able to refer to a map of the mood of the nation — it would certainly be an interesting experiment though.

As gadgets with environmental sensors become more and more ubiquitous and a greater number of devices have access to the internet, aggregating this kind of anonymous personal data will become increasingly easy. It’s never very easy to know how people will feel about sharing information; still it may not take many people to get a statistically relevant sample size.

One day we might get used to our kettles reporting levels of chlorination to the Environment Agency or the hoover sharing data on airborne bacteria. This kind anonymous data sharing has many obvious benefits – but experience suggests that the ready availability of data frequently comes with unexpectedly intrusive repercussions.

Jimmy Tidey

What interests me is the way there has been an absolute seismic shift in our attitudes towards drugs, drug-taking, and drug takers in the last ten years. This week’s Horizon was titled, somewhat provocatively, ‘is alcohol worse for you than ecstasy?’ The programme itself was somewhat dull – little more than a televised summary of last year’s paper in the respected medical journal The Lancet – which suggested, rather unsurprisingly to anyone with even a whisper of medical knowledge – that the current system of drugs classification is based on little more than hearsay and scaremongering.

What really caught my attention was the public reaction. Or rather, the lack of it. Twenty years ago it would have been unthinkable to even air something like Horizon. A decade ago, in the wake of the Leah Betts furore, it would have been controversial, to say the least. The programme received some gentle mocking in Wednesday’s Times for its ‘top of the pops’ style countdown to the most harmful drug, but no real criticism. Not even the tabloids touched it. I mean, come on – where’s the hysteria? Where’s the outrage? The BBC all but advocated the legalization of a class A drug this week, for Christ’s sake… come on! Surely that’s got to register?

Okay, so maybe you’d expect The Mail to be too busy chasing Mad Mullahs, bent traffic wardens, or whoever else their bogeyman du jour is right now. But not even The Sun went for it. They did, however, run with a front page splash about Amy Winehouse’s ongoing battle with crack cocaine. So it seems that while it’s not big news when a major, taxpayer funded institution advocates illegal drugs, prurient speculation about the self-destructive impulses of the rich and famous is still cool. In terms of attitudes, that strikes me as a big shift. Why is one big news and not the other? The answer is obvious. Drugs aren’t big news any more. But celebrity is – just as it always has been.

Why have we suddenly become so relaxed about drugs? Is it the effect of this £200 an ounce super skunk we keep hearing so much about? (Note to any journos reading this: if you paid 200 on the oz, you got ripped off.) I can’t help but wonder if it’s because taking drugs has become boring and middle class. It is, as Noel Gallagher once quipped, as ‘normal as having a cup of tea.’ If you think back to how controversial that statement was in the press at the time – and consider that’s exactly what Horizon spent an hour telling us this week – you can see just how much mainstream attitudes have changed.

Once the preserve of the very poor, the very rich, and the very dangerous, drug-taking has become, dare I say it, acceptable. Everybody knows someone who does or, at the very least, has. And society hasn’t crumbled yet. But is this complacency a good thing? Middle class dalliance means that most people – including those journalists who now shape the mainstream media – will brush with drugs but rarely see its most debilitating effects. This tends to strike those who take drugs to excess. Generally, these people are still either very poor or very rich. Either way, they’re usually pretty desperate. They’re rarely journalists.

I’m not anti-drug. I’m not pro-drug, either. I’m pro-freedom. Provided you’re not hurting anyone else, I don’t think it should be my business – or the state’s business – what you or Amy Winehouse or anyone else puts into their systems. But I am anti-complacency. I’ve seen people use ecstasy and cannabis – even heroin and crack – experimentally, without any serious long term effects. But I’ve also seen all four of those drugs destroy people’s lives. Addiction. Ill health. Insanity. All linked to one word: excess.

Some drugs, like the latter on that list, are far more likely to send people off the rails than others. But until we start treating all drugs as potentially dangerous and stop trivializing the issue with pop-culture programming like Horizon, we’ll never grow up. The nation is experimenting with drugs. Literally, and as an idea. Let’s hope we don’t push it too far.

Richard Allday

Don’t get me wrong. They’re probably a really nice bunch of guys (and gals, though it’s worth noting that their head honcho is a bloke) but ever since they formalized the miasmic coagulation of what had once been a pretty disparate, minority interest scene, the rest of us have had nothing but titty tassels thrust in our faces. This is not a good thing.

Burlesque is not in any way empowering. It does not give women the freedom to reclaim their bodies. Get this: you cannot be a feminist if you objectify your own body. If you’re up on a stage screaming ‘look at me’ you are not empowered, you are desperate — at best for attention, at worst, acceptance. Don’t try and tell me you’re a performer, or an entertainer, or even a dancer. You’re a stripper. Deal with it.

The reclamation of burlesque as an innocent exploration of feminine sexuality is a fantasy dreamed up by a post-feminist collective consciousness that has sublimated the pornographic urge of the male psyche into the supposed ‘empowerment’ of dominance via sexual means. Yet objectification it remains.

Girls on stage, think about it for a minute. Do you think anyone would want to see you get ‘em out if you were old, ugly, or morbidly obese?

No.

The world of burlesque is more inclusive than the sex industry. It has a few professionals and a hell of a lot of amateurs. You don’t need to be a pneumatic blonde or be willing to have a German shit on your chest to do it. Yes, women of varying shapes and sizes can perform, but is there anything more depressing than the stubby, slightly overweight one at the end parading around in stockings and suspenders like a closet tranny in front of a Travelodge mirror? The facts are inescapable. This sort of performance is predicated on the objectification of the female body. The fact the power dynamic has shifted away from the audience and towards the performer changes nothing. Burlesque demeans women.

Case in point, the hideous little troll I overheard down my local boozer last week telling two men about how she was a burlesque dancer, explaining (in some detail) her act. The poor thing would have looked vile even in a burlap sack if I had a paper bag over my head. Yet she seemed sensible, articulate and personable — valuable qualities in any person, let alone a potential partner. Why, then, did she feel the need to get up on the stage and do the tassel routine (always with the fucking tassels, don’t you people do anything else?). She, too, had bought into the great con that self-esteem comes not from a contentment with our own appearance (and personality) but from the approbation of others. It’s a tragedy that the way she chose to make herself feel better sets the cause of women’s liberation back every time she disrobes on stage.

Spreading out from our glorious capital city like an unacknowledged fart gently wafting through the room, burlesque has become big business, spawning regular club nights and a host of ‘professionals’ offering lessons in ‘the art of tease’ country-wide. Ultimately, it is a lie. I’m no feminist. I’m a man. I like seeing women take their clothes off. But why women would want to do this for peer acceptance is frankly baffling. We are all of us sexual beings. But do we need to get up on the stage to prove it?

So go on, girls. Flaunt that funky stuff. Does it make you feel big? Does it make up for being teased or shy or geeky in school? Fuck the lot of you. If you want to argue about it you’ll find me down the Clerkenwell Titty Bar, watching girls demean themselves for loose change. At least it’s honest. Who are you people trying to kid?

Chad Fanstor

Imagine arriving for a play with a ticket that leads you to a solitary piece of cardboard in a smelly doorway on Clapham High Street. You sit down. Slowly, you notice a few of the people passing you on the busy street are beginning to look familiar…

The irresistible allure of site-specific theatre is that it can occur just about anywhere. Clapham High Street is a hectic place more suitable for a Saturday morning shopping frenzy than a theatre production. Yet it is because of this that site-specific theatre works so well – drawing on its surroundings, physical and emotional, to deliver a unique performance.

Site-specific theatre happens at that special stage when half the audience know the score and half are wondering just what the hell is going on. If you are in the informed half of the group this division must at least double your enjoyment of the show; you get to be smugly unsurprised by whatever the production throws at you, while revelling in the other half’s initial bewilderment, surprise and enjoyment. It is not a new genre, but it is taking on a whole new sense of cool. With recent productions taking place in sites as diverse as disused warehouses and busy train stations, it has moved from entertainment enjoyed just by the most avant-garde of theatre-goers to the mainstream audience.

As a theatre-form ‘site-specific’ can be briefly defined as a production that takes direct inspiration from the location in which it is performed. However, many theatre companies cheat by simply staging a traditional play in a new surrounding. I spoke to Caroline Garland, co-founder and associate director of Kilter Theatre Company, to try and clear up this issue. She persuasively argues that a true site-specific work must enter its space with no previous agenda and devise from there.

Let us return to that solitary piece of smelly cardboard for a moment. Caroline was one of those familiar faces walking up and down Clapham High Street and highlights a few moments during the play that she would describe as truly site-specific. At one point, while ‘off stage’, she rings a public telephone box and an audience member is encouraged to answer. This part of the play was devised purely because the telephone box inspired it and yet is instrumental within the work. Another scene occurs down a grimy alleyway. During the devising process, the actors were asked how this area made them feel and the result was a particularly dark scene in the play. However, with no negative implication, Caroline points out that the characters in the play were already at least partly formed before they reached the High Street and this stopped the play being a thoroughbred piece of site-specific theatre.

Instead, she argues, phases of site-specific theatre exist, starting with a straightforward production of Hamlet that is performed, for example, in a castle, through to a play that is devised entirely on-site. The cut-off point for her comes with the question of whether the play can tour. If it can, then it is not site-specific. There is considerable debate at the moment as to whether the terminology used should be changed to highlight these differences. Caroline favours ‘site-responsive’ as it draws attention to the fact that the play must be a direct response to the site it appears in.

I recently appeared as an extra in a site-specific production. The play was called Remote Patrol and was brought into being by the company Caroline co-founded, Kilter, a ’sustainable theatre company’ that engages its audiences in ‘issues surrounding the environment, social justice and English heritage’. The play was devised and performed in a disused cemetery and chapel. The production team decided to only use props created from materials they had already found in the space. A surprising array of treasures were unearthed and were then used to help form the play itself.

The result was a deeply atmospheric and moving production that made the audience re-engage with an area many knew but had neglected. By being an extra (a drone, just in case you were curious), I was able to spy on the unsuspecting audience from various concealed vantage points as they made their way around the cemetery. As I repeatedly saw what seemed like exaggerated expressions of bemusement, joy, amusement and delight, I wondered if these were the faces people normally pulled in the darkness of a traditional auditorium. How wonderful then that the audience members could express them in the open, albeit unaware they were being watched from behind a fir tree by a renegade drone…

Speaking to Caroline about this observation demonstrated exactly why she is so enamoured with site-specific theatre. With traditional theatre, the audience is never really more than a spectator; the necessary level of engagement can be very low. With site-specific, the audience is often likely to experience exactly what the actors are themselves experiencing. For example, to return to the grimy alleyway, by creating work that directly responds to the emotions felt by the actors in that space, the audience’s reaction to the alley is predicted and catered for. The physical aspect of site-specific work has a similar affect as the audiences are often literally within a hair’s breadth of their actors. As with the audience member answering the public telephone, they are frequently actively involved in the play; they become, willingly and knowingly or not, part of the cast. In her considerable experience, Caroline has found that the audience is nearly always positively surprised by these encounters. She describes the experience as an adventure that requires bravery and trust in the face of the unknown; everyone participates and comes out the end smiling.

We end our chat by discussing the future of site-specific theatre and I learn that, although it has been around for a while (its heyday was in the 70’s), it is undergoing a considerable revival, which, we both agree, is jolly exciting.

Lucy Langdon
Illustration by Robert Nicol (www.robert-nicol.co.uk)

Having worked with a number of ephemeral buildings in London, the group secured their legacy with a six-month residency in a disused car showroom and parts centre on Bristol’s Cheltenham Road. Originally squatting the premises as a reaction to the wasteful neglect of such a prominent building, the project quickly gained the support of the local community. The street-facing ex-showroom became a glass-fronted, walk-past gallery featuring the cream of Bristol’s artistic endeavours and offering an outlet for those factions of the artistic underground who could not or would not find gallery space. Other internal spaces became rehearsal rooms and the setting for workshops, talks, film-nights and various cabaret performances from the Invisible Circus – the group’s performance wing. An epic finale show ‘The Road To Nowhere’ sealed the fame of the group, the building and the ethos of the project. And a newfound legitimacy beneath the moniker ‘Artspace / Lifespace’ facilitated the group’s progression and purpose beyond a single structure.
Doug Francis – Artspace / Lifespace founder commented at the time:

“We could all be a bit more aware of the spaces around us and the potential that might lie in them. Many buildings fall into disuse easily and people will all too readily complain when these places become an eyesore, or an attraction for crime or anti-social behaviour that can damage the surrounding area. We’ve shown that all it takes is determination and commitment to a project to completely turn somewhere around and make it an asset to the community.”

The car showroom was begrudgingly returned to its owners but the point had been made. Redundant space had been recycled into a thriving, multi-use arts hub. An eyesore had been turned into an asset. To say that it had all been done on a shoestring budget would be disingenuous; Artspace / Lifespace’s means consisted of volunteerism, donation and sheer, unwavering determination.

Unofficial accreditation from the council and mentorship from various parties allied with the energised team of volunteers and affirmation of potential. After several other offers made themselves available, the Artspace / Lifespace team were offered the chance to take on the Old Pro-Cathedral and Steiner school in Clifton. They took it.

Six months on and you can see the progression the group has made from their last venture. The Pro-Cathedral is nothing short of a triumph, housing a luxurious burlesque bar / lounge room, grand theatre and colossal Cathedral altar room.

The entire project encompasses many of the cornerstones of Bristol’s creative heritage and status quo. The theatre room – its parquet floor still garnished in the faded markings of a onetime sports hall – is, quite literally, one giant mural. Graffiti artist Xenz has spent many hours atop a scaffold tower adorning the walls with overwhelming vistas in implausible detail. It truly is a Sistine Chapel for the 21st century, its themes drawing from those of the project itself: beauty from decay; use from disuse.
Artistic Director Doug Francis took a moment out of his seemingly endless schedule to pass on a few words:

“We’ve received some financial help this time round. The developers Urban Creation have been hugely supportive and we have a great working relationship. We’ve also received support from the Arts and Business fund, the Scarman Trust and the Arts Council. But it’s still been really hard for us. We’ve really only managed it on the strength of the people who’ve helped out and given their time. That continues to be the case every time we put on an event… We are very excited about our winter season at the Pro-Cathedral. We feel that now is a crucial time to re-establish the creative profile of the city and lead by example, to some degree, in combating urban decay and environmental degradation nation-wide, with a fresh creative approach to an old social problem.”

The Pro-Cathedral is now a fully-fledged venue, having just been granted its full licence. Running under a temporary licence up until now, all of its shows and performances have sold out. With Bristol’s Old Vic theatre currently closed indefinitely, the Tobacco Factory theatre calling for financial support and Bristol Hippodrome cancelling shows due to “poor ticket sales” perhaps it is precisely Artspace / Lifespace’s idiosyncratic brand of participatory culture that is needed to motivate and inspire the masses.

Ed Williams