Excuses

I still haven’t written half of what I should have by now.

There’s always something else to do.

A sunny day can’t be missed; errands demand running.

I have no excuse. If I’m to continue calling myself a writer, that means I must write.

Oh well, here are some photos from the weekend…

Exmoor, where we stopped roadside and had a picnic

Exmoor, looking back down the hill

Exmoor, view for the picnic

Exmoor, view to the sea

Exmoor, a very exciting bench

Exmoor, driving through the water

Kilve Beach, where plants grow to look like smoke

Kilve Beach, a view South of Adam looking for crabs among the rocks

 

Tags: England, Exmoor, Kilve Beach, photos, Somerset, week in photos, writing

A penny change, or why book shops are killing themselves

This is a proper book store, and one of the best in the world. The Strand, in New York, is the type of shop where you can spend an entire day. The staff know what they're doing, too. They aren't just there because the clothing shop wasn't hiring.

This past week, I had a writing job that required the use of Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything. After a failed attempt to borrow the book from a local library, I resigned myself to purchasing it.

I went online to check the price and stock availability at Waterstones. I don’t trust just going into the local branch. The general stock in the Weston Waterstones isn’t very high end (a look at the shop’s Twitter account is fairly depressing, too). One of its biggest events over the past few years has been the in-store appearance and book signing by Katie Price.

According to their site, the book was in stock. The price listed was £6.19 with free delivery, and I was also given the option of collecting from the shop. I needed it the same day, though, or at least by the next morning. I also wanted to pay cash for it.

That said, I did toy with the idea of using Amazon’s next morning delivery. The drawback was that, on top of the £6 for the book, I would have to pay around £9 for express delivery.

Having interrupted Adam’s work day a few times already, I opted for the bus. My long-standing dislike of FirstBus meant I’d wait for the less frequent WebberBus that travels on the same route. (My faith in the new company was misplaced, it turned out. Having bought a return ticket, I stood in the cold for 45 minutes while three First buses came by and two Webber buses didn’t show or were late.)

Back to the book buying. I went to the shop, found the book, and went to pay for it. It came up at the RRP of £9.99. I commented that it was only £6 something online. The shop girl just shrugged and said, ‘Yeah. They’re usually cheaper online.’

Yesterday I returned the book out of spite.

I’m a frequent lamenter of disappearing book stores. Totalled up, I have spent years of my life wandering stacks of books. I’d rather buy a book than borrow it from a library. I am a bibliophile and enjoy the act of selecting a book. Of going through a shop and feeling the bindings, selecting one, reading the first page to see if I like it.

I wish there were more book stores in Weston. I’d even be happy with a few more in Bristol. I’d travel for the right book store.

But when I get financially penalized for buying in-store and not online (and it would have been even less had I been able to download it for a Kindle), it’s hard to argue for the ongoing existence of bricks-and-mortar shops. It’s hard to argue for them when the stock is slanted towards trashy novels, low-budget horror tomes, and tourist books about the region.

All in, I was only a pound or so out from what it would have cost for Amazon to have it to me by the next morning.

In this case, I knew the book I needed. No browsing was needed, no tactile experience of choosing a book. There was no need for the book store experience. In the end, I regretted opting for that experience.

If people want book stores to continue through the current economic slump, it’s not just a matter of campaigning and having woe is me monologues about literacy. The survival of book stores will require the shops themselves to change. They can’t be undercut by their own virtual presences. They can’t offer a selection that is almost insultingly narrow.

At one point, in another town, I would make the journey into town just for the book store. A wander around would be my only reason for the journey. It would be a chance to see if there was anything new published. I could find academic books and popular books.

I can’t do that here, and it sucks. My only choice is to buy online now, with no chance to flick through the book, feel its weight in my hands, carry it around and compare it to other books.

Online book sellers like Amazon are brilliant. They make a much larger stock available to purchase. Amazon makes it possible to buy obscure books that I couldn’t possibly expect a shop to carry.

But Amazon isn’t the reason for the failure of traditional book sellers. The ways those shops conduct their own business is the reason for their failure. Knowing that you can buy the same title for £3 less from the same company causes their failure. It isn’t even a choice of independent book seller versus big corporation. It’s the same corporation at the local or online level.

I often go to town and barely give Waterstones a glance. It lets me down time and time again, and I think this latest experience might be the end of my relationship with it. I would love to have it change, but I don’t expect any change. I didn’t get much from my £10 note, and I don’t think I’ll get much from the shop, ever.

Tags: amazon, books, bookshops, bookstores, waterstones, weston, writing

Time to Talk: England’s version of ‘hug a nutjob’?

The Time to Change campaign isn’t new (according to its site, it’s ‘England’s biggest mental health anti-stigma campaign’ and boasts of accomplishments for 2011, 2010, and 2009). The concept behind it isn’t new. So why does it bother me so much lately?

Simple. It’s everywhere, and it’s a bit offensive.

The current media blitz from TTC is the ‘Time to Talk’ campaign, in which ‘normal’ types are urged to talk to the crazies. See a crazy at work, in the shops, on the street, and throw ‘em a bone. Ask how they are, because crazies aren’t scary, just a bit wrong in the head.  (If you haven’t seen the TV ad because you’re not the TV sort or live out of the UK, you can watch it on YouTube.)

The cartoon series by Stephen Collins is meant to be spread around the internet as an online component to the campaign that also uses prime time television adversing, too. I can't get away from this kind of crap, it seems.

But while the intent here is to make mental diseases no different than any other disease, there’s something slightly sinister. Mental health problems aren’t a cold. They aren’t something that you take a few days off with and then go back and are all better. Being asked about your mental health disease is kinda like being asked how that genital herpes is treating you.

Tags: advertising, annoyances, bipolar, campaigns, depression, England, mental health, mental illness, time to change, time to talk

I Was a Comedy Groupie

Gotham got mixed in there a few times, too. One late visit there included us trying to keep another friend from going on stage to show off her pierced nipple. We didn't succeed.

 

Last week, I went to see some live comedy with Viv and Adam. It was the first night of the Comedy Box at Weston’s Blakehay Theatre. (The Comedy Box sign at the Hen and Chicken in Bristol always makes Adam giggle and sometimes almost veer into oncoming traffic.)

It marked the first time I’d gone to, a comedy show since 2004, I think. (The last time being a comedy night at a bar in Dublin that I went to with Mary. I don’t remember what bar, or who the comedians were, but I remember it being upstairs. There was an improv section that we mocked with both our Americanness and love of wacky sitcom scenarios. The comedians weren’t impressed. Neither were we.)

So anyway, I went to a comedy show last week and it was weird. It was all theatre-y, which was weird in itself. But it was weird to just go and watch the show and be sat in the audience and laugh and then go home. It was weird to be a normal comedy patron. But a nice weird.

Here’s where we get to the title of this post. I’m Jen and, as a teenager, I was a comedy groupie. I don’t entirely remember how it happened, either. At some point in my first few months at NYU, we must have looked at the Village Voice and decided to go to a comedy show.

Thinking about it, the first one must have been Stella at Fez. (This was all in the days before everything was on the internet, but I’m sure we had read or heard or imagined some rumour of slightly more famous comedians showing up there.) We continued to go there, necking kamikaze shots and reaching some level that was probably only slightly better than heckler. Mary did get on stage at one point and tell a story we had developed about her Uncle Harvy, who had celery legs that he would eat in a bathtub of ranch dressing.

From there, I know there was a weird night somewhere in Chelsea (I think) where some comedians were trying out some new material. It was another rumoured hangout of people at various levels of Comedy Central fame. There we came across one of the musical comedian guys. I can’t remember who we met first, though. It was either Rob Paravonian or Jason Nash. I’m pretty sure it was Rob, though.

We expanded our comedy going to the Lower East Side, giving different names each week. (I still have moments where I see some of those comedians on TV and struggle to figure out what I know them from, only to eventually settle on that BYO Sunday night open mike hosted by that little bald guy, something Boy (Face Boy, maybe?), who I once saw locked in a hardcore make out session in Washington Square Park, which was also where we got into our vaguely abusive relationship with Christian Finnegan.)

The central location, though, was always Catch a Rising Star. This was one of those famous New York comedy clubs. You know in Seinfeld, when he’s doing a set somewhere in the city? Almost always at Catch. It was that sort of place. It was a place where comedians were made stars, and I know that sounds like it should be said in some cigarette-ravaged agent voice. (You did have to walk down a street full of fur offcuts, though. It was at the edge of the fashion district.)

Catch became our home away from home, or home away from our home away from home, as by then we’d been moved into a hotel by NYU (long story). Our lives revolved more around the comedy scene than they did around our coursework. We created elaborate stories about small pet abuse in Brooklyn, one of which eventually led to tattoos. Other stories about inappropriate use of buttons came out of the free-form tale spinning sessions that would occur late at night.

The list of comedians we knew was always growing. Rob and Jason had a bet with Stephen Lynch that ended up with him in our hotel room with his cassette recorder running. There were as many bad stories as good. Most of my memories of that era are of the nights that ended in tears. They’re the ones that defined the era.

There are good stories, of course. There were brilliant comedians who never made it big. There were shit comedians who did better than they deserved.

So last week, going to a comedy show again, it was strange. I’ll be overstating it if I go on about it being a grown-up relationship with live comedy. But it’s sorta that anyway. The comedians were good, though some better than others, and we had a good night out.

My relationship with all those comedians from back in the day is weird. I’m happy for their successes, but whenever I see them pop up on TV, or whenever somebody shares something they’ve put on Facebook (they generally seem to not understand Twitter), it’s weird. For everyone else, they’re maybe a vaguely obscure name, but for me it’s part of my childhood popping up with some comedic authority. It’s difficult to explain.

That said, if anyone knows what became of Cary J. Prusa, I’d love to know. He was always a nice guy, and deserved to be more than the emcee of a comedy night.

Tags: comedy, confession, New York, television

Ain’t No Party Like a Mclevey Party ‘Cause a Mclevey Party is Just Fucking Weird

I don't even know what's happening in this photo. I think it was something to do with the cat. And probably testicles. Testicles are usually involved if it's Shamu and Steve.

We might be a curse if you want a nice, normal, sophisticated party. Just don’t invite us, because it won’t end well. It’s not that we behave badly. Weirdness just somehow attaches to us the moment a party is discussed.

Our hosting of parties tends to be a bit odd. Other than our wedding, which did have some vaguely strange aspects, our parties are generally set to some theme. We’ve had the Ass Party, to celebrate the donkey sculpture that was finished and ready to be collected (almost two years later, it’s still in our garden). There was the New Year, Take 2 Party, in which we decided that the new year had started off a bit crap so we declared a do over. One of our most recent parties was the Cheese Party, to mark British Cheese Week.

This was only a few hours into the party, too.

We don’t do the usual reasons for parties. Things like birthdays are generally spent out of the house. But every few months, we like to have a handful of people over. There’s always far too much booze and always enough food to feed the guests about 7 times over. It goes into the night and usually the next morning. For some reason, our bigger parties end somewhere around 5:30 am, no matter how many times I say beforehand that we’ll start earlier so that it can end at a reasonable time. I forget, time and time again, that there is no reason at our parties.

The Mclevey party quality isn’t limited to our own soirées, though. No, that would be too easy. If you invite us to your party, something will happen. There will be something that occurs at the party that will be more notable than anything either of us do, even if Adam breaks into his gas mask dance. There will be pink elephants in mucky streams.

I’d like to spin the Mclevey Party Effect (MPE) as something good, though. We bring people into conversations, lower the threshold of taste, and make your guests feel comfortable enough to talk about where to keep the alpaca or the best way to get a blowjob off a swan.

Somewhere in my head, I have this dream that I’ll eventually grow into a sophisticated bitch and be able to throw luxurious dinner parties that would make both Martha and Nigella weep in envy. Each party is thrown with grand designs, where we all sit around drinking paired wines and laughing at witty stories. In this same version of the world, our guests take notes about cheeses so they can ask their local cheesemonger for their favourites.

Instead, though, our guests feast, get severely drunk, and then stories get told. We recall accidental racism over the first course and by dessert, we’re passing around a gollywog doll. We talk about pets over hors d’oeuvres and at dessert we’re killing stick insects. We push things farther, farther, farther, until all the guests are bound by some sort of shared trauma, some deep emotional oppression.

At a later date, I’ll write about the related, but slightly different, wine days. And the days out. And how, if you want a quiet life, you should probably never meet us.

And never, ever challenge us to a YouTube DJ contest. We always win.

Tags: cheese, donkey, food, friends, parties

Fewer cakes, fewer ales

I’m now into week three of the One Week Challenge, which has gone from a challenge to a revised lifestyle. It’s no longer a matter of temporary deprivation. It’s now looking at the big picture, the very big picture. It’s eating less and moving more and all that usual diet crap. It’s all the things that have always kept me from going on a diet.

It’s all still fairly moderate, but it’s still a change. It’s still a challenge, but not in the same way. It’s a developing challenge. It’s setting goals and figuring out where I’ve gone wrong in the past. It’s an accounting. (Which, considering my accounting techniques — often a shopping bag or decorative bowl shoved full of receipts — isn’t saying much for the orderly quality of the whole weight loss endeavour.)

I have much to accomplish, and I’m starting to tease out all the options. My mind is a rat’s nest. There are threads of ideas that have gotten massively tangled up, and I need to get everything straightened out.

To set myself up for the week, here’s the topics I’m going to write about on here…

•  Ain’t No Party Like a Mclevey Party ‘Cause a Mclevey Party is Just Fucking Weird
• I Was a Comedy Groupie
• Reality, Hyperreality, Surreality, and Unreality in Contemporary Television Comedy

I might write a few other things, but that brings me up to the weekend, and I can’t be sure I’ll write on the weekend. I probably will on Saturday, but I don’t want to commit myself to anything. That’s a new thing I’m trying… not setting myself up for certain failure.

Now then, it’s almost 9 and I don’t eat after 9, so I’m gonna go grab a cup of tea and a chunk of dark chocolate to end the night.

 

A one-week challenge: Week 2

Last week, Adam and I did a one-week challenge, the gist of which was to make ourselves healthier. We both succeeded, and both had to come to terms with some of the problems we have. All along, the plan was to splurge on Saturday, since we had family down. I won’t get into details, but we’d decided to go back to the challenge from today. We both generally felt better for the changes, and figured out that we were saving quite a bit of money.

So today starts the second week challenge. This week I’m continuing with the diet and exercise bit. I’m keeping up with a food diary. I’m paying attention to what, when, and why I eat. But I want something more.

For this week, I want to add a mental challenge. I keep blocking myself. Whether it’s fear of failure or something else, there’s always something I allow to stop my pursuits. I need to get my brain in shape.

I know there are a lot of reasons for my brain issues. But I also know I use those as an excuse. I need to stop that shit.

I don’t know what I can do to keep track of things, though. I have a nifty site for keeping track of food, but how do I keep track of not stopping myself from trying to accomplish things with my brain?

I’m going to stop this wishy-washy post now because of a tendonitis flair up in my right hand, but am open to suggestions as to how to keep myself from brain blocking myself.

Tags: body, brain, depression, diet, exercise, fat, food, improvement, issues, one week challenge, writing