Three Strikes: Week 34

This week I spent a full 60 minutes on the cross trainer. I tried this once back in 2011. I made a 0.09Km improvement on it this week. That'll be not eating Subway, nor Tesco Value goods, MUCH less chocolate and better sleep.

Also this week:

Comic Con. More later.

Mum's birthday. Tapas meal. Good.

Glorious sunshine. Lots of. Made the most of it, sat outside reading Junky by William S Burroughs. A Penguin Modern Classic, and deservedly so, the book follows a degenerate but surprisingly eloquent (and surprisingly married) heroin addict as he makes numerous half-hearted attempts to kick his habit. A fascinating insight into a post-war American drug underworld. The glossary at the back of the book helps to pin down junk lingo and instill a sense of culture to a gripping, wasting habit. Fascinating stuff. More so due to being first person narrated and autobiographical.

Nursery Rhymes Redux

Group writing exercise:

Think of a popular nursery rhyme of children’s story. Most stories will have a couple of main characters and some secondary characters. Humpty Dumpty had a king, a whole army of men AND their horses involved in a failed attempt to rebuild him. Take one of these secondary characters.

With 10 minutes on the clock, write out the story in first person from the perspective of this secondary character, but don’t mention the characters’ names. After the timer has sounded, read out your stories one at a time. See how long it takes for the group to realise what story each person has chosen. Here’s what I conjured:

So he rolls in, me young lad, tears in his eyes and all. Once he’s stopped all his blubbering, it turns out it’s all over some girl- not the accident. He’s in a bad shape, mind. Summat wrong wi’ ‘is ‘ed. Can’t remember where his bucket is, so that’s us wi’ no water for stew tonight. I tries to comfort ‘im, but he’s not ‘avin’ it. I do what I can wi’ him, well, he’s me son an’ all. So I starts rummaging through the cupboards for bandages an’ antiseptic.

We ran out o’ all that ages ago, though, so I grabs what I can. Bit o’ vinegar should disinfect the wounds. Well, you’d think I were murderin’ him, the way he were squealing.

His cuts are ‘orrible deep, like, so I wrapped ‘em up tight around his head. We ‘ad no bandages, like I said, so I pulled the brown paper wrappin’ from the kitchen over the wounds, and said “keep that pressed on, lad.”

Teach him to go playin’ wit’ local harlots.

I take it you figured it out pretty quick. The group told me I’d made my vignette too easy. Interestingly, two other members of the group used Jack and Jill for their story. They pointed out, though, that in the original rhyme, Jack bandaged his own head. There’s no mother figure in this rhyme.

The purpose of this exercise was to think about stories from another perspective than the norm. This technique could be applied equally to popular nursery rhymes or historical occurrences.

James Ellroy's American Tabloid, for instance, describes a group of FBI agents whose dirty dealings result in the planning and executing of JFK’s assassination.

Forrest Gump weaves American history, pinning the events to the wanderings of a learning-disabled bloke from the Deep South.

Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy revealed that Earth’s evolution was nothing more than the development of a supercomputer intent on figuring out the meaning of life.

With that in mind, however, it’s clear that I completely messed up the original story. The popular version has no mention of the mother. Other versions do include her though- and she’s a big, mean woman. Well, I guessed that about right! 

Pic courtesy dacotahsgirl, Flickr

Three Strikes: Week 33

The heatwave set in last week and continued into this one, baking northern England in particular. The locals walk their pitbulls in the blistering sun. A flat a few doors down blasts Dr. Dre's 2001. The police arrive to make them turn it down.

Saturday morning: I park up near the gym. I've not even got out of my car and I've already been chatted up by a transvestite. Gonna be one of those days, I tell myself.

Saturday evening on the Littlemoor Riviera: A solitary Tarzan call shatters the idyllic urban silence of the street. I look out of my window, and see no-one.

Later, a young couple have a domestic on the street. There's some grabbing, both ways, but nothing overly physical. They leave together out of view.

I spend every free daylight moment I can sat outside, noticing these things, reading. Occasionally I jump rope, in search of the six-pack I once had. The local girls accuse me of showing off.

This week at the gym I tried a second, slimmer type of cross trainer with a slightly less elliptical, circular motion. I struck out training forward- the motion is akin to walking with poles- but training in reverse I managed to get 2 PBs.

I finished Money, by Martin Amis. John Self is a 30-something movie money-man, making deals and spending like the privilaged, streetwise hoodlum that he is. He two-times his girlfriends, visits hookers, buys porn, tries a range of drugs and gradually fucks up his life. He fully accepts that he'll kill himself eventually, but it seems someone is keen to do that favour for him...

An interesting novel. It's gripping and believable, although the narrator is frequently and contradictorily cunning and intelligent and eloquent yet portrayed as a dumb street hooligan in a suit. He's reminiscient, in that way, of Victor Ward in Glamorama and Patrick Bateman in American Psycho- they were both “bimboys”- good looking idiots who happened to be successful, and could show their intelligence when the story required them to. Money and AP both have wealthy, money-driven and slightly soullless narrators. Money, however, was first published in 1984, when yuppie culture was I full flow. AP came out in '91 and Glamorama in '98. The book has that instant freshness of the period, like a first-hand account. It's occasionally over-descriptive, but, hey, it was the eighties.

A good read. By the way, I got my copy signed. Check it out.

Apologies for this pic appearing upside down. This doesn't happen anywhere else on my computer. For fuck's sake.

2 months 'til Ibiza.

My rap poem for Sing Date

I realise it's been a few months since I was on this show and I'm STILL banging on about it, but I wanted to offer you something straight from the cutting room floor of Princess TV.

Sorta.

The team asked me to write a love poem for my episode of Sing Date. Now, I HATE love poems. I think they're cliche'd and boring. So if you're going to ask me to write one myself, I'm going to have to twist it up a little and do it in a rap stylee. Cough.

You've turned on your TV and you hardly know me

You might have only seen me doing karaoke

But listen to the wisdom right now that I'm giving

I've made it this far on the channel Sky Living

'Cause Cupid's just sharpening up on his archery

So maybe you could find some room in your heart for me

Why not pick me and let this thing take flight

And you could be my Sing Date tonight.

So. This we filmed around the Oldham area, and was to be a big part of my segment. But it was not to be and the scene was cut, for reasons unknown. I'd had contact with the crew until just before the show's air date- 30^th April- and not long after that, I asked them for a copy, reminding them that I don't actually have Sky. I got no response.

Three Strikes: Week 32

Highs of 25 today and yesterday. Scorching. I am not in the habit of preparing for the sun, living in rain-drenched Oldham, and ended up developing the lobster look in Manchester's Castlefield yesterday. Can't believe I've never chilled there before on a sunny day. With its canal and old stonework buildings, some modified into a range of upmarket bars, it's the perfect blend of urban chic and leafy suburbia- nestled right in the city centre.

I missed the last night at Prohibition Manchester. The bar, which was a favourite of mine, was a top spot for lovers of house music and trendy 20's décor. It's now shut, presumably due to dwindling customer numbers. Instead, I rocked a karaoke bar on Portland St with this number.

Yes, that WAS my Sing Date song, before you ask.

Today I sat in the strip of council grass that passes for my garden, doused in Factor 20, and finished off Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72. An interesting, generous and slightly mental account of Hunter S Thompson's coverage of the 1972 presidential elections, the book is a compilation of Thompson's articles, written as he followed and supported the doomed underdog, George McGovern. If you're not well-versed on 70's American politics, you'll probably struggle and not find it half as interesting as Thompson's other books. At least, that's my experience.

The most interesting aspect of the book is its creation. As the deadline for publication loomed nearer, the writing became more and more manic, desperate and basic. The final few articles were transcribed from handwritten notes that Thompson had ripped out of his notebook and faxed over to his office to be typed verbatim. Also included towards the end are transcribed conversations with his editor about the election itself where no time was left to develop a more traditional format for the reporting.

Next week's Three Strikes post could be similarly urgent- maybe a Youtube vid or Soundcloud file for immediacy...

I've passed the 150K page view mark! I must be doing something right. I've been running this blog since late 2008 and I only passed 100K some time this year. The exact date evades me. I'm sure I blogged about passing it. If you can find it on here, let me know. Stats have slumped over the last few weeks, but overall people are finding the site, commenting and feeding back to me on Facebook and Twitter and the page views are flying in. I'm getting somewhere.

Likewise, I'm getting somewhere at the gym too- my cousin noticed my arms were “looking big”. Appropriately, I'm a weight higher on vertical dumbell fly, which is my sole PB this week. I decided to mix in a little cardio to my sessions again, and- unsurprisingly- I'm not anywhere near as fit as I was when I last used these machines. An endurance project might be on the horizon...

"We will not repeat that..."

For this week’s exercise, we took the title of this post- from a conversation about past exercises- as our prompt. Here’s what I churned out in 10 minutes flat.

A factory in China

In the middle of spring

Working for designers

Making dresses and things

Conditions like a prison

Workers handling the vests

Burning with the friction

For the demands of the west

A closed-off room

Electrics badly placed

A tragedy is waiting

A disaster they will face

A machine overheats

When a room is closed off

The flames hit the sheets

above a forty-foot drop

the factory, the company

and the people are burned

Is this what has to happen

Before we all learn?

Yet in England there’s a shower

And the people take cover

In the high street clothes shop

Charging lower than any other.

Hmm. A few issues. I did this under pressure, spending the first five minutes thinking what the fuck do I write for this? Then this news story came to mind  (an incident which actually occurred in Bangladesh, not China). I also ran out of time and didn’t get a chance to properly contrast rainy, freezing England with scorched and arid Bangladesh (or China).

Furthermore, I wanted to tie the poem to the title prompt: “We will not repeat that”. Tragically, it has taken a disaster like this for Bangladesh to commit to improving their health and safety record. Here’s hoping that the country will work towards implementing safety measures to stop deadly incidents such as these from occurring.

Movies by Maths #3

                                   

X

 

=