Two bittersweet theatre trips these past few weeks. Scheduling snafus mean I will miss the next two months of Common Room – so if you’ve always wanted to go without the risk of bumping into me, now’s your chance. Meanwhile, here are my final updates for a while…
Four is a well-acted revival of a 1998 play. It’s a quiet, unflashy piece about two couples getting to know each other – a dose of realism without becoming banal – very ‘theatre’, in a good way. The theatre group made a big deal of the fact that in the mid-1990s no one had recourse to a smartphone during an awkward conversation, but I was actually more struck that no gay relationship in theatre avoided at least a passing reference to AIDS. It feels like a very long time ago now. I also saw The Capitano Must Die, an Italian commedia dell’arte (think masked comedy with a generous dose of bawdy slapstick) which has absolutely no interest in realism whatsoever, but is funny and jolly and quite wonderful too.
I also hosted the second instalment of the Salon, inviting a bunch of great folks round for Indian takeaway and Four Lions. It’s at least my third time watching this film, and I still love it. It’s not even particularly discussion-worthy or controversial or meaningful. It’s just great.
I’ll leave you with this photo from one evening at a Cuban restaurant, during the brief window where Chicago experienced spring and it was possible to eat outside. Suits me, though, because tonight I’m flying to Austin. Can’t wait 😀
Michele, Randi and Robert
It’s been a quietish few weeks. And although it seems spring might finally be on its way, it’s worth noting that my hair actually froze on the way to work this morning. I wasn’t aware that was a thing hair could do, unless encouraged by monstrous quantities of adolescent hair gel. Anyway, no surprise that the most appealing activities have been indoors and primarily sofa-based: “let’s watch the new series of Doctor Who from the start!” “let’s struggle to answer more than a handful of University Challenge questions while cheering on Michael and the Caius team!” “let’s find out David Cameron’s latest excuse for ducking a TV debate!” (Nope, haven’t given up my British TV habits quite yet.)
I did go see two more plays! (Note to self: no one reading cares about these plays or will have any opportunity to see them. Reply from self: carry on.) Plastic Revolution is a fun musical about Tupperware parties breaking out in the deadening nightmare of 50s suburbia, a show made with love and care but without taking itself seriously enough to be annoying. Sweetly, everyone I talked to afterwards who’d been around for the craze had their own story about being dragged along to a Tupperware party. It all seems so quaintly utilitarian. I want to live in an age when inventions “solved a problem” like storing leftover food rather than “solved the problem” of not being able to save Snapchats, or whatever it is you kids do these days.
The other play was Mr. Burns, which looked forwards instead of backwards to a post-apocalyptic future where a small band of survivors pass time by recounting Cape Feare, that wonderful Simpsons episode where Sideshow Bob steps on a load of rakes and sings the HMS Pinafore. Over time, this storytelling takes on a life of its own and mutates into quasi-religious folklore. This is the kind of play which divides opinion. I actually thought the surreal final act was the best part, while Randi thought exactly the opposite. We both believed that the two men sitting behind us deserved immediate and sustained violent retribution for being so loud. (If you can’t come to the theatre and be quiet for a few hours, don’t come. Stay at home and narrate your inner monologue to your TV instead.)
One exception to the indoors rule: dedicating a chilly Sunday to putting together a video for my Grandpa’s 90th birthday. (Happy birthday!) I believe the idea was for a ‘short video message’, but 88 takes later we’d assembled quite a masterpiece. I’m considerably more in awe of people who manage to recite a couple of sentences to camera without breaking down burbling.
Email’s not what it used to be.
Having decided it was Very Important to stay up all night migrating 13ish years of messages, chucking them into a few graphs seemed the logical conclusion:
All saved emails, sent and received (includes uni, excludes work)
The early years are spotty. I didn’t get my own email address until 2002, and this was in the era of dial-up modems and Hotmail storage quotas. I only have 3 emails from that year, and 2003 isn’t much better.
Then things start to climb quickly. By 2007 I’m at almost 4000 messages, or about 77 per week. These are mostly emails from real people: I didn’t keep the spam, the newsletters or the alerts. Many are short chatty messages from Babble – that group of us who often emailed back and forth before things like that migrated to Facebook comments and WhatsApp conversations. Indeed, a full 6 entries in the top 20 league of all-time email senders are from Babble, albeit pipped to the post by Lucy:
Top 20 senders of all time. You lose out if you changed your name halfway through (sorry, Abbi)
These days, most of the people I talk to most often barely get a look-in on these charts. It’s not surprising. There’s a big hit to my email counts at the end of university because (at least back in 2010) a lot of Cambridge still functioned on email, while the rest of the world was moving on. 2012 is catastrophic: email falling by 75% from its peak. Combine a plethora of new ways to communicate, a full-time job and a smartphone, and email looks like it’s down for the count.
Except… not quite. Every subsequent year has seen a rise in the total message count. There’s something nice about email. It takes time and commitment to write a message, and the inbox has a comfortingly archaic feeling of relative peace and privacy. Sure, many messages are of the “shall we Skype?” or “Your Amazon order is confirmed” variety, but others are long-form catch-ups and conversations.
And increasingly, like writing this blog, they’re happening later than might be wise:
Go to bed?
It’s Pancake Day! Or Fat Tuesday. Or whatever.
“Art is hard”
British-style ‘crepe’ pancakes
Todd on 2024: My Year In Books: “I know what Glass Hotel is about. It’s about a bunch of loosely connected, barely developed characters, with their timelines…” Jan 4, 17:17
