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
It’s not that I was desperate to watch the Super Bowl – it’s that I wasn’t given a choice. Which is fair, given the “when in Rome…” attitude which led me to monster trucks last weekend. And the chore of sitting through the roughly seven thousand hours which comprise a single game of American football was considerably lessened by all the mimosas and cocktails at our boozy brunch beforehand. (A mimosa, in case you’re wondering, is just a more champagne-heavy version of Buck’s Fizz.) So by the time we ended up at Catherine and Jason’s on Super Bowl Sunday, the weekend before last, I was quite ready to settle under a blanket and espouse a muted but not altogether insincere passion for the Seattle Seahawks. Who lost. Obviously.
(I mock, but actually the final ten minutes turned out to be pretty exciting – even to me.)
More my natural habitat was a third trip to Improv Shakespeare (Penguins of Siberia this time – and still joyfully good) with Randi, Catherine, Jason, Nick and Constance. Somehow, before the show started we ended up talking about the UK law on knives. Rather uncontroversially, to my mind, they make it illegal to carry most knives around in public without “good reason”. But it was funny to see how it put the freedom-lovin’ heebie-jeebies on a bunch of people who would support greater gun control without a second thought.
Other fun stuff recently has included a temporary farewell brunch for Mark and Kristina. (I asked the three year old present what her favourite colour was. “Pink and purple”, she replied. “And what’s your least favourite colour?” She scrunched up her face for a few seconds to ponder the question and then, quite rightly, dismissed it. “I don’t have a least favourite colour.” Aren’t children interesting? Isn’t it impressive to be able to cognitively process a question, understand exactly what the expected parameters are supposed to be, but then actively challenge them when they don’t make sense?)
A Map of Virtue cast members at Common Room. On someone else’s set, just to confuse things.
Randi and I also played a homemade edition of Coup with Anastasia, and I saw A Map of Virtue with a bunch of others after their Common Room appearance earlier in the week. “Part interview, part comedy, part middle-of-the-night horror story”, it claims, and I guess this is entirely right. I enjoyed it, but to steal verbatim from Shelby, “a play with so many unanswered questions is not the kind of play I love”.
What I have been recommending people watch is Adam Curtis’s new iPlayer-exclusive documentary Bitter Lake. (Obviously in reality available elsewhere for those not in the UK.) I realise, of course, that recommending a documentary about Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and the making of the modern world which clocks in at over two hours long is a bit of a hard sell. But it’s shorter than watching the Super Bowl, and you don’t have to endure any tedious “discussion” adverts or halftime shows! Plus, as I emailed to a bunch of people I thought might just be interested:
Quite apart from being a fascinating history, it’s also very unusually filmed. Basically, he got access to all of the BBC’s archive of everything they shot in Afghanistan, including lots of bits of film which never usually makes it onto news broadcasts. Not everything falls into a pacey narrative: the film is long because he deliberately lingers on footage. But the end result (I think) is quite extraordinarily effect in forcing you to think about Afghanistan as a real place, rather than a ‘TV news’ place filmed in a ‘TV news’ way.
It’s a story which is never really told: how many people today discuss the Soviet experience in Afghanistan? But even if you don’t agree with all of his conclusions, I don’t think you’ll regret investing the time.
Later this week I am going back to New York after a far-too-long nine year gap. After that, I promise a blog post with more photos (definitely), less wordy paragraphs (maybe) and fewer brackets (not a chance).
We put down our $10.25 plastic cups of Budweiser to stand for the national anthem. As the arena goes dark, the screens fill with the American flag and stock footage of a bald eagle. Speaking strictly musically, it is a very odd song. By the time we get to “land of the free” cheering has already broken out – partly from pure relief, it feels like, of the singer’s successful scaling of the octaves.
When Katie first announced at work that she was going to a Monster Truck rally at the weekend, I laughed at her. By late evening, I was sending begging texts asking to come along. I can go to all the nice parties and restaurants here that I want, but there are nice parties and restaurants everywhere. Watching comically oversized trucks compete to spin around in circles and leap over dummy cars: this seemed like a reasonably American opportunity. (“…the 2014 Monster Jam tour schedule will unfortunately not include an event in the UK”, their website informs fans. They are, however, “working diligently to have Monster Jam return in 2015”.)
If you’re imagining something rugged and cowboy, you’re in for a disappointment. The keynote of Monster Jam is family-friendly, and most people are here with young children. Think sports entertainment, in much the same vein as wrestling. The atmosphere, diesel fumes and sticky floors aside, is really pretty sweet. Suitably cute children are picked from the crowd and rewarded with free tickets to next year’s event. (It’s OK, the promoters will make it back on the hot dogs.)
Those things which are culturally dominant are often invisible. So it is with monster trucks. The thrill of watching a failed jump – seeing the truck yield backwards to gravity and land upside-down with a thump, smashing its windows in the process – this is probably universal. We’re all secretly wondering if a bloodied driver is about to be pulled out from underneath… whether the lights will dim unexpectedly for an unexpected tragedy. Of course, it didn’t. Of course, everything was fine. But as we warm to the fake-danger on stage, half the audience has already slipped in their ear buds. We’ve become accustomed to a culture which sees nothing strange in this – like selling anoraks in the queue for a water ride. Spectacle shouldn’t just be risk-free – it ought to be discomfort-free, too. A reasonable aspiration, perhaps, but it pushes ever wider the gap between our controlled experiences and the messy complications of ‘real life’.
We walk back to the train station to get some exercise. It’s about 5 kilometres – waiting for the bus (or, of course, jumping in the car) would be as normal in Britain as in America. Less common are the half-hearted attempts at sidewalks, which – to be fair – are often buried in snow. Running across the intersections feels greatly more dangerous than anything back at Monster Jam, but it’s also quite exhilarating.
Near the station, we pass the Rosemont Public Safety building. Their insignia is a hammer crossed with a machine gun. There’s no sign of any ear buds, but I wouldn’t be surprised.
A monster truck jumps through the air
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
