dramatic pause....

....wait for it....




.....WAIT for it.....



comedy? vs comedy - after a performance of "romance" by david mamet.

at what point do insults cease to be offensive and become pointless and hilarious drivel?
another question: when some pithy playwright starts whipping around insults, why is it naturally understood that he is kidding (because we have been told the play is a 'farce')? in short, how do irony and satire work to make us laugh? Of course we can look it up in a book, but someone please explain it to me - how do we compute comedy? i've heard of an Institute of Laughter (in Switzerland, is it?) - maybe they know.

let's say i knew nothing about the play (save the title) before i went in. david Who? sounds like a lactating badger! how did everyone in the audience know instinctively when to laugh? even the little pause before each round of guffaws was all planned out for us by the competent writers and actors - masters of timing. it amazes me how an audience just follows along like a crowd of simultaneously-walked dogs. Mr Mamet! Mr Mamet! tell us how you have us all laughing uproariously simultaneously: THIS is real audience participation. nobody had to embarrass everyone by creeping down off the stage apron to sit in your aunt madge's lap and don the old bag's spectacles. it makes me feel somewhat uncomfortable to have lost that subconscious control, giggling along with everyone like a communal trip to the ha-ha hotel.

can you have insult without injury? let's say yes, for the purpose of demonstrating current trends of Un-politcal correctness. smash humour, like that puppet who hits everyth- Punch, that's his name, yes punch&judy. punch humour.

so when the defendant (jewish) and his lawyer (episcopalian) build themselves up into a frenzy of "listen here, you koy Jesus-freak" and "you f'ing kites can't order a ham sandwich without mentioning the holocaust" (i'm so very PC!!), we are so aghast at hearing it that we laugh in shock but feel that none of it matters in the least. "he's just being funny", i hear people thinking. he's making fun of prejudice, not being prejudiced. the same sort of subtle humour occurs in south park with the whole canadian thing. most people (ahem, americans) don't get that the writers aren't making fun of canada, rather they are making fun of people who make fun of it.

do written words+subtext+action= communication? is life any different from the theatre, then (assuming you don't work from a script in real life)? is that the whole point - to have "make-believe" stage pieces resonate within our lives by illiciting emotions with which we empathize?

what about the opposite - do these dramatics draw you completely OUT of yourself and your experience - entertaining you as an observer? Jeanette Winterson in Art Objects challenges that we (as readers) have lost the ability/willingness to just enjoy art (books, in her case) objectively. we want to extract bits of ourselves out of characters so we can identify with them. when has it all become so egocentric? why can't we understand and appreciate those who are different from us? is that not just as viable as entertainment - a sort of intellectual pursuit?

one last mention of the almeida theatre, london, and of the star of the show, john mahoney - aka martin crane of frasier fame. but he also plays that wet-faced codger prof who is no match for heavy-lidded (not in that bette davis way, but in the "spare me, you putz" one) olympia dukakis in Moonstruck.

after a good foot-chewing

I can't sleep. It's 5 in the bloody morning, and I'm up. Just call me Limps With Foxes. The last time i was up at this ungodly hour was to catch a cab to the airport, and i had a nice convo with a tame urbane fox who was sniffing at my suitcase.

Am I a Drama Queen? Or am I a Dairy Queen? (Fairy Queen, yes, clearly) I went to Neal's Yard Dairy today - creme de la creme, quite literally, all organic - and bought an ewe's milk greek style yog. the wheels of stilton, cheddar, french, dutch and italians are piled neatly in the windows like dead soldiers, yet cultured and alive. it smells like a cellar (I was scrunching up my toes and shuddered with delight -i have this this wierd reaction to the smell of damp earth/cement) and also like vomit, so extremity visited me once again.

Past an ironmonger's square (tucked away near the 7 dials of covent garden) to Monmouth coffee shop, where the Sumatra had a dark cherry wood finish, like a 1916 writing desk I once saw that I cannot purge from my "I must have" memory. A man named Nicholas Saunders ran what sounded like a Ye Olde Purveyors Shoppe on the site "a very long time ago" the shaggy coffeeboy told me. I had inquired about the 4 ancient benched booths that we sit in (altogether now!) to enjoy our cuppas. There was one wee nook suitable for a sole person that was sad and irresistable all at once. Where to stare....I hastily bought a $15 mini-bag and hoarded it away in the freezer behind the cod stix. Nobody will look there, Scooby.

I used my charming Canadian accent (at least i thought i did) to procure many free samples from the face-product shop, had a nice chat with the naturopath at Neal's Yard Remedies, who gave me a tonic that tastes like raspberry juice, and proceeded to Chinatown. I won't describe the duck, which was likely hanging in the neighbouring shop and smoking a healthy fag earlier that morning. remember that Globe article a few months ago? let me see if i can find it...


click on first link in google.

yes, you see? my dinner did bear a remarkable resemblance to that man in the photo.

In other news, i slunk into St. Paul's yesterday ( I am reminded about it because of the bathroom at the Monmouth cafe, which was the size of a confessional). Follow the signs to St. Andrew (Lurking) by the Wardrobe. He's going to come out of his british closet any day now... Anyway, the last service was winding down, prayers of the people and all that, and I was admiring a plaque inscribed Ralph of Sudbury when the organ postlude hit. I staggered visibly. A wash of screetching and booming that filled the dome and the ears. Only my companions (low brass player and RMT) seemed to be affected, and we stood there agape, alone. What stalwartness of the masses, what? I could discern no tonality in the chosen piece because of the way it all mashed itself together like a mince-pie. Worse/better than truly eerie film music - and i don't mean that Theremin/Onde Martineau "Good Vibrations" stuff. We decided that the organist was smearing parts of his body on the keyboard in order to make such wonderful sounds.

Midnight in Soho, 2005.

no fixing in doorways, no poppies for young men.
a new Desperado sign buzzes on the tinted mirror wall (which wraps up the entire room and backroom too). not a portent, i hope, but nellie orders one anyway, unable to resist the bartender's unembellished pitch: it's french. we sit in a corner - it's all a corner - on worn red pleather. said tender serves us a mixed grill of mostly cuttlefish innards with experienced hands. her name is brij. the dirty little drinks menu is pastelled on the dark mirrors, smirking away: baby woo woo, french kiss, wallis blue.

casanova lived here on greek street once. after he haunted venetian roofs in single bounds, oh that verb's all wrong....watering my coffee and sipping the flowers...is that what humbert said?

we're here solely because the entertainer has the same name as i do. an inspired outing. she is brazilian, as might be the bar, but i can't be sure. she strides to the back, a red gaucho hat pulled not quite over her shortish straw hair. she fiddles with an amp, rustles some papers. her guitar has leopard print holes in it. her voice is fluid and mellow, pleasing the sangria ears, soundtracking nellie's canterbury tales. feedback shoots through the speaker from time to improvised time and we twizzle our eyes before swivelling for the drinks pitcher.

this area was once a hunting ground. one could hear the hunting cries of "so-ho!" all the way to whimpletown. and one still can.

the conundrum

Here are two recent pieces from The Guardian and The New Yorker, respectively.


When meat is not murder

Would you eat steak if it had been grown in a petri dish?

Ian Sample, science correspondent
Saturday August 13, 2005
The Guardian

It is the ultimate conundrum for vegetarians who think that meat is murder: a revolution in processed food that will see fresh meat grown from animal cells without a single cow, sheep or pig being killed.

Researchers have published details in a biotechnology journal describing a new technique which they hailed as the answer to the world's food shortage. Lumps of meat would be cultured in laboratory vats rather than carved from livestock reared on a farm. Scientists have adapted the cutting-edge medical technique of tissue engineering, where individual cells are multiplied into whole tissues, and applied them to food production. "With a single cell, you could theoretically produce the world's annual meat supply," said Jason Matheny, an agricultural scientist at the University of Maryland.

According to researchers, meat grown in laboratories would be more environmentally friendly and could be tailored to be healthier than farm-reared meat by controlling its nutrient content and screening it for food-borne diseases.

Vegetarians might also be tempted because the cells needed to grow chunks of meat can be taken without harming the donor animal.

Experiments for Nasa, the US space agency, have already shown that morsels of edible fish can be grown in petri dishes, though no one has yet eaten the food.

Mr Matheny and his colleagues have taken the prospect of "cultured meat" a step further by working out how to produce it on an industrial scale. They envisage muscle cells growing on huge sheets that would be regularly stretched to exercise the cells as they grow. Once enough cells had grown, they would be scraped off and shaped into processed meat products such as chicken nuggets.

"If you didn't stretch them, you would be eating mush," said Mr Matheny.

The idea of doing away with traditional livestock and growing steaks from scratch dates back at least 70 years. In a horizon-scanning essay from 1932, Winston Churchill said: "Fifty years hence we shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium."

Several decades too late, Churchill's vision finally looks set to become a reality.

Lab-raised steaks will be off the menu for some time though. Scientists believe that while tissue engineering is advanced enough to grow bland, homogeneous meat, tasty and textured cuts will have to wait.

"Right now, it would be possible to produce something like spam at an incredibly high cost, but the know-how to grow something that has structure, such as a steak, is a long way off," said Mr Matheny.
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From Adam Gopnik’s essay “Two Cooks” about Fergus Henderson’s new restaurant St. John, in London. (08-22 issue).



"....his larger subject is a humane, mindful approach to cooking and eating, one that reconnects what we have on our plates to the actual lives of the plants and animals we eat. By eating what he calls “pink-in-plastic”—packaged supermarket meat—we cut ourselves off from the reality of what we’re eating; by “embracing your carcass,” to use his strange and lovely phrase, we are embracing our own animality and the real existence of our food. If we’re going to slaughter beasts, then we should eat beasts as beasts, head to toe, rather than turning them into neatly packaged filets, treating them as objectified consumer commodities".