ActionLogr User Story Andy http://actionlogr.co.uk/user-story-3-andy/
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ActionLogr User Story Andy http actionlogr co uk…
http://distributedresearch.net/status/actionlogr-user-story-andy-http-actionlogr-co-uk/
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November 27 2011, 3:23am | Comments »
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Brian’s Action Logging Story A http actionlogr co…
http://distributedresearch.net/status/brians-action-logging-story-a-http-actionlogr-co/
Brian’s Action Logging Story A http://actionlogr.co.uk/action-logging-stories-brian/
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November 21 2011, 1:43pm | Comments »
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Smash! – review
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/04/02/smash-%E2%80%93-review
A Theatre review of Smash! at the Menier Chocolate Factory Theatre, London
This article titled “Smash! – review” was written by Michael Billington, for The Guardian on Friday 1st April 2011 20.30 UTC “Is there anything that matters less than a musical?” a character irreverently asks in this revival of the late Jack Rosenthal’s 1981 play. It’s not a sentiment one ever expected to hear on the stage of the Menier. But it sums up perfectly the comic anguish at the heart of Rosenthal’s biliously funny piece: a backstage story based on his own nerve-wracking experience of seeing his TV play, Bar Mitzvah Boy, turned into a musical floperoo. The musical, as everyone tells you, is a collaborative form: what Rosenthal captures is the high emotional cost of bringing together so many competing creative egos. In this instance, there is an added cultural clash: a Broadway composer and director find themselves yoked to a British lyricist and librettist under the shaky supervision of an American-Austrian producer. Things look bad from the initial New York encounter, when the veteran composer dismisses the book and its “cardboard, asshole characters”. Matters get even worse in the course of London rehearsals and a Manchester try-out after which the director demands new sets, costumes and rewrites of the rewrites. Yet, in the strange way of showbiz, everyone still believes miracles can be achieved by the time of the West End opening. I wish Rosenthal had defined more clearly the show on which they’re working: we learn its title, Whatever Happened to Tomorrow, and not much else. And, although Rosenthal forgiveably changed the book-writer’s gender to avoid a Twelve Angry Men feeling, it slightly weakens the enterprise’s testosterone-fuelled absurdity. But what he captures perfectly are the shifting loyalties of the team, the oscillations between insane optimism and despair, and the notion that a musical is like some giant, uncontrollable machine with which everyone feels obliged to tinker. As the director claims, in the play’s best single line: “In a musical nothing’s all right until it’s too late to be changed.” Tamara Harvey’s production creates exactly the right sense that everyone, while working for the good of the show, is protecting their own territory. Richard Schiff, of The West Wing fame, makes the composer a figure of wondrously acerbic vanity who prefaces every remark by reminding everyone of his 28 Broadway scores. Cameron Blakely’s director is all elegantly attired bombast masking profound insecurity. And Natalie Walter plausibly makes the writer, clearly representing Rosenthal himself, the still, small voice of sanity in this creative madhouse. But the funniest performance comes from Tom Conti as the producer who seeks to exude avuncular reassurance while secretly aware that the show is under-capitalised. What Rosenthal’s delightful play really proves, however, is that musicals operate in a special way: in conjuring up a world of fantasy, they leave their creators trapped in their own private bubble of preposterous self-delusion.
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April 2 2011, 11:37am | Comments »
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The weekend’s TV: The Killing
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/27/the-weekends-tv-the-killing
No spoilers, just a pice to say that The Killing on BBC 4 has been the best thing on TV for ages.
This article titled “The weekend’s TV: The Killing” was written by Sam Wollaston, for The Guardian on Saturday 26th March 2011 23.15 UTC Non-spoiler alert: there are no spoilers in what follows. If you’ve yet to see the end of The Killing, or any of it and you plan to, it’s still fine to read on. Honest. I need to explain something about the mechanics of this column. Unless there’s some massive live TV event on Saturday I file copy for Monday’s edition, the weekend’s television, on a Friday. The early deadlines are to allow people who work on the print edition, the newspaper, to have some kind of a weekend. I don’t know whether they deserve one, but that’s another matter. The point is, I’m not going to discuss who it was whodunnit in The Killing (BBC4, Saturday), the conclusion of which was obviously the Big Thing this weekend. It wouldn’t be fair on my editors and subeditors. For those of them (loads, this is prime Guardian territory) who have been watching, it would totally spoil their weekend. For the others, it would spoil the box set which I will be urging them to get hold of as soon as it comes out. If you do want to discuss how Pernille could possibly have slaughtered her own daughter (oops . . . only kidding, hahaha), then you need to go to Vicky Frost’s excellent series blog. Which you almost certainly have done already – more than 1,200 posts after the last one. And there are half a million viewers of the show – not bad for an obscure foreign-language drama on BBC4 that requires serious commitment. And after all that hype, who’s talking about Boardwalk Empire? I will say, however, that the end of The Killing has left a frightening gaping void in my life. What is there to think about now, to lie awake worrying about at night? (I had a nice little theory about Nordic neo-Nazism, Mayor Bremer, and the bid for the 1984 Winter Olympics on the go). In my house, The Killing – or Forbrydelsen, as we’ve come to call it, pretentiously – has crept up and engulfed us like the gloom of an unlit Copenhagen cellar in November. Not only has it been pretty much the only topic of conversation for the past 10 weeks, but we’ve also begun speaking in Danish. Pass the salt, tak; shall we get a hund? We’ll call out “Troels!” in the voice of Rie Skovgaard for no reason at all, often in our sleep. And then think of excuses to say it again. Who are ugly and live under bridges? “Troels!” How does the fisherman catch mackerel behind his boat? “Troels!” What does a bobby on the beat do? He pa-”Troels!” Shut up! I’ve also asked my girlfriend to dress up in a loose-knit white Scando sweater and walk about in the dark with a torch, saying nothing, stony faced, giving nothing away . . . anyway, sorry, perhaps you don’t need to know about that. The reason for the obsession is simple: The Killing is brilliant, the best thing on television for yonks. It started with the brutal murder of a teenager, then dragged us along for 20 hours, mainly in the dark (sometimes with a torch, sometimes without), up side paths and cul-de-sacs, doubling back on itself until it eventually reached its conclusion, leaving us exhausted. And emotionally drained too, because The Killing isn’t just a thrilling whodunnit, it’s a very human story that never lets you forget there’s a tragic death at its heart. It has some of the most interesting and real characters on television, who develop and react to the drama as it unfolds. I’m talking about Pernille and Theis Birk Larsen, Hartmann (“Troels!”), Bremer, Meyer. And Sarah Lund, of course, possibly the most single-minded detective in TV history, but also seriously fallible and therefore believable, and now officially the coolest woman in the world. A mesmerising performance by Sofie Gråbøl, by all of them. The Killing is also beautifully written and directed, deeply atmospheric and fantastic to look at once you get used to the dark. Eat plenty of carrots if you’ve yet to get involved. Which you must do. I do still have a few questions – mainly about Danish police procedure, but also about some of the political stuff and who knew what when. So conversation isn’t totally dead yet. Or maybe I’ll go back and revisit earlier episodes. I really think you could, already, and get more out of it; there’s not a lot of television you can say that about. The final body count is six, or seven if you count the earlier one. My final score is clearer, and higher. Ten. Out of 10.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.
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March 26 2011, 7:05pm | Comments »
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If you earn less than the average wage, you’re not middle class. It’s all a scam
I don’t know what class will be protesting today – squeezed, strugglers. But will they resist the fiction that class no long matters? If you earn less than the average wage, you’re not middle class. It’s all a scam.
This article titled “If you earn less than the average wage, you’re not middle class. It’s all a scam” was written by Suzanne Moore, for The Guardian on Saturday 26th March 2011 09.00 UTC My cafetiere is pink. Shocking pink. I am shocked myself, as I reckon now I must be the most middle-class person ever to have lived. For this is one of the ways we now reckon class. According to pollsters. So disturbed was I that I checked its make. Boden? Aaaah! No, Bodum, and I need glasses. This is not product placement by the way, I am simply trying to place myself in class terms. If class is now deemed to be about what one consumes as opposed to being about what one produces, I might as well put it out there: my coffee maker. Judge me not by my ancestors, but by my penchant for vividly coloured kitchenware. Posher friends, or at least some people who claim to know about food, scoff at my cafetiere and say I should make coffee in those proper French metal things, and they are probably right and they shall inherit the land. I won’t inherit the land, nor, I imagine, will the classes who drink instant coffee. They probably don’t deserve to. I mean, have they no aspirations, these non-real-coffee-drinking low-lifes? They are probably the same type of people whose children don’t read 50 books a year, I bet. Really, there is no hope. Seven out of 10 people now define themselves as middle class, so we may just look up or down on the three who don’t. Presumably they just tick the box marked “non–dom” or “can’t be arsed”. Who is to know? But really there is more to it than cappuccinos. I am shocked at the bloodless coup that has been achieved here. As social mobility has faltered over the last 20 years, we have the majority of people “self-certifying” as middle class. Certified is the right word, if you ask me. Delusions of grandeur are one thing. Delusions of being middle class when you earn less than the average income, and are indeed struggling, may suggest the class war is not going that well. It’s really difficult maintaining a class war when everyone says that they are on the same side. And believe me, I try. I hate to argue with Lady Gaga (deeply middle class) but I wasn’t Born This Way. I was born another way and got on and got out somehow. My cohort is probably the last generation to achieve real social mobility. And if you now look at the studies, despite the myth constantly repeated, it’s not grammar schools that made the difference. To change one’s class position leaves one in a kind of no-man’s land, unable to share the nostalgia for the good old working classes, but always willing and able to rubbish one’s new milieu. Much about working-class life is deathly dull and about anaesthetising oneself into numbing stupidity. The nobility of manual work was a necessary fiction. No man would live half their lives underground if they had another choice. No woman now happily gets up in the middle of the night and leaves her children to go and clean office floors. What has happened is that the main political parties cottoned on to the idea of aspiration being a vote-winner exactly at the same time when those aspirations could not be met for many in a globalised economy. Home-owning, self-reliance, a decent job for life, nice holidays, a taste for authenticity and real “experiences” came to define us. What we bought, rather than what we produced, became our core identity. As any fule kno, or OK, any old Marxist, this is not what social class actually means. This is reducing class to the trivia of etiquette and consumer power. The reality has been that as we produce fewer and fewer goods, our patterns of employment have become more haphazard and confused across the class spectrum. People on incredibly low wages are still required to look smart, present immaculate CVs and be respectful, even when on hideously short-term contracts. This may make them “feel” middle class. Alongside this, every politician has tried to wrap us up in some warm, fuzzy blanket of uniform classlessness. Last year Gordon Brown was promising that Labour would create “more middle-class jobs than ever”, and would also represent “the mainstream majority”. What on earth did this mean? Is it any more true than Osborne’s more obvious lie, “We’re all in this together”? The coercion of smooth, achievable middle classness was brought about under New Labour. Triangulation, remember, meant there need be no more class conflict or fights between workers and bosses. We were just floating in a perfectly harmonious world where things could only get better. The real working class remained problematic, and the workless morphed into what we now call the underclass. When Charles Murray started using that word in the mid-90s we reeled. The poor were not just people, he said, who didn’t have money, they were also morally impoverished. Now we use that word and others like it all the time: Chavs, “urban”, people from estates. Look at these people and their vulgar desire for instant gratification. Even instant coffee. Middle-class “values”, on the other hand, mean what? Some idea of restraint, of naturally knowing what’s good and being prepared to work for it. And, er, having a Ford Focus. If you don’t mind being defined by vote-hungry politicians or people who want to sell you stuff, then go for it! But I am sorry to say that when you are earning less than the average wage, even though your work may be sedentary rather than manual, don’t kid yourself, people. This is a massive scam, this horrible mutation of all into some homogenised vision of middle-classness. The old word for it was hegemony. Which, I can see, is as about as fashionable as class war. But when Gramsci described a culture in which the ruling class “persuades” the lower classes to accept its values, he could have had little idea of how parties of “the left” would also bring this about. But the rush for the centre ground means just that. The old collectivities of unions or the bonds of manual work have given way to individual fear and loathing in the workplace. Technology means outsourcing, and has been a liberation for some, but for others it means total loss of autonomy, and a working life that is under constant observation. The problem now is that mere aspiration, middle-class or not, is not enough. As if it ever was. The much-derided aspiration of the young – to become famous without necessarily having any talent – is no less nutty than many current political aspirations. We are to have growth without investment. Daft. We are all to stand tall and proud while we lop off the limbs of the public sector. Crazy. I don’t know what class of people will be protesting today. They may well be squeezed. Strugglers, downsizers. Or not from any of these marketing categories. They may simply be registering the fact that their individual interests are actually not those of the ruling class. Some may think they are middle class, and some indeed may be. Whether they resist the fiction that class no longer matters is surely much more significant than how they drink their coffee. For these new decaffeinated, tepid definitions of class are nothing like the real thing. And certainly not for the likes of us.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.
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March 26 2011, 8:48am | Comments »
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Douglas Adams’s Doctor Who story to be novelised
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/24/douglas-adamss-doctor-who-story-to-be-novelised
The lost Doctor Who episodes serial by Hitchhiker’s Guide author Douglas Adams will be published sometime in March 2012
This article titled “Douglas Adams’s Doctor Who story to be novelised” was written by Benedicte Page, for guardian.co.uk on Thursday 24th March 2011 14.58 UTC A novelisation of the “lost” Doctor Who serial Shada, scripted by Hitchhiker’s Guide author Douglas Adams in 1979, will be published next year. Adams wrote three series of Doctor Who in the late 1970s, when he was in his twenties and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was first airing as a BBC radio comedy. Shada was intended as a six-part drama to finish off the 17th season, with Tom Baker in the role of the Doctor. The story features the Time Lord coming to Earth with assistant Romana (Lalla Ward) to visit Professor Chronotis, who has absconded from Gallifrey, the Doctor’s home planet, and now lives quietly at Cambridge college St Cedd’s. (The Doctor: “When I was on the river I heard the strange babble of inhuman voices, didn’t you, Romana?” Professor Chronotis: “Oh, probably undergraduates talking to each other, I expect.”) Chronotis has brought with him the most powerful book in the universe, The Worshipful and Ancient Law of Gallifrey – which, in a typical touch of Adams bathos, turns out to have been borrowed from his study by a student. Evil scientist Skagra, an escapee from prison planet Shada, is on its trail. Large parts of the story had already been filmed on location in Cambridge before industrial action at the BBC brought production to a halt. The drama was never finished, and in the summer of 1980 Shada was abandoned – although various later projects attempted to resurrect it. Douglas Adams’s Doctor Who series are among the very few which have never been novelised, reportedly because the author wanted to do them himself but was always too busy. Gareth Roberts, a prolific Doctor Who scriptwriter, has now been given the job. Publisher BBC Books declared the book “a holy grail” for Time Lord fans. Editorial director Albert De Petrillo said: “Douglas Adams’s serials for Doctor Who are considered by many to be some of the best the show has ever produced. Shada is a funny, scary, surprising and utterly terrific story, and we’re thrilled to be publishing the first fully realised version of this Doctor Who adventure as Douglas originally conceived it.” Ed Victor, the literary agent representing the Douglas Adams estate, said: “The BBC have been asking us for years [to allow a novelisation of Shada] and the estate finally said, ‘Why not?’” Having Roberts novelise the Adams script was “like having a sketch on a canvas by Rubens, and now the studio of Rubens is completing it,” he added. The book will be published in March 2012 as a £16.99 hardback. Adams died in 2001, and a posthumous collection of his work, including the unfinished novel The Salmon of Doubt, was published the following year. A Hitchhiker’s Guide followup, And Another Thing…., written by Eoin Colfer, was published in 2010, but Victor said there were “no plans at the moment” for more such sequels.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.
Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogDouglas Adams’s Doctor Who story to be novelised
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March 24 2011, 10:15am | Comments »
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