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Suitably minimal “flyer” below:

Enter ‘The Zone’ with
Stalker Night @ A E Harris.

On Friday 17th July at 7.30
Stan’s Cafe celebrate one of their greatest inspirations

Andrei Tarkovsky’s extraordinary film Stalker

Alongside a DVD screening of this wonderful film there will be

a presentation of

Zone a photographic series by acclaimed photographer David Bate
inspired by the film, shot in an around its location.

two short performances devised by Stan’s Cafe
in homage to the film, one a ‘reworking’ of our first
major international hit It’s Your Film

of course there will also be a vodka bar

and, for those inspired by the tonsorial style of the film’s
eponymous ‘hero’, there will be a free hair clipping service on offer.

Tickets £5 on the door.

@ A E Harris, 110 Northwood Street, Birmingham, B3 1SZ

On this the second anniversary of my original comment regarding the Englishness of St George’s Day, I have commenced a new iterative documentation project, details to be released when I have some data.

I’ve signed up to see what it’s all about. I’m an explorer. Here I am.

One of my earliest memories is watching Blue Peter at what must have been the very end of 1973, making me five and a bit. The TV was filled with footage of Viking ships on fire, and one of the presenters was saying “and so we say goodbye to 1973…”. But what I was aware of at the time, and even more so now, was “what has 1973 got to do with Viking ships on fire?”

And so we say goodbye to 2008.

2008 has been a shit year for many people, including some personal friends, with bereavements and so on. It is not, I am sure, “the year in which everyone gets what they deserve”. I would have to be something more of an arrogant sod than I actually am to believe that it was the year in which I personally got what I deserved, as, overall it has been very good. I sipped champagne standing next to Ronnie Corbett. I visited Australia and New York for the first, and who is not to say only time. I became a forty-year-old man and got married on the same day. I made a return to theatrical performance after an eighteen year break. Lots of things.

Birmingham continues on its course of becoming a more interesting place  in which to live. Stan’s Cafe are instrumental in this, and this has been another in a series of triumphant years for them, culminating in bringing Of All The People In All The World to the city in September. In 2009 they take occupation of the A. E. Harris factory for who knows what fun. 7inch Cinema are another native cultural outfit that enhance the city and my life in it. I’ve been to a few Pilot Nights too, performing Reflections on the Counting of Sneezes in December. One of my favourite short theatrical performances was Edward Rapley’s 10 Ways to Die on Stage, during which I failed to get wet, and I was also very taken by Where We Live and What We Live For by Kings of England, with its gentle eulogy to the passing of time.

The back bedroom office, as visitors to Sneezecount will know, has reverberated to the sound of the Collings and Herrin podcast, and the Adam and Joe radio programme. I made a video for the Adam and Joe Video War, which I was quite pleased with, even though it lost.

And finally, my favourite cultural event of the year was probably Man on Wire, in which Philippe Petit sums it all up. “There is no why”.

It was Three Times Hotter Than Bournemouth.

This month’s All The Rage theme is Games and Play, and it is brought to you alongside the London Games Festival Fringe. Here below are some of my thoughts on the topic.

I think it was for my eighth birthday that I received a pair of binoculars. They were not toy binoculars but proper grown-up binoculars, hefty, with a binoculary smell. Naturally I was very pleased with them, but I was also distracted by two items that I found in the box. The first was a small sachet of granules which ate moisture that would otherwise get inside the lenses and spoil them. I would of course go on to encounter many more of these granules over the years, in leather goods, in the packaging of gadgetry, even in drawers, but this was my first exposure to them. You never forget the first time. The idea of these moisture eating granules intrigued me, as did the thought that moisture might get inside the lenses and ruin the binoculars. Where did this moisture come from? But what fascinated me more than the granules, perhaps more than the binoculars themselves, was the other item, the five year guarantee. I was eight years old, and this felt to me like a ridiculously exuberant promise from the manufacturers, a Lifetime Guarantee in all but name, and it made me dizzy. Looking forward in time as an eight year old I was holding the binoculars the wrong way round, time stretching out impossibly in front of me. Reversing the perspective as I prepare to enter middle age, the telescopic lenses have a foreshortening effect, as, for example, I blinkingly realise that those episodes of Saturday Night Fry that I have just listened to on YouTube first entered my consciousness over half a life ago.

It is the fate of binoculars never quite to live up to the excitement that their acquisition generates. They are in this respect very much at the same end of the toy box as spy kits and invisible ink pens, or walkie-talkies, wherein their potential is never fully realisable in the eight-year-old universe. Who is to be spied on, what secrets are to be encrypted, who will hear the over-and-out? It doesn’t matter. The function of these playthings is not to be found in their use, but in the giving and the receiving, and in the first heady moments of possession.

Those childhood years of Action Man and espionage were rich and fun, but as a teenager I was deprived. Attending a school alongside fifteen hundred boys, my only exposure to girls were the tantalising glimpses through the bus or car window as the traffic inched its way up the Palatine Road, the whining school-boy, with his satchel and shining morning face, creeping like snail unwillingly to school. Shining with grease and spots, of course.

I was not even able to take solace in technology, as the other boys did. Our household budget somehow never stretched to one of the VCRs that were laid out, with their gaping cassette trays, in the Littlewoods catalogue. This, combined with my relative geographical isolation, meant that I was never invited to the weekend video club meetings that clustered in the outer lying suburbs, and so I was excluded from the informal education of Escape from New York, or The Life of Brian, or Porkies, and from the Monday conversations as the retelling lubricated and reinforced the social networks of the video-owning classes. I once forced my way into one of these sessions one afternoon by resolutely staying on the bus as the others talked excitedly of a trip to the video shop, and then more or less just following them home. They didn’t seem to mind, but the video that we shared was King Frat, and I always got off the bus at my own stop after that.

I was further deprived of the natural recourse of the awkward and excluded teenage male, as our house contained neither computer nor computer games console. Actually strictly speaking it had contained a ZX81, but once I had deployed the customary two line program to fill the left-hand part of the TV with my name, the device lost its novelty, and was put aside. For some reason this dipping of the toe into the lukewarm waters of early ’80s home computer did not progress into the more fruitful areas of the Spectrum, or Commodore 64, or even Atari. Space Invaders, Pac-Man and Defender were therefore holiday amusement arcade treats only, but my lack of practice meant that these machines just ate my money, and I always felt more comforted by the capitalist allegories of the coin nudging cascades.

It’s time for the first All The Rage of a new autumn, and so here is my bit.

There was an old woman who swallowed a fly.
I don’t know why she swallowed a fly.
Perhaps she’ll die.

I swallowed a fly once, but I survived. The key, I think, is not to panic.

But the old woman in the story overreacted to the initial incident, resulting in a catastrophic escalation of hostilities. This is how the biological arms race played out:

Fly v. Spider v. Bird v. Cat v. Dog v. Goat¹ v. Cow v. Horse

Applying the “enemy’s enemy” principle, we can divide the animal combatants into two sides, or teams, as follows:

Team A
Fly
Bird
Dog
Cow

Team B
Spider
Cat
Goat
Horse

The sequential ordering of the teams in the original story puts us in mind of the tradition playground “first pick, second pick” system, though on this occasion we find a curious reversal, wherein the supposed weakest players are selected first, Team A effectively taking the first pick.

It is worth perhaps taking some time to examine in more detail how the two teams line up.

Sometimes a team is only as strong as its weakest player (butterfingered relay sprinters coming to mind) in which case Team A is in for a drubbing. Certain spiders could of course “have” any of the other animals, very much “punching above their weight”. (Equally, the bird that was swallowed to catch the spider would be in for something of a shock if the spider in question turned out to be the South American Goliath Bird Eating Spider.²) In all, it seems safe to conclude that the spider might well turn out to be Team B’s secret weapon, not least taking advantage of its opponent’s tendency to underestimate its power, a scenario endlessly exploited in David Carradine’s popular Kung Fu television series.

Assuming that the bird gets lucky, keeps its head, and overcomes the spider, it would then come up against the cat. Popular wisdom generally presents the cat as a wily and effective protagonist, the only possible problems being represented in the natural-order-overturning cartoons such as Tom and Jerry, or, most pertinently in this case, Sylvester and Tweety Pie. Did the old woman swallow Tweety Pie? It seems unlikely. Notch this one up to Team B.

The Cat versus Dog contest is as old as fictional animal conflict itself, and as hard to call as that between a monkey and robot, depending as it does on so many variables – age, breed of dog, “street” experience of the cat, previous martial arts training, etc. With the evidence presented to them, the Pools Panel award a score draw.

Sending in a goat to catch the dog is a curious strategy, given the dog’s more traditional role as a herder and “worrier” of domestic ruminants. Goats, however, are noted for their willingness to eat anything, and their stomachs are reported to be able to digest almost any organic substance – logically this would include dogs. Folklore surrounding the goat is also instructive. The three Billy Goats Gruff first outwit and then defeat in combat the apparently more powerful and aggressive troll, and research indicates that “a common superstition in the Middle Ages was that goats whispered lewd sentences in the ears of the saints”³. Sending in the goat, therefore, while at first sight quixotic, turns out to be a tactical masterstroke. Combining tried and tested butting and kicking skills with stamina, intelligence, the element of surprise and “PsyOps” (in the form of dirty whispering)⁴, that’s another round to Team B.

In desperation, Team A deploys the cow, an animal less suited to catching a goat it would be difficult to imagine. Unless the cow is planning on mooing the goat into submission, the situation is becoming hopelessly one-sided. If this were boxing, as commentators of all sports (except boxing) are prone to surmise, the referee would have stopped it a long time ago. Team B finishes the job itself though, with the straightforward deployment of the horse, since antiquity the experts’ choice when it comes to the rounding up of cattle.

¹ I had no idea that there was a goat until I checked. Where would I be without the Internet? Nothing but a little heap of bones.
² According to my favourite user-compiled Internet encyclopaedia, the Bird Eater, or Theraphosa blondi, while capable of seriously ruining a bird’s plans for the evening, is “fairly harmless” to humans, despite having a leg span of up to 30cm, and having fangs capable of biting off a human finger. Females have a life span of between 15 and 25 years, but males only 3 to 6, a discrepancy no doubt partly due to the idiosyncratic arachnid female’s attitude to one-night stands.
³ Internet encyclopaedia, ibid.
⁴ For more information about PsyOps, goats, and all manner of military crazybonk, see The Men Who Stare At Goats by Jon Ronson

This is how Joyfeed looks like to Wordle:

It’s time to pop over to the pdf magazine All The Rage and read about Monsters. My own contribution, a sobering account of celebrity excess, can be found below.

A dinosaur is diverted from a course of city-scale mayhem by a
Godzilla-sized packet of Chewits, cleverly mirroring the use of bright
candy to mollify the “little monsters” at which the advert is
targeted¹. I had thought that they had left the character at that, but
a quick trip to www.chewits.co.uk reveals the following:

The brand character, Chewie the Chewitsaurus, first appeared in a TV
commercial in 1980. Today he is an integral part of the brand identity
acting as a spokesperson for Chewits. Although his appearance may have
changed slightly, he is still very popular with the kids of today. His
original name was ‘The Muncher’ and only changed to Chewie in 1990.

He liked them so much he bought the company. Pausing only, like New
Labour, to change his name and his appearance.

But The Muncher’s hubris is nothing compared with that of the Honey
Monster. Originally a jovial sidekick, he first appeared alongside Henry
McGee in 1976².

“I’m not his mummy”.

Honey Monster’s shtick was that he destroyed everything in sight for his
love of “pieces of natural wheat, puffed up, and tasting of honey”³.
While the original advert juxtaposed the blundering Honey Monster with
McGee’s perfectly judged deadpan, subsequent outings became increasingly
far-fetched, and in the 1980s “mummy” was removed altogether. The 1990s
Honey Monster changed, both physically – the hair is longer and more
fluorescent – and in his demeanour. He is suddenly hip and coordinated,
scoring the winning goal for Kevin Keegan in football obsessed 1996, and
appearing with Boyzone the following year. Believing the hype, believing
his agent⁴, believing he is big enough to go it alone, he is no longer
the more-or-less-lovable clumsy sugar-obsessed proto-Blobby, he is now,
simply, a twat.

The reasons behind this sad transformation can be glimpsed in a
statement, apparently from “HM” himself, on his website:

In 2006 Sugar Puffs were acquired by the nice men at Big Bear. I was
very happy as I felt a bit unloved by my previous owners. Now I’m at the
centre of things again and Big Bear even decided to call the company
Honey Monster Foods.

The previous owners were Quaker. Why did they make him feel “unloved”?
Was there tension between the owners’ puritan, pacifist roots and the
increasingly brash and self-centred Honey Monster? It would seem that a
split was inevitable. Appearing with pop stars and footballers, even
performing his own 1998 “Sugar Puff Daddy” rap, was not enough: he had
to have the whole company named after him.

And so, like so many ageing vacuous celebrities before him, he has
re-invented himself again, this time planting his sticky, fake-fur
encrusted flag in the spiritual home of today’s media-literate,
intertextual youth, The Mighty Boosh. The press release for the latest
advert speaks of family fun and a “bizarrely comic musical ritual”, and
the advert’s crimp-style song ironically refers to “wheaty chums that
settle in transit”, but many fans remain unimpressed by the
appropriation of the Boosh, and Honey Monster himself admits in his blog
that “Some people like our song, but it hasn’t made everybody happy so
I’m a bit sad about that”.

Yes, he even has a blog, and he uses it to talk about his charity work
and appearing in OK! with Katie Price. He has, truly, become a monster.

¹ Real monsters of course exist not in adverts, but in the minds (and
occasionally wardrobes) of children. The things that keep us awake at
night are usually normal objects, distorted by our imagination, shapes
in the wallpaper, the big fluffy brushes on the sides of car washes, and
Concord, turning into bad-Emu when the nose drops. You were safe as long
as no part of you was sticking out from under the duvet, but, as this
included the face, breathing could become difficult (for which of
course, Gary Larson invented the Monster Snorkel: “Allows your child to
breathe comfortably without exposing vulnerable parts to attack”).

² The fun, and the horror, is available via http://www.honeymonster.co.uk/

³ Cookie Monster, meanwhile, destroys rather than consumes his objects
of desire. He has no oesophagus, what did we expect?

⁴ Eric Hall?

Last week, my companion and I found ourselves in the Islington area of London, and in possession of a voucher for Pizza Express. We had received the voucher by email, and had printed it out, as per the instructions. We were amused to note that in the “small print” it stated that photocopies of the voucher were not accepted. You could print out as many as you wanted, but not photocopy them.

This is amusing in itself, but provided extra amusement for us, as it reminded me of a curious incident from my time working for a publisher in Birmingham. I was in charge of a website that published technical articles, and was tasked with commissioning various experts to write for us. The website was well regarded and was doing well. One writer had done a nice article for us, and we were in the process of commissioning another from them when negotiations stumbled unexpectedly. In the tetchy aftermath, they commented that we published too many articles by writers with Indian names. We said that we would not stop commissioning articles from highly qualified and competent technical writers with Indian names, and left it at that. Fine, we thought. Weird, and annoying that we had already spent some time on the article, but, there you go. Then they emailed the editor to request that the article they had submitted, by email attachment, be sent back to them. I’ll say that again: they had sent us the article as an email attachment, and now, because we weren’t going to use it, they wanted us to email it back to them. Our amusement at this request, which we were happy to oblige, was muted only by the knowledge that we had already published a technical article by this person.

So, back in Islington, flushed with amusement at the follies of others, we ordered our meal, being careful to inform the waiter, as directed in the instructions, that we were in possession of, and fully intended to use, the voucher.

I ordered a Nicoise Salad, and my companion opted for a Veneziana Pizza. The voucher entitled us to buy one main meal and get (the cheaper) one free. So.

As followers of Richard Herring’s Pepysian weblog will know, Pizza Express has for some time offered a “discretionary” 25p to the Venice in Peril fund, with every Veneziana Pizza purchased^a. Whilst I have great respect for the Veneziana Pizza, I have a distinct and mildly irrational antipathy to Venice. I visited Venice once – a day trip from Croatia – and enjoyed a splendid Italian lunch in one of its many piazzas. The waiter attempted to instigate a “Venezian in Peril” fund of his own by adding a zero to the four thousand lira cover charge, effectively hiding about twenty pounds amongst all those circles on the bill, presumably in the believe that two hot, stuffed, pissed English tourists wouldn’t notice. I challenged him on this (using my fluent English) and it was all cleared up, but left a bitter aftertaste. One which I harbour to this day, in fact.

Herring does an amusing job of explaining the ins and outs of the Veneziana Pizza issue in the piece linked to above, but suffice to say that, although the 25p donation is “discretionary” there was no way for Pizza Express to guarantee that, when you order the pizza and pay the bill, whilst they can refund you the 25p, the system won’t donate 25p to Venice anyway.

So here is my conundrum. If you order a Veneziana Pizza, and you get it free on production of a “buy one, get (the cheaper) one free, does Pizza Express donate 25p to the Veneziana Fund?

^a As ever, when you look into it, the situation is more complex. According to the Word document linked to from the relevant page on their website, the 25p now goes to the Veneziana Fund, which then donates 50% of its “net receipts” to the Venice in Peril Fund, with the other 50% “being available for grants for the preservation, restoration, repair and maintenance” of various UK things that were around before 1750. According to the figures quoted in the above documents, as of 23 September 2007, the total amount raised was £1,736,842, and as of 14 March 2008, £1,147,669.68 had found its way to the Venice in Peril Fund itself.