HeadSpill

(Submission piece for The Scotsman)
August is fast approaching already I’m packing and racking my brains to make sure I’ve covered everything. clean underwear, check. Digs, check. Multimedia bells & whistles, check. Tightly written hilarious Show, check (I hope).
I’m taking my first full stand up show to the fringe, and to be honest the thing stressing me out the most isn’t submerging my brain into the all encompassing creative din of sound, colour and taste. Or my show, which still needs work, but is robust enough to set sail on the sea of competitive mirth. The cause of my furrowed brow is the multimedia elements that go with the show. Also being the control freak I am it’s all triggered by remote control instead of having a tech on hand.

Comedy and technology aren’t exactly a marriage made in heaven, one is born of sponteneity, adaptability and  tangents that creates humour, the other is about order and numbers, and safe predictability. Arriving at a recent preview show, loaded with AV gear like an powerpoint terminator, one of the others comics, armed with only a handful of written notes made the comment ‘how can I compete with that?’ and as much I as I understood the question, it’s a bit of a moot point.

Multimedia Bells and whistles are exactly that, and shouldn’t be a distraction. If anything he’s far better equiped, and purer to the art form of stand up. Good writing is the core of any show, and if the show can’t be done without multimedia, then arguably it’s not straight stand up.

Increasingly comics at the fringe are using projection and multimedia elements to enhance their shows, and I’m biting off a sizable of in mixing character comedy, stand up and multimedia together in a themed show about eczema. Did I mention my show was about eczema?

The previews I’ve done so far already I’ve pressed the wrong button good few times. Ironically pressing the wrong button is getting a big laugh, which is a result, but not what I’d planned at all. As long as I don’t do it too much, I might just keep it in the show.

‘John Cooper: The 30 Year Itch’ is on at the Canons Gait at 7.15pm from 2nd - 25th August and is free.

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The Apple Bar, Bristol. It only serves cider. It’s on a boat. What more do you want! I’m in heaven! (Some swearing)

I am becoming addicted to Hopi ear candles. I had my ears done with them and now I don’t feel like my ears are properly clean without having them done at least once a fortnight. I’d wanted to try them ever since I saw the picture in the holistic therapy shop of an old woman lying peacefully on her side while an unidentified hand holds a lit a candle made of beeswax in her ear, like her head’s a big waxwork cake, or she’s just died and they’re having some sort of weird party.

I also didn’t understand how they work either, and in my speculation before I got the courage to use one I made up my own theory about how they worked. What they actually do is create a kind of vacuum chimney in your ear because the candles are hollow so it gently sucks the wax out of your ear, but not knowing this I came up with the idea that their must be some kind of really long wick on the bottom that is pushed into your ear like an enema and all the wax drips down and mixes with the wax your ear, then cools down and you pull the whole thing out like one big plaster of Paris mould of your ear drum which you could keep and put in a jar.

I’ve always wanted to go to Brighton, so it was a polite surprise when my highly organised and forward planning female partner informed me we were going there, in the car on the way to London mere hours beforehand.

Girls are great aren’t they? I have a tremendous affection for mine, however, as I’ve mentioned before, with my experience of ‘proper relationships’ only coming after the age of 30, my brain is full to bursting of habits, theories, cod philosophy and happy bobbins, that until now has remained far outside the direct burning gaze of female scrutiny. Under this new light of experience I have learned a lot of things quite quickly, like not to just say ‘yes’ if you haven’t fully heard the question asked.

I was expecting a foursome. As in my lass meets her mate, and I meet her bloke, they catch up and we find stuff in common to talk about, which would have been comparing the merits of Call of Cthulu and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons having found a large framed map of a fantasy kingdom in the lounge. Alas he wasn’t there, having devoted his whole weekend to said pastime (, and before condeming us both as geeks, you’ve got to respect a guy who’s negociated himself an entire weekend of pure escapism with his mates).

We also shot some footage of ‘Danny Pensive’ my character creaton/alter ego which Bron is working on. It’s one area of our relationship I can’t fault, she loves pointing cameras and recording everything the moves, and I’m an attention seeking egotist. It just works.

Brighton was in the middle of it’s Fringe festival, the venue where we saw two plays venue was a bit small, but the plays were good, Rachel (Bron’s mate we were visiting who wrote one of them) clearly has a good ear for dialogue, and giggles a lot.

Sunday consisted of wandering around London looking at landmarks and filming, then going to see the comedy store players. It’s the second time I’ve unintentionally seen Phil Jupitus, and despite not being a bad improviser he did suffer from some proper stagemongering, a trait which I myself suffer from.

K800, Aye.

I have a new phone. It’s terrible. I’ve only had my last one a year. Despite my loathing for disposable technology as fashion accessory, my last phone was a ‘motorola sliver’. To be honest I didn’t care what kind of phone I had, I just wanted one with a camera on it. And the camera on it was rubbish, My new phone is a sony ericcson with a proper 3mpx camera on it and loads of other gubbins that I’ll probably never use. The golf game is highly addictive though.

God I feel old, I can remember in my Student gaff at Uni having to go round the corner to the phone box in the rain with a stash of 20 pences to see who was doing what on friday night. We did have a land line, but between the four of us only two were paying for it, one was never there and the other guy whose name escapes me as he was such a recluse openly stated he didn’t like the idea of paying for anything he ‘couldn’t see’.

This led to a metaphysical discussion about how to quantify the electrical implulses that came down the phone line into the phone and I explained that yes, although the telephone handset itself was paid for, it was the conduit for the energy and was the nearest thing to a solid object there was. He tried it a couple of times, but it’s hard to justify phone use to a recluse with no friends.

Anyway it’s a nice phone, but I feel I’ve already damaged the enviroment beyond repair simply owning the thing. Still, if the radiation melts the ice caps tomorrow and we all drown, I’ll be able to compose some nice photographs of the world collapsing.

Danny Pensive visits Brighton

I casually dropped the word ‘multitudinous’ into conversation last night. I’m quite pleased.

Big words, and the use thereof. It’s somthing I bang on about every now and then, there’s just not enough people making full use of the English language anymore. I remember once waiting outside a metro station in newcastle when someone came up and asked If I knew where the biscuit factory was, (an art gallery build on the site of an old bakery,) and what the nearest metro station stop to it would be. I named two stations saying the venue in question was ‘equidistant’ to them. The initial look I got was one of puzzlement, like I’d said something that was nonsense or delibrately confusing, but then a smile cracked right across her face and she repeated the word back to me, ‘equidistant!’, taking pleasure from the use of the word.

I was pleased she smiled, because in the few short moments beforehand, when she was looking at me curiously, like i’d just been beamed down from another planet, my brain begangearing up for a defensive response for an “eh?” or “you what?”, to which I like to think my retort would have been somthing like ‘if you don’t know what it means then I’ll give you themetro fare, you need all the education you can get’, but probably wouldn’t.

The full English langange, like the breakfast, is a rich and cultured affair, if you can use a big

word, do it.

Other stuff.
My sweet girlfriend took me to Colwyn Castle in Wales. Lovely. However as I was walking around I couldn’t trying to compare it to the castle in the game ‘Oblivion’ which I’ve been playing recently. oh dear.