On a train in England

At the moment I am on a high speed train speeding through the great green expanse of England – or will be soon – we have just left London Liverpool Street Station and on our way to Suffolk; we are going to a tiny village called Great Finborough which is near Stowmarket – an old market town as you will deduce from its name.
I am due to do my play The 2 Sides of Eddie Ramone in Edinburgh for 3 weeks in August and whilst in London I went to a small pub theatre to have a look at the space as they offered me a slot there for July 23^rd to try it out before going to Scotland.
At the moment the train has stopped at the station in Stratford; now this isn't the Stratford in Stratford-upon-Avon where the Royal Shakespeare Company hang out but the Stratford in east London made famous many years ago by Joan Littlewood and her theatre group in Gerry Raffles Square – I believe Gerry Raffles was her partner in the venture and they produced plays by Brendan Behan, Lionel Bart and many others and some great actors. At the moment Stratford seems to be famous for the upcoming Olympic Games and I can see the buildings ready for the games as I look through the window I can see plenty of work and a wonderful round of delights to come next year.
I will be trying my play out first of all in Santa Monica as they offered me 3 nights there in June – so by the time I get to Edinburgh I should know it – I hope.
Yesterday I met the guy who runs the Edinburgh venue and he offered me a nice spot for a bigger poster – I hope that wasn't the lager talking so I sent him an e-mail this morning telling him that I would be taking him up on the offer.
We were in a pub in Great Russell Street, in Covent Garden, very near the Royal Opera House which is truly a beautiful white building and newly refurbished; I don't know if they still get funded by the Lottery Fund but it's well worth it; unfortunately it costs a fortune to get in way much more than regular theatre seats in the West End.
This means, of course, that the man in the street can very rarely afford to go there. Now you might say that the man in the street isn't interested in opera well I have to tell you that this man in the street loves it. I worked with a couple of opera companies many years ago; not as a singer, I hasten to add, but as a technician.
With the D'Oyly Carte company I did the sound; they specialised in Gilbert and Sullivan operas which is not grand opera as there is spoken dialogue. I didn't have to pick them up with a microphone or anything like that as their magnificent voices would carry over the sound of the orchestra and into the auditorium.
I had to play the announcements, which were pre-recorded – you know 'ladies and gentlemen would you kindly take your seats as the performance if about to commence.'
Usually the person who did the lighting on the grand master very sophisticated lighting board would do the sound which only be used for effects and music but with the opera companies and ballet troops the lighting cues were many fold so they needed another person to do the sound.
Now we are stopped at Colchester; it is the oldest recorded town in England and is also famous for a military nick; that's the place the army send you if you’ve been sentenced after a court marshal. It's not only a military prison as they have soldiers there too. I can't remember what regiment is there – maybe an Essex regiment. I was there years ago when I was in the Army Cadets and remember seeing a prisoner or two being marched around the parade ground by a sergeant on the double and the prisoner didn't have any laces in his boots.
We were only cadets and very young too; I looked younger than most and one of the regulars turned around to me and said “Oye! When did you leave off your nappy?”
I didn't say a word back, of course, but my mates decided it was a good excuse for a fight so we went outside and had a scrap; can't even remember if we won.
So back to the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company; as I sat in the control box there were a few tape recorders at the back which I would use for the announcements and when the company manager from the opera company came in all he saw was tape and immediately thought I was going to record and pirate the opera. Nothing could have been further from the truth because even though I loved the opera we had The Beatles White Album in the control room – nuff said??
But I worked with the Sadlers Welles Opera Company too on Grand Opera and that was really exciting and gave me a lifetime of pleasure.
The opera singers with their wonderful voices didn't always sound like that – most of them were Italian, of course, but I remember one singer who had a wonderful bass voice; I was backstage this time and had to knock very loudly and angrily on a door. It had to be a really hard knock and I had to use a hammer. The singer, with the bass voice, didn't speak with a bass voice when talking and he had quite a thick London accent.
“Give it a good bang there son – a really good old smack!”
I wondered who this was and turned quickly to see the aforementioned bass singer.
“Nice one, son” he said, walked on and came out with his wonderful voice.
So now we are nearing Ipswich and I thought I would be posting this on the train as it said there was free wi-fi; I looked on there and, in fact, it does say it's free but in order to use it free of charge you have to pay £2.95. Now what's free about that?

Being Irish and liking The Beatles

The original Dubliners

Here I am again – thinking; well I was thinking about something and what it is that identifies us to where we come from; I mean why are some people, a whole race of us, Irish? It's something in us isn't it's something in the soul – or even the sole.

The Welsh, Irish and Scots are basically Celts although there will be somebody to argue with that and say that the Celts are in the Baltic states or the Caucuses or some other wild place. The Celts are supposed to be wild and – I suppose I would have to agree with some of that as I've seen some really wild buggers on the west coast of Ireland and in Scotland. I don't think I've seen much wildness in Wales and there is another part of the British Isles that are supposed to be Celtic and that's Cornwall.

Up to the age of 5 I led as sheltered a life as any preschool child and spoke with the accent of my parents. We were an Irish family living in England but I only met Irish people; my parents' friends were Irish, their children were Irish and our grandparents were Irish and we all spoke with Irish accents; what else?

Then when I went to school I suddenly found that the kids and the teachers spoke differently; what was that strange way of speaking? They had English accents and I had an Irish one. So started my life of mimicry, I suppose, as I didn't want to stick out as being different.

I spoke with an English accent at school and an Irish accent at home; when I went to Ireland, which we did 3 times a year, they would call me English; that was my nickname. When I played football in the streets the other players would shout at me to pass the ball “Over here English!” they would say.

I would shout back “I'm not English, I'm Irish!”

Then I would return to England and school with an Irish accent again and when we played football and they wanted the ball off me they would shout “Over here Irish!” and I would shout back “I'm not Irish – I'm English!”

Can you blame me for growing up confused?

After a while what I was didn't matter; I got on with life till I was asked what I was and I had to say – Irish.

It's in us we're Celts.

In the 1960s my cousin loved The Dubliners and I loved The Beatles. I don't know if he'd ever seen The Beatles, and I'm sure I'd never seen The Dubliners, but we went our separate ways loving our Beatles and our Dubliners.

Even though I felt Irish, when the chips were down, and I had been thrown out of one or two pubs for rowdy behaviour – sometimes with my dad – I suppose I felt English till I actually discovered The Dubliners just like my cousin Eamon; they were magnificent.

I bought as many of their records as I could and that led me on to buying a lot of other Irish stuff.

I saw The Dubliners at the Barbican in London and people of all ages were actually dancing in the aisles. The rhythm was so infectious and tribal that I couldn't help but get out of my seat and kind of 'move' – it wasn't dancing but the whole of my body felt stimulated by this bunch of bearded big bellied middle aged men.

So I think the big thing about identity and knowing who you are owes a lot to the cultures of where you are from - namely the music.

I went from there to learning a lot of Irish music so I could sing it and accompany myself on my guitar and banjo; I was never a singer but I learned to sing and eventually made a CD – A Bit of Irish which is 16 Irish favourites but I had to lie about them being favourites as one of the songs was The Wild Colonial Boy, which I think is Australian and another one The Coombe I wrote myself.

Board of Equalization, Baby Boomers and Keith Richards

Keif!!

Let me have a moan; we do the market at Fairfax once a month; some people do it full time and go every week and rely on it for a living but it doesn't seem to matter how much money you take you are supposed to charge sales tax on top of everything you sell.

The whole idea of sales tax here is ridiculous; in Britain, for example, where the equivalent is Value Added Tax (VAT), the dealer doesn't have to register till they turn over something like $50,000 per annum; maybe more.

Here, market traders at the flea markets have to register and actually eat the tax – ever tried to charge extra tax at Fairfax Flea Market? Of course not they would laugh at you; after spending five minutes bartering and getting knocked down to a price the customer wants to pay they are not going to give you 10% more – and the way to make money at flea markets is to be flexible with your prices.

When companies like Wallmart etc set up in the state the Board of Equalization let them off tax free for ten years – and yet the companies still collect the tax; and pocket it more than likely.

E-bay traders charge tax; so it is time the law was changed; big companies like Amazon and the like should charge tax (it doesn't cost them anything apart from having to administer it) and maybe the small traders in California should have to turn over a certain amount before having to register at the BOE – it takes a long time to file the sales tax forms and also costs the market traders after the fact which forces a lot of these free enterprise entrepreneurs out of business.

So that's my moan.

Now I was thinking the other day and you know sometimes it really hurts to think – I was wondering whether any of us Baby Boomers know what it’s like to be old – so far I don’t.

When my dad was my age he appeared to me to be an old man; I don’t think I appear to be an old man to my children I mean, after all, my contemporaries are Paul McCartney, Rod Stewart and Keith Richard – oh maybe I should strike out the last one but how does he do it in any case.

I read that Mick Jagger always gave the impression that he was a waster but in private he was on health food diets and kept really fit for his very cardiovascular stage act – but Keith Richard!!!

I read in the book The Dark Stuff that he had taken so many drugs one night that they thought he was dead; then in the morning he got up, shrugged and got on with it. I just wonder how anybody who is supposedly so drugged up could play the guitar fantastically well.

But getting back to me which is what this is all about; sometimes I try to eat properly – not all the time but I try; my dad had bacon, eggs, sausages and black pudding every day of his life. Maybe that’s what it is - the diet; we have heard the phrase you are what you eat so maybe that’s true.

I saw an advertisement for hair dye the other day and they used the phrase ninety is the new fifty – are we really going to live that long and see our contemporaries prancing around the stage playing the guitar?

If we do see that we know that they will be playing the same songs they do now as they have been playing them since they started – the only one who seems to have changed his tune is Rod Stewart but he hasn’t changed his way of life – he still has a young blonde wife and recently that young blonde wife had a baby.

So there we are – that's it folks for today.

Jameson's Whiskey from Rock and Roll Ralphs and more.

Sorry to have been away for so long; I had a chest infection last week and it put me back a lot on my recording. So this week I have been almost exclusively making sure the chapters in my audio book are the right length for the CDs etc and now I have finished it.

The title – Who Was Gertie Ford? - will be available on Audible.com soon.

Sometimes when I am driving around Los Angeles I realise that there are things that happen here which don't appear to happen anywhere else.

In Britain at Christmas time the shops are full of things needed for Christmas; things you can buy for presents, food, turkeys, booze, clothes CDs etc – all at top price. Then on Boxing Day the sales start; here the sales start before Christmas so people can buy those bargains and in the long run the shops make loads of money and people get their presents before Christmas.

On Thursday it was St Patrick's Day; the local supermarket, Rock and Roll Ralphs, reduced the price of Jameson's Whiskey from $27 to $15; I bought two. In the UK they increase the price because when they think there's going to be a run on something.

I have been to Cannes a few times and the bars and restaurants would increase the cost of beer and wine for the rush at the festivals but places like Ralphs, and other stores over here, make a load of money and make everybody happy; especially the droves of people walking up to the check outs clutching their bottles of usquebaugh.

Last week I was taking my wife up to Ventura in our old Volvo Station Wagon when it blew up – gone!! The engine is now kaput and never to be driven again.

I had barely looked into my wallet to call the breakdown service when I saw in my mirror the So-Cal metro free breakdown service. I told the fella what had happened and he said they would come and tow me off the freeway within half an hour. If I'd run out of petrol they would have replenished my tank for free or even changed a wheel if I'd had a puncture – all free; California.

The breakdown truck arrived and dropped us at Denny's where we had a grand slam – 2 eggs, 2 sausages, 2 slices of bacon and 2 pancakes all washed down with coffee; $6.99.

When people visit me here they kind of stare gobsmacked in the street when they see a bus; nothing strange about the bus but they have bikes on the front on a special bike rack at the front for the passengers; they also have great room for wheelchairs.

You can just about make out the bike rack, above; I couldn't find a picture with actual bikes on them.

People put their bikes on the rack themselves and get out near a bike trail or even anywhere they want to ride their bike.

Yesterday in the San Fernando Valley I was stopped at the traffic lights when a light next to the traffic light started flashing – it said 'bus.' Then a bus came across unhindered as if it was a train.

So there are lots of things here in Los Angeles – including the weather – which add to the quality of life.

Of course there are a lot of silly people here who rush out and buy potassium iodide pills to try to prevent the radiation from Japan giving them thyroid cancer; it can protect against thyroid cancer, but not any other organ, and the people who need it are in Japan not California and because there has been a run on the pills here in the good old US of A the people in Japan, who need the pills, can't get them.

So it's not all sweetness and light – and last night, would you believe it rained!!!

Mardi Gras in Los Angeles.

Chris Sullivan and Justine Sullivan eating . . well eating gumbo!

Today is Mardi Gras – or to be translated from the French, Fat Tuesday or Shrove Tuesday in the UK; Pancake Day.

Most people there will cook and eat crepes with sugar and lemon juice or they'll have savory pancakes with various fillings.

They will toss those pancakes – it's part of the tradition – and I guess some of them will stick to ceilings.

It all comes from religion, of course, with shrove meaning, as a verb, to impose penance upon a sinner and also has something to do with the word shrive and all the other connotations so I prefer Fat Tuesday.

As with most of the religious traditions in Britain, Christmas, Easter and Whitsun, the religious side gets forgotten about and it is now secular tradition.

Today they will have the mardi-gras in New Orleans which is an excuse to celebrate; people will dress up in costumes and dance in the street.

On Saturday we went to the Gumbo Pot at The Farmer's Market on 3^rd and Fairfax here in Los Angeles – a place I have written about before on here.

Near the Gumbo Pot a band played a kind of New Orleans type of rock and roll; they had a pianist/singer, drums, bass, a trumpet and two saxophones and they sounded great.

When they played their first song an older man with beads around his neck and white hair (not me) got up and started to dance with a woman who was sitting near by; I don't know if they knew each other or not but they didn't mind as they were enjoying themselves and everybody was looking at them.

I must admit I had thoughts about granddad or an embarrassing uncle dancing at a wedding but they loved it and the crowd were loving it so who cares.

The next piece of music was a little more up tempo and standing near by was another fella with very long hair and a very curly pony tail and he was listening to the music and tapping his feet as he listened; then his feet started to move to a little more than tapping and he was snapping his fingers too.

Then he moved to the dance floor where the music seemed to catch hold of his body; I couldn't help think of the bear in The Jungle Book and I almost expected him to say the same line “I'm gone man – solid gone!”

He was swinging his hips, shaking his shoulders and generally rattling his bones as the music moved along.

Hovering on the side of the floor was a fairly tall woman using a walking frame; she had nice teeth and a lovely smile and was quite attractive and might have been around 70 years of age as was the pony tailed guy swinging his hips and taking the floor; he beckoned the woman with the walker and she shook her head; again I don't know if they knew each other but she kind of didn't really mean no so she left her walker on the edge of the improvised dance floor and joined the shaker on the floor like Lazarus getting up for Jesus.

He looked after her and guided her as she was, indeed, without the walking frame; it didn't stop him shaking his hips and dancing but she could only manage one dance.

Didn't stop him though – he was still dancing when we left.

Best director at the Academy Awards!!

David Seidler and his statue.

Well the Academy Awards have been and gone for another year and the winners and losers are have gone on to pastures new and revisited. The winners can report to their agents, publicists and their staff and say that they did indeed thank them from the podium and bored the arses off the rest of us!

No matter how the Academy try and stop they always come out with a list of people to thank – wouldn't be so bad if they just thanked their spouses but to thank people they actually pay!!!!

It's strange that the best speeches were from non-actors and in particular the writers; namely the fella who wrote the script for The King's Speech, David Seidler, and Aaron Sorkin, the writer of The Social Network.

Incidentally it was good to see the former win at the age of 73 – kind of knocks ageism on the head – but not really; one swallow doesn't make a summer.

By the way the publicity has him as a British writer but he sounded American to me!

The best picture went to The King's Speech and it also got the best director – as you will know.

Some years the awards have been split and people have suggested to me – in a bar, over coffee; nowhere important – that if a picture wins the director should win too.

How does that leave the 5 extra movies that are now nominated for best picture – 10 in all now – when they only nominate 5 directors?

Personally I thought the best director this year was Christopher Nolan for Inception – but how do I know that? How could I even have an opinion? I wasn't there and didn't see any of the work.

There are 3 big bosses on a movie but the director oversees the lot: the editor, the director of photography (the DP) and the directors themselves.

The director's main job is to direct the actors and lots of directors just don't know how to talk to actors to get the best performance from them; so they hire actors who direct themselves and in films and television that's most of the time.

These directors are more concerned with the lenses, the shots and how the film looks but – even though this is commendable – isn't that really the job of the DP?

How does a director advise an actor to play an excruciating, difficult emotional scene if they don't know themselves or don't know what to say to them to give them a clue. It's no good saying 'you have to cry here' or 'here you are angry;' an actor needs to know the reason.

There is one form of direction and lots of directors use which is 'faster' or 'slower' or even 'give it more energy.'

I did some work with student directors at The Royal College of Art film school in London and when asked how they would direct a very difficult and emotional scene for an actor, one of the replies was 'I'll start off with a tracking shot and move into a close up.'

Great direction?

So how did the director of The King's Speech win as best director? Because the performances were good? If so – what about Churchill? Or the fella who played Churchill – a fine actor but totally miscast; what did the best director do about that?

Don't get me wrong, I loved The King's Speech and mentioned it in this blog in November - Bugger Bogner - the Oscar goes to . . . http://dlvr.it/9Ht9B – but when I saw it I couldn't help but wonder about the composure of some of the shots.

I have noticed the same kind of shots in some of the stuff that comes out of Britain particularly in one of my favourite shows MI5.

A close up in a movie – or a single shot – should not have the subject in the middle of the frame; the subject should be slightly to one side or the other. Documentary film makers usually put them in the middle when photographing talking heads.

The middle is the weakest part of the screen.

So the character you are shooting should be on one side or the other – like this photo of me I edited from the imdB.

You see I am slightly over and looking across to whoever I am talking to; when the other person speaks they face the other way and are on the other side of the screen; this way you don't cross the line (I won't go into what that is now but if you are interested there are other places). It also looks comfortable and dynamic.

But in The King's Speech, and the things I have seen coming out of the UK they do this:

They have the characters talking to the side of the screen with a space at the back of the head. My picture might not be a great example but I'm sure somebody out there knows what I'm talking about!!!!

It makes it difficult to know where the other person in the scene is!

My question is this: if this was the only clue to his direction, apart from the aforementioned performances, why was the director of The King's Speech the winner on Sunday?