Talk To Rex

It’s amazing how quickly you forget things – and equally how quickly you remember them again. Like French: I was taught French up to the age of thirteen or so (strictly speaking there were lessons until GCSE at sixteen, but I don’t remember learning more than how little you needed to know about pronunciation to pass), at which point I was, I’d like to think, not bad. I could have small conversations in French, providing they weren’t really about anything, and at one point I bought a headphone adaptor while on a school trip to Normandy. But then I was thirteen – my conversations weren’t about anything anyway (“la belle dame ne m’aime”), and a headphone adaptor was pretty hot stuff. I had more trouble trying to buy coat hooks in St Malo, but that was a few years later and quite a different story.

The point is that since then I’ve barely touched French – the odd brush with it, but nothing serious. Nonetheless, when I visited my sister in Lyons a few years ago, I found that not only could I still get by, have little conversations about nothing, and indeed buy headphone adaptors, I could also, after a few days there, start to follow along with more complex conversations (“la belle dame ne m’aime, mais veut dire de quelque chose”). I couldn’t join in (in any case these more complex conversations belonged to girls, which I’ve never really got the hang of), but I could sense it within my grasp. The patterns of the language had started to make sense, leaving me only with the north face ascent of my underdeveloped vocabulary. I had regained my thirteen year old’s French.

So it is with manual transmission.

Up until about two years ago I hadn’t really driven – a handful of lessons when I was seventeen, including two test failures, at least one of which was because my instructor managed to remove all confidence in my ability to reverse park just before the test, and the other one went wrong when I accidentally boxed in a learner driver who was going about two miles an hour and refused to get in lane. Since then I’d lived in Cambridge and London, neither known for being terribly car-friendly, and Cirencester where it seemed sacrilegious to the sheep (and in any case I still couldn’t drive).

Then, during 2004, doing some calculations of how much it would cost to take An Extremely Memorable Emergency up to the Fringe, we realised that it might actually be possible to buy a car, drive it up ourselves, and still wind up spending less than if we’d hired one. This turned out to be utterly false, but not before I’d signed up for driving lessons again. This time they worked.

So come January 2005, I was a licensed driver, although it wasn’t until January 2006 when I bought a car, for the tour of Impromime; the set consisting of a large tower, I needed a large car, and wound up with a Vauxhall estate which for some reason everyone else keeps calling a Volvo. Like many estates these days it’s an automatic, and thank god or I’d probably still be learning how to park the bloody thing.

Yesterday morning I dropped it off for a bit of love from the place I bought it, and they gave me a little courtesy car in return. Not exactly a fair bargain, and particularly not so because, as is common with small cars, it had manual transmission.

I didn’t stall it leaving the dealership.

Actually, I didn’t stall it very often at all – once at a roundabout in Newmarket, once parking outside my house, and once as I left the A14 because I’d been driving in fifth gear for twenty minutes or so and had completely forgotten it had a gear stick. Three times in half an hour still isn’t great though, and I cycled on to the station feeling a little worried about driving the car back again.

This morning dawned bright and crisp, or at least dully-lit and wet, and to my complete surprise I was able to actually enjoy driving while paying attention to gears, clutch and so on; given a couple more hours I’m sure everything would have flooded back again and I’d be talking fluent manual again. My conversations probably still won’t be about anything in particular, but dammit all my cars will have headphone adaptors.

Last night I followed the Maundy Thursday service at church with the suitably sombre The Last Temptation of Christ. I considered it particularly relevant at the end of a Lent which seems to have lasted for several years now – for I am still very much off the booze, and at forty-five days (one to go) have made it through the period of Lent with only three slip-ups – two of them very minor (the feast of St Patrick and the feast of St Aylett) and the other at my M.A. graduation when I was persuaded by Jamie Hawkey that I was actually obliged to drink on account of it being clitoris sunday. Or something.

On the whole then, I feel I’ve not done badly, and certainly it’s all good material if Martin Scorsese decides to make a film about me (it would feature a scene showing forty days spent in a dessert with only a bottle of Kaliber for sustenance).

Martin Scorsese’s film about Jesus is also full of good material. Much lambasted at the time of its release either on the grounds that it was sacrilegious or that it was a bit ridiculous, I feel it has aged well (being neither). Yes, so Judas talks like Harvey Keitel – it works. Even the potentially ridiculous David Bowie puts in a fine turn as Pontius Pilate. (Random fact: due to a myth that Pilate was born in Scotland, Billy Connelly apparently tried to persuade Bowie to play the part with a Scottish accent. That would have been ridiculous.)

Attempting to portray Jesus dramatically is fraught with peril and has been achieved well only occasionally (Bach) and much more often horrifically (Andrew Lloyd Webber). Before yesterday, the most convincing portrayal I had seen of Christ on film was in The Miracle Maker, in which he is made of plasticene.

But Scorsese’s film manages a picture of the Messiah that is more rounded than any other I’ve seen – and more challenging – because it takes more risks in interpreting the character and motives of Christ (something the Gospel writers more often than not leave to the imagination). So we see a Jesus racked with indecision and uncertainty, terrified by his increasingly inevitable death and prey to guilt and temptation on all sides.

I can see exactly why it got a whole load of Christians hot under the collar on its release. Okay, so a lot of them were upset that Jesus has sex with Mary Magdalene, but that’s in a dream sequence and a more intelligent viewer would see that as an important part of the ultimate temptation the film tries to portray. No, more generally, it is simply an uncomfortably human portrayal of a figure we Christians spend much of our time deifying. It’s much easier to deal with a God who is distant and etherial; to be confronted with one who has the same fears and desires as us is strangely unsettling. It’s one thing to talk about Jesus as humble, but to see him physically humbled by the limitations of the human form makes him seem “ungodlike”. Yes yes, he washed his disciples feet, but we don’t want to see him terrified, we don’t want to see him doubtful – that’s not the sort of God we want at all.

Of course, neither was it the sort of God people were after at the time, and it was equally difficult for them to accept. Maybe the hardest thing to understand about Jesus – still – is his humanity.

For all the liberties it takes with scripture (and with received wisdom about the person of Christ), in Scorsese’s film we finally see a Jesus we can identify with. And that, I would argue, is the whole point.

It’s been a good week for Neighbours alumni as far as I’m concerned. In an attempt to top meeting Jason Donovan, I managed to get hold of the one film on the CV of Ian Smith – also known as television’s Harold Bishop.

So on tuesday night I cracked open a few Kalibers with some friends and sat down for the film in question, which bears the title Body Melt. The back of the video announces that its director Philip Brody, “along with Baz Luhrmann, represents the exciting new wave of Australian cinema”. I can’t help feeling this is a little generous.

Which is not to write off the film – oh, no. Moulin Rouge it may not be, but it has a certain…ahem…style. Essentially, it’s the episode of Round the Twist that never got made because it was too sick. Or possibly just too nonsensical. I haven’t really worked out what the hell the story was about, but I’m pretty sure the lengthy subplot involving two people getting eaten by a family of inbreds had very little relevance whatsoever.

Although “relevance” is not really an appropriate word to use in this context. The film’s main raison d’etre is simply to show lots of different people dying in bizarre and horrific ways. The prognosis of “body melt” (it is some sort of disease) is sufficiently vague to allow for a considerable amount of variety where this is concerned.

But delightfully, even in a film which boasts a woman choking on her own enlarged tongue, projectile vomiting on an amazing scale, death by mucus and an exploding penis, our Harold Bishop is still a definite highlight – Ian Smith delivers his every line with an intense, meaningful quality, every single word used to its utmost potential in the hands of this consumate professional. If there is a reason to see this film (and there are many), it is first and foremost for this early tryout of the psycho Harold concept.

And apparently Quentin Tarantino loves it.

We also had with us the original feature version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, in comparison to which Body Melt is a work of pure genius. In these enlightened times, of course, we all know that a high-school girl kicking vampires about is rather a good idea. So it’s fascinating that back in 1992 the whole thing just sucked. It’s a slow, dull, uninspired mess – and the laborious storyline makes little more sense than the aforementioned antipodean rollick.

If I hadn’t known that the great Joss Whedon had written it, I’d instantly have dismissed the film with the old (and true) adage that a bad script means a bad film. But with the benefit of hindsight (seven series’ of Buffy and the tragically curtailed Firefly) I found myself searching for other reasons why the film is so appalling. And with much effort it was just – just – possible to see that somewhere in there were vestiges of a decent script. The production had simply sapped all the life out of it, and presumably because the dialogue was all being delivered about four times too slow most of the vital narrative exposition had to be cut.

So in addition to the old bad script, bad film rule, here are a few new things I’ve learned:

1. A good script doesn’t necessarily mean a good film.

2. Sparkling dialogue can be made to sound dreadful if delivered in a big echoey gym with long pauses between every line.

3. If you have to cut a script, try not to cut out all the bits explaining who your villain is.

4. If you don’t have a good script, an exploding penis will often ensure that your film remains entertaining.

5. But just to be on the safe side, cast Ian “Harold Bishop” Smith in one of the roles.

Last night I saw Jason Donovan.

I feel this is worthy of note because Jason Donovan was one of my great childhood heros – possibly even the greatest. For a period of maybe two years (which I remember as an eternity where it was always sunny) I was completely Jason obsessed. I listened to little else and I was so single minded about collecting and displaying posters of him that my parents felt it necessary for my sanity on one occasion to confiscate them for a week. Perhaps they were worried that I’d turn out gay.

At that time I’d have given at least one limb, possibly four, to catch a glimpse of the King of Pop.

How ironic that that my reason for seeing Jason Donovan was ultimately because I had turned up to watch somebody completely different in the same show. My dear friend Peter Head (who shares the same photographer as Alan Rickman) is currently playing the Beadle (and the piano) in John Doyle’s production of Sweeney Todd, which stars Jason Donovan.

(I confess, I was a little jealous. But only a little, for my taste in music has changed considerably since the late eighties. Some might say improved.)

Meeting one’s childhood heros is not always a pleasant experience, but in this instance I think my illusions have mostly been long-since shattered anyway, and Jason was pretty much as I would have imagined him to be. By which I mean, not really up to the part of Sweeney Todd either as a musician or an actor, but not anything like as bad as a lot of people might have expected or indeed hoped. And I have to say, I was rather moved by the sight of Jason struggling to do his best in a challenging role and a challenging production.

In full John Doyle style he was surrounded by multi-talented actor musicians playing their instruments and singing at the same time as coping with the necessarily complicated and clever staging. He looked – and possibly felt – a little out of his depth. But he coped, dammit – he strummed his guitar in “Johanna” (not at all badly), he sat and played the glockenspiel and cymbal when it was required of him and he didn’t fuck up the choreography. While he didn’t inspire awe, he kind of invited confidence in a weird kind of way.

When I was waiting at the stage door for Peter, Jason Donovan emerged to greet a smallish crowd of rather loathsome thirty-something women. They all had to be photographed with him, and get his autograph, and when he unwisely kissed one of them on the cheek they all wanted to be kissed. Looking rather out of place in the midst of these peroxide blondes was a balding forty-something man, who very seriously told Jason that he had “occupied the stage”. I feel they should all be ashamed of themselves – especially the balding man. I stood and watched from a slight distance, feeling quite relieved that I didn’t look in any way like a Jason Donovan fan. How times change.

But watching Jason Donovan being rather lovely, graciously kissing and signing and nodding sagely for the benefit of the balding man, even though he was clearly in a hurry – and after he’d at least given Sweeney Todd a good go, when let’s be honest he could still be lip-synching to “Too Many Broken Hearts” for students – I couldn’t help feeling just a little bit proud of him.

1. Good writing is about 2% hard work, 98% arsing around.

2. If you’re stuck for a direction for your writing to go in, have a walk to the post office. It often helps ideas to form.

3. If ideas are forming but you can’t quite get them out of your head and onto the paper, spend several hours agonising over the best way to make an inappropriate pun fit into what you’re writing. You can cut it out again later.

I discovered The Arcade Fire quite some time ago – I don’t mean “discovered” as in heard them in some student venue, became their manager and rocketed them to fame, I mean that their music was in my collection when they were still obscure. Since then, they have won awards, been nominated for Brits and Grammys, played at Fashion Rocks and had their music wallpapered over many a TV trailer; essentially, they have enjoyed mainstream success.

When you like music by somebody obscure, all you want to do is tell people about it and stand open-mouthed in astonishment at a world which hasn’t acknowledged the thing that you love. But when the world decides to embrace it, suddenly it feels as though you’re sharing something that was really rather personal. And so it is that I’ve found myself explaining on several occasions that, yes, I like The Arcade Fire, and in fact I liked them before anyone else so there – just so that people don’t think I’m the type of person to follow the crowd.

For which reason I am declaring now, at this point, while nobody can take it away from me, that I have fallen absolutely in love with The Dresden Dolls. I bought their debut album yesterday and it blew me away – it’s awesome and terrifying and brilliant. Oh, and I have tickets to see them in a few weeks time, at a relatively tiny venue.

In their case, I suspect massive commercial success is extremely unlikely – The Dresden Dolls’ brand of – ahem – “Brechtian punk cabaret” (to borrow one description of music that doesn’t really want to be categorized) doesn’t exactly scream “mainstream”. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

But do visit their website – not many bands post their hate mail on the internet, and it makes for extremely entertaining reading.

And just so you know – I was there first.

After many weeks of toil, www.jameslark.co.uk is finally online.

I made my first website when I was temping for the civil service using a free web-builder template, so there wasn’t any skill involved except in choosing the right pictures to put on it and pretending I was actually processing grant applications. (I maintain that my website is one of the most creative and interesting projects that the office in question saw, and I still didn’t get a government grant.)

But it has long since ceased to be useful and interesting, and for some time I have been putting off learning how to properly design a website. Until a few weeks ago, when I started the process of sitting for many hours at a time making decisions about layout and looking a lot of photographs of myself.

I was cheerfully explaining this to a friend at the weekend when she asked me “why exactly do you need a website?” and I realised that it was a legitimate question to which I didn’t entirely know the answer.

The reasons I gave her went along these lines:

1. A website is a useful tool for self-promotion in the arts
2. erm…..

I’m not a huge fan of self-promotion, but I was given a lot of advice about websites a while back by an actress called Rosanne Priest, who says she has even been offered jobs on the basis of her website alone thanks to its clear layout. Presumably, if you present yourself as if you’re the dog’s bollocks, casting directors might presume it to be true. So I’ve swallowed my lack of pride and exaggerated all my achievements. A bit.

In the process of doing so, a different possible line of reasoning for making a website has presented itself:

1. to make my life feel justified and in some way worthwhile
2. to impress my friends and family

Again, in the arts this is kind of legitimate – it’s not as if I can expect regular promotions or pay rises to make me feel like I’m getting somewhere, or indeed to indicate to relatives that, yes, I am making something of my life. So a pretty web-page displaying all the latest news, or better still a page of reviews saying I’m good, may even be the thing that stops me from committing suicide when it’s all going horribly wrong.

Although perhaps I should also consider the possibility that:

1. I like having photographs of myself displayed on the internet
2. especially when they make me look like I’m modelling for a perfume advert

Check out the miscellaneous gallery if you think I’m exaggerating – it’s amazing what sympathetic lighting with black and white film can achieve.

But now that I have finished the process of building my website, the sense of aimlessness I am feeling suggests to me that perhaps the real reason for doing it was the sense of purpose and achievement I gained in learning to do it in the first place. After all, let us remember that I am of a generation that, in terms of technology, is “old”.

I mean, I presume they teach people how to make websites at school now. They certainly should. To the younger generation, getting one’s face all over the internet is – well – child’s play.

When I was at school we learned how to make ceefax pages. Yes, really – we sat at the BBC micros laboriously placing little squares of colour on the screen like on ceefax.

Perhaps our teachers thought that ceefax pages were the way of the future. Maybe they envisaged an internet-like web of ceefax pages which we would all contribute to one day. Or maybe they thought there would be a lot of openings working for ceefax in years to come.

Either way, they were wrong, and you won’t find my ceefax page anywhere on the internet, with its purple blinking greeting “WELCOME TO JAMES LARK’S COMPUTER PROGRAMME!!” (until somebody pointed out that in that context it you spell it “program”).

The idea of a room full of people sitting making ceefax pages is probably as foreign to the youth of today as the idea of people writing on slates, and slightly more laughable. Even in my own head it plays out like a scene from a period drama. Ah, the early nineties is a foreign country indeed.

By learning how to make a website I feel I have managed to keep up with technological advances. In a minor way perhaps, but in a way which means I can give my Godchildren a few pointers on how to do it in years to come.

Or at least get pointers from them without being totally confused.

I thought it was worth mentioning that our book about the Edinburgh Fringe, the cunningly titled Fringe, is now available for pre-order on Amazon. Although it’s not actually out until July I can only imagine you’ll all want to be first in the queue to read it. Also, in this digital age it is entirely feasible for a book to become a bestseller before it is even published, and hey, I reckon we could have a good go at it!

Information about the book can be found here and you can order it at Amazon here. Happy anticipating!

Many thanks to the people who expressed their commisserations about this. As a natural Lark I did my best to have a restful weekend, and due to my “larkishness” I have decided to do no work over the next six months. I hope people will try to be understanding.