The Next Train to Depart - (Review)

Live Theatre to see the sold out play by John Challis, “The Next Train to Depart”, commissioned as a new work by Queens Hall Arts, Hexham.

The tag-line described a ‘Brief Encounter for the 21st Century’. It's a two-hander set in the ambient sounds of Newcastle Central, where an aspirant poet meets a call centre worker.

Both twenty-somethings, she doesn’t remember their first encounter, when rendered mortal as the result of a Lambrini fuelled Hen night.

He writes initially over-the-top poems which he’ll perform under spotlight as the action progresses.

There’s a weave to the action. A dialogue that gradually tunes as they get to know one over several meetings. Maybe the call centre worker has the more poetic eye? Maybe the hours of observing from a table at the station have created an overload?

The performance by Adam Donaldson as Dante created an enigmatic poet, becoming more grounded through the influence of Alex Tahnée as Kayleigh. Alex presents a feisty spirit, a canny awareness of Dante’s observations and a great counterpoint to his outpourings.

Snappily directed by Melanie Rashbrooke, with scarcely an unused second or nuance, this was an elegant performance worthy of its current North Eastern tour, but also in need of being seen by a wider audience throughout the UK.

Somewhere like Theatre 503 should consider this for a London airing.

waiting at the station

I've travelled to the North through the rain then snow then rain again.

Now it's feeling gale force cold, but I suspect that's more about my southerner constitution rather than the actual climate here.

No one else here seems to notice.

I've just been waiting for the next train to depart.

...Could almost be the title of a play.

a near future experience

I feel as if I'm from the near future at the moment. Except I don't know the raffle ticket numbers.

It's the combination of commuting in the little space bubble, being on evening video conferences from a hotel room and then eating Japanese noodles from a pot.

Somewhere between cowboy bebop and fifth element.

I've noticed there's an exhibition across the river about life in 2050. I think I'll need to visit.

hot toddies at the Folly

One of the standard freebies in London is the little wallet to keep Oyster cards and other travel tickets safe. I usually use them as a main wallet, which is also a way of paring down the amount I'm carrying.

There's plenty of sources, beyond the ones from the train stations and I've been using a Royal Academy one recently. Of course they eventually wear out, but are surprisingly robust and can last for more than a year before the first sticky tape has to be applied.

It's always good to have a couple of spares, and today's 'snowy London Town' scene addition was from The Folly where we'd arranged to meet for an early evening supper.

The Folly is one of those slightly subterranean bustling bars and restaurants that seems to be perpetually busy. It's much bigger on the inside than you'd expect and has various zones with different designs varying from garden areas, lounges, long tables and stand up bar areas. We'd taken the precaution to book because even at an early hour the place fills with a boisterous evening shift of clientele.

We'd picked the venue partly because of its location, kind of equidistant from Bank and London Bridge. I'd walked from London Bridge station, over the bridge, thereby becoming the evening's lone person walking north against the solid commuter flow heading south*.

An entertaining supper followed as we chatted and schemed, before heading in opposite directions which would see us finish the evening hundreds of miles apart. London's closeness. For card carrying members, with free wallets.

* Pretty much the route used by Bridget Jones in that movie

Inside Llewyn Davis - cool for cats?

In Leicester Square, it was a last minute decision to go to see 'Inside Llewyn Davis', the movie about a struggling folk singer on the 1961 Greenwich Village circuit. We're talking the era of early Bob Dylan and the emerging folk scene from the Village inside of New York. I enjoy wandering the area around Bleecker when I'm in New York. So that's a double tick in the box. Music and district. The movie is also directed by the Coen Brothers. Should be another tick.

Yes, I expected to like it a lot. There's great cinematography with every scene evoking stylish album covers from the era and locations that look brilliant.

I just wasn't sure about the main story or character. Oops.

Our man, Llewyn played by Oscar Isaac is in a spiral of downward situations, most of which he tries to escape from by bailing onto the nearest fire escape. Not a complete unknown, he's seen earlier modest recognition with a co-singer who committed jumped off the Washington Bridge.

Llewyn sings fairly well and plays a lot of C, F and G chords. I know he wasn't supposed to be likeable, but aside from throwing the occasional strop, there wasn't any real passion or heart to create empathy.

There's other characters that add some spark. A double act by Justin Timberlake and Carey Mulligan as a couple of folkies who help Llewyn along. That's Justin on the right.

Mulligan has other problems, but that's where, for me, the film goes rather too formulaic. I don't think she was given the best script here and tries to act her way our of being given a caricatured and sometimes illogical part. Later, when stoned jazz muzo John Goodman turns up, he's also give a part that is larger than life.

Then there's a few middle of the road folk acts that turn up wearing matching sweaters or singing novelty space race tunes. Whenever Llewyn has a chance to get royalties on a song or join an up and coming commercial opportunity, he makes the poor wrong decision. If there's a sign pointing to anywhere better, or anywhere redeeming, our man will miss it. Akron, Ohio, springs to mind.

I began to wonder if the film was all a big movie buffs' in-joke. Introduce a cat to make the main character show some loveable compassion. Show the main character is a bounder by him maybe getting his best friend's girl pregnant. Even the graffiti in the toilet at one stage asks,"What are you doing?"

The Coens are good at quirky humour and I suppose there was some in here. It could be possible to play an irony card too, but I don't think that for me it has really worked. Even the film's narrative loop seemed flimsy and somehow unsatisfactory. I was thinking, surely it can't just be that? as the final credits appeared. Maybe I did care more for the cat(s).

I can understand that sometimes music albums need to be listened to a few times to appreciate their greatness. I'm not so certain that this will happen for me with this movie.

margins of respectability?

Flying past Canary Wharf every day at the moment, I keep seeing the trader blocks in the distance.

I've already written about Wolf of Wall Street and although I'm not convinced it was part of the original plan for the movie, it's one that lingers because of some of the ideas.

There's the rampant sales culture about 'sell anything', the premise that the punters are fools, a totally unreliable narrative which we are expected to follow. There's fair warning right from the start when the Ferrari changes colour from red to white during a trip along a freeway in the opening scenes.

Then there's the almost entirely male wheeler-dealers and the women often regarded as little more than objects.

I'm reminded of a few of the other movies about the same era 1980-2008 which includes 'Wall Street', 'Boiler Room' and the tad more extreme 'American Psycho'.

One that has previously stuck in my mind (which even had a female Investment Banker) was 'Margin Call'. That's the one about the collapse of a Lehman-like bank.

Without it being a spoiler, and true to many Hollywood scripts, the character played by Demi Moore was the one who became the scapegoat.

The worrying thought in the back of my mind is that although this stuff gets made into movies it is probably still happening.

Who really knows what happens when the US prints another $40bn per month of QE? Or how this gets beamed around the planet and then every so often a currency in another country collapses?

In a few of the words from the amoral Margin Call...

John Tuld: There are three ways to make a living in this business: be first, be smarter, or cheat.

Peter Sullivan: Look at these people. Wandering around with absolutely no idea what's about to happen.

Eric Dale: I run Risk Management. I don't really see how that's a natural place to start cutting jobs.

blurred vision

What with whizzing around London and working in various offices, I've really had to put the blog on the back-burner this week.

A few hasty iPhone grabbed snap-shots is about all I can declare.

No television, no external entertainment, pretty much head-down.

A blur, really.

the crane in rain

I said this would be a week of few words as I fly around docklands. The foggy iPhone picture of the crane from yesterday needs further development, so here's one of it around sunrise. Even the people punching the tickets on the Air Line were taking pictures of the bright early morning.

It wouldn't be complete without another one of the crane in rain.

London fog makes me feel so blue?

Of course, it's not always sunny around docklands, and this time we've some of the fog atmosphere, the way that London gets portrayed in old movies.

Pea-souper fog, umbrellas and bowler hats. As if.

counting the cars on the east London Air Way

Another week of commuting across the Thames using the cable car. It's interesting how much the view changes on a daily basis, from the sunshine of Monday, through rain and mist and fog. I don't have much blogging time this week, so a few snaps of the journey from my iPhone should suffice to keep things moving along.

I can remember the frisson of pleasure the first time I travelled on the New Jersey Turnpike out of New York. That song, obviously. And I was somehow drawn to remember it when I watched the cars on the east London Air-Way. Even without a gaberdine suit.

wolf of wall street

We went along to see The Wolf of Wall Street on Saturday evening. It's a film about excess. The Leonardo di Caprio lead character of Jordan Belfort leads us through boiler room scams making money initially from penny shares.

When I say excess, everything in the whole movie is writ large. There's expletives beyond count, partying that would fit well into scenes from those hangover movies, snow drifts of cocaine and bottles of the last Quaaludes left on the planet.

The sexual politics are (deliberately?) very dated and I did see a few people walk out of the cinema during the movie. It wouldn't pass the Bechdel test, for sure: many females; mainly love interests; or prostitutes; main roles involve men/sex/child rearing; often not fully clothed. Oh and did I mention the dwarf tossing?

Add noisy rows of leery barrow-boy traders at Stratton Oakmont extracting large sums of money from people ill-equipped to deal with share trading.

Pump and dump the chop stock, as the scam theory goes.

Buy the cheap share illegally, inflate its price, sell it to the ignorant and then sell your own now inflated price shares before the price tumbles. Easy money in the unregulated '80s.

Interestingly, we don't get to see the actual punters, except in the sense that the early recruits to the firm could have all been punters themselves. Tire salesmen*, furniture shop workers. Maybe it needed a postman as well.

The style of the movie remanded me of Goodfellas with lead character Jordan narrating his point of view, sometimes to camera, and even a drug addled scene reminiscent of the helicopter part when Henry Hill is cooking the ziti.

There's a helicopter in this movie too, at one time parked badly by di Caprio and later receiving a Titanic fate. Like everything else in the film, you just know that a boat trip from a glassy sun drenched Portofino to the 200km distant Monaco can only have one type of weather. Excess. Oh yes. 100 foot waves that would do the North Sea proud.

But that's to quibble. And they could always throw a party on the rescue boat.

I enjoyed the film for it's melodramatic portrayal of the excess. There were a few extemporised scenes that ran too long and could have sliced some time from the around 3 hour run time. There wasn't a lot to like about the di Caprio character, whose real-life counterpart makes a small appearance at the end of the movie.

It also illustrated the worrying sales culture trend to extract money from punters at all times. What's the business being bought or sold? Don't know, don't care. Gimme your money. Want to cash in? Don't care. Gimme some more of your money.

Boiler room scams persist to this day. They've just got the internet and ACD (Automatic call dialling) to ramp them up from those early days.

Oh, and the real Jordan Belfort to help get the sales lines right.

siri, samatha, cortana and clippy

Although it was first being discussed several months ago, the new Microsoft equivalent of Siri is getting recent attention. I know the code name was Cortana, but it seems that the implementation is to get that name as well.

It's one of those names that, when googled, can get *ahem* more than one expects. I guess it's because it was also used in that popular game Halo, as the VGH* avatar for the Artificial Intelligence.

Some may have seen that Spike Jonze movie 'Her' about a guy who falls in love with Samantha, his Scarlett Johanssen voiced electronic personal assistant. In the freeze-frame below, that's Samantha in Joaquin Phoenix's shirt pocket.

If you switch the American female voice on in Siri, it'll give 'Samatha' short shrift. I didn't find it works so well with the UK voice, which has more of a male butler's tone.

But I suppose there'll be fun to be had when both Siri and Cortana are available together. Start a conversation with one of them, keep the other one switched on and see what they make of each other. It has to be done

I guess it's all moved on from Clippy the annoying Paperclip.