A Little Bit on the Primitive Side

The Battle of the Cut.  The two biggest shows of the summer on the same street at the same time.  Old Vic vs Young Vic. Tennessee Williams vs Arthur Miller.  The Crucible vs A Streetcar Named Desire.

For my money, there was no competition.  

Maybe I'm just a Philistine but I just didn't get The Crucible.  Without watching it during the McCarthy era, it just seemed to be overblown, backward-peasant voyeurism.  It played like Game of Thrones filler but without the special effects.  Or the sense of fun. 

Streetcar wins.  That is all.  

The Ian Hunter Museum

I went to the Ian Hunter Museum - or the Hunterian as it styles itself - now I don't know all that much about Mott the Hoople but it's fair to say that some of the early stuff wasn't quite so pop. A sloth foetus in a jar. A sliced up dogs head. A presentation about the reproductive organs of sparrows. A skeleton where the muscles have turned to bone...

You can sort of see why they didn't go mainstream until they did a Bowie song.

Silly Season

Aah, I remember festival season as a whippersnapper Dead keen on music and trying to see everyone. When two bands that you wanted to see clashed you chose and stuck with it for fear of missing even a bit of one. I'd hardly drink anything to make sure I didn't miss anything.

Now I'm not sure what has happened. I guess I don't take festivals as seriously. I seem to have become one of those people that goes to a festival to escape from reality, to wander about getting distracted by shiny things rather than trying to see as many bands as possible in a day - I used to hate those people. Or maybe I just don't like music. 

Standon Calling was this weekend. And as ever I had a great time. But I'm not certain that I saw any bands. Well not the whole way through, by the third song they'd normally been dismissed as sounding like a not-as-good Toots and the Maytals / Longpigs / Freakpower and I'd wandered off to try to get a hit of something genuinely new. Or watch some Mexican wrestling. Or Rockaoke.

Bands that I did enjoy:
Interiors - terrible name. Kind of like Belle and Sebastien.
Imperial Leisure - not certain if that's a terrible name or not. Sound like Audiobullys.
The Cuban Brothers - you know the Cuban Brothers, you saw them at bestival that year, more vaudeville than band.

And Beans on Toast. What kind of festival gives Beans on Toast an hour set on the main stage? A ridiculous one. And what a set. He won the crowd over early on. Bigg Jeff sang along to Who is Bigg Jeff. He did all the 'hits' - I was surprised that MDMAmazing was an actual singalong with an actual amount of actual people seeming to know all the actual words to a fairly obscure and quite wordy folk song. But I guess that that's the Standon Calling way.

1066 And All That

Nothing says British seaside town like needle disposal points in public toilets.

I've been to Hastings.  It was ace. It was the first day of carnival and they take that nonsense seriously. Beach parties.  Street parties.  Pop up restaurants. Heroic volumes of alcohol. Got it covered.  The kick off event is the Tug of War - we got there for the 10.30 start: we felt that we had a heap of catching up to do; everyone seemed to be about four pints in - and the whole town seemed to be there.  And the drinking continued.

It was like 28 days later in Old Hastings this morning.  A sea of crushed plastic glasses. Candy floss tumble weed bowling across the street. Herring gulls pecking at beerstained corpses.  We got the hell out of dodge and headed for Battle, to try and get some of that history stuff.  What we actually found was a touristy ghost town with overpriced parking - who would have thought?

Speaking of history, isn't it strange that the only dates that everyone knows end in '66? The Alamanni attack on the Roman Empire; the Battle of Benevento; the Death of Frederik V of Norway - all of the dates that everyone knows...

To fully embrace the staycation vibe we camped in that Hastings. Aside from festivals I've not camped anywhere in over five years. I don't remember ankle deep brown water in the showers being a thing when I used to camp.  It appears to be a thing now.  Not certain that it added to the camping experience for me.

Millions of Mischiefs

Don't you hate it when you turn up to a well-reviewed, barn-stormer of a show only to find that that night's performance is actually in Norwegian? Ho hum. Still it sort of fitted with the show and it did mean that I discovered the Norwegian Coffee Song - which is ridiculous - I've found a mediocre version for you.

I went to see Julius Caesar.  I've seen it a few times now, but never realised how much teen fiction steals from it - Mortal Instruments; The Fault in Our Stars; about a third of the characters from Hunger Games (I mean, Caesar Flickerman - how did I not notice that before?) - so I'm laying claim to Millions of Mischiefs before anyone else does.

Talking of YA fiction, just finished the Daughter of Smoke and Bone trilogy. That's worth a read.  Although I am nervous that it might be a gateway drug to hardcore fantasy.

In food news - foos - hats off to Merry Berry Chocolates for giving me something that was too spicy to eat. Their scorpion death chocolate has been doing the rounds for a couple of years now and is tasty as. Whatever they gave me on Friday night made the scorpion death taste like Milkybars, it left me seriously concerned that my mouth might slip out of my face.

A Toast for the Douchbags

So I went to Wireless Festival.

Now I knew when I booked it that I was too old for it, that it would be full of people that listen to Radio 1; people that know what an Iggy Azalea is.  I was out of my depth. It's three years since I last went to a Big Festival - I didn't enjoy it then. It was stupid of me to go.  I admit that. So the following rant needs to be put in the context that this is all my fault.  No one else to blame. That being said...

Right let's gloss over the bulk of the day, ignore the terrible choice in expensive drinks, ignore the shambolic between set deejaying, and start with Pharrell. He put on a karaoke set absolutely chock full of hits (Boom).  He also spent a lot of time between songs preaching about equality between the sexes; spouting sickly, quasi-feminist platitudes - "Who's hear today with a woman that's going to change the world?" This was made even more sickly when he launched into everyone's favourite pro-rape anthem. Aah, equality and rape - what a hero. Sorry, did I say hero? It had the right amount of letters.

Still at least the Pharrell set was a crowd pleaser (albeit for a crowd who can't spell hypocrisy). Next came Kanye West, the main event. For just about the biggest pop performer in the world I was expecting some sort of stage show - this wasn't so much the case - no stageset, poor sound quality, no visuals, for a fair chunk of the show the big screens were turned off - this wouldn't be so much of a problem either at a smaller festival, or a festival populated by smaller people - but there seems to be a correlation between obvious pop and steroids so all that about fifty percent of the crowd could see were enormous shoulders.  

Still he did give us a Spectacle.  It was a masterclass in dividing a crowd - stopping songs part way through to have a chat with his entourage, not bothering with his own songs to concentrate on his side project stuff, wearing a beaded face mask for most of the gig.  And then the piece de resistance, a twenty-ish minute rant about the benefits of creativity over celebrity from a man who married a reality TV star.  At the five minute mark the boos started; at the ten minute mark people started leaving; still, it's a show that people will talk about, that you had to be there to be a part of something bigger, something unique - which I guess is the point of live music.

Can't help but think the Festival organisers may be giving back a few more refunds more Drake's cancellation tonight than they may have done.

Let's Get Mythical

City where the walls were built by Cyclops? Box ticked.

Yesterday I went to the ruins of Mycenae, a town built by the son of a God; a man whose claim to fame was cutting the head off a gorgon. Home town of Agamemnon: a man who led the mythical ten year siege of a town that may or may not have existed.

Still the ruins were proper old. But then I guess they had to be seeing as cyclops have been extinct a fair while.

This trip is the first time I've used TripAdvisor. Not sure I get it. Don't get me wrong, I love a ranking as much as the next geek and (as, if you've read anything I've ever written, you will know) I'm not above a snarky dismissal of something of historical or cultural importance. I just don't know how you can filter through the mire of uninformed nonsense on there to find any way of benchmarking anything. Admittedly, my research was limited to something in the region of eight minutes, so there could well be an "ignore all idiots" button which I missed. But:

Case Study 1 - the Bavarian Lion
Synopsis of review: it's off the beaten track but well worth the effort of getting there.
TripAdvisor rating 4 out of 5.

Reality: A mediocre (but respectfully monumental) statue of a lion in a grave yard in the suburbs.

So what is that 4 out of 5 rating for then. Surely it can't be of all "tourist attractions" everywhere (I'm not even going to start on the semantics of what constitutes a tourist attraction). I would have said that the Parthenon was the only genuine five star-er in the country. Which would put the lion on par with the Agora, the monasteries in Meteora or the ruins of Delphi. It's not. On this basis you are looking at one star at best.

Is it of things to do in Nafplio? It's neither the biggest nor the most activity-packed town I've ever been to but it does have three castles, four museums, a beach, a "charming" old town and Unesco approved ruins. I wouldn't have thought that the lion would out muscle them.

So is it of lion statues? Well I'm no expert on lion statues but the ones in trafalgar square are better. And I think there's a pretty good one in the British Museum.  And a pretty famous one in Switzerland. If we're using the Lucerne Lion as our five star, lion statue benchmark then the Bavarian lion is a solid two, maybe nudging a three if you catch it when you're in a good mood. Rather than in the mood of someone who has sweated through suburbia to see a not-to-be-missed sight rather than a mediocre lion statue.

So what does the four stars relate to? Answers on a postcard marked "Too much time thinking about things that don't matter".