Eeek. Last night a bootleg advance DVD of "You Don't Mess With The Zohan" was on A.'s player.

Despite a couple of quite interesting things to say about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - not a subject many comedies would dare touch on - any film after which the only joke I remember from it is of such a piss-poor quality as the following:

Bystander: "Are you bionic?"
Zohan: "No, I only like ze women."

…has to get an official Fishy thumbs-down.

…I was reminded of a TV series a couple of years ago over here called "Respectable", set in a brothel. Although it created a little storm-in-a-teacup in some feminist circles for its portrayal of prostitution which blankly ignored any of the moral or sociological issues, it otherwise sank without trace [except for the unnamed friend who runs a website for one of the actresses] and only the following excerpt remains in my head;

[A punter, earlier seen telling his wife he was going out to play in a jazz orchestra, enters the bedroom with a large double bass case.]
Working Girl: "What's that?"
Punter: "It's a subterfuge."
Working Girl: "Oh. I thought it was a cello."

Today's Big Question: What quote from a TV show, film or something else that was absolutely shite stays in your head despite you not wanting it to?

[bonus points for piss-poor so-called "jokes" which made you curl up in your chair in cringe-ness, especially those involving ethnic origin, sexual orientation or cross-dressing.]

The long Bank Holiday weekend passed off peacefully, if by "peacefully" you mean "Fish gets roped in to shifting furniture and boxes full of crud again, with only the promise of large amounts of Italian food to keep him going".

There's little else amazing coming up on the radar, apart from next week's Annual Mental Health Day Out Jaunt To A Beach Beside A Nuclear Power Station [hey, at least it'll mean another year without having to have that vasectomy] and an invitation to Saturday's opening of the local Polish Arts Festival.

My knowledge of Poland is, I think, not too much wider than most people from these islands; we know all the World War II stuff, we who were old enough at the time remember the reporting of the Solidarity movement and revolution, but since then apart from a pattern of migration of skilled workers from there to here [and back again now we're in the fiscal poo] it's not really registered on the radar.

Beyond that the only Polish culture I've experienced in the past twenty years was going to see Krótki film o zabijaniu [A Short Film About Killing], a brutal exploration of capital punishment which achieved a praiseworthy stance of showing the violence and pointlessness of institutionalized murder without evoking sympathy for those who are convicted of such a heinous crime.

Anyway, I don't quite know what'll be going on at this festival opening, but hey, I'll be there anyway. Must brush up on my phrases… wonder what the Polish is for "excuse me, your terrapin is nibbling away at my left kidney"…

A lovely evening: as I type there's actually some really decent music on the radio, as two of Edgard Varese's pieces get the Proms treatment ["listen again" here, it starts about 25 minutes in].

This was the guy whose empties-the-rooms-at-parties¹ music provided one of the teenage Frank Zappa's eye-opening moments; this was the guy whose electronic and industrial sounds came forty years before Trent Reznor even touched a synthesizer; this was the guy whose Poeme Electronique on my CD player finally convinced a slightly dubious ex- of mine that I was completely insane and needed to be dumped.

For the last of those, if nothing else, I salute him.

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A slightly less lovely day of beating a head against a wall, mp3-player-driver related.

This firmware update doesn't go with this MediaPlayer installation on this version of Windows² for this Service Pack for this laptop…

And all I wanted to do was roll back my Zen player so I could have the software tell it "hey, track 1 comes before track 2, not the other way round just because that's the alphabetical order, you arsewipe"…

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Codpiece News: It's going to be some months before Henry V, King Of Beating Up French People For No Reason Whatsoever gets cast, so gawd knows if I'll even get a part.

You're all welcome to the première, even if all I get is one line; "This way, my liege" and then only appear as Dead Person In Beret And Stripey Jumper #7 for the whole rest of the play.

Anyway, I couldn't play the king ["V", as his friends called him]. I'm not that good an actor to be able to actually say "Cry God For England, Harry and Saint George!" without going into a long rant pro-Scottish independence…

…talking of which, why are the athletes, cyclists and other Olympicsportspeople who were formerly "Scottish" when they weren't winning anything now suddenly British as soon as they pick up a medal?…

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shoenotes:
1 Unless you're having a "people who like really weird music" party. And if you did, none of the guests would actually mingle and mix, they'd just sit around drooling over themselves; also, note we're not allowed anything sharp.
2 Yes, yes, I know. But Linux has no support for Zen players at all [the Nomadness.net site which was developing it shut down].

I think I may have discovered my [other] calling in life.

The little community theatre in town-which-stinks-of-dead-turkey is doing Henry V next year, and have invited me on board.

Despite my indifference to the Bard ever since having The Scottish Play rammed down my throat at school, the frustrated performer in me really wants to give it a go.

Time to get out my codpiece…

The piece of cod which passeth all understanding…

Adventures In Fish's Dairy, no - sorry, Diary:

¹

Part of my job supporting recovering-from-mental-health-problems people - probably the best part in many ways - is when occasionally I get to spend a day or part of it accompanying somebody or a group of somebodies doing something unexpected, all in the name of "social rehabilitation and therapeutic activities"².

Under this aegis I've previously taken belly-dancing classes, written bad poetry at seminars, learnt astronomy, played badminton, hung out with big political cheeses at the Uni of Essex, and put my back out in a yoga class that had more to do with Sacher-Masoch than Hindu practice.

On Thursday, this list will get added to when I get to spend the day at a Drama Workshop ["Physical Theatre and Improvisation"] at nearby-town-which-stinks-of-dead-turkey.

"This workshop will explore the potential of play to impact on the actor as well as other aspects of the theatre, including direction, writing and devising. With an emphasis on fun, expect to play games, improvise and clown around… Wear loose, comfortable clothing."

Having never done any "drama" since school - and, with hindsight, that was less about acting than about being the only kid in an all boys' school willing to take on the female roles - I've absolutely no idea what to expect, although the phrase "loose, comfortable clothing" is intriguing…

Just about everybody does do "performance" - the masks we put on in our interactions with the world; the roles we have to play to get on in our lives, our careers, sometimes our relationships. It only usually gets noticed when the role becomes intolerable and you're forced to leave the stage, or when you start refusing all the parts you're offered - and start becoming isolated and neurotic.

Coming back from that last state is connected to learning "performance"; to be able to successfully take on the role of someone for whom your inner turmoil or despair is put in its proper place, not hindering your ability to do what you need to. Some can only do it for very short periods of time. Others get better at it.

Eventually, the hope is, that "role" you practice becomes your primary one, and you feel confident to play that part at any time you need to; indeed, you become it, and the Bergmanesque script of darkness you wrote for yourself slips into ancient history.

This may sound esoteric to those who've never had to struggle with these things, but I think it's actually a fairly good metaphor. With this in mind, I'm hoping Thursday will not only help the person I'm going with, but may also provide subtle little insights into my own jigsaw puzzle…

Today's Big Question: When did you last feel you were having to put on an "act" to get yourself through a sticky or uncomfortable situation?

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1 For Ozzy's sake, whatever you do, don't do a Google Image Search for "milking" with SafeSearch off. *gets mind-bleach*

2 Some may regard such events as "jolly days out for laze-abouts", but sod them: there's plenty of evidence, both anecdotal and formal, that helping needy people do silly things is a big step towards helping them do important things.

Following on from the post the other day about life post-Butterfly:

There are, I've decided, three things I really miss from our relationship. The first, slightly kinky sex, is probably the most pressing late at night, and that's all I'm saying about that. The second, her cooking, is also too damn typical.

The third, however, is not so much about missing her as about missing her job; since she is a manager of a charity shop, and I usually finished work before her, I always got the opportunity to hang around the shop until closing and grab first look through whatever donations came through the door. Occasionally these were surprisingly new [a Doctor Who DVD that had only just been released was our best find].

Now I'm back on my own - a decision that, despite the above disadvantages, I'm still very glad that I took - I've had to do my own skulking around for cheap second-hand books.

Thus, with thanks to Mr Oxfam Bookshop of Woodbridge:

…all for eight quid. Not bad.

The advantage, of course, of my singular status is that I've actually got time and space to read. B. was not a great reader. The only book I ever saw her nose in was on psychics, which perhaps was a signal of basic incompatibility I should have picked up on a lot earlier.

These kind of reflections, like the other day's post, are, I think, part of the final healing process from that relationship. You could call it a "bereavement", if that didn't patronize the greater pain from people actually bereaving. But it's the same kind of processes - first the primary pain, followed by a kind of denial - "sod that, I'm not thinking about it", then the acceptance, when it's possible to take a more objective look at what was actually going on, and hopefully learn from whatever mistakes were made [on both sides].

Again, it's a work-in-progress. Not always ultra-comfortable, but what's the alternative? I like sitting down with a good book, but I can't do it all the time…

Today's Big Question: Tell me one valuable thing you learnt from your ex- or ex-es that you wouldn't have learnt any other way.