Two very good Stand-Up gigs to go to.

It's rare we advertise other people's artistic endeavors, due to a mixture of arrogance and innate laziness.

However with two great Stand-Up nights occurring in such a short space of time it seems ridiculous not to shout their presence from the rafters as everybody likes to laugh right? Right? Right?

First up on the 29th of November is The Reckless Moment, a comedy night that has been running off the crumpled back's of a group of incredibly dedicated Warwick University students. Starting out as a small project amongst friends, the night has grown to a point where it now features as a key spot on the mythical "circuit". Ooohh. It still remains true to its credentials and privileges new work above all else whilst managing to book well known and emerging headline acts. The beer is really cheap too. Like really cheap. The night consistently delivers great material and has built a strong community of dedicated acts and audiences, of which the line between the two is often blurred. Not through heckling it must be mentioned though, trust us, they will call you out on your dumb shit. But in a nice way. Still, don't do it. It will sting. You may even get a biscuit.

EVENT! http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=171591532867136

Next, is a brand new night that has started in the aging crusty punk crevice that is Camden. Remember Camden? Of course you do. You love Camden, which contrary to poe faced East Londoners (yeh we know who you are, yeh you! ((See you next week)) is still a great place to go and find something interesting going on.

The night is named The Ministry of Whimsy, aptly named after it was concluded that the original name Snigger Please just wouldn't fucking fly with most people, as much as we pleaded with them.

Started by two young, superb (and, sorry chaps, amazingly named, well done parents) stand-up's, James Mcphun and Richard Stainbank, the night acts as a place for emerging, new, old, any stand-up to try fresh and experimental material. This doesn't simply act as a place for the trawling out of new, half formed jokes, but rather provides environment where form, content, and the mechanics of comedy are experimented, mucked about with, and generally disregarded in favour of artistic expression. How ominous. Heading into their second night there's a really exciting atmosphere surrounding the gig and to catch it in its early days will be a privilege.

But yeh, here it is. The Event. The Facebook event.

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=177754478903509

Go to both of these. Or one of them. Preferably both of them.

IRONY or PSYCHOPATH: 2, Nigella Lawson

Okay, so writing about how Nigella speaks is a little passé – passé like, say, Alistair McGowan and his FUNNY FUNNY IMPRESSIONS are passé. However. At the seventeen minute mark of the seventh episode of Nigella’s Kitchen, which aired last night, there was this amazing little moment where her fattened, opulent syntax revealed, to our mind, a side to Nigella’s HAPPY SUCCESSFUL LIFE that we’re not sure we’ve seen before:

It’s the cooking that needs precision and a great deal of pernickety detail – that is enough to send me over the edge. But then [turning to the camera and smiling with all her teeth] that’s not very hard.

You see what we mean – it makes us rather suspect that Nigella is one of two things: deeply, deeply unhappy or actually mentally ill. Sardonically ironic, then, or a psychopath? Let us consider the evidence, all taken from last night’s episode:

At the end of a busy week, I love a bit of hunter-gathering so that I can grab the wherewithal for a really relaxing weekend of cooking and eating. PSYCHO

Though I say peas, they are in fact petit pois, that’s what it says on the label and they are indeed very small peas. PSYCHO

It feels wrong, and yet good [using a gigantic knife to cut a big pile green beans inside their packet]. PSYCHO

Despite the bucolic appearance, these leaves were not picked in turquoise-skied Portafino but in grey Battersea. But no matter, they smell fantastic. IRONY

If anything is guaranteed to get my children coming to the table promptly, and nothing is really guaranteed to do that. IRONY

It’s like a holiday without leaving the kitchen and without the hell of air travel. IRONY

My ideal way to spend my Sunday is just giving myself up in the warm embrace of the kitchen. HOW VERY SYLVIA PLATH OF YOU. PSYCHO

I am thinking of everything here. PSYCHO

I want a flat oval-ish. I don’t want any geometry professor telling me this isn’t an oval. It’s my meatloaf. IRONY

Inside my meatloaf are jewels. And these jewels are eggs. Hard-boiled eggs. PSYCHO

And now [talking to meatloaf] this baby just needs swaddling. And what I’m swaddling it with is bacon. PSYCHO – this one made me think of Nigella cooking children, like the witch in Hansel und Gretel.

The thing about meatloaf, it comes from a time when food was fuel. IRONY

I feel a sense of Sunday lunch splurge coming on. PSYCHO

To give this the consistency of dressing, I need a quick trip to the frigo. IRONY

Try and be patient, to be as serene as this sauce looks. PSYCHO

Look at this, just ready to be dolloped on a baked potato. I say, let’s cut out the middle man [licking cheese and buttermilk off the spoon]. IRONY

Friend at dinner: I haven’t heard of a strawberry crumble. Nigella: You haven’t lived. PSYCHO

Endnotes: Nigella’s Kitchen is the only show on the BBC to have it’s own ‘focus-puller’ and two ‘home economists’ – the latter of which suggests, a la Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman being taught how to fuck gracefully in preparation for Eyes Wide Shut, Nigella needs to be taught how to make it look like she has a happy home life. Also, as ever, episode seven concludes with a post-credits sequence featuring Nigella returning to the ‘frigo’ at the dead of night for a wee snack. This time, she decides on an entire slice of bacon-wrapped, egg-studded meat loaf between two slabs of bread. She takes a bite, spreading her fat lips a width that would absolutely dislocate my jaw. PSYCHO, mos def.

The Verdict: PSYCHOPATH

A very strange, very troubled woman who has suffered her fair share of tragedy and has lived her entire life named after one of the biggest douchebags this country’s ever been governed by, has definitely been sent over the edge. ‘Try to be patient, to be as serene as this sauce looks’ – she manages for half an hour a week. But when the cameras stop rolling, all bets are off. Good luck Charles, keep an ‘emergency bottle’ of gin handy yeah?

Filing: some points and notes

Filer's nightmare.

We at the Mansion have a lot on our plates. It’s not all swearing and snarking here. The hard-nosed world of business is something that we have to treat with as much care as that of the soft-snout slobbery puppy dog. Specifically, we thought we’d get onto the unaddressed issue of filing. Yes, that’s right.

And so it goes… For those of you not in the know, or perhaps those who think hitherto that they are, the below is for you. Filing essentially involves two major areas of file organisation, divisible into one of either (i) inter-file or (ii) inner-file. The first is the sorting of different objects that constitute a whole, distinguishable body distinct from other objects of a very similar or very different kind.

The second… OK, we may be slightly disingenuous here as the latter could be sub-divided into entrance and ordering, which could open the second area into perhaps two whole areas. However, we think the two-areas distinction still holds up when we take note of the fact that the act of entering paper (or what have you) into the file is so great a part of the filing process — not only of time, but also of energy. We know we’ll be preaching to the converted when we ask: did you ever notice how you get past that 700-page mark, entering pages and some strange cramps and aches begin in muscles that you didn’t even know were muscles?!… Yeah? Recognise that? God, that’s a bitch, are we right? We sure know Paul from accounts knows the ol’seadog! (See you next week for lager-lager, Paulio?)

Of course we’re right. Now, the entering part needs emphasis. We think it has been undersold in the promotion of filing, its advertisement in culture generally, and in press commentary on the issue.

Check out those staggered organisational tags.

Let’s paint a particular example to make our point. Say you have, ooh, 89 Office Depot-brand, 30 sleeve, clear plastic A4 files, with blue flexi-plastic cover (including removable bind label). You’ve also got into each has to go, in a specific order, 25 various-coloured printed A4-pages to constitute 89 booklets.

How are you to go about placing these pages into the files? A pertinent question in the field of file entering, indeed!

Now, you don’t have all the space in the world, here. In fact space is limited to a small-sized office desk, around two metres squared. You also have to be wary of the folding. You can roll and unfurl each page to ease the passage of entering. Or, you can slightly lean the edges in to ease said passage. The perils of getting fold-lines in your pages need not be extensively considered here, so suffice to say that we must be vigilant at all times.

Thumbs up, indeed!

So the first option that’s out is sorting all the booklets into respective individual order, and then beginning the entering, there’s simply no space! (One page at a time increases the risk of fold-lines f/y/i.)

Second option: enter the pages page one into booklet one, page one into booklet two, right through to the last page, then begin page two into booklet two, booklet three, and so on. Now that’s just way too slow, there’s the opening and closing of the files for each single one. Completely inoperable and inefficient!

The third option: enter all the pages into one booklet-file, then move onto the next booklet. Here the issues become where to place the files and the entering pages according to seated or standing position… the height differential between the enterer and their desk… whether you’re a right- or left-handed enterer… and anything else one can recall to think.

Now, what order you are required to enter makes huge sways upon whether you can enter page-by-page or conglomerate two pages back-to-back and enter them into one sleeve. It’s either a stroke of luck or an inspiration business tactic (we’re not sure which yet) if you can, because your efficiency savings are going to be mind-blowing — the sort that’d have Paul celebrating in ways we all know we should keep out of forums like this. What’s more, your rivals will be seething that they, unlike you, couldn’t reach these heady heights.

We hope this goes someway to redressing the balance in the filing field. It’s an issue that reaches far-out from the specific profession and into our culture widely. We’re excited at the news that a think-tank may be starting-up to lobby the Lithuanian parliament for a monument to be erected in each township as a movement into file-entering becoming one of the three national sports. Hopefully we can take the journey further from the inroads being made on the continent, to the power hubs of Reading, Swindon, and perhaps even Redditch.

Spend some FaceTime with Infinity: Apple, BT and some other stuff

Have you seen that advert? Y’know, the one where that guy’s sitting there, leg-up, wrapped in a cast, while he’s talking to his mates on his iPhone, and they’re all like, sad and shit ‘cause it seems like they lost they’re football match—the match he’s injured for but apparently too fucking lazy to hop down to the local pitch and see? And then they’re all like “NAH MATE, WE WON!” And he’s all like “yeah!” and they’re all jumping around, except for him ‘cause he’s crippled and shit… Yeah? This one here:

As it's cut off half of it, just double-click on the video to watch it on Youtube. Sorry.

Well, anyway, it’s a lot like another iPhone ad that we saw in the paper which the characters are using the same app[lication] to talk, yet again to someone who gone done broke a limb (see below). This time it’s a kid with an injured his arm (tibia or fibula we assume) showing the cast to a guy who looks like a cross between Karl Pilkington and the evil Dad in This is England '86. We are left to connect the dots and hazard a guess that this is a father-son moment (“good” adverts always like to leave you to fill in the back story). This guess is only an educated one in so far as paedophilia in advertising is not going to win anyone over. Though, there is a side-effect in that paedophiles will see these technologies as a new avenue to explore their abuse. (We’re not joking around when we mention this by the way. It’s just true.)

Only one word could be read: End

The tagline is: “Introducing FaceTime video calling. Smile.” The name - FaceTime - is a pretty blatant signal as to what these adverts are getting at. Spending time face-to-face, meeting-up, catching-up, quality time together, etc. etc: i.e. all the very things that, according to common perception, iPhones and their techne brethren are preventing within the family unit. ("Smile." is a bit of good ol'passive-aggressive dictatorial advertising added on for good measure: DO THIS, BUY THIS, and so it goes on.)

We all know how the argument goes visa-vis the idea that we all just sit around, watching different programs on different TVs, when we want, not when it’s scheduled… We’re on the internet talking to our friends rather than being out with them in the park on the merry-go-rounds… We don’t even talk on the ‘phone anymore, we just send each other pictures of our genitalia in various postures and poses, replete with ironic accoutrements and now these expressionist dick-dances are superseding oral conversation as the main mode of communication for today’s youth...

So this is exactly what the iPhone adverts avoid like the fucking plague. They don’t want to evoke the image of technology actually in the home, when the members of this family are actually all together, at one time, in the fucking building—precisely because it’ll seem so unreal to people (the people at home) that these people (the people on screen) would actually spend time together.

And it’s not strictly the fact —DEERRRR— that no company would make a phone advert where the characters are not using their phones. Rather, these ads are directly taking on the idea that technology is pulling everyone apart. And this isn’t just Apple. Loads of companies are in on it; BT foremost among them (as we mentioned before). Across the spectrum is the narrative that we’re all apart in our lives so get this product, it’ll bring you and whoever together, OK?

As it's cut off half of it, just double-click on the video to watch it on Youtube. Sorry.

With this loneliness written into every advert, there’s no way we can look at the BT Infinity adverts and think of anything apart from the fact that the seemingly happy couple are looking to the future, and to INFINITY, because they, like everyone else in the ad, want to die. BT has hit upon the core of modern life, surely? No matter how joyous and content we may appear, we’re all so desperately sad and lonely that we haze longingly into the infinite, colourless nothing that is our death. The children of the famous BT couple have gone — where we do not know — and now they seem to be contemplating some suicide pact or waiting for the new BT to arrive. So, it’s either death or BT’s version of Infinity. The choice is yours.

We’ve got Virgin Media.

Here's to Strange Powers

We don't often go to the cinema alone. In fact it was our first time this week (OK, excuse the mixed up pronouns here). It was also part of the BFI London Film Festival to boot, which made it a little more acceptable. 'Cause, let's face it, if you're that one guy sitting on their own watching Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire then people are far more likely to take a disapproving view of it than seeing something really arty on the Southbank.

Not that Strange Powers: Stephin Merritt and The Magnetic Fields was a particularly arty movie. A documentary about--just as the name suggests--the genius (yep, genius) behind a band who have turned out much over their some 18 years, Strange Powers really tapped into our fan boy love of the band. It foregrounded Merritt's hilarious responses to interview questions or shout-outs from gig audiences, and some amazing live performances:

'Yeah! Oh Yeah!' in Cambridge

'Born on a Train' in Cambridge, again, but not the same gig

Tending more towards biography than music/ social study, this long-form film covering the creative period (and the background of) Stephin Merritt centred itself on the former's relationship with his band mate and manager Claudia Gonson. It did so without being sappy and without being too idolising. Probably this is down to the fact that it was made by a few of Stephin's friends. But that's no bad thing for the project that was undertaken.

Anyway, we thought we'd do a little "hooray" for The Magnetic Fields along the lines of a Spotify mixtape. It takes a song from each of their albums (3 for the three volumes of 69 Love Songs) as a nod to Strange Power's range. Just click on either one of the links below to get all the Magnetic goodness:

Here's to Strange Powers: Stephin Merritt and The Magnetic Fields

Here's to Strange Powers: Stephin Merritt and The Magnetic Fields

"Stan, don't forget to poke your grandmother"

Too often the Internet gets a free pass and is relegated to a weird far off mystical virtual realm that is somehow psychologically segregated from everyday life. Considering that in the past 5-10 years iPhones and Blackberry's have forced their megalomanic behemoth schlongs into our greasy hands with all the intimidating force of a grunting alcoholic PE teacher as he ushers you balls first over the Pommel Horse, this partition between the 'real' and the 'virtual' seems hopeful at best as the two have converged to the point where they are no longer that distinct, just kind of all mushy and together in a troth of shit.

Without jumping head first into academic debates between Live vs Mediated (Phelan vs Auslander) it seems that this pretense of 'what happens online stays online' acts as a convenient means of getting away with fucking murder (which can of course be funny as hell). Now this isn't to say that we here are apposed to net neutrality, open source and freedom of information and generally using the Internet as place of continual good and funny shit that doesn't take itself too seriously, quite the opposite in fact.

We here harbour a secret love of Trolling as a healthy antidote to those that take the Internet way too seriously and put it on a pedestal as the saviour of all our woes. However, to some extent the same rules of generally being not a terrible person apply online as they do, in you know, everyday life. Really, it's pretty basic stuff like; don't shout racial slurs at people in public places, don't fuck kids or look at other people fucking kids, don't declare loudly in a bar that "all women are objects and should be treated accordingly". In real life its likely that if you transgress any of these rules then someone will probably call you out on your shit (hopefully). On the web however, stuff goes unnoticed, gets lost and slips through the cracks and that means that at times people seem to reckon that their bigoted garbling won't come under any scrutiny, and for the most part they're right...

Here we handover to the website 'People who said nigger today', a website dedicated to unveiling "privileged whites using, often with intentional malice, the word nigger" online. See the web-site's FAQ for a full explanation of its purpose, but its basic function is screenshots of people being super racist on Facebook. It sounds preachy, but it manages to avoid those pitfalls through its bluntness and refusal to bow to any sense of 'oh ho doesn't the Internet produce some gems' (which it of course does), whilst avoiding any pompous, apologetic chest beating.

There' s hardly anything revolutionary about the site, or the sentiment of 'don't be fucking racist duh brain', but it does act as a nice antidote to the monstrosities of sites such as the now felled Fit-Finder (barf). Those types of site have become emblematic of an approach within the casual practices of the net that resembles a skinless, jizz covered Lizard groping and spitting its way over a pile of rotting fruit as it barks out the ramblings of a semi-senile colonel berating the 'natives'. PWSNT rather it seems is a healthy way of making visible the myth of the Internet as a separate entity where your bullshit doesn't count (not us though, we don't count, we get to do what we want, poorly and you can't say a damn thing about it).

All that being said there is nothing worse than whiny little bitches with skinned knees crying to the Internet police that someone was mean to them. A healthy general rule to go with might be 'be funny', so over to you Louis CK to explain things much better than, well, anyone.

and...

Maureen, Maureen, I'm beggin' of you, please don't take my band

She's the one at the back. Yeah, that you can barely see.

After hearing the apparently world-shattering news that Maureen Ann “Moe” Tucker was a signed-up member of the Tea Party we’ve seen a hell of a lot of commentary on the issue. There’s those who are now totally distraught over the loss of one of their idols by political association to a “movement” that’s well documented for its anti-masturbation, witchcrafting, “I’d give Anne Frank up to the Nazis ‘cause lying is a sin", socialism-is-commu-facism gestalt. Then there’s Alexis Petridis’ pseudo-formalist riposte of “separate the art from the artist”.

And, as Petridis points out, this isn’t exactly unexpected. Rightly or wrongly, there’s outcry whenever a previously radical figure suddenly appears head in The Man’s lap, throat-deep on his profit margin. Whether they’re voting for George W. Bush (yes, we’re looking at you Tom Wolfe), or gadding around LA with their puppet-self in a roofless car insured by Swiftcover, there’s a sense of betrayal— that their idols have gone against, maybe even reversed, those anti-conformist freedoms they typified, restructuring the staid taboos and rigidities that they uprooted as often as their genital appendages (we do wonder what Iggy’s puppet penis is like b/t/w).

Now, that a woman named Maureen is the latest subject at the epicentre of this cultural conjuncture should be restated. We’ve got a neighbour named Maureen; she’s a lovely old lady who we’d suspect never spent days on end stratospherically-high on LSD playing second-sexual-fiddle to Nico in one of the most celebrated rock bands of the last century. She’s kind and always asks us how we’re doing. Her husband’s a decent guy. We don’t think she likes the Tea Party. But you never know.

A true tea party.

The point being that Maureen [Tucker, not our neighbour] is a metaphor for what’s going on with this debate and kind of reveals why the thing seems never-ending. Just as no one named Maureen could be a far-out radical, the sixties and seventies rebellion of identity politics and it’s aestheticisation in popular music was never, actually, as anti-establishment as is generally thought.

Adam Curtis has been making this point for years in so far as the central tenant of individual liberty that the hopeful 68ers so readily took up and perpetuated in the name of worthy political causes was co-opted by some more active malevolent business types to leave us with self-obsessed, consuming, fearful Nixon-like societies. [Here he is making a side-line into this debate on the topic of Mad Men.]

For the theory buffs out there, the names Slavoj Zizek, Judith Butler and so on should ring a bell as these guys have been arguing for this way better than we ever could and concerning far more ubiquitous shit than Adam Curtis. But let’s not tumble into that whole area and let’s get back to Maureen.

To remind ourselves of just how good The Velvet Underground were, we went to listen to some CDs we found back in our old rooms (from a time before we became pirates). We listened to White Light/ White Heat and remembered that it’s actually pretty awesome—the muffled production’s pretty charming and it has a lot of the repetitive swirling melodies that they’re famous for yet they’re far more docile than is the case elsewhere which then work into the noisy finale of ‘I Heard Her Call My Name’ and ‘Sister Ray’.

BUT, after that we discovered that the & Nico disc was missing. We hate that. Why not put it back in its box? It’s not hard is it? For fuck’s sake, some people have no respect for our personal, private property! Fucking hippies.