Monday 29 October 2007

Punk and Metal

As part of my nightclass on Popular Music I've been writing an essay on subcultures in music. This has led me to watch some interesting documentaries such as The Punk Years, Metal: A Headbanger's Journey and The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years.

From that last film comes this piece of video below. WASP's Chris Holmes floats in his pool, drunk out of his head, as his mother watches. It's horrifying yet compelling to watch.

Friday 26 October 2007

Comedy on Telly

You'll all be reading this too late for it to matter but here are some TV recommendations for tonight.

Firstly The Armstrong & Miller Show, on BBC One at 9.30pm.

Here they are in the Telegraph and in The Times.

Secondly Doug Stanhope, Go Home on Channel 4 at 11.35pm.

This is a pilot that includes a live gig he performed in Edinburgh in March. On a radio interview I heard with him recently he said he hopes it doesn't get picked up for a series as he doesn't want to keep coming over here to film it.

Here's Doug from his mailing list.

Attn UK! "Doug Stanhope Go Home" Airs Friday Oct 26th on Ch 4!

The pilot I did for Channel 4 in the UK "Doug Stanhope Go Home" airs Friday, Oct 26th at 11:35 pm.

Please send out the town crier to go door-to-door and let people know. Or just repost this round the clock until then.

I'm sure one of you good folk will tape it and Youtube it for the poor pricks here in the states.

Thanks for your support. And before you ask, I'm sure I'll be coming back over sometime in the first half of '08. Stay tuned. ~ Stanhope


This is Brian Donaldson's review of it from The List.

As the latest batch of Comedy Labs reaches us, the pick of the bunch is Doug Stanhope, Go Home (Channel 4, Fri 26 Oct, 11.35pm ••••). While the pottymouth slurring of the man who threatened to run for the White House is not, as some of his disciples will claim, to be comedy’s Second Coming, he undoubtedly shines in this half-hour tirade against race hatred. Interspersed with his trademark firebrand stand-up routine recorded in Edinburgh’s Caves, he confronts a BNP activist outside Ibrox, meets Polish workers finding flaws with potatoes in a farm near Perth and tackles stereotypical bigots on Scottie McClue’s radio show. Naturally, he has his own vile sentiments to get over on occasion, but on this showing at least, the core of Stanhope contains a warm spirit with a previously hidden humanity oozing from every noxious pore.

And if you want to go laugh at something right now, Jacqueline McCafferty’s Big Brother Audition Tape made me cry with laughter when I saw it at Limmy's Show during the Edinburgh Festival.

Here's a video of Armstrong & Miller trying out some new material for the show.



Here's a clip form Stanhope's new DVD 'No Refunds'.

Wednesday 24 October 2007

They All Sit in the Town Centre

There was a hilarious call on George Galloway’s TalkSport show this morning. Galloway had kicked off the discussion by suggesting that Britain could do with more immigration. The population of Glasgow, he said, was one million in the 1960s but now sits at around 400,000.

A listener from Blackburn called in. He was outraged at the large number of Asians in his area. “Once they’ve finished their shifts on the taxis at 3am, they go into the town centre. Now, there’s no way I would take my five-year old in there.”

George said the same as I was saying, “At 3 in the morning? I would think not.” The caller then said he ‘wasn’t talking about 3 in the morning.’ When George prodded him to make an actual point he had another go.

“When they’re not working they all sit in the town centre talking in their own language...” George first of all pointed out that the guy just said the Asian population in his area regularly work until 3am, then asked him why, if they were all sat together and talking to each other, did he care if he couldn’t understand what they were saying. “Do you normally go around listening in to other people’s conversations?” George asked him.

“Why? Don’t you George?”

So this caller’s point seemed to be that the Asian population in his area worked long hours, made it impossible for him to take his 5-year old out at 3am and prevented him from listening in on their private conversations by speaking a language he didn’t know.

And then there was the other caller who said, “There’s too much health and safety in this country.”

You wonder why some folk bother to pick up a phone.

Tuesday 23 October 2007

Black Cape # 30

Seinfeld Interview

Here's a revealing interview with Jerry Seinfeld as he promotes his forthcoming Bee Movie.

"I don't mind it at all when people come up to me. I figure I owe them that much. It's my job to talk to them. The truth is few things make me angrier than celebrities whining about how hard it is to be famous. Stop whining! It's not hard. It's easy. It's what you wanted."

Are You Kiddin' Me?

More goals, this time the Goal of the Week contest from Major League Soccer in the USA. There are a couple of belters.

Monday 22 October 2007

What's it Gonna Be?

I couldn't help laughing at this. It features Mike O'Connell and Dr Ken Jeong.

It's definitely Not Safe For Work.

An Interview with Stewart Lee

Here's an interview with Stewart Lee from Chortle.

Before asking what he makes of the state of stand-up right now, I mention that he’s sometimes been critical of other comedians in the past.

‘Have I? When?’

Well, there was a fairly sizeable attack on Joe Pasquale in his show 90s Comedian.

‘Well, that’s hardly… I mean, all his stuff’s stolen. It’s not a controversial opinion. All comedians know that. I don’t think he even really counts as a comedian, does he? It’s not even really a little dig about Joe Pasquale – it’s a 15-minute explanation.’


And here it is.

Goal!

Here's 5 minutes worth of goals. Mainly scored in Italy. There are a lot of great goals in here, but have a look in particular for the one at the 1 min 10 sec mark. It's by Francesco Graziani of Torino in 1976.

Sunday 21 October 2007

99p Challenge

The 99p Challenge was a radio series that ran on Radio 4 from 1998 to 2004. It regularly featured such funny people as Simon Pegg, Armando Iannucci, Richard Herring and Peter Serafinowicz.

You can download all the shows here.

Saturday 20 October 2007

Brendon Burns

Last night I went to see Brendon Burns at a packed Maggie Mays. The triumphant winner of The if.Comedy Award at this year's Edinburgh Festival played for around two hours.

He started off telling us how winning that award had made his cmedy life different, then went on to discuss his ill-fated stint presenting the I'm a Celebrity show on ITV2.

Properly edgy, a lot of his material centred on race, religion, regional stereotypes and the sexes. So much so that a large chunk of the evening was devoted to him feilding heckles from several inebriated women in the audience.

Here he is on an Irish TV show a couple of years ago.

Soup Man

Did you know that you can buy soup from The Soup Nazi online? No? Well you can . The Original SoupMan has set up around 200 stores across the US. He even has the same rules as the Seinfeld character.

Thursday 18 October 2007

Black Cape # 29

Black Cape # 28



We're All Stuck Out In The Desert

When me and the This Place is Dead boys went to see Jenny Lewis last year, she was supported by her boyfriend Johnathan Rice. I think we all agreed that the best song he did was one he introduced as a new song, "We're All Stuck Out In The Desert". It's now on his new album Further North. Here it is being performed when he supported REM at Hyde Park a couple of years ago.

You can see the video for it by clicking on the link to his website.

David Simon in the New Yorker

Here's a long piece in the New Yorker on David Simon and The Wire.

Much of the new season, which will begin airing in January, will take place at a downsizing newspaper called the Baltimore Sun. Johnson, back at the monitor, began teasing Simon for giving so many of his old Sun colleagues small parts on the show. Among the dozens of people who have recurrent parts or cameos are Simon’s former editor, Rebecca Corbett, now an editor at the Times; the former Sun political reporter Bill Zorzi, now a writer for “The Wire”; Steve Luxenberg, the editor who first hired Simon as a reporter at the Sun; and Simon’s wife, Laura Lippman, a crime novelist who used to be a Sun reporter.

Have You Been to Brixton Yet?

Here's Dave Chappelle on one of his recent surprise appearances in London.

Black Cape # 27

Wednesday 17 October 2007

Armstrong and Miller are Back

An interview with Armstrong and Miller.

Having decided to reunite, Armstrong and Miller recruited a team of writers, including The League Of Gentlemen’s Jeremy Dyson as script editor.

Armstrong explains: 'We have always been big fans of Jeremy. He has a fantastic outlook and a wonderful scientific and emotional handle on comedy. He's really good at putting his finger on what is funny and we leapt at the chance when he was suggested.'

The pair tried out some of their sketches in front of a live audience, and Miller said: 'It was one of the best things that we did. It got us used to performing in front of an audience again, and helped us try out lots of material before we went into the studio.’

Some YOMG Show Photos

Here are some photographs from last night's show at The Stand.












Sunday 14 October 2007

Black Cape # 26

Saturday 13 October 2007

More YOMG Rehearsal Photos

Here are some more YOMG rehearsal photographs.

Mind it's this coming Tuesday the 16th of October at The Stand in Edinburgh. Six quid/four quid.




Thursday 11 October 2007

C'Mon

For no reason, this is Guster riding on Segways and being bullies in the video for C'mon.

Panini Stickers


Of no interest to anyone who wasn't into football in the mid 1980s but here is the complete Scottish Premier in Panini sticker form for the 1985/86 season.

30 Rock on Five

Season one of 30 Rock starts tonight on Five. It's well worth watching. Set behind the scenes of a Saturday Night Live style sketch show it stars former SNL Head Writer Tina Fey, SNL star Tracy Morgan and the ever-hilarious Alec Baldwin.

In my opinion it's like an updated Mary Tyler Moore Show, if that means anything to anyone reading. It has a really strong supporting cast and everyone in it gets there fair share of laughs.

Here's an
interview with Tina Fey from the New York Times. Another interview from Kansascity.com.

Control

Here's a good piece by Matt Greenhalgh who wrote the Ian Curtis biopic Control.

I can tell you that as good as this film is it is not improved by having two 50-year-old jakeys drinking cherry brandy sat next to you.

The film looks amazing, as you might expect from a top-class photographer like
Anton Corbijn. One scene in particular, after Curtis's baby is born, is framed like a classic photograph and lingers in the same way as you would take in a still image.

It's certainly pretty bleak but handles Curtis's battle with epilepsy well. The performances are all pretty strong. Sam Riley as Curtis though is the obvious stand-out.

"In the research phase, I had a hitlist of people who knew Ian to go to see to get it right. As a biographer, you've got to be right. Some can try to bully you into presenting their version of Ian - we'd have a showdown and I was just waiting to get "well, you didn't even know Ian" thrown into my face. But Tony Wilson just said: "Fuck 'em, go write the myth". I felt free after getting his permission."

Wednesday 10 October 2007

Glue Rehearsal Photies

Here are some photographs from the most recent Glue rehearsal. It's going in the usual haphazard fashion.





Saturday 6 October 2007

Comedian Interviews

Here are some comedian interviews in Harp magazine.

David Cross

“I still stand by Freak Show,” states Cross. “My poor attitude is partly to blame; I may not have been the easiest person to work with at that time. But Comedy Central can be blamed for the rest.”

Patton Oswalt

Asked to pinpoint where it all went wrong—or right, depending on your p.o.v.—Oswalt points to a scene from his childhood. It’s Sunday at St. Catherine of Siena, the church Mrs. Oswalt tried to get her son to swallow. Oswalt, not yet the ostensibly raging atheist with a shit-tipped blow dart for every pious prick, showed up in what you might call his Sunday Okay; he was lookin’ sharp, but not sharp enough for some. “There was an elder in the church that complained about me not dressing nice enough,” Oswalt recalls, “and it turned out to be Robert Hanssen, that spy that was selling secrets to the Russians. He was flagging me for not dressing nice enough, and he was trying to take out our country.”

Eugene Mirman

Mirman created his own “comedy” curriculum at Hampshire College, with his thesis a one-hour standup he wrote, performed, produced and promoted. “I never understood why anyone thought what I did was so impractical,” he observes. “We were all going to temp for several years until some of us gave up on our dreams.”

Flight of the Conchords

Clement and McKenzie were roommates in Wellington, New Zealand, when they began writing together around 1998. Clement had been doing comedy with the Humourbeasts and McKenzie was playing music, but at a time “when we didn’t have much work on,” Clement says they picked up guitars to learn David Bowie and Leonard Cohen songs. “We’d never remember them,” Clement says, “so we started making up our own songs.” Although these had funny parts, they weren’t necessarily comedy songs. They played them at an open-mic comedy night anyway.

And from the same issue - Rilo Kiley.

Friday 5 October 2007

Black Cape # 25

Thursday 4 October 2007

In The Thick Of It

This is a good interview with Armando Iannucci, as he discusses The Thick of It and promotes the forthcoming book of scripts.

"When you say mainstream," he says, "what I don't mean is very safe and very twee." He points to American comedies such as The Simpsons and Malcolm in the Middle - each original, intelligent and uncompromising in its own way. They're only "mainstream" in the sense that everyone watches them.

"I'm trying to persuade the sort of people who write Father Ted or Peep Show to start thinking about writing stuff for BBC1 or BBC2, in front of an audience, but not in any way compromising the material." Comedy writers in this country, as he sees it, are in danger of resigning themselves to chasing cult followings on specialist channels. "Comedy is a strange thing," he says. "I think it's the only genre in television where the people who are best at it don't automatically write for the biggest audience."

The Peter Serafinowicz Show

Here's a good interview with Peter Serafinowicz discussing tonight's Peter Serafinowicz Show.

"There’s not mystique about being on TV anymore. You see these people go on Jeremy Kyle and carry on their miserable lives as if the cameras weren’t there, there’s no prestige about it. That’s why we came up with Michael-6, a robot talk-show host. The people in our sketch just ignore him."


And here's another one.

When we were writing this series, me and Jay, and this guy called Dan Mayer and the Dawson brothers; we were trying to come up with spoofs and tried to fi gure out how to spoof Big Brother because its ridiculous enough as it is, especially celebrity big brother, and also every other comedy show has done it already.

Dick Cavett: Rock Icons

I make no apologies for this being a bumper post raving about an American TV Show from over 30 years ago.

Some time ago I
raved about the DVD set The Dick Cavett Show Comedians. Through my subscription to Love Film I rented Dick Cavett: Rock Icons. This three-disc set comprises several full-length episodes of the DCS featuring some of the major music stars of the time.

The first disc features a musical special with Jefferson Airplane, Crosby, Stills and Nash, and Joni Mitchell. Cavett, a good decade older than the hippies in his studio, looks like a dad hanging out at his kid’s birthday party.

There’s then a fascinating episode featuring Sly and the Family Stone. After performing
Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin) Sly joins Cavett and Debbie Reynolds for a chat.


Although the former Sylvester Stewart isn’t completely all there (in an interview on the disc Cavett suggests his brain had been beaten by an egg whisk) he still manages to be an entertaining guest, frequently telling Cavett how much he likes him.

The third episode is an all-David Bowie one. Interesting as it was in the period where Bowie, although having moved on from Ziggy Stardust and now performing as himself, still wished to maintain an aura of mystique. The interview is a little slow but throughout it Cavett manages to coax more and more personality out of the Thin White Duke.

Disc Two is all-Janis Joplin. I couldn’t claim to be a big Janis fan and even after watching these shows I’m still not converted to her music. However I could listen to her talking all night. In the each of the three shows featured she’s a warm and engaging interviewee who oozes enthusiasm for what she does and helps to create some lively debate.



In the first episode she’s joined by writer Michael Thomas and improvisational sketch group The Committee. The second sees her chat with Raquel Welch, Douglas Fairbanks Jr and newsman
Chet Huntley. At the time he was about to retire from his role as co-anchor on The Huntley Brinkley Report. (A news show that Alasdair Milne claims was the blueprint for Reporting Scotland).


In the third show, filmed just two months before her death, her fellow guests are film legend Gloria Swanson, a young and kooky Margot Kidder and American footballer Dave Meggyesy, who had just written an
expose on the sport.

The third disc kicks off with Stevie Wonder, though he’s the least entertaining thing on the show.
Elsa Lanchester, Bride of Frankenstein and wife of Charles Lawton provides numerous amusing anecdotes from her acting days as well as some catty but funny tales concerning Isadora Duncan.

Then
Alain Delon doing his first chat-show in English, joins in as Cavett playfully banters with him over the language gap. We then get Tex Ritter performing the theme song from High Noon.

The second show is a George Harrison special and it’s an interview you’ll never see on a chat show of today. He jokingly mocks John and Yoko, laughs off the suggestion that there were no internal problems in The Beatles before Yoko and suggests he was relieved the band split up. He then talks of delays in publishing The Concert for Bangaldesh LP, before inviting his distributors’ head to sue him as he intends to release it through another label.



Cavett asks him if he feels responsible for The Beatles’ drug use possibly encouraging their fans to try drugs. Some of the audience boo. Harrison chastises them, saying Cavett can ask that question if he wants. He then goes on to discuss LSD and numerous other drugs prevalent in the music scene.


The final show sees a change of format. The first half is all Paul Simon, who plays some songs and chats to Cavett about songwriting. He then plays two verses of a song he was then writing, asks Cavett for lyric suggestions and explains the chord progression choices he felt he had available in order to complete it. The song was
Still Crazy After All These Years.

The show was recorded in September 1974 and Cavett had just completed his book ‘
Cavett’. So, in the second half of the show he turned the tables on himself and had a selection of authors interview him about his writing process in an attempt to illicit some of the personal side of him he was often accused of concealing from the viewers.

Anthony Burgess, Barbara Hower and Jerzy Konsinski are the authors in question. Burgess particularly is fascinating. Erudite and authoritative he proves a compelling conversationalist as he praises and quizzes Cavett while also throwing in some literary stories and myth busting.


Due to the discs containing complete episodes this isn’t just a package for fans of 70s music. There’s something to entertain anyone interested in films, music, books, sport, news and intelligent conversation.

Cavett really is a first class interviewer. Even although some of his guests seem slightly reluctant to talk Cavett never seems frustrated and with his excellent ad-libbing skills he’s never short of something to say himself. These kinds of conversations just don’t appear on television anymore. Actual debate breaks out, discussion, arguments, differing opinions, guests listening to and being entertained by other guests. There are several Dick Cavett DVDs out there. I just wish there were a lot more.

Here’s an
excellent article by Danny Miller on the Huffington Post discussing the Janis Joplin disc.

In the bonus interview on the disc where Curb Your Enthusiasm’s Bob Weide takes him through some of his memories of the show he briefly mentions the time one of his guests died on the show. Cavett
writes about it here in the New York Times.

And here’s the rest of his
blogs for the NY Times.

Monday 1 October 2007

Jerry...um...

Here's a trailer for the first episode of the second season of the terrific 30 Rock. The episode features a guest spot from Jerry Seinfeld. The best bit of this is where Kenneth the Page mimics the Seinfeld theme tune to Jerry.

This is a feature on the show.