By: Patrick

My parents told me about the movie ‘Shame’ as they went to watch it shortly before its general release as part of a film festival. They seemed to be most interested by the fact that Michael Fassbender spent large portions of the film with his penis on display. As for the rest of the movie, they could not say much except that they found it a bit unsettling. There was no sense of connection with Fassbender’s character – he was inexorably Other. The plot of the movie is simple: Brandon (Fassbender) is happily getting on with his life, working in a high-powered job in New York and then masturbating and fucking as much as possible in his spare time. Then his ‘emotional’ sister drops onto his doorstep and forces the kind of intimacy on him that his type don’t really enjoy. He finds it more difficult to hold his lifestyle together under the weight of his sister’s demands for intimacy and relationship. Eventually he tells her that she is a parasite and that she should bugger off. This coincides with his sexual ‘addiction’ spiralling out of control and then she slits her wrists as a result of his rejection. She survives. It is left ambiguous at the end as to whether Brandon has changed his ways.

With the plot out of the way, the thing that is perhaps most strking about Brandon is how normal he is, at least as a representative of the male population at this point in time. In many ways, I felt like it was my life being depicted on screen. I too have spent most of my life shying away from intimacy, chasing sex by every means possible: wasting days helplessly lost in internet pornography and contacting girls in chatrooms for ‘casual relationships’, dating numerous girls at a time and still looking for more. And yet I don’t get the impression that I am so abnormal. Indeed, intimacy in the kind of sense that it is really hoped for and aspired to is very much the exception rather than the rule. As the philosopher John Gray writes of the character ‘Utz’ in Bruce Chatwin’s novel of that name: ‘It is true that in many ways [his life] is a poor one. It lacks deep friendship, abiding love or any commitment to a cause. But in these respects, how different is it from most people’s lives?’. Brandon, like most of us, is trapped somewhere between his dread of both loneliness and of relationships. While the rest of us choose any number of distractions (from a couple of glasses of red wine a night to taking food far too seriously to going away on holidays to working a full-time job to logging onto the internet to reading books to writing essays to having hobbies and so on) to keep us chugging along, vaguely oblivious to the dread that lies beneath, Brandon chooses sex.

If reviews are anything to go by, most people watching it wonder about his family life. Late in the film his sister says: ’We’re not bad people, we’ve just come from a bad place’. This titillating snippet alerts us to the possibility of abuse, maybe even sexual abuse. Brandon’s behaviour is then easily shifted to Other, to pathology, to Not Us. Yet what if that which motivates much of Brandon’s behaviour is more simple, more mundane than that? Is that not a more unsettling way to view it as it then implicates the rest of us? In his agonized grimace of orgasmic release, is he not at least letting out something of the repressed emotion that the rest of us carry and manifest in any number of other less dramatic forms? What if Fassbender’s behaviour is simply a response to the recognition that he is going to die? If, as David Foster Wallace put it, the role of fiction is to ‘aggravate this sense of entrapment and loneliness and death in people, to move people to countenance it’, then dismissing Fassbender’s behaviour as pathology rooted in childhood abuse is a classic form of the denial that sustains the dread. In this case, Fassbender is little more than a freak, a subject of our voyeuristic scrutiny, to be examined but not understood. Yet this seems precisely the wrong conclusion to draw from the movie. In fact, Fassbender is us, or at the very least he is me. And I am a high functioning, well-liked and well-respected person. I am fairly normal. I sit fairly close to the middle of the bell curve.

To me, Brandon is predominantly bored. The opening scenes of the film suggest a monotony to his routine, while his intense, leg-tapping absorption in internet pornography suggests the kind of immersive sense of release that one enjoys so much when relieved from boredom. In conversation with a date, Brandon dismisses the notion of marriage or even relationships, suggesting that in the end the couple will have nothing to say to each other, they are ‘just bored of one another’. Later he tells the same date of how he would have loved to be a musician back in the 60s. When she says that she is happy being alive at this time and in this place, he comments on how boring the world is. His day-to-day life is an itch, a bored, dissatisfied restlessness, ever ready to tip over into anxiety, depression and despair. Once again, how different is this from most people’s lives? Forced into relationship by his sister’s extended stay, Brandon can only come to see her as a ‘parasite’, sucking away his freedom and autonomy by forcing intimacy upon him. When she tries to justify her presence, he ends up shouting at her repeatedly ‘How are you helping me?’. Yet of course she is the only person who will ever help Brandon, who will ever care enough about him to shake him out of his impoverished lifestyle.

It is interesting that in a film called ‘Shame’, we only see Brandon with his head bowed at the end, as he sits besides his sister’s hospital bed after her suicide attempt. Even here we are led to believe that his head is bowed in tiredness rather than shame. Brandon’s shame is embodied, yet remains deep within him. We can see it come to the surface in certain moments of sexual release or occasional flashes of vulnerability before his calm exterior re-assembles itself, machine-like, ever protective of its self, however wounded. For those of us who carry around our shame, depression and madness hidden deep within, this brief connection with ‘one of us’ gives us that space to breathe, that crucial sense of not being alone in the world. And yet we still find ourselves grappling for some aetiological explanation of his ‘addiction’, preferably in some form of childhood sexual abuse, that will serve to re-inforce his Otherness. We may succeed in othering Brandon, but as far as victories go it is rather a hollow one, like claiming belief in free will because you can raise your hand voluntarily.

By: Patrick

I remember that I picked up The Book of Disquiet having arrived at my parents’ house for a restful week and realised that I was no longer in the mood for crime thrillers. I started reading it late at night and was instantly enchanted. It’s a difficult book to describe, but basically it is a posthumously assembled collage of journal entries and passages from notebooks found in a chest in the rooms of Fernando Pessoa, a Portuguese writer from the early twentieth century. Pessoa was a little known writer in his lifetime and, as the book describes, he spent his life doing a very mundane office job. The Book of Disquiet is basically a work of poetry – endless lyrical passages that render Pessoa’s mundane existence anything but mundane to the reader. It is considered an ‘existential’ classic and also a ‘boredom’ classic. The former as Pessoa can’t seem to help musing about the deepest questions of life, the universe, consciousness, the human; the latter as his life, by his own admission, is SO boring! And this boredom is the appeal for me. I have never managed to develop a ‘poetic consciousness’, like Pessoa’s. In other words, the ability to render the banal extraordinary through attention to it, through extracting what is beautiful or miraculous from it. Whether it is dreams, seasons, moods, or any other topic Pessoa touches on, he helps us to see these day-to-day phenomena in a new light. This may suggest that The Book of Disquiet is a celebration of the mundane, the monotonous, the boring, the everyday. In many ways it is as Pessoa writes that ‘one must monotonize existence in order to rid it of its monotony’ and ‘may I always be blessed with the monotony, the dull sameness of identical days, my indistinguishable todays and yesterdays…’ And yet the book is so sad as well – Pessoa’s moods drifts between an acceptance of and even celebration of his monotonous life, and an agonizing sense of dejection, of solitude, of hopeless dreams, of pure tedium. As he writes of one particularly bad day: ‘Some days are like whole philosophies in themselves that suggest to us new interpretations of life, marginal notes full of the acutest criticism in the book of our universal destiny’. Perhaps this deep and abiding sadness is a result of Pessoa’s self-proclaimed position as a by-stander in life, one who looks on but is unwilling to get involved: ‘Far better to write than dare to live’.

I have always been one who flees boredom rather than tries to stay still and explore what boredom is trying to tell or teach me. Yet as Pessoa points out: ‘Tedium is not a sickness brought on by the boredom of having nothing to do but the worse sickness of feeling that nothing is worth doing. And thus, the more one has to do the worse the tedium.’ As a mood, boredom has the potential to offer us crucial insights into questions surrounding time, the self, freedom and, ultimately, significance. Yet ours is a culture built on a denial of boredom. To be bored nowadays is perceived as a personal failing, a source of shame. And so we flee it, generally into meaningless activities and distractions that simply serve the purpose of ‘passing time’. This feverish tempo is deceptive and there is a serious risk that when immersed within it, we cannot see this deceit or withstand its temptations. In this way, we are unable to commit ourselves to what Martin Buber referred to as ‘the truth of the slower tempo’.

Boredom is a mood that can integrate the religious and secular worlds. Within boredom our consciousness is forced to slow down, to experience time as an apparently endless, dragging present. It is painfully reeled in from the rollercoaster ride of the everyday. I am acutely aware of my state of mind by whether I can be still enough to absorb Pessoa’s gentle prose or whether I speed through it and end up lost and frustrated. This reeling in of our bored, restless consciousness may not be pleasant, but once we emerge from boredom, will not the colour of the sky, the singing of the bird or even the whirr of the photocopier be rendered far more significant? Will we not finally be alive?

And yet, how many people are truly willing to give away their boredom?

By: Hugin

We went to see Noises Off at the Old Vic for all the wrong reasons.  In actual fact, the sole reason we opted for that play in that location was because it starred an actor we all admire greatly: Robert Glenister.  The decision to travel 500 miles in the middle of winter was made before we even knew anything about the play.  It was only weeks after we had booked our travel, accommodation and (determined to “do the theatre experience properly”) tickets for the best seats in the house, that I began to wonder if maybe we hadn’t done things the wrong way around.

Our trip to London started off brilliantly, watching a film at the cinema in Inverness (a luxury at any time of the year but particularly in winter when the 215 mile round trip is not to be recommended), a beautiful train journey down the length of the country, and meeting my friend in the Royal Navy for the first time (which also doubled up as a fantastic – if speedy – tour of London!).  By the time Lydia, Ginny, Clemency and I had tucked into a delicious meal at our hotel, returned up to our eighth floor rooms, admired our sterling view of London At Night and dressed for the theatre, the play had a lot to live up to.

As anyone who has been to the Old Vic will know, the interior of the theatre is exquisite and, although our seats were hardly worth the extra £25 (each) we paid for them, we were pleased to have such a good view of the stage.  The play was immediately amusing, although the first act saw more restrained tittering than out-and-out belly laughing.  I was particularly pleased by the director’s decision to have members of the cast coming out of the audience, something that took me back to my days as an A Level drama student, although here it was done to far greater effect.

The interval came at the end of a promising first act which, although it provided a lot of entertainment, was also slightly too close to home for anyone who has been involved in amateur or small-time dramatics.  Ginny confided in me later that too many of the things in the first act reminded her of moments during her time with various amateur dramatics groups and I can’t help but agree with her.  During the interval we also sampled some extremely delicious ice-cream which can’t be faulted in any way other than that: a) it just didn’t last long enough, and; b) I was unsure as to how I was supposed to access the spoon!

It was really during the second act that the play ‘got going’ as far as I was concerned.  So many moments of pure comedy genius, delivered with fantastic timing by the cast, had me screaming with laughter, unable to stop myself breaking into spontaneous applause at the parts that appealed to me the most.  The play really went from strength to strength: the sequence with the flowers was hysterical, and Ginny had tears in her eyes from laughing so much when a cactus came in contact with Mr Glenister’s posterior.  (She’s a lovely girl.)  It really was a stroke of genius to set the second act backstage, especially as the set then reverted to its earlier layout for the third and final act, which was also so full of humour that we couldn’t stop laughing.

Every single member of the cast was superb in their roles, but I must admit to being particularly impressed by Jamie Glover.  Not only was his comic timing impeccable, but his excellent and untiring physical performance was both hilarious and inspiring.  I suppose I had previously identified him as “the son of Julian Glover” and so potentially it was for that reason that I was particularly impressed by his performance.  But I am henceforth far less cynical about his identity, having been more than convinced by his competence as an actor.

As Noises Off is still running at the Old Vic until the 10^th March, I won’t go into too much detail about exact moments in it, in case I ruin someone’s viewing experience!  However, what I will say is this: go and see this production of the play.  If you watch nothing else this year, watch Noises Off at the Old Vic.  It’s just the thing to beat off those vicious winter blues and set you thinking about just how many things in your life are actually a farce just waiting to be written!!!

By: Patrick

I miss D. Boon. Although of course I never met him. I was only 5 years old when he died in a car crash. He was the lead singer of a band called the Minutemen – one of the most original and brilliant punk rock bands of all time. And this is not punk rock in the sense we now think of it – with a distinct style of music, clothing and world view. The Minutemen came into punk rock at a time before it had become stagnant and petrified. For them punk rock was about taking control of your life – about immediacy of expression, freedom of thought.

Double Nickels on the Dime (1984) is their magnum opus, a sprawling 43 track epic. I love the story regarding the name of the album: Sammy Hagar (of stadium rockers Van Halen) had written a song entitled ‘I Can’t Drive 55’ in protest at the lowering of the speed limit on the US motorways. Seeing this as rather a feeble statement of defiance, the Minutemen decided that they would drive at the legal speed limit (double nickels is apparently trucker-speak for 55 miles per hour) but that they would make defiant, wild music. As bass player Mike Watt pointed out: “the big rebellion thing was writing your own fuckin’ songs and trying to come up with your own story, your own picture, your own book, whatever. So he can’t drive 55, because that was the national speed limit? Okay, we’ll drive 55, but we’ll make crazy music.”

Double Nickels is an intimidating album – 43 songs! And despite the occasional humorous song titles (‘Political Song for Michael Jackson to Sing’ and ‘The Roar of the Masses Could be Farts’), the lyrics are anything but superficial, dealing with everything from language to racism to politics to working class life. But what is it that I love so much about this album? Well, it is, as Flea from Red Hot Chilli Peppers has described it, ‘a cacophony of colours’. It is limitlessly creative. It is incredibly exciting. It is happy, inspired, alive. It is humorous, truthful, authentic. D. Boon’s guitar sounds like a cross between a buzzing insect and a dentist drill; Mike Watt’s bass lines are so elastic and imaginative and George Hurley’s drumming is so varied and intense. It is also painfully touching – Boon and Watt’s friendship shines through in songs like ‘History Lesson – Part II’, where Boon talks about the two of them playing music together as kids in the working class backwater of San Pedro – “we were fucking corn dogs”, he tells us. Elsewhere, Boon, a heavy set chap, takes aim at Watt’s wiry figure – referring to him as a skeleton, a series of points with no height, length or width. The tales of Watt and Boon arguing in tour vans over Marx’s Communist Manifesto or working peoples’ rights in Cuba are legendary.

There is a documentary about the Minutemen called ‘We Jam Econo’. This phrase sums up much of what the Minutemen were about – minimal expenditure, hard work, no pretensions, just getting on with things and creating your own world rather than expecting others to do it for you. This vision has inspired countless artists and non-artists since them. It is a vision that allows people to look beyond the mundane aspects of their lives to dream of creating something better – summed up beautifully in ‘The Glory of Man’: “I live sweat, but I dream light years”.

The music journalist Michael Azerrad wrote that the Minutemen ‘told stories, postulated theories, held debates, aired grievances, and celebrated victories – and did it in a direct, intimate way that flattered the intelligence as well as the soul’. For me, it’s all about the soul. The Minutemen offered a vision of freedom, of friendship, of loyalty and of creativity. In the midst of all the worrying about parenting that clutters our bookshelves, perhaps parents should heed a few wise words from the late, great D. Boon: “Create forms in which your children can learn the beauty of the world through the arts, so they can pass it onto their children”.

By: Patrick

It was as I walked out of Hall Two at the Sage that I noticed that everything looked different and felt different. Dreamlike insofar as it felt in no way like my everyday perceptual experience of the world, yet so far from dreamlike in the way that everything felt so vivid and lacking in the ephemeral quality of dream states. It was as if I had never stood before in the cavernous atrium of the Sage and had never heard the ambient sound of people talking before. It was as if I had never really paid attention to the sound of my feet walking on the marble floors. If great art challenges the way you see the world, forcing you to reconsider the banal and everyday experiences that we take for granted, this concert had been a resounding success.

Anyone acquainted with the drone metal sound of Sunn O))) will understand that the use of the word ‘resounding’ above was used in such a manner that I might legitimately add ‘no pun intended’. Because one thing to understand about Sunn O))) is that they are extraordinarily LOUD! The programme had warned of this possibility but I thought this may just have been the Sage trying to warn its usual septuagenarian and octogenarian clientele against ‘taking a chance’. In reality, it was the loudest thing I have ever experienced – so loud that to say I felt it in the pit of my stomach would have ignored the fact that I felt it in rumbling in every throbbing cell of my body.

Dressed in black robes, filling the room with dry ice and tuning their guitars to drop A (most guitars are tuned to E and bands are considered ‘heavy’ if they use a drop D tuning), Sunn O)))’s live show is as much a visual experience as an auditory one (especially when the vocalist emerges dressed as a tree!). Of course when faced with this theatricality it would be easy to dismiss Sunn O))) as cartoon characters in a similar vein to Spinal Tap performing Stone Henge or Ozzy Osbourne biting the heads off bats. But there is something unnervingly authentic about the ritualistic elements of their live performance. It is not an experience that draws an audience together. It immerses each individual audience member in the sheer brutality of the sounds that are produced. It is not fun to watch a gig like this. No one smiles. No one talks. No one even stands very close to each other if at all possible. One audience member spent much of the gig swaying back and forward, frequently unable to open his eyes for fear that they might burst forth from their sockets under such pressure. It was me. While meditation immerses people in the silence of their inner world, this gig immersed the audience in the deafening intensity of their outer world. The effect is much the same – both are deeply cleansing and profoundly effect one’s conscious experience of the world.

At times standing there with my eyes shut, allowing the waves of noise to pulse over me (the frequencies were sometimes so low that you could imagine them visibly pulsating towards you, the surrounding air vibrating as it drew nearer) it was impossible to work out exactly what this sounded like – if it was possible to compare it to anything else. Perhaps an avalanche is the closest I can come to capturing the deafening, rumbling menace of the sounds – the sense that this was what terror, madness and even death could all sound like.

I felt fragile at the end. I was extremely glad that I had come by myself. I am relieved that the few people I had asked to accompany me as ‘it would be an experience’ had sensibly declined my offer. It felt inappropriate to clap – clapping seemed so frail delicate. I was grateful that I did not have to speak to anyone – the sound of my voice would have been absurdly inappropriate. Yet listening to the ambient noise of others talking as I exited Hall Two was inexplicably beautiful. I could not make out their words – it was just noise with no beginning and no end (or was I imagining it all?).

Why should it be that the world outside seemed so extraordinarily vivid? I can only suggest that the quiet of the night combined with the fact that I was basically deaf to the usual city sounds like the cars passing over the bridge emboldened my other senses – the feel of my shoes passing over the metal gratings of the millennium bridge and the serenity of the blackened water drifting below. On the drive home, I took immense pleasure in the sound the car made as it emerged from a patch of smooth tarmac onto a stretch of roughened concrete. I likened it to someone emerging from the tranquillity of the sea to catch a much needed breath of air. Suddenly the spell is broken and reality has to be faced once again. Until you dive down deep into the infinite peace of the ocean once again.

As I arrived back home, one of my friends was still up and asked me what I thought of the Christmas decorations she had designed and put up. I tried to speak but the words caught at the back of my throat. In the end, I whispered that I thought they were extremely beautiful. And looking around, I realised that in fact they were extremely beautiful – intricate patterns weaved from brightly coloured cardboard. Whispering felt pleasant – almost like a massage. So I turned to my friend and whispered again that I thought they were really beautiful. Then I smiled faintly at her as I had forgotten how to smile and I went to bed.