Stop motion - start acting!

This is what I've been doing for the last two weeks.

If you want to stop drinking, there is no better way than to attempt to make a stop motion film. You need to be sober to the point of not even having any alcohol in your blood from last week, never mind last night. Otherwise, you knock over a bit of the set on shot number 8,956 and so spend the next hour constructively crying.

Oh, and the end result is always not as good as you'd hoped, but you think 'no WAY am I doing that again...unless I get more lego!'

My idea for a short is a film about the TV, Territorial Vikings. They do viking lego. Hummmn.

So why do people make these films and put them on Youtube and such. I think there are three reasons.

First, you are a frustrated filmaker. You always wanted to make movies and now, finally, the technology is there not only to make films but to distribute them! Your short about a man who has a romantic liasion with a box of cereal can be shot in the morning, edited in the evening and by bed-time, somebody in Hong Kong can be logging on to comment that it's shit.

Second, you're getting paid to do it or in some other way rewarded. There is quite a lot of commercial content on Youtube, some of it is even there intentionally. Or, maybe the reward is non-material. Maybe you have put together a film showing in graphic terms how you will end it all by masturbating yourself to death in a 'photo-me' booth if Mandy Simkins does not go out with you. This embodies not just live-action, but stop motion animation as you could actually present Mandy with a flicker-book of you pleasuring yourself, made from the photos you had taken in the booth. Warning, may result in prosecution, or an award from the German film board.

Lastly, peer approval. This is the big one. We all like to be liked. Some even just like to be noticed. So if you post a movie of badger puppets shooting up and call it 'badgerspotting' or something, and so prompt several emotional retards to rate it as cool, you get a sense of self worth. If you get one thousand comments saying it's shit, then I suggest turning to a career in writing, or go back to spanking your plank at the nearest photo-me to get your jollies.

Games of shame

Well, the Olympic torch-lighting ceremony was about as much fun to watch as one tramp pissing in another tramp’s mouth. There’s nothing quite like a fat politician greasily mouthing platitudes at a lectern (too busy to learn his short speech no doubt) while some hapless protestor is bundled off in the background.

Later, during the progress of the torch, a new Olympic sport – protestor punching. Basically, two Greek goat-fuckers took time off from putting rohypnol in the retsina and fucking goats to work part time as policemen and punch protestors.

Why is it that foreign policemen always look like escaped prisoners who have been living rough for weeks in the woods. Do these people not know how to shave?

You can tell that protestor punching is a sport because the guys were wearing track-suits. Obviously, on a day when the entire media of the world is looking on, it’s important to look your best and nothing quite says authority like the sort of track-suit favoured by eastern European field-workers, gyppos and sex criminals.

I’m already worried about what will happen in London. The last thing we need is to have British bobbies having to worry about peeling protestors off the torch when they should be keeping the streets clear of crime and the tube clear of Brazillians. Instead, why don’t we just have the route lined with ‘free Tibet’ posters? What’s wrong with that? Better than ‘drink Starbucks’. Or have the torch bearer wear a free Tibet shirt or badge.

Or headband – in fact I think that the symbol of resistance for Tibet against those rice-eating panda-fuckers should be the red headband – handy, as this is normally the colour of any head-dressing after the Greek ‘police’ have caught up with you.

China syndrome

If I were the Chinese government, I’d be crapping myself about now. Anyone who has been to the cinema in recent years knows that the most deadly force known to man is the Annoyed Monk. Annoyed Monks’ can, at least in the movies, stop time, punch through walls and generally kick ass. Even those who have simply studied at the monasteries of Annoyed Monks pick up kick-ass moves and can do Kung Fu.

In fact, the Chinese government probably don’t much care about Annoyed Monks, or anyone, or anything. They know that no matter what they do, we in the west will keep buying the stuff that they make and turn a blind eye to human and environmental abuses. Hell, we’ll schlurp our cola (sponsors of the Olympics) and use our credit cards (sponsors of the Olympics) and so on, putting money into China. And they need it – tear gas doesn’t buy itself you know.

There’s still something distasteful about watching a soldier beat the hell out of a Monk and it shows the difference between East and West. If some oriental git tried any of that shit on with the monks at the Jesuit School down the road, then forget Kung Fu, they’d have their riot batons shoved up their own arses and their ears soundly boxed before they knew what hit them – and that’s before the elite paedophile priest brigade went to work on them!

Basically, China can do what it wants, as long as it’s thousands of miles away. The West are too busy getting super-rich by having everything made out there for peanuts and then shipped here to be sold for…well, not much more. Everyone here loves their cheap DVD players and clothes too much to worry about Tibet.

Mind you, things might change if it was pandas, not people, in danger. But Tibet’s only endangered species is the Yeti and nobody believes they actually exist, so it’s sort of hard to whip up support for their preservation. Maybe if one was seen on YouTube ripping the arse out of a Chinese soldier that would drum up some interest.

The only thing the Chinese have lost is face – and not even that really. Ever since they ran a tank over a shopper in Tienaman Square, most people have known that they are a bunch of gits.

That’s one of the reasons I won’t be watching the Olympics. That and the fact that it’s dull as shite. I mean, really – running. Is that a sport? Seeing how quickly somebody can run? What’s entertaining about that? And they run in a bloody circle! What’s the point of that? Running for a bus, yea, I can see the logic in that and the sense of triumph is catching it before it roars off with the driver flicking the Vees at you, but just running? Or jumping? Can’t you see that in any playground?

Oh, and the spectacle of the opening ceremony, where smug, well-fed criminal arseholes look smug. That I can do without. I might just read a book instead – printing appears to be the one thing not outsourced to China. Yet.

The rich and insane

There’s always been a place for the village idiot. These days, that place would appear to be a seat in Government rather than seated in the stocks, but there are other options – screaming abuse at strangers outside railway stations for instance, or being on television.

The fortunes of the genuinely deranged have fluctuated over the years and depending on which culture you were born into. In the past, being a gibbering loon may have seen you burned as a menace (Europe) or all-but-worshipped as somebody obviously touched by the Gods (anywhere which today counts olive oil, tourism and sexually transmitted diseases as their major industries). In more civilized times, we locked the loonies up and gentry went to go and see them on Sundays, like Disneyland with nutters.

For a while, nutters were on telly – usually on reality tee vee shows pretending to be ‘real’ people. The reason that nobody realised they were screaming nutters rather than ‘characters’ (‘characters’ are to be tolerated, just ask anyone in a local boozah about the bloke in the corner with his trousers tied with hairy string and a brace of live ferrets performing inside the top hat he’s wearing and it will be explained he’s a ‘character’. In my experience character = slight smell of wee-usually the ferrets’) was that the antics of a dyed-in-the-wool nutter are practically identical to those of a game show presenter.

Now, nutters have moved to the courts.

Whatever you thought of Heather Mills, whatever position you took or did not take and even if you cared nary a toss, her performance outside the divorce court the other day was like watching a slow motion train wreck. A train carrying a load of monkeys all flinging excrement at each other. If Heather were a nuclear power station, this is the point where the big red ‘meltdown’ light would be flashing.

I guess the issue was: how could ANYONE complain about ANYTHING after being given twenty three million quid of somebody else’s money! There were many low points but my favourite (watching the scene from between the cracks in my fingers while hidden behind the sofa) was the fabulous point where she pointed out that Macca is obviously content to see his daughter travel B class while he travels A class. How I yearned for Macca to lean into camera and smugly explain ‘actually, I hire a private jet…just to go to the shops’.

If Heather ever wonders just when the British public decided she actually was a complete deranged chav bitch after all, it was that moment – when a lot of parents sat at home knowing that their kids would be travelling Z class, if at all, lost sympathy.

The other madman performing for the gentry this week was MoHarrods Al Fahyd. Mo is insisting that the royal family give evidence at the inquest into the death of Princess Diana, he’s convinced that they plotted her death. Now, I think we can cut the guy a certain amount of slack – he’s foreign – but there comes a point where one stops making sympathetic noises and starts muttering ‘nutter’. That point is when he accuses the Duke of Edinburgh of masterminding assassination plots.

You want grease with you coffee?

Oh great, I appear to have a new vice. Having switched my morning beverage from the reasonably priced Americano to the more ‘aspirational’ latte, I’ve not had a chance to indulge because I’ve been late for my train every morning this week, meaning that the last part of my stroll to the station, securing of coffee and then perusal of the more lurid tabloid headlines at the newspaper table has been abandoned in favour of a sweaty, grunting desperate sprint to get to the train before it pulls out of the station leaving me trembling with impotent rage and considering crying.

Arriving at Victoria, hummmn, Krispy Kreme stand appears to have no queue. Admittedly, with Krispy Kreme clientel, it only takes one of them to form a queue, indeed one is a small crowd, two is a mob and three is a gravity singularity. So try the latte from there…oh, and an original glazed please.

The latte is great, the doughnut is sublime (and comes in a little waxed paper bag – I mean, how lovely is that – in a world choking to death with plastic bags, you get a little greaseproof paper bag that would not be out of place in the 1950s. Possibly this is a superb marriage of design and function but more probably a reaction to some twat that got grease from the doughnut on his suit and sued the company).

What really stands out though is the service, the KK staff are the friendliest, cheeriest people you could hope to meet. And believe me, at a railway station this makes them stand out like a fairy cake on a manure pile. And it’s not that false, corporate, Stepford friendliness either, the sort that comes out of a corporate instruction manual or, if push comes to shove, a bottle rattling with pills. That sort of cheery just makes you want to batter the server with whatever you are buying – good if it’s a rolled up magazine, less effective if it’s pillows – and scream ‘I hate being here more than you! Let’s just move on!’

This KK cheeriness comes from one of three things. Either the staff have not been on the job long enough to be ground down yet (I can kind of see this, but not sure it would translate to other realms, for instance, the time elapsed between pinning on a badge saying ‘MacDs, here to help’ and developing a simmering resentment of the world and deep self-loathing that will probably lead to your masturbating into the mayo while grinning at the CCTV is probably 0.23 seconds). Or, they are allowed as many doughnuts and coffee as they like and are manic on sugar, fat and caffeine. Or they are just normal and they simply appear cheery in proportion to the rest of us.

Whatever, they bring a little sunshine into my day. Serving out of a tiny kiosk on a busy railway station platform can’t be a picnic, but they do a great job. God alone knows what a hash of it an English person might make. The English do not do service. I think they think it demeans them. That’s tripe of course, you only have to go abroad to realise that your waiter is there to help you have a great evening. Possibly the problem is the English consumer who doesn’t know how to behave when interacting with staff and so dredges their memory for interaction with staff, latches onto ‘Upstairs Downstairs’ and acts accordingly.

Of breezes and zephers

The Beaufort Scale, the measure of how many yards you will spend futilely chasing your umbrella along a street as it is propelled by a gale (and if you do catch it, how long you will do your Mary Poppins impression before your umbrella folds and you plummet, doing your impression of a rock), is a useful tool for clarifying just how strong the wind is. Like the Eskimos with their snow, the English have thousands of words to describe different degrees of weather – it’s useful to be able to sustain whole conversations about the cimate because it means we don’t have to talk about our feelings. God alone knows how many marriages a debate about a downpour has saved.

The Scale probably needs revision. No breeze is described as ‘smoke rises vertically from chimneys’. This is a useful marker if you are in the countryside, or the eighteenth century, but less useful for a modern city dweller. Possibly ‘steam rises vertically from latte’?

Towards the upper end of the scale we need no new measures, as any official definition above ‘gusty’ is ditched in preference of the traditional English method of emphasis – profanity. So we have ‘bloody windy’ all the way up to ‘fucking windy…and I’ve lost my brolly again!’.

England has once again been buffeted by winds, gales and storms. I know that things were bad out there on Sunday night because when I exited the house on Monday my wheelie bins were lying on their side. I’m glad they fell over actually, as the other option would have been to see them, teetering on their wheels, being blown about the street like duelling galleons.

Less welcome was the realisation that the wind had also tried to dislodge a fence panel. I have to admit that my fence is in a bit of a sorry state. I think it’s actually made from paper mache and the fence posts are not sunk with any great security. Indeed it’s remarkable it’s lasted as long as it has. The paradox is that it stays intact long enough to actually act as something that can catch the wind, leading to the thing swaying like a dipsomaniac at a wine tasting.

So it was that in the failing light, howling wind and driving rain, I was up to my ankles in my wellie boots in mud, waxed jacket flapping round me while I tried to secure the fence panel with nails, screws and string, while it did a great impression of the sails of a floundering schooner.

Still, I got the job done (well done trusty hammer) and squelched back from the garden. Soaked and in ill-temper I felt every inch the farmer to the extent that I even considered a twenty minute rant about DEFRA.

As for the wind, I think it blew itself out that night but I do have a suggestion for the highest gale force definition. It’s the one that drives smokers indoors. Honest to God, I was walking from the office to the station, hat brim down, collar up and passed a couple standing outside a pub, in the driving rain and howling gale, trying to keep a far alight. The bloke was probably wondering why the level of his beer glass wasn’t going down.