Ian

Monday 20th October - time to work! ( Read more... )

Tuesday 21st October - more work! ( Read more... )

Wednesday 22nd October - finishing off ( Read more... )

Overall

Like I say, this was an astonishing example of international community building. Congratulations to all the organising team.

Having the amount of money they had helped: it meant a bunch of people got flights and/or accommodation and/or conference fees paid. How many, I'm not sure, but my guess would be somewhere between a third and a half.

It's not necessarily a model I'd want to follow, because without large grants 'gold plated' events are not sustainable and this was one of those. It was a catered hotel event - and hotels tend to go 'ker-ching!' when told you want to have a conference there because they're used to businesses that don't really care about the costs. I would never ever ever had considered having an official photographer, for example.¹¹ But this was Bi+ History being made and the results are very good to look at.

It was also the least fluffy bi conference I think I've ever been to, but that's entirely OK: it was clear from the first mention of it that this was a work event much more than a social one, and attendees were picked according to what they could contribute rather than 'anyone and everyone' or 'first come' basis. And that definitely worked.

I'm already looking forward to the next one.

Oh, since more or less finishing this, I see that the two people who led the governance process have published their version. It's great, and I'm not just saying that because there's a flattering picture of me in the middle of it :)

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1. I'd thought the reason they're part of ILGA Europe etc is around safety, but it turns out that they'd prefer to be part of 'European' organisations rather than 'pan-Asian' ones.

2. An obscenely low £61, a quid over twice the cost of the train to and from the airport.

3. Just over £370, but mostly because I had eight nights in Vilnius rather than three and at one point, the plan was for L to come too. Staying at the hotel effectively cost €290 in a single room for four nights, so more per night than I paid. There was also the option to share for €40/night.

4. €250, or about £220.

5. In the end, I spent around £95 during my time there.

6. It 'obviously' couldn't have been both: with one normal meeting a year, you'd almost always be within six months of the previous or the next one.

7. This is how we realised the published programme was wrong - when registering, there was a form for signing up for this walk on Monday or Tuesday. I was about to go for Tuesday anyway when one of the people on the desk mentioned that I had no choice because of when my session was scheduled. "No it's not, it's in the first afternoon slot, look..." "Ah."

8. I do wonder if I was the only person to go 'that's 25% non-bi+ identified...' I should also note that I'm presenting this in a slightly different way: the text was around having all or a majority of people being bi+ identified, but this is the way the discussion in the session was actually framed.

9. I tried doing some typing on governance lead Soudah's laptop with a French keyboard but gave up. Having a few of the letters change position wasn't a problem, but what sort of keyboard has a key that has both full stop and semi colon on, but makes you press shift for the one everyone uses the most? :) :) More seriously, given that English was most people's second, third, fourth, fifth, or sixth language, the other way I felt a minority there was in my monolingualism.

10. There was a noise warning, but I'd have moved away to avoid the smell if I'd realised what the noise warning was about: the smell of these really irritates my nose. Fortunately, this one wasn't too bad.

11. Even before he was occasionally irritating! Presumably being more used to doing weddings, he wandered around coming into sessions, walking around the room one way or another taking photos from various angles of various people, then leaving and coming back later to repeat that. Had he come to my one, I'd have been very tempted to tell him he had two minutes and that was it. In the end, he went with the first of the walking tours and, as mentioned, the results are great to see.

The Last Stand of Mary Whitehouse

This was great - I hope it plays somewhere else, otherwise you need to be in range of Nottingham Playhouse by next Saturday.

Looking at the reviews, the thing that strikes me is that they all (rightly) love Maxine Peake as the title character, but most of them don't make enough fuss about the performance of Samuel Barnett who plays all of the other roles: if just one of the two gets an award, it should be him.

There is at least one bit that made me go 'that's not right' - the idea that the closure of Gay News in April 1983 was a) before the arrival of Aids in the UK (nope), b) that meant no national info on Aids, so c) more deaths.

For one thing, the big shift in behaviour for men having safer sex with men was over the spring and, more so, summer of 1983. I'd need to look at old issues of Gay News to see how much they encouraged that before the end.

April 1983 also saw the first showing of the BBC Horizon programme, Killer in the Village, and that was very widely viewed from talking to people then and over the next few years.

Oh, and the 'national' is a way to not acknowledge the role of Capital Gay from the end of 1981, and that was read outside London - I think it was even officially distributed in Brighton - including its up-to-date coverage of what was happening here and in the US.

The Void

A space-based horror. The extensive use of video looks too consistent to be generated by AI, and the sound design, lighting, and stage magic effects - to get some of the effects, one of the two actors has to disappear / reappear somewhere else without being noticed by the audience - are excellent. The performances are also very good.

Overall, it's good, but it's the script that's the problem. Chunks of it are a bit too much like the 'question tennis' scene in Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead (without the comedy) and overall it fails to deliver a satisfying end. The journey's good though.

On tour.

This one invites me to join in a contract selling computers etc to Dubai. I was going to file it in the 'wrong Ian' folder when I look a bit further and see what the carrot they're dangling in front of me is:

Total Approved Over-Invoiced Amount: €24,923,362.00
Estimated Cost to Supply: €4,923,362.00.
Estimated Profit: €20,000,000.00

... with that profit split three ways.

I'm wondering if the invoice amount, exactly 20 million more than the supply cost, is a way to screen for gullible people. If it had been

Total Approved Over-Invoiced Amount: €25,000,000
Estimated Cost to Supply: €21,923,362
Estimated Profit: €3,076,638

... it'd still have been worthwhile joining in (a million Euro each!) and a lot more realistic.

One side-effect of not finishing the 2023 meme until it was time to do the 2024 one was that I missed mentioning Tár as being one of the best films of 2023. Of the decade. Of the century so far.

I saw it again when a 'last chance to watch' site had it as just about to disappear from Netflix (delays in writing this means it has done, sorry!) having been there for six months.

It is not for everyone, with no hand-holding in its two and a half hour runtime, and having the opening credits are the usual end credits - several minutes of a list of names in very small type - is a sign of that.

To my great disappointment, it looks like the disc versions do not have a commentary from the director and writer, otherwise I'd actually pay retail price for a copy.

Elektra

I like the way that it makes no concessions to people who are not familiar with the Sophocles version of the story, it's straight into middle of the overall plot. The chorus are particularly wonderful and most of the staging worked for me, even if some of it is rather artificial.

The most obvious example is the way there's a 'THUMPSSS' noise every time someone says 'father' (THUMPSSS) - amusingly, someone stumbled over a line and said 'father' (THUMPSSS) too soon and whoever presses the THUMPSSS button either knew that it was a mistake or didn't catch it. "No" is said at a different pitch to the rest of the line every time too. And what was the airship doing?

It's fine, but the pricing is based on 'Look! Some actor who's been the lead in a Marvel film!' rather than anything else. If you do see it in London, go for the cheap seats.

The Haunted House

David Alnwick is a very good magician. He also likes doing story-based shows as well as his pure magic ones. As this new one is two hours long including the interval, it's unlikely to get to the Edinburgh Fringe, so I used it as an excuse to visit H in Sheffield where it had its premiere.

While I like his story shows because they are good, they're usually not as good.

This one is no exception, even if it does contain one of his best tricks... unfortunately added in slightly unnecessarily. Given the murder mystery of the plot, it would have been nice to see a version of another of his favourites. (Various audience members choose a card from a set where each has one of three things on it, one being relevant to them. In the best version of the trick, they're confessions about something they've done. The 'guessing' of which one they picked is done by pointing at them later and asking them things like "Why did you sleep with your brother's girlfriend??"*)

The big problem is that the solution to the mystery is too 'look at me, I wrote this, isn't it clever' for anyone to get or to think that you should have been able to get.

Again, it's fine but if it was chopped down to an hour, it'd be better.

Comet of 1812

Parts of it are fabulous, like the opening Prologue introducing all of the characters - not having read 1812, I just know Woody Allen's speed-reading of it joke** and the history it's about - and the opening of the second act:

"In 19th Century Russia, we write letters, we write letters. We put down on paper what is happening in our lives."

.. which is so wonderful for re-immersing you into the time, a commentary about musicals (where people sing songs, sing songs, on what is happening in their lives), and provides a fab way to show the position the heroine is in. I was surprised that bit got so few laughs when I saw it.

But other parts feel like the author had read Writing Musicals For Dummies, should that exist: "In anything that's not a comedy, it's very important to have a comedy song featuring an otherwise very minor character one third the way through the second half" etc. Fortunately, those bits don't take away too much and it is a very good show.

I do think it could have used what I discover is part of the wider plot in the book: after everything that's covered in this, one character Natasha is involved with ends up having a leg amputated at the Battle of Borodino while being next to another one. There's a song in that.

A bigger problem that shouldn't affect anyone else seeing it was that I ended up standing behind Little Miss Chatterbox and her friends. The third time she started talking to them during one of the quieter bits of the show, I leaned over and went 'AHEM' just behind her ear. She jumped. It took a while, but when she started for the fourth time, I did it again. This attracted the attention of an usher, so I explained (very quietly in the corner on one side) what was happening, and waved when she did it for the fifth, sixth and seventh times. The eighth time wasn't too bad - it was a very quiet whisper - and had she done that each time I'd have been less cross.

The end result was an upgrade for me from the back of the circle to the stalls during the interval...

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* There's a more family-friendly version too, where what's on the cards is something fluffy but still gets 'guessed' in a less amusing (to the rest of the audience) way.

** "It's about Russia."

I thought '2024' when I was writing the title, but my fingers got it right...

Road Trip Show

This is effectively Stephen Sondheim's last musical (there's another one, but it was never really finished). It had a very troubled gestation - there were three previous versions, different enough to have had different titles, before this version was settled on in 2008 - and partly because of that, there's not been a West End (or Broadway) production.

I liked it. It's certainly much better than his previous one, Passion, which made the mistake of arriving in London at the same time as excellent Donmar Warehouse production of the much better Company and I would rather see it again than A Little Night Music.

It has humour, a gay lead character, and intelligence. The lyrics are great, but unlike ALNM there is no great tune and none of the songs would really work as standalone pieces (not that that has stopped people including one or two in tributes).

It's on at Upstairs at the Gatehouse in Highgate for a couple more weeks.

Hold Onto Your Butts

It's not quite a shot-for-shot version of Jurassic Park as performed by two actors doing physical comedy, and a foley artist, but it's not far off.

It's been about twenty years since I saw the film, but I still recognised it all. If you haven't seen it (or can't remember much) I suggest doing so before going.. and I do recommend going.

It was an Edinburgh Fringe show and suspect there it didn't have the trailers at the start that do part of padding it out to 75 minutes. It's on at the Arcola before going on tour.

I saw it for £4 via Central Tickets - they have it until Wednesday Thursday at the moment.

There's a non-bi community website that I'm responsible for.

For most of its life, it was using WordPress. When its server was changed last year, I took the opportunity to change it to a 'static site generator' - it wasn't updated very often, doesn't want anyone's comments, and serving plain HTML files is much quicker and vastly more secure than something looking at a database to go 'Oooh, what's on this page?' each time.

It's obviously possible to generate the HTML in a plain text editor but it's not 1994 any more and it's very useful to be able to say 'here's the content specific to this page, the rest is as usual / like this / etc'. And that's what an SSG does for you: feed it some text in some simple format and it will gather everything together to make your webpage. Want to change the colour of the menu? Want to change the entire theme? It's likely to be changing a single line in a single file and, on running the SSG again, every page will pick that up. ( Read more... )

Shortly after these became a big 'thing' in the UK, I realised that they're small fan ovens.

We've got a fan oven, so why pay £100 for a small one?

Staying with someone who finds their one very useful was a small nudge.

Using the one in the Edinburgh flat that the niece has was another one: if there's just one of you wanting to eat after coming back after midnight, having the heating element much closer to the food making things quicker is a big plus, even before you consider the lower electricity usage.

So when Lidl said they were going to sell some for £14.99 from the 12th, I went 'Oooh'.

I was expecting to have to be there at opening time (8am) to get one, but - having missed setting the alarm to earlier than its usual 8am - wandering over there around 11am, I still found plenty of them.

In fact, there were three sorts. The 4L one I was after from Daewoo that was £14.99, a smaller (2L?) own brand one for the same price, and a fancier one from Tower for £44.99 that really is a small fan oven.

I checked on Amazon - yes, they really sell the Daewoo for £49.99 there and the reviews were fine* - and bought one.

The next time I went, around a week later, they seemed to have gone, but that ones at £14.99 were still there hours after opening did make me wonder if we have had 'peak air fryer' in that most of the people who want one already have one?

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* At least one of the reviews did make me pause for a second, because it described it as using an unreplaceable halogen lamp for the heat source, with a limited life. But the three year warranty made me go 'that's £5/year' and it turns out that they're completely wrong about that: looking inside reveals it's a standard heating element.

On the train to London, I was reading the Guardian website and saw a five star review for Macbeth starring David Tennant. It gave the dates it was on, but didn't think - as far as I could see - it was important to say at which theatre it was on.

A quick search revealed it was the Donmar Warehouse and the whole run is sold out..

.. except that they release some standing tickets at noon every day. (There's another small release of seats seven days ahead of each performance, but I was too late for that.) My evening was already arranged - see later - so that meant the 2.30pm show.

Setting up an account - it's been years since I've been there and a friend used his membership to get two tickets to everything - and starting to refresh the booking page just before noon revealed that about half a dozen seats were released then. Seventy quid vs fifteen quid for the standing, but they weren't available yet and I might miss out.. I grabbed one, especially as they were middle of the front row vs back of the small balcony.

At the end of the process, just after noon, there was one of the ten to twelve standing tickets left. Going in, there was a very long returns queue outside.

The show is fabulous. Shakespeare's Globe had a very good Macbeth this year, but this is even better. The trick is that you hear it via headphones - each of the actors is mic'd, even though they're very close (even if you're not on the front row - the Donmar Warehouse is a very small theatre) and assorted stereo sound effects are added by an audio engineer.

This means that you can have the actors whisper to themselves or others, and everyone still hears it in a way that's believable that no-one else on stage can. Similarly, assorted effects mean you can do in audio what you'd have to do purely in the imagination or practically. You don't need to have the wryd sisters vanish - they were only heard rather than seen in the first place. Anyone else hoping to win the Olivier for 'best sound design' can give up now: if this doesn't win, I will be utterly astonished.*

The current trend is to rewrite the gatekeeper character's speech when opening the gates of the castle the morning after the murder before. Here, they even lose the joke about alcohol provoking desire but taking away performance, but he does say that everyone has paid seventy quid to listen to a radio play..

.. and on one level that's true because of how important the audio is, but on another it really isn't, because there's lots of physical performance too.

It's on until Feb 10th, and I will be repeatedly refreshing the booking page around noon on at least one date between then and now.

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The evening show was The Time Machine at the Park Theatre very close to Finsbury Park. (That's a new venue to me, having opened in 2013.)

The premise is that one of the trio of actors is HG Wells' great-grandson and the story of The Time Machine wasn't fictional. The biggest laugh came from something an audience member said..

.. as part of the show, it's necessary to have a phone in order to receive a call from the future. The cast borrow someone's phone, and the cast are waiting for the call, when he says "It'd help if the phone weren't switched off.."

.. but it's good stuff. I paid £12.50 per ticket via the Central Tickets site but it was also available via Tkts for around £20, I think.

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* If anyone knows how I can place a bet on it winning, do let me know!

I'm not the only one who remembers the old mechanical credit card machines retailers used, am I?

They'd put your card in it, a three part plasticy paper / carbon paper / paper form over it, and then move a slider over it so that the raised numbers on the card appeared on their top copy and your bottom receipt, thanks to the carbon paper.

There's one expensive purchase, a disk drive for an Atari 800 microcomputer that was around £400 in 1983, that I got for free when the branch of electrics retailer Laskeys I bought from had a robbery and all the day's top copies were stolen along with the rest of the contents of the till. No top copy, no way for them to get the money from the credit card companies.

Of course, the reason I said 'credit card' was that instead of debit cards, we had what I think of as 'cashpoint cards' (thanks to having an account with Lloyds from 1981 to 1991 where they messed something up while I was away at a by-election - other banks had different names for ATMs) most of which doubled up as cheque guarantee cards and you'd use those with your chequebook to pay for stuff in shops etc.

Cheques were.. :)