I am dying and I’m having fun

OK, our first lovingly-scheduled Tapes on Tuesday (or TOT) didn’t quite go according to plan; blame me, or technical ineptitude. I thought we could begin with Bodies Of Water’s excellent I Guess We’ll Forget The Sound, I Guess, I Guess, a glorious procession of a song which sounds like a gospel choir going through an existential phase, backed by a lethargic George Clinton. Since a certain blogger is worried about copyright issues besmirching her good name should she ever venture down the primrose path of copyright law, and because I don’t know how you post mp3s, I thought I’d link to their video on YouTube. Unfortunately so radical and precocious is our taste in music (or so skint are artists in general now that the Hype Machine pretty much offers you the illegal download equivalent of a valet service and a hand job) that this band don’t actually have a video.

Pissed on as my musical chips were, I did find some interesting stuff typing ‘Bodies Of Water I Guess We’ll Forget The Sound’ into YouTube, not least this hour-and-sixteen-minute-long video by an American professor called Randy Pausch. It’s part of a ‘Last Lecture’ series, in which academics are invited to give a talk about something close to their interests about which they have thought long and hard, and distilled down into vodka-like droplets of pure profundity, and are asked to give a talk to the audience as if it were the last thing they could ever say about the subject. Except that in Randy Pausch’s case, it really was: at the time he gave the lecture, he knew he was dying of pancreatic cancer. Parts of the talk stray into the tediously geeky (he was a professor of virtual reality), university-specific, and just plain disturbing (037:38-041:09), but there’s some good ole American earnest (watch that rash now) advice scattered in there too, and the part where he brings his wife up on stage at the end to blow out the single candle on her giant birthday cake is genuinely moving. There are a few life-lessons he hammers home: ‘brick walls are there to show you your determination’, ‘you’ve got to decide whether you’re a Tigger or an Eeyore’  (or at least convince your neurotransmitters), my favourite being ‘don’t bail; the best gold is at the bottom of piles of crap’. A lesson I would encourage the new dozens of readers of this blog to take to heart.

And in the end, this seemed like a very good match for the Bodies of Water song. It has the same corniness, the same levity, the same gravity. The same will to celebrate a tragedy. The same idea of lighting one candle rather than cursing the dark. Though why it came up under ‘Bodies of Water I Guess We’ll Forget The Sound’ I’ve still no idea.

Cross-dresssing Performance Poet of the Week

I got the Josie Long DVD for Christmas, which I have watched so often I now dream of bags of tangerines and endearingly bizarre flow-charts in a sweaty Edinburgh room. Just booked tickets for her show in February, ‘All The Wonders Of The Universe (Shown In Detail)’, which I hear is meant to be a little darker than her previous two shows, though I imagine she does ‘dark’ to about the same extent that Neighbours does ‘pornographic’. Anyway, she’s pretty much my Favourite Living Human Being That I Don’t Actually Know So Should Probably Stop Talking About As Though They Were My Best Friend at the moment, thanks to her revolutionary brand of comedy that somehow takes that usual comedy kryptonite, earnestness, and proves that comedians don’t have to be arrogant idiots who have to rely on insulting the audience to get laughs. A sample can be found here (about the least funny part of her show, but you have to go with what YouTube gives you). Plus, if you buy the DVD, you get a handmade postcard of varying quality (I got a picture of a Thai woman pointing to a child and saying ‘I love this child! And the music of Jeffrey Lewis’. Tom got a scene depicting a tetchy anteater).

Anyway, in her show, Josie Long refers to a performance poet called Rachel Pantechnicon. The specific bit, and yes, I sadly enough can remember this verbatim, is that she says she has been to see some performance poetry (‘which normally I would despise with the level of hatred that is appropriate, which is all of the hatred you have in your heart’), and that Rachel Pantechnicon, who was performing that night, taught her an inspiring lesson about learning to value your weaknesses as much as your strengths, because your ‘failings’ are as much a part of who you are as your successes, and only then, when you’ve learnt to love everything about yourself, can you move on (for those of you who, like me, break out in a rash at high exposures of earnestness, Josie Long then goes on to put this lesson into practice by painting a giant ocean scene saying ‘Marvellous’ on her belly. Just buy the DVD, it’s funny when she does it).

Since I’m in the excitable throes of a new discovery and have slightly too much time on my hands, I decided to check out this Rachel Pantechnicon (who also goes by the name Russell Thompson, which explains the voice being lower than Barry White), and I wasn’t disappointed. Her poems are delightfully odd and hilarious; imagine if Half Man Half Biscuit wrote for Wendy Cope and you wouldn’t be far off (example line, from ‘Folk Song Girls’: ‘Turn out your pockets –/what’s that you’ve got, another piece of coal?/Have you been listening to that song/About the Durham pit lockouts of 1861 again?’). A slight seeming obsession with pixies aside, coming across her poems made my day. Again, YouTube conspires to make me seem like I have had my sense of reality transplanted with a broken toaster, but it’s the only video of her performing (and I still like it, even if – or possibly because- noone realises when she has finished).

Read a selection of her poems here. Apparently you can buy the book if you send £2 to her nan.

Time to Change

As someone with neurotransmitters apparently wired by a team of monkeys on their break from mistyping Shakespeare, I was glad to come across the Time To Change campaign for ending mental health discrimination. The ‘people’s stories’ are disappointingly short, and the forums so far pretty much barren, but the campaign is a good one and well worth a look. It seems to be especially focussed on ways for friends and relatives to support the one in four of us who suffer from mental health difficulties – vital stuff, since there are few things more isolating than experiencing a mental health problem.

On a tangentially related note, I can’t stop listening to Florence and the Machine’s ‘Dog Days Are Over’ – with drums, handclaps and harps so powerful they should have their own government-sponsored rehab programme. Definitely recommended for the ‘depression can just fuck off’ playlist.

Watch the video here (and buy the song on iTunes).