The debut issue of Dirty Bristow magazine is now on sale. It’s a beautiful looking thing – as magazine’s go, it’s definitely a looker – and features an article wot I wrote and an illustration wot I drew and lots of great stuff by very talented people. You can find out more about it from here where you can also buy yourself a copy for the very reasonable asking price of £4 (inc UK P&P).
Here’s a couple of photos from my stand up gig at Highlight last month:
Pics courtesy of Brum-based MTC Media Productions.
As you were.
For those who like to supplement their audio with moving pictures, here’s a video of my first stand-up gig from last month (my “early, funny period”):
Tom Lennon’s First Stand-Up (in COLOR) from Tom Lennon on Vimeo.
The video was recorded by my good pal Gerry Logan and – just to clarify – I’m now available for bookings.
In case you haven’t had enough of politics this week, here’s my General Election-themed stand-up set I performed last Sunday night:
Tom Lennon Stands-Up Again from Tom Lennon on Vimeo.
As I’ve already said, much of this material seemed quite topical on Sunday night, quite dated by Monday teatime and now resembles a vintage newsreel. So it goes.
Thanks to my good friend Gerry for filming this.
(Yes, my name’s ‘Tom’ and I’ve got a good friend called ‘Gerry’. Deal with it.)
* The title of this blog post was inspired by Armando Iannucci and Chris Morris’s ‘Six Months that Changed a Year’, a fiendishly satirical reflection of 911 that was published in The Observer in 2002.
Courtesy of my good friend Mr Pete Ashton, here’s an audio of my first ever stand-up comedy gig from last night.
Tom Lennon’s First Standup from Pete Ashton on Vimeo.
(This, of course, means I’ll now have to write fresh material)
I’ll be doing my first proper stand-up comedy set this Sunday night (11th April). The venue is now:
Highlight Comedy Club (formerly Jongleurs)
Quayside Tower
259-262 Broad Street
Birmingham
B1 2HF
Doors 6.45pm, Tickets £5
It’d be great if you could make it.
The following is a brief extract from the recently unearthed sequel to James Joyce’s Ulysses, entitled ‘Twolysses’. This rigidly structured chapter was to be written as a sequence of questions and answers, and an early version originally appeared in a 1921 edition of Aston Villa’s match day souvenir programme.
WHAT DIVERGENT COURSES DID STEPHEN DEDALUS AND LEOPLOLD BLOOM’S RESPECTIVE TRAMS FOLLOW?
Stephen’s 11A tram followed Birmingham’s outer ring road in an anti-clockwise direction; Bloom’s 11C tram followed Birmingham’s outer ring road in a clockwise direction.
AT WHAT POINT ON THE ROUTE DID THEIR TWO TRAMS CONVERGE?
In Cotteridge.
WHAT WERE THE NAMES OF STEPHEN’S FELLOW PASSENGERS?
Rev Al Green, Mr Edward G. Baston, Mr Mose Lee, Mr Bart Lee Green, Mr Bill Slee, Mr Derek End, Mr Dud Heston, Mr Frank Lee, Mr Thor Ochs, Fr Garret Greene, Miss Cassandra L. Vale, Dr R. Bourne, Mrs Hayley Mills, Mr Lee Bank, Mr Laurence ‘Loz’ Ells, Miss Minnie ‘Min’ Worth, Mr Kit & Mrs Mia Greene, Mr Oz Kot, Mr Rube Berry, Miss Sally Oak, Mrs Sally Park, Mrs Shell Dunne, Lt Col Shaw Teeth (Retired), Mr Tighe Burne, Dr Winston Greene, Mr Wes Teeth, Mr Ty Slee and Mr Alan Rock.
IN WHAT STATE OF HEATH DID STEPHEN FIND HIMSELF?
Gravely Ill.
WHERE WAS STEPHEN’S TRAM LOCATED IN SPACE-TIME?
At 2.30pm on 14th June 1914, Stephen’s 11A tram (maximum seating capacity approximately 45) was negotiating Erdington’s Six Ways traffic roundabout as it followed the 27 mile imperfectly circular outer ring road of the city of Birmingham (population approximately 840,000): which was part of the county known as Warwickshire (population approximately 1.3 million): which was part of the country called England (population approximately 34 million); which was part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland (population approximately 46 million): which was part of the continent of Europe (population approximately 450 million): which was part of a planet known locally as Earth (population approximately 1.8 billion) which was currently following a 150,000,000 mile imperfectly circular orbit of its neighbouring Sun (maximum seating capacity approximately nil).
WHERE WAS BLOOM’S TRAM LOCATED IN SPACE-TIME?
In Stechford.
As a delicate, dreamy soundscape filled both tiers of a new and extremely packed Birmingham Academy last Tuesday night, a silhouetted dancing girl drenched in phosphorescent hues performed a saucy routine on a massive crescent video screen behind the stage. It looked like she had no clothes on, but silhouettes often give people that impression.
For several minutes she continued to shimmer psychedelically and sashay suggestively before erupting in a dazzling explosion of light. As the audience blinked frantically, trying to disperse an unwelcome chorus line of phosphorescent dots and after-images, this coruscating brilliance seemed to contract and coagulate, transforming itself into a misshapen orb of pulsating energy. This was some otherworldly object that emitted an omnidirectional halo of beatific light, and it seemed to be located in the general vicinity of the dancing silhouette’s unmentionables.
As the audience realised this it let out a cheer, which only seemed to encourage the tie-dyed temptress to up her game and gyrate in even more provocative ways. As she relaxed into a particularly risqué pose, the camera slowly -- and, it must be said, shamelessly -- zoomed into the pulsating orb of light. As it brought us closer and closer, the music became more harsh and discordant. Eventually, the light filled the entire screen…
What was this supposed to mean? Was the dancing silhouette some lurid reimagining of the Myth of Ishtar? Did the ball of white light represent the svadhisthana chakra and the awakening of the kundalini spirit? Did it have something to do with the Mayan rebirthing ritual? Was it a tribute to Russ Meyer?
Before these questions could be answered, a door opened in the middle of the screen and a bunch of guys from Oklahoma City stepped out. One of them climbed into a giant plastic bubble and proceeded to roll on top of the audience.
There’s nothing quite like a Flaming Lips gig.
The high-brow world of literary scholarship was thrown into disarray earlier this week when lost manuscripts by the great Irish author James Joyce were discovered in one of Paris’ infamous northern suburbs by a team of French construction workers.
These priceless documents – which include fragments of a previously unknown sequel to Joyce’s masterpiece, Ulysses – were unearthed by the workmen during the building of a controversial new scenic landscape over a much-loved stretch of dual carriageway. This news comes as a further embarrassment to an already beleaguered intellectual community still reeling from several high-profile discoveries of lost Modernist texts by French construction workers.
Joyce’s Ulysses tells the story of Leopold Bloom (a middle-aged advertising salesman), Stephen Dedalus (a melancholic young writer) and Bloom’s wife Molly (a successful concert singer who suffers from a rare form of PDD, or Punctuation Deficiency Disorder). During the course of the vast novel, Bloom takes a stroll through the streets of Dublin, forms an unlikely bond with Stephen, visits a whorehouse and finds out that Molly has been cheating on him. These events all take place within the course of a single day – 16th June 1904 – and, on account of this, the novel is often cited as a major influence on the hit television series ‘24’.
For Joyce’s legion of fans, 16th June 1904 is now affectionately referred to as ‘Bloomsday’ and every year they celebrate its anniversary by dressing up in Edwardian clothes, walking through the streets of Dublin and visiting local whorehouses for charity.
Experts have already determined that the Ulysses sequel – which Joyce provisionally entitled ‘Twolysses‘ – was to take place on 16th June 1914, exactly 10 years’ after Ulysses and just prior to the outbreak of the First World War (which, as historians have been quick to point out, eventually had a sequel of its own). As well as a new date, there was also a new location: while its illustrious predecessor was famously set in the Irish capital city of Dublin, for the sequel Joyce relocated the inaction to the English second city of Birmingham (or ‘Brum’, as it was then known).
According to local historian Professor Charlie Chin, this change in setting was prompted by an “innovative local government cultural regeneration initiative” that offered “bostin’ (tr. ‘splendid’) tax breaks” to “arty-farty types” who agreed to move to “Birmingham”. Joyce, of course, was unwilling to leave Paris on account of his fondness for mille-feuille, pain au chocolat and other French pastries, so negotiated a deal with Birmingham’s civic leaders to relocate his characters instead. Ironically, the Irish government launched a similar scheme in 1969 to lure artistic migrants to the Emerald Isle, but the tax cuts were funded by an inheritance tax hike and Joyce would have ended up financially worse off on account of him already being dead.
The sequel was to feature the three main protagonists of Ulysses – Bloom, Stephen and Molly – interacting with fellow fictional characters and real-life historical figures from the area like Joseph Chamberlain, Neville Chamberlain and Richard Chamberlain. As the novel opens, we find Stephen Dedalus – now in his early 30s – living in Perrott’s Folly, an abandoned Martello Tower in the Edgbaston district of the city which dates back to a time when Birmingham had a thriving coastline. Stephen shares the tower with a group of boisterous history students from the nearby University whose excessive drinking and late-night partying remind him bitterly of how he used to behave in a previous novel. At the end of the first chapter he storms into the communal kitchen area and confronts his tormentors by shouting: “Historians are the nightmare that keep me awake at nights!” This becomes a recurring theme of the novel, despite the fact that nobody in the book takes any notice of it.
Disillusioned by life, Stephen has all but abandoned his literary ambitions and now works at Digbeth’s famous Old Crown public house as its resident balladeer-balladist (an early form of singer-songwriter). His attempts at turning his complex theories on theology, philosophy and dermatology into toe-tapping crowd-pleasers have so far met with mixed success. This is partly due to the fact his radical and esoteric ideas are out of step with jingoistic pre-war mood of the period, and partly due to the venue’s poor acoustics.
Meanwhile, Bloom and Molly arrive in Birmingham at the nearby Digbeth Coach and Horse Station. When questioned by an obnoxious taxi driver en route to their lodgings at the Bartons Arms pub, Bloom claims he has come to the city to accompany his wife who has been booked to perform a selection of her hits at the prestigious Aston Hippodrome music hall. Privately, though, the advertising salesman is motivated by a strong desire to avoid Dublin on 16th June as the Bloomsday festivities are starting to get embarrassing.
When Bloom discovers that Stephen Dedalus is living in the city, the two arrange to meet on the Number 11 Outer Circle tram so the “Bull Ring Befriending Bard” can take him on a guided tour of the city’s key residential areas, even though most of them are still fields. Unfortunately, Bloom boards a number 11 that is travelling along the route in a clockwise direction and Stephen boards another heading the opposite way. As a result the two characters never actually meet, although their respective buses briefly pass each other in Cotteridge. This seems to be an oblique reference to the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics which states that any two particles moving in the opposite direction will eventually pass each other in Cotteridge.
Bloom and Stephen’s journeys are told in a variety of literary styles paralleling both their journey through the external environment of the Outer Circle route and their own respective inner-journeys of self-realization. This includes a chapter that’s written in the style of a bus timetable.
When Molly finds out about her husband’s planned rendezvous she’s incensed, having never forgiven Stephen for leaving the previous novel so abruptly. By way of revenge, she decides to resume her affair with sleazy showbiz impresario Blazes Boylan. Unfortunately, a bizarre backstage accident at the Hippodrome involving a case of HP Sauce falling from an overhead gantry renders Boylan incapacitated for several vital chapters and, in desperation, Molly is forced to arrange a hasty tryst with the woodwind section of the CBSO.
The novel ends with Molly meeting Bloom at a bus stop in Perry Barr and pledging to make him a breakfast of tea, toast, eggs and haddock the next morning. Bloom realizes that Molly only ever promises to makes him a breakfast of tea, toast, eggs and haddock after she’s been unfaithful, but decides it’s not worth having a row about. Stephen, of course, has already wandered out of the novel, just like he did the last time.
It now seems likely that Twolysses was part of the short-lived Modernist follow-up fad of the mid-1920s, in which many of the writers of the period tried to cash-in on their artistic credentials by turning their masterpieces into money-spinning franchises. The craze was started by the American poet T.S. Eliot, who ruthlessly exploited the popularity of his poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by churning out several dozen artistically inferior and increasingly tawdry spin-offs. These included The Protest Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The Power Ballad of J. Alfred Prufrock and The Hardcore Dance Anthem of J. Alfred Prufrock.
Eliot’s fellow experimental writers were quick to jump on board this lucrative bandwagon. Besides Ulysses, other classic Modernist texts to receive the sequel treatment include Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (‘Second Wave’), William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (‘2 Loud 2 Furious’) and Ezra Pound’s Cantos (‘The Wrath of Cantos’).
The follow-up fad came to an abrupt end in 1927 during a party held at Ernest Hemmingway’s Parisian home to commemorate the removal of one of the great writer’s more troublesome wisdom teeth. Joyce, Picasso and other leading lights of the Modernist movement were in attendance when a drunken Gertrude Stein gatecrashed the gathering, making lewd and disparaging comments about the guests’ artistic integrity and the host’s choice of hors d’oeuvres.
Devastated by these comments, Joyce swiftly threw away his canapé and discarded his drafts of Twolysses. Like so many other abandoned Modernist sequels of this period, it was subsequently used as roadfill by the local authorities.
In addition to the sequel to Ulysses, the recently discovered Joycean hoard also contained journals and personal correspondence together with an unfinished screenplay for a Laurel & Hardy feature film entitled ‘Agenbite of Nitwits’. From next week, members of the public will be able to view a selection of the documents at museums in Dublin and Birmingham for a limited period. After this, the manuscripts will return to France where they will be housed in the permanent collection of Modernist literature located at the Paris headquarters of the National Union of French Construction Workers.
So, Britain’s best-selling red-top is back in the blue camp again. I can’t say I was particularly surprised when The Sun’s 12 year love-in with New Labour came to an end the other week. Maybe it’s because my political conscience first rolled off the production line during the 1980s, but I’ve always struggled to think of the Soaraway One as anything other than a vicious little Tory rag. For me, at least, its recent volte-face was a bit like the Angling Times announcing a return to fishing-themed coverage after a decade or so spent focusing on musical theatre.
I’ve never much liked The Sun, but I don’t expect that revelation will come as a tremendous surprise to anyone who knows me and/or reads this blog. I don’t really fall into its target demographic, you see. It’s not pitched at those of us lumbered with left-leaning tendencies, celebrity tat allergies and a phobia of xenophobic homophobes. Mind you, this probably won’t give the Murdoch clan too many sleepless nights.
In The Sun’s defence, however, at least it’s not the Daily Mail. I may dislike The Sun, but I really do hate the Daily Mail almost as much as it seems to hate benefit cheats, asylum seekers and Jonathan Ross. That probably won’t come as much of a surprise to anyone, either. Still, I shouldn’t just pick on the obvious targets. While I’m on the subject, I detest the Daily Express, despise the Daily Star and wouldn’t eat chips out of most of the broadsheets, either.
These paper prejudices have been with me for years. They weren’t the result of some misspent life of political activism, a disastrous career on Fleet Street or even a Media Studies evening course at the local FE College. No, they have their roots in something far more mundane than that.
It was my paper round wot did it.
