Chatterbox - still talking nonsense

On the Trans Day of Visibility , and given that trans rights has lately become one of the bleeding edges of the culture wars, I thought it would also be good to highlight some stuff I've enjoyed recently that is inclusive and (largely) positive, particularly for young people who are most likely to suffer from the latest drummed up moral panic.   SAP With perfect timing, Mae Martin is now streaming on Netflix with SAP, their new stand-up show and I watched it last night.  I loved their work in Feel Good and Dope, and this new sharing of their personal snow globe (you'll need to watch it to understand) was funny, thought-provoking and life affirming.   They lay their heart out open on the stage and have a good dig through it.  Although their life journey bears little resemblance to mine, Mae managed to take me with them every step of the way.  I loved the understated-ness of the structure and delivery despite the full forest on stage and the little ...

Women Talking Incredibly elusive film this, so I ended up going to Saturday morning pictures to catch it.  Very much my cup of tea though.  Debate on ethics and morality, with a great cast and an emotional thwack thrown in for free?  Count me in! This is a fictional imagining of what might have happened after a real life event where 150 women were systematically drugged and abused by the male members of a Mennonite Community in Bolivia.  The women are gaslit to believe the attacks are 'female imagination'.   Once the abuse is discovered, the men of the community head away to town to bail the accused from jail leaving the women with an ultimatum.  Either the women forgive their abusers, or if not, they should leave and will never enter the Kingdom of Heaven.   The next hour and a half on screen is the debate amongst the women to decide what to do.   As a response to #MeToo, I found it really effective in covering the issues without g...

I read an awful lot of rubbish but these are the standouts from January and February The Wall by John Lanchester Dystopia novel set in the near future where the seas have risen catastrophically, there is huge migration as a result, and surprise surprise the UK has build a huge wall to keep out the sea and the 'Others'.  National Service keeps The Wall guarded, with a penalty of being put to sea for any failure.  A simple idea, brutally thinking through the implications, but as with all the best sci-fi, grounding it in the issues of today.  Are the Others any different to us, and what would we do?  Enjoyed it, but it came to a bit of a sudden stop for me. The Last Day by Andrew Hunter Murray   Another dystopia novel, this time after the earth has stopped spinning in space.  The details of how are sufficient to give a dubious credibility but aren’t really important. The ‘Stop’ means that half the world is in perpetual darkness, the other in perpetual day, wi...

(Some mild spoilers) I came to this series with absolutely no expectations apart from something along the lines of Walking Dead.   I never played the game that The Last of Us is based on because..... well I don't play computer games*.  I don't mind a zombie storyline but get bored if it is just new ways for zombies to come at the heroes for hours on end.    So, it was all a bit of an unknown.    If you have been in an internet free dungeon for the past 9 weeks, the plot is based around a human pandemic from a mutation of the fungus that in the real world turns ants into zombie.   The first episode was all a bit standard apocalyptic fare, but I liked the way the storyline with Joel and his daughter played out differently from the usual, and of course now that makes perfect sense.  From the second episode on, we are dumped into a world 20 years on from the outbreak, with plenty of flashbacks, sometimes taking up a whole episode. A quest to...

The darker months are definitely good time for telly.  This week I have mostly been watching films with a bit of ordinary telly too  First the films The Menu - well I thought this was a delicious black comedy.  Rafe Fiennes as an indulged and adored chef with an exclusive restaurant and a unique dining experience.  Very very entertaining and yet another film aiming at pretentiousness and the entitled super rich.  Slightly more subtle than Triangle of Sadness but treading a similar path. Bullet Train:  A silly and fun action caper, an entertaining way to while away an evening when too tired for anything more demanding than trying to remember who is trying to kill who at any particular moment The Miseducation of Cameron Post:  LGBTQ teenagers locked away by their parents for reprogramming.  There's no physical violence but the mental and emotional impact is still laid out pretty clearly.  It's not misery porn though, with engaging characters to...

A different pair of star crossed lovers, Julie (Rosie Sheehy) has a bright future in astrophysics in front of her while Romeo (Callum Scott Howells)* is a single dad who hasn't ever really looked up at the stars before. I got a last minute ticket for this with what was supposed to be a restricted view, but in fact turned out to be a great seat.     A fairly slight  but very sweet rom-com-ish story in the first half with some nicely turned dialogue, it had a slightly distracting variety of accents for a tiny corner of Wales.  The second half though ramps up the kitchen sink drama, with complicated dilemmas to resolve alongside the romance with  themes around disadvantage and disparity in life chances and education; there was a great and passionate speech about the value of care work, which was a bit shoehorned in but still worth listening to.   Not perfect, but  this was a play that crept up from behind and kneecapped me.   Deftly written...

We visited this free installation at Somerset House last week.  The work by Jitish Kallat is in the Fountain Court, and we had an enjoyable half hour walking both arms of the whorled structure, which highlights distances and key points of interest in the UK, the Earth, and the wider cosmos.    We did a lot of stopping and deciphering the road signage, and working out the connections between where we were standing and the places listed.  I certainly found it pretty inspiring, from its spiral arm form, which for me reflected the nature of our galaxy, brought to scale by the juxtapositions being thrown up.   So, in our short walk we were 3,800 light years away from the Butterfly galaxies and in the same general direction 3,055 miles away  from Shakhtinsk (which I found out later is in Kazakhstan).  We were also in central London a few miles from London Zoo, in a courtyard which has East and West clearly marked on the buildings. Embarrassingly we had ...

We started off the day at the V&A with a wander through the Reimagining Musicals exhibition which was an interesting and timely look at how original works are adapted to land for new generations and sensibilities.  Then we had a wander through the other Theatre and Performance rooms.  Probably my favourite bit was picking up the end of the public tour, and taking a look at Sandy Powell’s autograph suit, signed by stars at the Baftas and Oscars and auctioned to help preserve Derek Jarman’s Dungeness home.  Least favourite bit was paying more than 8 quid each for a cup of tea and piece of cake.  Although that was possibly trumped by the sad lukewarm courgette pasta we had for dinner later (even if they did give us an apologetic discount) ….Anyway…. The main event of the day was Lemons Lemons Lemons at the Harold Pinter Theatre with a starry cast of Aidan Turner (Oliver) and Jenna Coleman (Bernadette).   The last production we saw here was Good , and I ...