Uhm....right.

For the next thirty days, starting tomorrow (Nov 1st), this site will be where I post my attempt to complete NaNoWriMo, the National Novel Writing Month. The idea behind this challenge is to write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days, which means I'll have to try and post about 2500 words a day for the next four weeks. This may not work. I may not have time. I may sit in front of the computer and stare blankly instead of writing. Whatever I write may be so awful that I put a stop to it.

However the most likely thing to happen is that I'll just say: "Ah, I can't be bothered." and never even start at all. Which is why I'm writing this now. So that you can shame me into at least starting it.

The novel may suck. In fact, it's bound to suck. First drafts usually do suck. But there might be the kernel of a good novel in there, and I think if I can get out a first draft, that'd be something I could work on. Then I can say:

"I wrote a novel."

"Did it suck?"

"Yeah, but I wrote it, god-damn it. At least I did that."

This blog has never been much more than what you might hear if you sat down next to me in a pub and asked what interesting thing I had done recently. Well, for the next thirty days, it'll be as if you asked if I had an interesting story to tell. Except serialized.

How can you help? Well, by reading it, for starters. Praise is appreciated. Constructive criticism is useful. Pointing out that it sucks isn't- even if it does. Asking questions or observing that certain points were not clear is useful. Pointing out any real or implied references to my actual existence isn't. If you're also NaNoBlogMoIng, let me know and I'll link you and read your work.

You can also help me find an ending. Right now I have about 17 beats of what needs to be, barring overruns, a 20-beat story. The last three beats are a mystery to me. I need some help there. I also need some help being INconcise. Contrary to this blog's existence, I tend to get to the point a bit too rapidly to make a good novelist. If you read anything and think: "I wouldn't mind knowing a bit more about that.", I can go back and add more. Any and all ideas are welcome.

See you tomorrow- wish me luck.

I've long held the theory, mainly generated from my experiences watching live gigs in small venues, that it's nearly impossible to hear what a live band is supposed to sound like if you haven't spent some time listening to their studio recordings- and I held this belief simultaneously, without contradiction, with the opinion that live performance is the most powerful way to experience music.

I think of it in this way: Let's say you're standing in a noisy, crowded room and your friend is talking to you. You focus on your friend and the rest of the noise is filtered out by your brain, and you only hear what your friend is saying. But if you actively listen to the noise of the entire room, it's one of the oddest and most claustrophobic noises that can be heard. Now, live gigs are very noisy, and despite the best efforts of sound engineers, most of that noise is not precisely what the band wants you to hear. But you can filter out what they don't want you to hear, provided you know what you're supposed to be listening to. I've had numerous experiences where I've listened to a live band for the first time and heard nothing but chaos, but after listening to their songs in a closed environment, they've been vastly improved in subsequent live listenings, because I can filter out all that stuff that I know is not meant to be there. If you follow me.

Which is why I was somewhat suprised that I enjoyed Kaiser Chiefs so much, having heard so little of their music (although, oddly, I knew four of their songs- I must have absorbed these through some kind of cultural osmosis because I don't have their album and have never actively listened to any of their music). I think this was because they didn't just rely on the music alone to ensure everyone was having a good time- they actually made a show, they were really focused on entertaining you, whatever it took. For example:

• They started with a short film about London, which everyone loved. It showed grainy, 60's-era footage of London, while a voice-over intoned things like: "London, where the Queen and her government make the decisions that control your lives. Don't worry, Londoners, you don't need to make decisions for yourselves, your lives are in good hands. Meanwhile, the Kaiser Chiefs stand outside Buckingham Palace playing their hit song 'I Predict a Riot'."
• Then they opened with "Money for Nothing", you know the huge build-up of 'I Want My MTVeeeee' intro, which drove everyone crazy. I thought this was pretty indicative of their desire to make sure the crowd was having a good time- I mean sure, they could have opened with one of their own songs, but they knew nothing could make a crowd more amped up than Dire Straights. That's right.
• At one point the lead borrowed a leaf from the book of the world's greatest showman and got a girl out of the audience to ballroom dance with her for the slow romantic song.
• Most awesome of all, the lead singer snuck around to the back of the audience and then crowd surfed (whilst singing) all the way to the front of the audience. I thought this was pretty ballsy of him, given that the people at the back of an audience don't always like the band playing, and aren't always amenable to crowd surfers.

The overall tone of the band was that they were headlining their first tour and were obviously off their chops about playing to such a large audience, they were clearly loving every minute of it and having a ball, which was really infectious. The crowd was nuts, we were flying all over the place. Great stuff.

Maxïmo Park were pretty reliable, but didn't spring out at me as being incredibly awesome*. I guess I just have to wonder about bands who wear ties up onstage. You're leaping around, it's hot as hell under the lights, a tie must be a nightmare. What kind of impression is so important that you'd put up with being so damned uncomfortable in order to convey it? I guess that you're the sort of band that would put up with discomfort in order to convey an impression. But what impression are you trying to convey? That you're the sort of band that would be all hot and sweaty in order to deliver a specific impression. But what kind of impression......oh, I could do this all night.

"I guess your liver must be taking a bit of a beating here in London?"

"Oh, no, we drink far more in San Francisco. This is actually a bit of a break for me."

"Really? Wow. It's hard to imagine a worse drinking culture than London's."

"It's not worse."

"But you said you drink more?"

"Yeah. Plus like the drinks are cheaper, and they give them to you in bigger servings, and the bars don't close until two."

"So it's worse."

"No. That's better."

"I think we're coming at this from opposite directions. I'm coming at it from a 'worse for your liver' point of view."

"Yeah, I'm looking at it from a 'better for drinking' kind of thing."

"Right. As I say: It's hard to imagine."

You will find this in the 'Life' section of the Tate Modern.

There's a great scene in Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, where the titular menace comes rampaging into a garden festival. The owner of the 'Garden Supplies' stall slaps up a hastily scrawled 'Angry Mob' sign over the word 'Garden', and quickly starts selling pitchforks and spades to the townsfolk. The whole scene is probably less than two seconds long, and by the time you've registered the gag, it's already moved on to the next one. The whole film is like that- one gag after another, which somehow forms a single entertaining entity.

W&G may not be the best film I've seen this year, but I certainly haven't seen another which has caused me to have a permanent goofy grin throughout the entire running time (which is short, and was preceeded by a quaint but not wholly successful Madagascar short). There's actually so many gags, some of them so well hidden (the newspaper headlines are particularly hilarious) that you'll never get them all, and indeed you'd have to have an encyclopedic knowledge of film lore to get every single reference (although the Watership Down reference is insanely brilliant) that they throw in. Some of the gags are inspired, others are lame, but even these are given a sort of joke-from-your-dad charm by the delivery of the fantastically good-natured characters.

"So the Were-rabbit can only be killed by a gold bullet?"

"Yes. It has to be twenty-four......carat!"

"Get out of my way, you idiot!"

The constantly consternated Gromit is the star of the show, forever trying to keep up with Wallace, who seems to bumble through the film unaware. It's amazing how much expression they can give Gromit just by manipulating his one big plasticene eyebrow. The endless stream of bunnies who populate every frame are another great highlight, making cute "weee!" noises whether they are being stuffed into drawers, sucked up by vaccuum cleaners, or indeed think they've been shot and are heading toward the light.

Wallace & Gromit is just plain good fun- go see!

Oh! And watch to the end of the credits for one last cute gag.

Because sometimes you're in a meeting and forgot to bring a pad to doodle on.

Because you can taste the care.

I considered substituting this review with a photo of a big pile of dog poo....cause that's what this movie is. Other visual representation options might include: some sweaty dead monkey balls, a high powered vacuum cleaner, an anthropomorphic sickle & hammer masturbating all over the Hollywood sign, and so on and so forth.

Night Watch has two plots, barely related to each other. The first is, there's this woman, see, and she's a 'vortex', which means that not only do big flocks of CGI birds circle around her apartment building, she's also on a countdown to jumpstart the final battle between good & evil. She turned into a vortex because somebody put a curse on her.....but who put the curse on her?!? If Nightwatch, the ragtag team of ah, vampire-trapping vampires, don't figure out who put the curse on her, someone might start playing a Heavy Metal track and jump-cutting nauseously every time anyone does anything! Wait, that already seems to be happening.

The second plot is something to do with, uh, the guy's old girlfriend, had a baby, and uhm, it actually turns into a really bizarre anti-abortion polemic at one point (like, I'm not kidding, a 12-year old boy turns to the screen and says: "You tried to kill me.....12 years ago!!!" Ugh), a few moments after thousands of medieval warriors appear on the top of an apartment building without any explanation whatsoever and start fighting (in a sequence that makes Discovery Channel historical re-enactments with the three dudes from the Scottish Historic Battle Re-enactment Enthusiasts Society look awesome), and, oh, man, this movie is in-co-her-ent.

But not without its positive points! There's some cool stuff about the gloom and one neat bit where a guy looks at a little girl and only sees her veins, like she's an exhibit from Body Worlds. But that's like saying Pearl Harbour didn't suck because it had a few neat explosions. This movie makes no sense. It's a bunch of random dialogue punctuated by the most derivative music video action scenes.

Watch this movie if you like:

• Rockin' out to Heavy Metal every time any character wants to go anywhere
• Cool subtitles that occasionally interact with the environment
• $2 CGI in every scene, because it's not enough that a car has to start, you need to fly into the engine and see the ignition sequence itself to really get the message across

Avoid if you enjoy:

• Plot


• Structure


• Dialogue

So I went and checked out the new installation at the fantastic Turbine Hall, under the Tate Modern. It's called 'Embankment', by Rachel Whitehead. It's not much to look at from the outside, but once you're actually inside the thing, it's a lot more fun. There are lots of nooks and crannies to explore, and a million different angles to view it from. Not as cool at The Weather Project, but definitely worth popping into if you're in the area.

We also popped into the gallery proper, and I have to say the current selection was not as inspired as it has been on previous visits. But it's a lot of fun to read the ludicrously pretentious title cards that tell you what the work is supposedly about. You could barely write a more perfect parody if you tried.

My flatmate said he'd buy me lunch if I could think of five obscure trivia questions about Hamburg before the bill came. Which of course sent me to God:

What is an interesting fact about Hamburg that isn't on Wikipedia and not many people would know. Thanks!

BONUS ROUND! Now that I know someone who actually works at AQA, I texted her a similar question. I got the following results:

From: AQA [63336]

Hamburg turned out 1.2M spectators to see the QM2 when the ship sailed on August 1st. The QM2 is the most profitable ship in the world.

Hamburg has a 4 day Port celebration every year that attracts vesdsels from all over the world. Hamburg is also the centre of the German sex industry.

From: Nat

Um, the Hamburger was named after it. The local Ice Hockey team are all the 'Hamburg Freezers'. 5 of the 2006 FIFA world cup games will be played there.

Sadly, the Hamburger did not originate in Hamburg, Germany. It originated in Hamburg, NY. So I lost the bet and paid for my own lunch.