I didn’t know Anthony Bourdain.
I don’t claim to.
I can’t imagine what his friends and family have been going through in the last couple of weeks.
It just served as a reminder that despite having the life that a lot of us are striving towards, ithe black dog doesn’t stop barking at the door.
Bourdain was cool. A friend recently described him as a culinary Hunter Thompson. I don’t know how either would feel about the comparison aside from the obvious, that they were gifted and that they made the decision to take their own lives.
I’m not going to dwell on the man much because it’s not my place to but he had a heart and a spirit that I greatly admired. He traveled, he ate and he wrote. I looked up to him as someone who was closely linked to the life I most wanted to live. He celebrated what it was to live fully and to embrace other cultures. He made no attempt to pretend to understand anything he didn’t and listened and engaged with others. He seemed cool, punk as fuck and very kind.
I’ll be spending the next couple of weeks working my way through everything I can read or watch about him and remembering a man who broke the mold.
A month ago my very fine friend Sam Sexton mentioned the pair of us starting work on a podcast together. Tonight we are recording our fifth episode and the feedback to it so far has been fantastic.
Sam and I met several years ago through Danny and ended up forced into performing improvised comedy together. I feel very lucky to have him in my life, as I do for everyone I’ve met through improv.
Our podcast, Sync Tank, chooses a random film and album each week, playing them simultaneously to search for any coincidental moments of synchronicity that we can pass off as being a hidden message from the filmmakers/artists. It’s very, very silly, but then, so are we.
If you’re interested then you can find us on iTunes as well as our social media on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.
Last week I got to enjoy the intoxicating scent of a pre-show toilet freak out. For any of you who have followed my ridiculous antics for a while, you’ll know this is part of my process before I take to the stage. This time it was for my return to improvised comedy. I haven’t taken part in improv for almost four years after it became a SFZ in late 2014. I’ve got to say, it was great to be back.
I first got into it after I was tricked. My friend Danny convinced me it would be good for my confidence and that there was no obligation to do anything outside of my comfort zone. I’m sure he was entirely aware that existing is outside of my comfort zone, but I persisted. On our first night at the class we were told we would be doing ten weeks of the course before a showcase in Southend. I stared at Danny, hard. He smirked.
I have met some of the most incredible friends through improv. It takes a certain kind of person to wish that kind of panic-inducing fresh hell upon themselves and, as it turns out, they’re the kind of people I want to be around. There’s a wonderful supportive network of individuals waiting.
I’ve come a long way from that first show but it hasn’t changed the absolute terror that grips me in the half an hour before I am due onstage. I’ve been told that I appeared to be drinking desperately at the side of the stage, not just before, but during the show. I think I managed to fathom my way through it all. I made jokes about topics I would not usually touch with a bargepole, the whole time supported by Lee, John and four new improv friends.
It might make me more uncomfortable than when a friend’s mum hits on me but it is a great form of discomfort.
I’ll be shaking my little tush again this Saturday but Laughter Academy showcases are on from Wednesday to Sunday this week.
Last night I was lucky enough to see Young Frankenstein at the Garrick Theatre and I cannot recommend it highly enough.
I grew up on a steady diet of Mel Brooks films so was naturally drawn to the news that it was on in the west end. I have only just discovered that it has been around and on Broadway for more than a decade. We only received it in the UK in October, so I don’t feel quite as guilty.
It managed to perfectly balance everything about the 1974 film that I knew and loved with a host of new songs and gags thrown in. I came to Young Frankenstein via my grandparents, who told me that it was one of the best films of all time. They were not wrong. They were never wrong.
I think my favourite moment, even knowing exactly what to expect and how every beat of it would go, was Puttin’ On The Ritz. It’s a slice of brilliance that only Mel Brooks could ever pull off. It’s daft but so clever. It’s wise and beautifully orchestrated but ridiculous.
If you get the opportunity then I definitely recommend seeing it while you can. It’s the best thing I’ve seen since Springtime for Hitler.
For the last six years I have dedicated myself, with mixed levels, to this blog. It’s been something of a journey I suppose. In the way that time has to be. More than anything, I started it to make sure I was flexing my writing muscles and making sure I get the key details down.
I would like to take this opportunity to thank anyone who has ever taken the time to read anything I have posted. It means an awful lot to me. I’m glad I’m doing this in an age when an audience is so readily available to me.
You’re awesome and I’m glad you’re there.
This week I was asked what my Desert Island Discs would be. Unfortunately, it wasn’t by Kirsty Young.
For the longest time, I have thought about what my eight songs, one book and one luxury item would be if I were cast adrift on a desert island, but until now, nobody had asked me. The conversation was more of a back-and-forth and I can’t promise that if I am ever on the show that the songs would remain the same (I’ve just realised I missed Led Zeppelin out). For now though, these are my Desert Island Discs.
1. Tubby The Tuba – Danny Kaye
When I was a kid, we spent a fair amount of time with my mum’s parents, my grandparents as it were. Understandably, they didn’t have a lot of toys but they did have an old VHS of the 1975 animation, Tubby The Tuba. For those of you who aren’t up on your cartoons about brass instruments, it tells the tale of a tuba who goes on an adventure to find a song of his own. He’s a vicious and podgy little narcissist but aren’t we all at some stage.
We watched Tubby every time we were there. I never really appreciated the brilliance of it at the time. I heard the opening spiel on 6Music recently and it brought all these memories of my grandparents flooding back. This track is the sound of the orchestra gearing up. It reminds me of the opening of Moonrise Kingdom too, which can only ever be a good thing.
2. What’s The Frequency, Kenneth? – R.E.M
To this day, my parents swear that we would always listen to Automatic For The People but this is the opening track of Monster and I know what I’m about, son. As kids, we holidayed for two weeks in the south of France every year. Mostly because my dad is scared of flying. There, we would stay in a caravan and try and make friends with French kids, by shouting at them in English.
These holidays involved driving through the whole of France, listening to cassette tapes. I remember The Beautiful South, Joseph & The Technicoloured Dreamcoat soundtrack and R.E.M. As the opening track of the album, it always signaled a change in tone. I was too young to know that R.E.M. were fucking cool but it definitely set a tone for my tastes in music.
Listening to them always invokes these mad stories of our time together as a young family. Accidentally getting an enema from sliding down the flumes over and over again, falling in love with any girl who dared make eye contact with me, my father in drag for some reason, reading Lord Of The Rings, mum flicking butter at our next door neighbours, stealing my brother’s chips until he noticed and cried, watching my other brother get split in two by a bungee trampoline. Ahh, the good old days.
3. With A Little Help From My Friends – The Beatles This was the first song I learnt to play on the piano. I had lessons when I was very young, before I really appreciated what my parents were trying to do. I used to visit this old woman in a block of flats for lessons. Her name was Mrs Udaman. She was fascinating and terrifying. She used to give me cherryade and tell me stories about riding on the backs of elephants in Africa.
That aside, she babied both my brother and I in our lessons. It seemed forever before I went from learning Catty, Ducky, Eggy (C, D, E) to an actual, recognisable tune. That tune was With A Little Help From My Friends. It was a real lesson in what music could do and how creating noise could make you feel. It’s obviously from one of the most important albums of all time but this song in particular has a deep message about friendship and love too.
I can’t find the studio version on YouTube but look at them!
4. I Know It’s Over – The Smiths
As Nick Hornby says, via Rob in High Fidelity; “what came first, the music or the misery?”
I believe Morrissey came first. There’s something about The Smiths and the time you come to that band that very heavily influences you. The first time I heard The Smiths and remember it impacting me was when my friend Sam used Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me as the soundtrack to a short film we shot at college. I can’t remember the details of the film but he was adamant we used the song. I was hooked. It felt like Steven Patrick Morrissey was reaching into my heart and soul and understanding just how misunderstood I was. I appreciate now that’s it silly. In the same way that my book of choice isn’t really for the me I am now, that’s why I continue to listen to The Smiths. I can imagine this being played in my funeral. What a better opening line for that day. It touches something in the loner and allows them to belong. What better way of indulging in your own masturbatory pursuits while adrift on a desert island than listening to this?
5. Claude DeBussy – Clair De Lune I used to spend a lot of time with this girl. I don’t know what happened there but we used to lie in her bed and listen to piano moods. I was in my early twenties and I didn’t think I had any time for piano moods. It didn’t fit in with what I was feeling or who I thought I was. I don’t even know if this is one of the songs that we would listen to but there’s something about the vibe of it that has stuck with me. It also featured beautifully in Wes Anderson’s Darjeeling Limited. Why can’t I take one film with me onto the island? That’s the real question here because it would definitely be that. There’s something about the mood of this piece that I absolutely adore. I’ve spent hours with this piece of music playing on repeat as I try to fathom my way through something I’m writing. That’s why a bit of DeBussy makes the cut, it helps you to turn off from everything else and just zone out for a while. It’s intricately beautiful. It drives something up from within me that contemporary music can’t. Sometimes it’s nice to pretend you’re swanky with some piano moods.
6. Boys In The Band – The Libertines
Going from one extreme to the other, this song reminds me of the best part of my coming of age. I will never forget the number of times I have bounced around, clad in leather and denim, arms around someone I love, screaming every sloppy lyric in their ear. I will always love this band and I will always love this song.
7. Kooks – David Bowie This track is from one of my absolute favourite albums. I have my parents to thank for that. I remember listening to it on vinyl when I was very young. I would run my finger along the contours of his face on the cover. The wonder of records was that you paid so much more attention to the artwork because it was so big. The album sounded completely different to anything I had ever heard before and this track is sublime. It has a touch of madness to it which I believe is linked to his feelings about his brother. I can relate.
It’s like a nursery rhyme to me and was the start of my love for David and my love for vinyl. If anyone asks, I grew up with three parents; Trace, Si and Bowie.
8. Road To Joy – Bright Eyes.
So this is my last song. I’ve placed it last because it is the closer on one of my all-time favourite albums. The way this song drives and the bombastic ending with the trumpet wailing and the hoarse way Conor shouts the words over it all kill me every time. This was an album that my friend introduced me to. He’s one of those people who is always into cool stuff before anyone else seems to have had the chance to have heard it. He’s always a cut above. I remember going for long, roaming drives with this on as we smoked roll ups and talked about our dreams.
A book?
Do I still have to take a bible? If we are talking works of fiction, there are others I would much rather switch it out for. I know I get the complete works of Shakespeare as well. If anything, this will be a good opportunity for me to read them. I’ve never really committed to it. I hope I can find a way of relating them all to something else, in the way that I can only process Hamlet by thinking about The Lion King.
My choice though, my favourite book of all time, is actually tattooed on the back of my leg. It’s a cliche I know but it’s Catcher In The Rye by Jerome David Salinger. Like The Smiths, it was a piece of culture that smacked me between the eyes at just the right time. I read it at least once a year, usually around Christmas time. I would be only too happy to do the same on a desert island. Sure, there are parts of Holden’s personality that I now find insufferable, but that’s only ever going to be because I am becoming more phoney as I grow up. I can still see what I saw in that book then and that’s what I hold now. It’s a work of absolute genius. It’s one of the most important works of the 20th century. I know he grew to despise the way people treated him because of it but J.D. Salinger shaped a lot of people and it would be my absolute pleasure to be adrift with his work.
A luxury item?
Can I have two? They go hand-in-hand, literally. A bucket and spade. Every day I could go down to the beach and create something. The tide could take it away and then I could just begin again. That would satisfy me greatly and the fact that I would be repeating the same process every day and looking for a different result is the first sign of madness. What a beautiful place to go insane.
As I sit crying, with a glass of wine and a cup of coffee, some Netflix original twittering away in the background, I realise that today is a day for reflection. I just picked out the photo album we recovered from my grandparents’ mass of books when clearing out after my grandma passed away. It has a host of photos of my earliest days, photos I didn’t get to know of until I was well into my twenties. Looking at that little squidgy face and imagining that it became me is a strange sensation.
I picked out one picture in particular, a beautifully framed shot of my grandfather holding me. We look at each other in a mixture of shock and awe. It was one of two occasions I would ever see him cry, the second being when Sinatra snuffed it.
On the reverse is the name of the subject: Paul, and the age of the subject: 23 hours. Beneath it is a note in my grandma’s handwriting, suggesting the comment I would make if I wasn’t busy soiling my nappy with Marmite and trying to work out how to crawl back into a womb sometime soon:
“Grandpa, will you tell me about life assurance when I get bigger?”
There’s something so incredibly her about the comment that I began to cry. It’s like a message from her, from beyond this mortal realm. I don’t believe in an afterlife or ghosts. I do believe in words and I do believe in memories. I’m going to spend much of today alone, thinking about them and thinking about you, what a jolly thing to do.
It’s been an interesting month. I decided to delete the Facebook, Twitter and Instagram apps from my phone and log myself out of all three on my laptop. I have a strange and strained relationship with social media. I spend an awful lot of time on it and I always wonder why.
A day after I deleted the app, I checked my battery usage on my phone (Settings> Battery> Battery Usage> Clock). I had spent the vast majority of my time (42%, 8.2 hours) on Deleted Apps in the last week. That’s an entire working day I had spent/wasted on social media. I had absolutely nothing to show for that time. I’m not much good at even the most basic levels of maths but we will call that 32 hours in a month. That’s more than a day. With sleepy times added in, that’s two full days (awake) in a month that I’m scrolling. That’s not a good balance to have.
They see me scrollin’, they hatin’.
This month I edited two books. Two whole books that had been sat waiting for me to do something with, for over a year each. I have read five books and watched every episode of TaskMaster (which I thoroughly recommend). I have been spending a lot more real time with the people who matter to me and I have been experimenting with veganism. It’s been a great month and a really positive way to kick start the new year.
I’ve also noticed that I don’t take anywhere near as many photos. I always thought that I enjoyed taking photos for the sake of the photos but maybe it was to try and impress everyone else.
I’m going to return to social media, of course I will. My public misses me. I think the important thing is to try and keep in mind what it is there for and which of us is in charge.
I’m very much on a “new year, new me” hype. As part of this strange near wanderlust with life, my joie de vivre (yes, I had to look up the spelling), I have discovered the gym at which I have been a member for over a year, offers free classes. Realising that I had been missing out on a fantastic opportunity to get something for nothing, I signed up for a Pilates class.
I woke up this morning to discover I had booked the class for yesterday and am a fucking idiot. Seeing how I was already awake, I decided to go to the gym and join whatever class was going down. The reason I didn’t fancy my usual workout is that Sunday was leg day and it still hurts when I cross my legs like I’m in Basic Instinct.
There would be no alarm and no Pilates,
No alarm and no Pilates,
No alarm and no Pilates, please.
There are two “zones” of the gym in which I have never stepped. One is the closed off area for classes, the other is the “ladies only” zone. I went to a ladies night on a Philippines beach and ended up shouting at backpackers and vomiting Mai Tai. I assume the same would come of entering the ladies zone in the gym. I wouldn’t get in without a Some Like It Hot makeover.
I stepped into the class and waited for someone to stop me. Classes are available to book online. You have to snap them up real quick because everyone is trying to be a better version of themselves in 2018. If there were too many people in the room I would back out and do some other gym stuff. I sat on an exercise bike at the back and checked the class on my phone. It was called Indoor Cycling. I quickly booked myself in after finding there were only six of us taking the class. How difficult could Indoor Cycling be anyway? I’ve done Outdoor Cycling.
It turns out that Indoor Cycling is fucking Spin. Spin is just a brand name. I’m comfort eating a pack of Aldi’s Cookies ‘n’ Cream right now to get over it. They’re fucking Oreos. Oreos are just a brand name. The difference is that I like Oreos. Oreos are kind to me. Spin was not.
Five minutes in, I discovered that I wanted to vomit. Then the instructor said we weren’t done with the warm up and I fainted in a way that would make an actress in an infomercial blush.
I think the key lesson is that women are fucking tough. There was one other guy in the class. He was wheezing too. The women were hardcore as fuck. I was struggling to keep pace with the changes and so busy trying not to vomit that I couldn’t reach to turn up the resistance or to give it 100%. I don’t give anything 100%. I’m certainly not going to make that change for Spin.
As we stretched out and warmed down and I realised that I had survived the worst ordeal of my life since shitting myself on the Inca trail, I wondered why anyone would ever put themselves through such a traumatic ordeal. I went through all the stages of grief; denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance through that forty-five minute class. On the way home, I wondered if I was dead. Now, as I sit typing and stinking up the joint, I want to go again. Fuck you Spin.
Don’t listen to anyone who wants to put you down for your “new year, new me” rhetoric. I think the new year is an amazing opportunity to start afresh and whatever way that chooses to present itself is important.
I’m taking January 2018 as an opportunity to regroup and reassess. I have a number of projects that I want to start up this year and I’ll be taking this time to work out what I am going to focus on and when. As part of this I am removing myself from social media and taking part in Veganuary. The good news is that you won’t see me going on about being vegan because I won’t be on Twitter. Hooray for you!
Take 2018 as a new chance to do more of what you enjoy with the people that you love. It’s key.
…and here’s to hoping that it doesn’t follow in the wake of 2017 as an international shitshow.
Paul Schiernecker 