Quick Explanatory Post

Hello!


For anyone who just happened upon this blog, or followed the link in this article:
http://chortle.co.uk/correspondents/2012/07/20/15804/critical_situation..


I'm using this blog mainly as a vehicle for ideas. It contains my experiences of studying abroad for a year in 2010-2011 and my attempts at stand-up during that time. Otherwise, there's short stories, there might be poetry (heaven forbid) and some journalism might appear.


Hope you enjoy it and get in touch if you do. I will be doing the FringeReview New Talent Podcast during the Edinburgh Fringe festival and I'm also without any open spots as yet. So give me a shout on those.


xxx


Jorik

Saturday 14th July 2012: Sorry + Is Stand-up Dying?

Well, that was a bit of a disappointment. The gig ended up being pulled, because there were exactly 0 (zero) audience members present. So the emotional build-up was- as ever- for nought. It is quite difficult to do gigs in Amsterdam anyway, because of this apparent dearth of audience caring for comedy. It's different to what I hear is going on in London, and I got the beginning of last year. There are just too many open spots. Too many losers, like me, who want to see their name in lights. And it may well be that it's just going to be too difficult to have a career as a stand-up, precisely because -as Dutch uncles tell you every day- 'everyone's a fucking comedian'. It may just be the case that, like in Holland in the mid-nineties to mid-noughties, there was an interest in comedy, which will just wax and wane. Friends of mine who work the Cabaret (a theatrical form of stand-up, with clip-on mics and satirical songs- not like burlesque in any way) circuit in Holland talk about the difficulty of getting up and running. Once a career has got going, and you've been on the television in the past, you've got a career. But, like one friend who recently won one of the leading Cabaret competitions, it's never certain that you'll even get booked e.g. get the chance to start your career. Because the bookers are theatres, they'll only book the big names, to get a regular stream of bums on seats. 

The huge numbers of open spots currently trawling the capital and surroundings worry me for the very selfish reason of just not being able to slot in and have a sensible career progression as a stand-up. I want to get good, I want to play clubs both horrible and wonderful, and I want to do Edinburgh. But I'm worried that- due to nothing else than the biscuits being eaten and shout before I even got the chance to get near them- I will not be able to do stand-up anymore. The reason for that is that I'm deferring my MA at UCL for a year, in order to -you know-, get better. Especially since I won't be able to get my regular shot of stand-up, I should actually maybe consider learning to be a proper person. Some friends don't agree with my pessimistic view of the comedy circuit. They say quality will get you there, as long as you're prepared to put in the hours. But we all secretly know life doesn't work like that. You can try and try and still not get anywhere. Past a certain point, this has got nothing to do with quality. Of course if you're really shit, then of course. You're never going to go places. But it might just be that -like the Dutch theatre world- the U.K. comedy circuit is overheating and lots of acts who could have been brilliant will therefore fall by the wayside. Whether we should bemoan this, as I'm clearly doing now- is another matter entirely.

SO BASICALLY WHAT I WANTED TO SAY IS THIS: I will be putting poems and more short stories on here as well, as I'm writing those in addition to stand-up material that no-one might ever see because there are just too many acts and too few spots. If stand-up is really dying, I will be seeing that with my own eyes at this year's Edinburgh fringe. Will it be a last hurrah or a moan, curling up and dying? Or maybe I'm just wrong? Convince me here on the comments-bit. I will of course be writing about my Edinburgh experience. Through which media you'll get to know what I'm thinking- well, you'll just have to wait for that. In the meantime, love to all. xxx

P.S. I'm currently writing a thing about an open spot experience I'd had last year. The general idea that most people have is that most comedy open spots are in some way damaged or mentally ill. That is of course a cliché of the comedy open spot, which unfortunately happens to be exactly true. I saw one who fitted that bill perfectly, who in fact gave me a full-blown panic attack. In Portsmouth. But now, more than a year later, the realisation has dawned on me that I'm basically just as bad as the mentals, I'm writing about that person. It may turn up on here. It's now called: The Ocean Queen of Portsmouth. We'll see how it goes.

Wednesday 4th July: Braininess and Comedy

Good news, I'm coming back to stand-up. Tonight will be my first gig since December 2011. I'll probably be rusty as fuck, but on the plus side, I've lost loads of weight, so I'll be more attractive. Pick and choose, people. It's going to be at the Comedy Theater in de Nes, so please come. Amsterdam crowds have a reputation of being apathetic to the point of inertia, so I need some good laughers to come round.

That's neither here nor there, though. What I'm really interested in is the physical aspect of stand-up comedy. Or rather, the physiological, psychosomatic aspect of going onto a stage and trying to get laughs. I have a theory about that. Last year, in April, I did a gig in Southampton with another comic who shall remain nameless (unless he really wishes to have himself 'outed' in this way), who said something quite interesting. His adrenaline rushes that he used to experience when on stage or just after were far less now than they were when he started out. I tried to explain something about your body getting used to the sheer amount of adrenaline being shot into your spinal cord and that causing a different reaction.

Now, I am more guilty than anyone I know for abusing the noble form of stand-up to my own wicked devices. When I lived in England, I basically did stand-up to keep sane. The rush I got from doing a good gig and killing basically heightened my self-confidence to a point that was almost live-able. I needed (NEEDED) to gig at least once every four days, or I would crash. And it would hurt. 

Now I'm working on other aspects of my life being functional, I probably won't experience the heights of stand-up that I used to. Tonight will be quite important for my continuation of comedic work. I will be doing new material and it will be a shitty open mic night (unless YOU'RE THERE!) but I will hopefully get a good response from it. What that response will be, I don't know. It'll have to be somewhere between utter euphoria (that's the one that made me give up drinking) or contentment (that's the one I'm going for). It's going to be interesting either way.

Also, the Higgs Boson has been found. Better figure out a joke about it to remain super ultra topical. Or not. 

Love,

Jorik

P.S. More blogposts will come soon.

Short Story: Lemmings

Disclaimer: Not necessarily funny.

Tuesday 28^th May 2012

David stood up.

“Here's a list of things that I'm NOT expecting of you-”

“Buh-” she'd wanted to interrupt, but wasn't given the time of day.

“Ready? One, no sympathy. I have absolutely no need for fellow-feeling, whether it be yours towards me, or some old guy standing in the park, trousers round his ankles towards the kid he's just paid 20 quid so suck his old dangly balls.

“Secondly,” he paused, checking her eyes to see whether they had drifted at the balls-bit, but when he found they hadn't yet, he felt he could do without the rhetorically cute repetition of the word, but since he was on a roll anyway, he decided to go for it, raised his chest and repeated, with a higher cadence this time: “Secondly, I don't want you to try and change my mind. You're not the most convincing person I've ever known. No, wait, no-no-no-no-no! Wait.” A breath. “Thirdly, no pity. There is no reason – well” he interrupted himself, sneaking a look at her to see whether she'd grasp the opportunity to interject, which she let fly. “I actually meant no love.”

A shattering pause. He tried to keep his voice steady, which he wasn't fully in control of anymore. “You've shown to me that this is perfectly possible, over a number of years- running nearly into double figures now- No Alice don't even try-”

But his refusal was empty. Alice sat, her dark brown hair cascading over her shoulders, focussing her eyes on a flowerpot in the middle distance and fixing her mind, trying to think very hard about egg cups. She'd always preferred them orange. She also thought about Nick. In her vicinity. Naked, the hairs on his chest and forearms bristling with excitement and the magnetism of her and of what they'd just been engaged in. His smell, the taste of the inside of his mouth, his sweat streaming in canals along the ridges of his spine as he thrusted into- “ALICE!”

Her reverie was broken by David, who appeared to be having one of his moments of misplaced grandeur again. That she could deal with. Him no more. Not for nine years. After all the- Not the- she-

“Alice, I...” a broken David addressed her now. She could obviously see his grand oration failing miserably, so without sympathy, pity, love or even much interest she -having bored herself on the subject of the colour of egg cups- asked him the 10.000 dollar question.

“So what IS your plan, David?”

He raised his shoulders, which had been forming the left side of the hypotenuse with the doormat and his feet in a Euclidian triangle, over-back, as if he were the base of anti-aircraft machinery, erect, very much like the ones you get in packs of plastic green toy soldier; catapulting unbidden truth in the direction of his girlfriend: “I'm going to do a bike ride.”

Alice spat out some biscuit crumbles over the kitchen table. “You what?”

“Yeah,” he said, as he was building himself up again from that salvo. “I'm going to cycle, and I'm going to go end up in the mountains. And I'll live off the land.” Just then, he realised that he should have demanded that she would address him without ridicule, which was a late realisation of Homeric proportions. He was going to feel the full blast of her ridicule. He bit his lower lip and closed his eyes to narrow slits, as if he were trying to avoid salvos of archers firing from the back ranges of the front, all the while preparing his fragile ego for the Howitzer of mockery that Alice was about to deploy.

In the meantime, she cleared up the biscuit crumbs off the table and dropped them into the bin, before taking offensive position number 24: left arm akimbo, hips out, right foot over the other -toes uncurled and straight-, right arm leaning into the door frame, her head ever so slightly sideways. All he could do now was prepare for the assault. He knew there was no way he would be able to cope. No way.

She then began. A sigh. “Ok,” she looked at the tiles, at the floor, as far away from the man she used to love as she possibly could. “So! Cycling!” she tried, with the drag of feigned optimism in her voice. “Whereto exactly may I ask?”

That was it. He had been defeated. His great, heroic plan was noting more than dead shit in someone else's garden. He tried to suppress his tears. “Highlands. The Highlands.” he blurted out, surprising Alice, in that he still had some sort of faculty of speech, not to mention not having desintegrated before her very eyes.

“There I will cycle to. All the way up to the mountain top. And then-” he raised his shoulders one last time. “I want to jump off. I want to jump off the highest mountaintop and fall. I want to fall and fall until nothing is left and my bicycle bell will be found by a fucking seven year old in fucking Dundee for all I care.”

As his lungs tried expanding outwards for air, they hit so many physical blockades that they eventually had to find some spare space in his neck which then expanded and retracted, making him look even stupider than the words he had just spoken. The term 'unattractive' would never carry the full significance of exactly how repulsive David then was.

“Because Alice, I would die for you.”

Alice sat down, took a sip of tea and turned her thoughts to where Nick might leave his stuff as the main obstacle to their relationship had apparently gone the way of the lemming.

“Alice I will.” He started to undress. A hideously unflattering lycra pair of shorts and bicycle shirt unveiled themselves. All of David's bodily flaws, faults and bumps (of which Alice could draw the Michelin maps blemish by idiotic useless blemish) were more visible to her than if he had stood naked in the kitchen before her.

She said: “I don't know what to say anymore. You denied me giving you love, despite all the arguments against and how you seem to have turned into a fat lemming in lycra. By the way, who's sponsoring you? Gregg's?”

David was as ever silent. Alice looked up at his face for the first time in five years. “So what you need from me is – forgive me if I get this incorrectly- some kind of blessing? Is that it? So you can chuck your sorry self off a mountaintop?”

She paused, feeling her anger rising, and looked at that man there, clad in lycra, 38 years old. Infertile, jobless, on lithium since October.

“David, I'm telling you this as a friend. Ok? Go and, you know. Take a break. No. Listen to me David. Pack your things (he'd started to silently weep by this point) and go. Take these fucking things off first, you look ridiculous. No! Don't fucking look at me like that, I'm not taking you back.” She made an attempt to leave the room but felt she couldn't yet. “I deserve a life of my own too. I'm not just there to deal with your shit. I refuse. If it were, fucking if it even were washing a wannabe lemming's disgusting lycra shorts. I still would not. David I cannot deal with you any longer.” She inhaled with force now, but started her exhalation before she even commenced to form her words: “Now leave.”

So he did. David left Alice, who couldn't even bring herself to kiss him goodbye anymore as he boarded the train to Aberdeen. The highland streams were tainted that year. The water under the bridge coloured red at places. A stone in Pembrokeshire was now illegitimately used as advertising space for Gregg's the baker's. It took Alice a week to stop feeling guilty and two years to stop thinking about him every day. She never taught her and Nick's children how to cycle, which always puzzled Nick. He would have to forget about it too.

DAY 1, Tuesday 2nd August 2011

I got up early for the big trek up North, drawing a picture for my no-longer housemates on a piece of paper. I hung it on the fridge, got my suitcase and bags and set off. The luggage was quite heavy and, remembering the two excruciating treks up the hill I made not even a month before, I was pleased I could now relax and let the downhill gravity pull me towards the busstop. This wasn't as easy as I imagined, especially as it started raining. Luckily, I was nearly at the busstop by then.
More trouble came in the form of cancelled trains from Brighton to London, since South Croydon station had been flooded. I still cannot understand how. I got the train 45 minutes late, and arrived at the station, lugging my bags through the building site that is King's Cross. There I found my friends who I would be living with for the next month (and teching their show) Politically Erect. Ben and I went out for a MacDonalds across the road and when we came back, the train was ready for boarding. Unfortunately, I couldn't reserve a seat near my friends, so I had to get my bags into another carriage and sit there for the full 5 hour trek (not including the delays that would happen). The people were relaxing and settling into their seats in that way that people do when they know they're going to be travelling for a long time. On a 5-minute to 3 hour journey, people tend to be more serious, hiding behind free newspapers and texting. I had 15 minutes of free wifi and I was going to use them!
After a 5½ hour journey, we trekked into the new town with our luggage, until we got to our flat. It's a lovely, but small accomodation. I'm sure we're going to have a lovely time.

This year, apart from teching and random open spots (so far: not many) I've been talked into writing reviews for an online publication called Fringereview. This means I've got a press pass, scaring performers on the Royal Mile and getting admiring glances from offensively young-looking flyerers. Hmm. Maybe I should abuse this power. Surely Brian Logan and Kate Copstick get loads of fanny thrown at them during the fringe? Hmm? SURELY? (tenuous). I had been invited for the C Venues launch at the Carlton Hotel. Free drinks and schmoozing journalists, it was a world that had been strange to me, having been mainly a performer or just pleb at arts festivals, gigs, theatre shows and the fringe. There was, however, also a showcase, featuring a lady wearing a Ukelele on her head (Tricity Vogue) and a Scottish comedian who had to work a cold room, without adequate mic and in front of journos who obviously weren't going to find time to listen to him. Still, I met some nice people, and it's interesting to see what it's like on the other (some would say the dark) side.

I met up with a friend from Sussex, who's in a play called Coal Head and Toadstool Mouth at the Spaces (go see. I saw the Brighton preview and it's funny, stylish and cool), and we had pie, pints and a very amusing yet animated conversation about why he thinks evolution is wrong, because he can't believe life arose from dead matter, chemicals, amino-acids and electricity, back in the day. And by back in the day, I mean back in the days of the Precambrian era, when days were about a third shorter then they are today. Just saying. So it was a lot of days. I respect his opinion but he is, of course, fantastically wrong. His point, that you should not let people (and children, specifically) believe something that cannot be proven to be 100% true is however, more understandable. Yet as we know, the scientific method requires that we find out what we DO know (or think we know) and try to disprove that. If we do, we (and by we I mean scientists, not me) can take babysteps closer towards what IS empirically true.

But he is completely right in saying that I am most likely wrong too. Science can only be an approximation of the truth and by necessity, never the whole, all-encompassing truth. We only know what we CAN know, and science doesn't ever give all the answers. In her book Being Wrong – Adventures in the Margin of Error, Kathryn Schulz talks about the fact that people CAN be wrong (and usually are), means that if we become aware of our errors, we can move to a position that is 'more right' than the one before, but usually doing this in full conviction of their own rightness. I, personally, enjoy being a hypocrite, because that means I can be right at least twice. By this time, I'd started gesticulating and drooling and we'd gone round Assembly Hall twice. And, er -people were starting to stare.

Still, good convo.

I had a milkshake with him at McDonalds (bad habits start here) and he got chatting to a Scottish guy who complimented me on my accent but also immediately informed me of the fact that I was gay. I wasn't aware of this.The accent I have chosen to use in English may be poncy (giving me the idea of doing a show called 100% Ponce about -obviously- identity), but to immediately make assumptions about what kind of person I may be is a bit odd. It might have something to do with the feminisation of the English by the Scots. Not that I would have had any problems with that, I'm just a ponce. Why can't I not be that? Ah well. We've been together ever since.

DAY 0, Monday 1st August 2011

On Monday, with my packing and cleaning done, and having gone to Sussex campus one last time (to buy Sussex University-emblazoned clothing for my Dad and my brother) I basically had two options. Either I could write a maudlin, self-indulgent blog about my year in Brighton (suffice to say it's been good) or I could get pissed with friends, which is exactly what I did.

I also figured out how I could receive Radio 4 on my phone. Because that, ladies and gents, is EXACTLY how I roll. Bring on You and Yours. Acecakes with Awesomesauce. Woman's Hour! That's what I'm talking about.

I met up with the oft-besuited ringmaster of Casual Violence comedy, Mr. James Hamilton. We had a couple of drinks and later ate Japanese Food on the lawn of the Pavillion Gardens, in the sunset. This could be described as romantic, were it not for the fact that I, at every slightly heartfelt word he uttered, laughed in James's face. He has to learn. I then tried to scare away a seagull by shouting at it in a once-competent Australian accent. I did this to make sure no-one would suspect me to be the culprit. James then reminded me that everyone could, you know, see me and my attempt at a disguise was a flimsy ruse. That was Brighton, then. See you some time next year!

EDINBURGH BLOG FROM HELL

Hello. I'd been planning to restart the blog for a while now, but I was either far too busy or my life was too uneventful (as in: got up, went to Crawley, worked for 8 hours, went back home which constituted pretty much all of July). But now I'm at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, I thought I'd better keep you all abreast of what I've been getting up to. Mainly walking around, obviously.

There is also another reason for the recent lack of blogs, My blogging-routine is possibly not the healthiest in the business. The ones that are good either start with a good idea or something I just have to get off my chest. I then write about this, possibly 800-1000 words. That's all fine (although I've been hearing from people who tell me the blog – does go on a bit-). The ones that are ok, I really have to work hard at, fighting off boredom and wireless internet, or get so bored I can do nothing else than write a blog, if only to torment myself. Those last ones, ironically, tend to be the best ones. But recently I've not had that opportunity, so expect this cavalcade of catch-up blogs to be faintly amusing at best and rambly twoddle at worst. But you did get the word twoddle. So don't complain. Enjoy!