Laughing At Monsters: Interview with Handspring puppeteer, Gabriel Marchand

Known for the phenomenal success of War Horse, the Handspring Company returns to it's South African roots by reviving a play they first put on twenty years ago: Ubu and the Truth Commission.  Inspired by the French play by Alfred Jarry, and by the Truth Commissions occurring at the time, this incarnation of the man see him as a leader of a death squad.  Following him is  his three headed dog, each head representing a different aspect of the government, that carries out his orders.  It is a ninety minute extravaganza of violence.

One of the puppeteers involved in the show, Gabriel Marchand, talks about South Africa's history and how the statues of tyrants and their pride of place was being questioned by the younger generation.  This invokes a larger question of erasing history to ease tensions.  

"Of course one should remember the people involved but they should not be in front of a prominent university,"

Two of the original members of original Ubu production, who do remember the actions of such tyrants, took on their roles again in this year.  Busi Zokufa, playing the jealous Ma, and Dawid Minner, who plays Pa Ubu.  They are joined by three younger puppeteers, Mongi Mthombei, Mandiseli Maseti, and also Gabriel, who have all grown up with the stories of the apartheid regime.  In a way the baton of experience is passed down.  I asked Gabriel if by doing the show has helped him understand what the older generations had been through.  

"You can never truly understand but having to listen to the testimonies from those who testified at those TRCs you understood that utterly awful things had happened,"  

The company has been touring this show for two years by now but the rawness of those testimonies still have their affect on those like Gabriel portraying it.

"Even thinking about it now still brings up tears.  On stage you have to live it, but back stage you have to forget,"

Ubu was one of the most challenging piece of theatre I have seen as it is almost an entirely grim affair, despite it's farcical elements, the overwhelming horror of it's source material and because of it's deeply troubling conclusion.  Sometimes the bastards do get away. 

Gabriel was taught the art of puppetry by the associate director of Ubu, Jenni Younge, and he finds that puppets are a good medium for tough messages due to their ability to be still.  Stillness is important because the audience can then read into them a wide range of interpretations.  The puppets range from the bunraku type who are used to give testimonies, to objects turned into animals (such as the surreptitious crocodile whose body is a suitcase), to a wooden vulture that is operated by a manual mechanism giving it movement.

The crafting of these puppets becomes very important in giving animation to their design.  Gabriel explains.   

"The deep gouges that these puppets have, given by the maker Adrian Kohler, on their faces and the asymmetrical nature of their looks means that with a little movement they can be seen to have life and thoughts,"

Anyone who is expecting War Horse: Part Two will be very disappointed, but anyone wishing to learn the roots of the Handspring Company pre-National Theatre will have plenty to digest.

Howard Barker

It's hard to get a hearing

And the educators lie willingly

And unwillingly

As do the poets

It is hard to get a hearing

And everything's sewn up

Sewn up as usual

But more sewn up as usual now

It is hard to get a hearing 

But like the dew which falls in the dark

And the slow journey of rain through faults

The words seep down

Aberystwyth is so very chaste

Only Victory emerging from the dead

Looks flagrantly naked

But in such fractures it occurs

How far from the beat of mechanical

Art and oiled acting

How far from the centres where the

Secretaries yawn and discard their shoes

We gather round a text which yields

Meaning reluctantly

We try to perform the contradiction

We do not smooth and it occurs

That must be the purpose of art

That must be art occurring

Its discomfort is considerable

And yet we return.'

-'To the Aberystwyth Students', Howard Barker

Studying anywhere else in Britain I would not have known about Howard Barker, even if I studied Drama and Performance.  Aberystwyth was different.  'A Wounded Knife' was being performed in my first year, almost one of the first things I saw at that University.  

The first scene:  family around the grave of a King.

The first words: the nephew spits on the grave and says "I have spat.  And, in having spat, I wish to spit again".

The wounded knife of the title refers to the killer of the King that does not get punished but is instead allowed to live, kept alive by the nephew.  This angers certain members of the family who then plot to get rid of the assassin.  There's a surgeon who at one point comes on covered in blood, which no-one notices or remarks upon.  There's a moralist who eventually becomes the killer of the killer after being pushed to boiling point.  The characters calculate and maneuver themselves around like chess pieces, chess often being mentioned by the characters.  

The play talks about death and when it is right to die, who gets to choose to die?  

It was my first introduction to Barker and I was in a fortunate place to witness more.  Over the three or four years I was in Aberystwyth I watched other plays by him.  'Lot and His God', about Lot and an angel in a cafe discussing why Lot should leave the town and his wife that involved the angle to blind a waiter who then crawls about the floor below them.  'Acts: Chapter One' about the legacy of a woman, also containing angles, ending in a man and woman facing each other in total nakedness.  'Slowly' about four woman in a castle waiting for the barbarians to get in and imaging what was about to happen to them.  

'The Forty' where Barker tries to strip narrative completely leaving only forty scenes that include people at an art gallery saying 'I am here today, but only for today', a sadistic army officer dragging away a solider from his lover, a shopkeeper who as he sweeps breaks down crying, a returning man at the door of his wife saying 'I'm ill.  So can I come back?', a photographer taking pictures of a model kissing an old tramp, a large birthday cake wheeled on and off the stage, and others.

Most of these performances where put on with foremost scholar on Barker David Ian Rabey's company 'Lurking Truth' and a student company called 'Pot 'o' Thieves'.

Since then I have been looking for Barker where I can.  I found him in Coventry with a student group called WUDS who were putting on 'Seven Lears', the life of King Lear before he was King and before he divided his kingdom but also incorporating the Shakespeare passage about the seven ages of man.

'Sevens Lears' has the subtitle: The Pursuit of the Good.  Early on Lear find the people of the gaol while playing with his brothers.  'NOT YET DEAD.  EVER SO SORRY.  NOT YET DEAD.' the prisoners chant.  Lear is horrified.  'When I'm King, I'll not allow this', he says.  His brothers commit suicide and Lear cowers in the dark alone.  

He is introduced to a man placed to be his moral guardian, the Bishop.  'I am a bad man', says the Bishop.  'I will love you passionately then won't talk to you for days'.  The Bishop is certain about his purpose and place in life.  Later on the Bishop ransacks a Church reflecting 'I'm a Bishop, why do I need candlesticks?'.  As for the gaol the Bishop does not share the concern that Lear has with it.  'The prison is full and that is excellent,' Why excellent?  'Because if some men are to be free then some men have to be unfree.'  Lear refuses to accept this.  'But you must look at it and you must swallow it'  the Bishop insists, injustice being an important part in being King.  'God knows why your father appointed me' the Bishop wonders.

Lear enters the stage followed by a female scholar who wishes to touch him.  Lear pushes her away.  'You do abuse me.  Your love is rough'.  He's more interested in her daughter, whom she finds Lear's interest in her suspect.  'I am sixteen and therefore not interesting'.  Lear makes not attempt at hiding his passion.  'I must fuck your daughter' he says to the mother.  'That would so injure me' the mother says.  'There is a law in love' the scholar elucidates later saying 'There is a law that a man may be tried to adultery on a Monday but not on a Friday.  This seems to make no sense but at the beginning of the week the man is strong, towards the end his morality is weakened'.

Lear confesses his love for both the mother and the daughter and asks the Bishop for advice.  'Kill the mother' the Bishops advises, 'Love the mother' Lear says, 'Then abducte the daughter' Lear can't bring himself to.

Lear studies government.  'The role of government is to make being good easy for people, that way they do not have to try to hard.  No, no, the opposite is true, the role of government is to make being good as hard as possible and that way making the good seem worthwhile'.  Soldiers go by.  'Is there a war on?' Lear asks, 'I am the Prince and do not get told anything'  The soldiers leave.  The King's dead body is brought on and when the daughter enters Lear pretends to cry.  'I do not think you should do that' she says crying being below royalty, especially now that Lear is King.

In being King, Lear has the assistance of the government minister who advises on policy.  Lear asks him about what to do with the aging fool Lando who has run out of use.  'You retire Lando with a sum of money and make the post available to others' Lear is advised.  Lear has an idea: 'You can be my fool.  Bring to comedy what you have brought to economics' the minister is aghast, 'ALL MY SKILLS ARE IN GOVERNMENT'.  The minister reluctantly complies.

The gaol makes it's re-appearance.  'LEAR LEAR YOU ARE NOW KING YET YOU DO NOT FREE US'  'I haven't forgotten you' Lear pleads.

Lear marries the daughter after an awkward dinner of seduction.  Lear's unborn children cheer him on 'WE WANT TO BE BORN WE WANT TO BE BORN'.  The new Queen becomes a formidable leader in war as Lear fights in Asia.  The fool struggles with his new duties in the battleground.  'Getting better' he says cheerfully, 'humor is inputence upon catastrophe'.  The fool considers his job 'The job's not what is was.  It was easier for the old fools who could say any old shit'

Lear comes across a beggar and his mate who decides he will become his new Duke so long as he ditches his companion.  The beggar relishes his duties and makes use of his position to advance his sexual life.  'Do you have a lover?' he says to the Queen, 'I led an army into Asia' she replies.  'I never mind making love to the dead,' he says 'Their cold flesh can be just as passionate as any living'.

An engineer builds an areoplane for Lear.  'For this two thousand went without arithmetic, millions went hungry'.  The scholar cannot support this.  Lear still has some concerns about the technology.  He asks the engineer if flying was compatible with the will of God.  The engineer reassures Lear that God wants people to fly but that God did not give people wings because He wanted men to use their imagination to that they could achieve it themselves.  Lear with excitement puts his best boy servant into the plane's first flight.  The plane explodes.  The fool seizes on this opportunity.  'If there was ever a need for humour this is.'  and attempts a joke about the folly of the King but is choked with rage and is unable to complete the punchline.  Lear has the engineer killed.

After the war with Asia the people want to be praised but Lear is unable to give them what they want.  'I crawled in the mud for you, I lost my eye for you now you brush us away?'  a soldier exclaims.  The Bishop becomes unnerved by the approaching unrest.  'Praise them Lear, say anything but praise them'.  Lear gets up on a chair and address the simmering crowd.  'I want to say, but won't say...I could say, but can't now'  The Queen steps in and gives a speech that quells the anger.  Lear is chased by the one-eyed soldier but is killed by the King.  Blood is on his hands.

Hated Lear remains in a tower visited by the fool and his two daughters whom he cries in their embrace.  The Queen's mother is also there.  'What is our mother's mother doing here?' the two girls say in unison.  'Does she make the bed?'  they ask.  Yes, says the fool, 'she makes the bed untidy with the movement of her arse'.  Kites dominate the skyline outside.  'A red kite for every dead child, a white kite for every suicide, Lear we will blacken the sun with kites for your injustice'.

The King struggles to live and asks a beggar to kill him holding out a knife, which the beggar initially refuses stating that that would be an act of teason.  Lear's best friend Kent comes to him and embraces him.  The beggar returns remarking that the killing of the King would make his name among his friends but quickly finds the knife in his own body, Lear preferring to kill then be killed.

Kent and the Bishop are at odds.  Down at the beach the Bishop is paddling in the water as Kent approaches.  Kent accuses the Bishop for having poisoned Lear and for turning him into a tyrant and is about to kill him when the two Princesses appear.  The Bishop quickly holds one hostage.  'Oh you monster' says Kent, 'Yes, monstrous for having the will to live'.  Kent does kill the Bishop in the sea but is taken out by a strong current and becomes deserted on an island where the body of the Bishop floats in and out tormenting him from beyond.  

Regan is born, different from the other two girls.  The prowling Duke makes his desires known to the young girl.  'Take me to the dark places so that I may learn' she says.  The Duke is ashamed of her innocence and leaves her untouched.

The word innocence is mentioned by Kent to Lear over the dinner table.  'Innocence?'  Lear says dumbfounded 'I never knew that word.  What is innocence?' he is not offered an explanation.  Lear struggles to bear his own corruption.  A swing appears and Lear gets up on it's seat and cries out in desperation 'RAISE ME!'.  A man with a drum walks by.  'Who are you?' Lear asks, 'I'm happiness' the man says.  'Happiness?  But I never asked for you'

At the end Kent and Lear are playing chess upon which Lear lightly tells off Kent for cheating.  'All these years we've played, I've always noticed that you cheat, I don't criticize, merely mention, even a good player who could win with his skills cheats'  Kent suddenly realises that the room is filled with the dead bodies of the gaol and gasps with horror.  'Ah, well now, you're changing the subject'.

In all my reading of Barker the most transgressive play I've read is 'He Stumbled'. 

The play focuses on a anatomist called Doja, a man unable to prevent people from falling in love with him.  During the play a body gets dissected with the organs put into glass jars.  Both the Queen and her son are in love with Doja and though he does his best to manipulate the situation to avoid tragedy it, in the end, becomes unavoidable.  What makes this play the most transgressive comes in the moment when Doja forces another character to drink the liquid from one of the glass jars- a heresy for normal medical procedure.  In the end Doja comes to the realisation that it is himself who should be anatomised by his own hands.  Here science is questioned.

The radio play 'In the Depths of Deep Love' an exiled poet has to guard a bottomless well against all those who refuse to pay the charge for falling down it, namely students.  He comes into contact, and falls in love, with a woman connected to the King of the country and she hovers around between deciding to commit suicide or not.  It ends with the King and the woman jumping down the well together, their hands touching each other for the rest of their lives.

'The Love of a Good Man' is set on the fields of Passchendaele, the mass grave site for many young soldiers.  The Prince of Wales is there to find the Unknown Soldier who will represent the millions dead.  The Prince is a man who desperately wants to have common touch.  In the first scene the Prince kisses the hand of a labourer, something which his man servant finds nauseating.  Digging on the field is Flowers and his men who are approached by two English women, one of whom is trying to find the exact location of her son's grave, the other becoming seduced by a young rouge.  The Prince also becomes victim of love for the young woman and, with real lack of tact due to desperation, chats up the young women with the line: 'I WANT TO FUCK YOUR CUNT'- easily the best line in all of Barker.  Flower's own love life comes to a crisis when he realises that he needs a son because he will at some point die.

In 'Blok/Eko' the Queen decides to eliminate all the doctors and nurses and relplace them with poets to do the job of healing.  The Queen takes a young poet under her wing and because she understands that the only songs worth singing are ones of tragedy she gives the poet a life full of pain.  

    

Why Barker?  This quote by David Hodgson from the book 'Howard Barker's Theatre: Wrestling with Catastrophe' that articulates well what attracts me to him:

'I first discovered Barker through just reading about his work, and from this distance I was intrigued.  His words and thoughts resonated quietly with my teenage self.  They seemed potent, vital, and this was before I even saw anything on stage.  I felt I had grasp on it, that I 'got' Barker.  Of course, I was totally wrong.  This comfortable introduction didn't prepare me enough.  On stage Gertrude hit so hard I felt bloodied up, assaulted by it.  I left the theatre stunned and disturbed.  I couldn't be sure of what I had seen.  Then something happened that I didn't expect; part of me began to feel more vulnerable than a couple of hours before.  The catastrophe left a hidden part of me exposed, and didn't apologise for it.  What was worse is that I didn't understand what I had witnessed, at least not fully.  Barker talks of an audience divided, but in this instance I felt as if I was the one that was disconnected, my understanding of what I had seen being so splintered and conflicting.  I could tell you that this feeling disappeared and that I came to a grand conclusion as I pulled the pieces together, though that would be a barefaced lie.  I never completely put the pieces together, not entirely.  To me, this is the crux of why I enjoy immersing myself beyond the immediate.  It still gnaws at my guts in ways I couldn't have prepared for.' 

 

 

    

The Longlist For The Man Booker Prize 2014

To Rise Again at a Decent Hour, Joshua Ferris (Viking)

The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Richard Flanagan (Chatto & Windus)

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, Karen Joy Fowler (Serpent's Tail)

The Blazing World, Siri Hustvedt (Sceptre)

J,  Howard Jacobson (Jonathan Cape) 

The Wake, Paul Kingsnorth (Unbound)

The Bone Clocks, David Mitchell (Sceptre)

The Lives of Others, Neel Mukherjee (Chatto & Windus)

Us, David Nicholls (Hodder & Stoughton)

The Dog, Joseph O'Neill (Fourth Estate)

Orfeo, Richard Powers (Atlantic Books)

How to be Both, Ali Smith (Hamish Hamilton)

History of the Rain, Niall Williams (Bloomsbury)

For your information this list above is the longlist for the Man Booker Prize 2014.  I'm not going to run through each book and writer as I have done with the Nobel Prize (see http://whatihavegottenupto-thebookspy.blogspot.co.uk/) but I am going tell you my impressions of it.




Howard Jacobson is back on the list after I believe his last entry to be 'The Finkler Question'.  This time he seems to be trying to mark himself out as a kind of Kazuo Ishigaro or Haruki Murakami with, what could be called, human sci-fi.  He could also be trying to hark back to the dystopian worlds of Anthony Burgess.  It's good to see him challenging himself.




Siri Hustvedt is a novelist who is married to one of my favourite novelists, Paul Auster, but does this by proxy make her a good novelist?  From what I've read she does have similar overlaps but is a perfectly distinct storyteller in her own right, though I've yet to read any of her novels.  Probably the novelist I am looking forward to read the most from this list.




David Mitchell is back and back with a zinger of a title.  I've read his 'Ghostwritten' and enjoyed it very much.  He does well at making very technical plots easy to read.  I would like to read more of him.




Richard Powers is a very worthy novelist, full of heady ideas and his book on the list sounds like it's no different.  The novelist I think I Should read because I know it would be good for me.




I'm fond of Ali Smith due to a very vague connection with her through an old University friend and also I have enjoyed her stories.  I've only read her short story collection 'The First Person', which was a bit like a broken up novel, and enjoyed her perspective on storytelling.




The novelist I am going to officially back is Paul Kingsnorth with his book 'The Wake'.  This is mainly due to the fact that I bought it a long time ago, about two and a half years ago.  I only received his book earlier this year because it was made with the crowdsourcing publishers Unbound.  I had never bought anything crowdsourced before, only learnt the term fairly recently, so it was an experiment to see if the book would attract enough people to get the money it needed to make the book.  Crowdsourcing, if you don't know, is a way of getting money upfront from your audience so that you can then use that money to make the product.  It's a new business model that's best used on the Internet; there are websites such as SpaceHive and KickStarter that create hundreds of new products based on this.




Also, the book sounded like a great experience.  It's set in the Anglo-Saxon period in Britain it uses a version of the language of that time, which probably makes it hard to get into but would be, I imagine, a world that would place you and root you in that world.  I'm greatly looking forward to it.  And yes, mine does have Coptic stitching.  

The Peculiarity of the Vote

 Voting is a rare occurrence.  It happens least often than a birthday and it’s like going to see the nurse for an injection.  You think there should be something special behind the magic and mystery of political campaigning but in the end it’s just a piece of paper that needs crossing, then you wait.

I voted today but I’m not here to try to persuade you who to vote for, I simply want to record the adult feeling of participating in a democracy and the distinct blend of connection/ disconnection between the country as a whole and yourself as an individual. 

It’s a day where we all become powerful and are trusted enough to be put in the position to decide what is best for businesses and communities as a whole.  As a friend of mine said, it’s not in the broad strokes of people’s agreement that is interesting but the minutiae of the disagreeing details that are more fascinating.  The debates and discussions will go on and it is particularly fulfilling to be engaged with them as a human being but it is also important to note that politics cannot answer everything, there must be something else, in families, long walks and art.  Parties do not ultimately define us and we must be careful to pledge too much loyalty to them.

It is a peculiar thing, to vote.  Animals, as far as we know, do not do so yet the flourishing of our particular creation, civilization, demands that we must be able to.  Voting, if anything, reminds me of our strangeness as a species, an irresolvable facet of our being.    

My Diagnosis

At the beginning of this year I was, without pomp or ceremony, finally given a diagnosis to the mental health problems I have had throughout my adult life.  The diagnosis is that I have bi-polar disorder.  This makes me one of 250,000[1] people in Britain who have this illness. 

   

Am I glad to have a name to what I have had to go through?  Well, it doesn’t make too much difference to me.  I sort of knew I had it, or something similar, so the diagnosis was more of an ‘of course, that’s what it is’- but it does change the way I talk about it with other people.  Rather than say vaguely that I have mental health problems I can clearly say that I have bi-polar, and that offers up a more concentrated understanding of what it really is that I have to deal with.

   

The name identifies but the illness is still there.  I still have to deal with tiredness, part of the depressive side of the illness, and I still have to be vigilant and alert when I take part in intense activities, such as being in shows, but with all the work the mental health teams, both in England and in Wales, have done, and still doing, with me I have managed to overcome most of my problems.

   

I want to take the time to mention the Early Intervention Team and how they have helped me.  When I was eighteen and had my first episode of the illness there was no Early Intervention Team to help young people to stay healthy after their first encounter with psychosis.  When I ran away from University that year I stopped taking the drugs completely ending up dealing with severe depression for a year or two on my own.

   

When I had my episode while in my second year at Uni the Early Intervention Team had been newly created and though I was a bit older than who they would normally take because I would have been eligible for it when I had my first episode before they existed they thought it no problem for them to help this time around.  Since then they’ve been there when I needed them- sometimes weekly, sometimes once a month- I’ve found them to be a vital assert to the building and living my life with this illness.

   

It’s great to be living in a country of scientific advances that can supply Lithium to those like me who need it, the great thing being, as long as funding is rewarded to research, treatments for these illnesses will only get better.

   

What helps a lot for me is keeping active, seeing friends, writing scripts and doing shows.  It all stops me from allowing myself to relapse into depression but also trying to keep a regular routine helps me to keep grounded and stops me from flying off into a manic state.

   

I am hoping to do a show about mental illness because although awareness is getting better it’s like any serious illness: one can never be too aware, especially if you are undiagnosed and you think you may have an illness.

   

Nobody should feel as if they cannot talk about their own health and thankfully there are plenty of decent websites ready to give advice.  If you do think you are ill then the best thing to do is to see your GP who’ll be in a better position to offer you help; the second best thing to do is to educate yourself about mental illnesses, and this is advice to everyone reading not just those who may have an illness.

   

I’ve been fortunate but I’ve also worked hard at understanding how my body and my mind works.  One of the important things I’ve learnt is to seize the day when you can because you don’t know when you’ll have days when you can’t.

  

 So I have bi-polar but I look forward to the day when I don’t have to take any sort of medication for it.  It gives me something to work towards, which is itself hope. 

Below is a short list of videos that I've enjoyed and found interesting if not a little bit useful 

Now this is where you hit a paywall- well not exactly a paywall more like a moat you can swim across- but what I'm saying is that if you enjoyed this blog and my previous work than you can help support me by going on Patreon.com and search for Alistair David Todd-Poet. 

I only ask for the lowest possible donation ($1) so that you don't have to wake up in the middle of the night sweating about bills and tax.  Two reasons I ask you of this is 1) It would mean a lot to me and 2) I can buy more books. 

Another way you can support me is by buying one of the literary books that I write.  The links are on the side of the website, if you are reading this from a mobile phone than switch to web mode to see it.

You can even message me with recommendations of books I should cover that I haven't already, I'd be really interested in what you have to offer me.  In the meantime stay safe and all the best to you.

 

---

[1] http://www.pendulum.org/bpfacts.html

The Protest of Negotiation

  Someday I may be arrested for not paying my debts to the banks I use.  I will be found guilty.  I am not interested in trying to argue out of this as it will be true but I am more interested in the reasons of why I am guilty.  In short I want to try to understand if I have good reasons for being guilty.  I also want to find out what the moral thing for a person in my position to do.

  There are two reasons for wanting to be arrested, one I want to feel as if I had some power over my life and in the society I live in and two I want to try to negotiate what is good moral criminal activity and what is not.

  I’ll try to explain what I mean in the second instance.  People break the law.  People break the law knowing that they are breaking the law.  People of all strata of society break the law may it be a robbery or may it be through tax evasion.  People who break the law are sometimes caught and punished.  Some aren’t, whether they are not caught or that they are caught and not punished.  Many corporations don’t pay tax.  This is cliché.  Some banks are involved in drug cartels and financial crashes.  Some people protest the installation of a fracking industry.  From this we find that some people are more punished than others, though it may be inproportion to the amount of damage they actually do.

  Why is more important to contain and keep protestors under constant watch than it is to take away bonuses from bankers?

  This is the society I live in and so how should I react.  What should I do as a good citizen or as a morally good person?

  If we are unable to punish the irresponsibility by legal mean the citizen should try to punish them in their own non-violent ways such as changing to different banks or by not paying the debts we owe them.

  I feel justified in not paying my debt to my bank because I had to take out an overdraft in order to pay off my living fees at University because I had to take a year out due to mental illness.  Out of University I had great trouble getting a job and even if I were not protesting I would still be unable to pay off the debt before the interest is applied.  I may be guilty and I may be put to jail but is this really the most appropriate way of dealing with the large questions of economy and even larger questions with what are we really supposed to be doing with our emerging adults?

  There will be more of me; more intelligent, able people who are not put to use, who are not involved in their community, whose futures look uncertain from the start.  This in the world’s sixth richest country makes little sense to those who want the best for themselves and for their children.

  For me I see two things going on that has allowed this to happen.  One, the legal corruptions of those in highest positions in politics and in business, and two, the majority of people who are unengaged, unconcerned, with the way society is run.

  For me election day can’t come soon enough, the day when I will be able to try and put a government that might actually tackle the deep economic problems as well as the environmental problems, and even then they might not do that.  What is it that I, someone who believes that society need to change the way it operates if our successors, namely our children and grandchildren, are going to have one?

  I feel powerless because I don’t feel like I have a hand or a say at how society should be organised, I feel powerless because I don’t feel that society cares for me or is willing to negotiate with me, I don’t feel like a citizen.  In Philip Blond’s ‘Red Tory’ he outlines the situation where public spaces are either in the hands of the state or the hands of the markets.  In Michele Houellebecq phrase we are more ‘service users’ of our country.  I want to change that.

  I may be put away but that will not put away the reasons as to why I am guilty.  This is a plea to everyone that we must put on hold our everyday business and try to negotiate a way of living that does a better job of sustaining the environment that we need to survive and that does a better job of making our lives worth living.

  I don’t believe in giving my money to people who hold others with contempt and who break the law in such a way that changes the livelihood of neighborhoods.  This is why I will not be paying my debts even if I was in a position to pay them off.  I may be punished but there are greater things at stake here that need to be negotiated, things that need to be protested.          

Types of Anime

Anime has a young audience, probably because of the form of animation appeals better to younger people, but it also can appeal to adults as well.  The films of Hayao Miyazakihave made families in the west more aware of Japanese Anime but it is not films I wish to concern myself.  As an adult who watches anime I can suggest some very good anime that is not overly kiddish and off the top of my mind there are five worth checking out:

Kino’s Journey

Kino and her motorcad with sidecar (which is also her sidekick) travel, as the title suggests, across a fantastical land.  They only spend three days at each town and each one of them offers up a different philosophical thought experiment and reflections.  Such towns are those that have discovered the secret of mind reading, those that banned the reading of prohibited books and those that force people to fight to the death in a tournament to improve their circumstances.  Each episode (of which there are thirteen) is stand-alone but does eventually come to a conclusion.  Kino is packed with deceptive simplicity where much more deeper and bigger issues are at play so that repeated viewing is rewarded.   

Serial Experiments Lain

The female protagonist of this series (also thirteen episodes) deals in complexity but is rather more swallowed up by it that successfully navigates it.  Lain is a seemingly ordinary schoolgirl who, after the suicide of one her friends, gets involved with the world of the web and discovers sides to herself that she never knew existed.  Lain is also worth repeated views but this may not clear anything about it’s plot development as it is a deeply puzzling piece of work that will often leave you thinking that you missed something.  This is anime as French New Wave film and if you like that style than you might like the disaffected tone of Lain.   

Eden Of the East

A bit more accessible than Lain, this anime packs in a lot in it’s much too short thirteen episodes.  The quick version of the story is about this boy who has lost his memory and finds himself in possession of a God-like phone that can do almost anything for him.  It’s a brilliant idea and it’s excellently executed, up until the last episode that is but focusing on the good things.  Very clever and satisfyingly original but won’t take you too long to get through. 

Texhnolyse

This anime is a moody piece set in the technological future where a boxer crosses the line and gets his arm cut off by a gangster group only to replace it with a robotic one, he then goes for vengeance.  Interwoven in this is a girl with a creepy mask and a man with a backpack and we follow them as they go deeper and deeper into the city.  Is quite violent at times and is certainly not for children (not so much because of the violence but because of it’s pacing, they would be bored silly).    

Paranoia Agent

It’s difficult to say out of these which is my favourite but on most days it is this one as it is all the things I love, a clever idea well done, disturbing story and most of all memorable scenes.  It’s about several different people who are all attack by a kid with a golden baseball bat and roller blades and about how they recover as well as uncovering who the kid really is.  This will knock you off balance as it comes to it’s unexpected conclusion and though it is only thirteen episodes long it really is a perfect number as each episode does more than it’s fair share in engaging the viewer with avid interest.

So there we are, anime doesn’t have to be just for the realm of children’s entertainment but it can also but used to create adult (or at least adolescent) art.  Some may be disappointed that I have not mentioned Death Note or Cowboy Bebop but I thought that five was a good enough number to start with, though they are short, and maybe if I watch more I will have more to write.