Wrestling with Reality

As a wee nipper I was a big fan of wrestling. That is to say watching professional wrestling in the form of the World Wrestling Federation, for I possessed very little charisma at this young age and had no signature prop.. I had a snake named Jake in honour of the wrestler, but had no such moustache; I had a parrot named Colin after no-one in particular, but had no golden jacket. Though I was a child, a newly-formed and lesser-intelligent human being, I had started to wise up to the construct of wrestling and believing it to be fake my interest waned. My parents, quick thinkers as they were, taught me that wrestling was indeed fake but often enough it would ‘go real’ when someone pissed someone else off or something. So I would be sitting watching casually when my dad would announce ‘It’s gone real! It’s gone real!’ I would leap of the sofa and stand in front of the television transfixed, watching these actors really go at it, fighting within the fight.

I still watched wrestling for many years after, even when I knew it wasn’t a real undertaker with a real grudge against his real half-brother. I watched it for entertainment. It was hyper-masculine dramatism akin to theatre within a sports league. Characters in costumes each given a narrative to follow, a path to tread that would lead them to be supported by or taunted by the crowd: good, evil or underdog. An operatic UFC. In some ways boxing appears to tread this same line. The drama that surrounds the fight can become the focus, from tabloid fodder to pre-match hype that may simply be promotional but appeals to our innate desire for story. Continue reading “Wrestling with Reality” →

January 9, 2015 0

Prolonged Sentence

When I was a teenager – old enough to know better but young enough to be a bit of a prick despite the fact – I pulled what I thought to be a harmless prank, thinking it would get me out of some schoolwork. Instead it took me deeper than I could have possibly imagined and taught me something about social constructs that effects me to this day. harry-houdini

Once before in school, when I felt unprepared for a French oral exam, I took an impromptu sponsored day of silence. I told a couple of friends to explain this to everyone, Mademoiselle in particular. The pièce de résistance: a note scrawled on the front of a ‘donations’ envelope that would serve as a prop that I could carry around as testament to my lie. I didn’t raise any money but this didn’t matter – I had gained another day of revision. Success.

Confirming my ability as an escape artist, I took it as a challenge when one day a new substitute teacher announced that we would each have to read our work to the class. Though I would often take on the role of the clown, I feared the spotlight when it was out of my control. This underlying nervousness paired with the unfounded confidence provided by my previous scam, led me to take extreme measures to avoid reading out loud. I made my decision and began to warm up for what I was about to do.

Apparently unfamiliar with how classrooms work when under temporary supervision, all of her questions became rhetorical. She was a new face, soft featured with a suitably friendly demeanour. She wasn’t going to get anything from us. Staring out into the silence, she took extreme measures herself and started to pick on people to answer – a pretty uncouth course of action that wasn’t going to make her any friends. The immediate response to a teacher who employs such a technique is to avoid eye-contact. So head-down I stared at my empty page and waited to hear my name called, preparing to make an emergency change to the plan. Then the inevitable – “You there”. Evidently she didn’t know my name. Someone nudged my shoulder as I settled into character. This was happening. I slowly looked up from my book, nervous and hesitant, when the words stumbled out.

“I.. th..thh. I think that from from fromm the book, from the the…”

Each cluster of stammers was broken with a deep sigh as I seemed to refocus and overcome frustration with myself. People had started to turn and face me and as soon as I started to talk again, in broken sentences, they began to laugh. My ruse was up. Or at least I thought it was until their sniggering was silenced by the now stern substitute. Then she encouraged me to carry on… Yes. This was working. “I’m s-sorry” – more laughs from them, more empathy from her. They were all playing into this perfectly. In becoming the timid and tormented I had gained power over them all; they were all part of my game now. The substitute excused me from having to finish my answer and she wouldn’t ask me to read out anything again. I had won, for now at least.

At the end of the lesson she asked me to come and join her up front. I sat at her desk whilst she asked if I was alright, if people had always laughed at me. Panicked and nervous, the stutter became easier to contrive, though I said very little and convinced her I was okay. I was more than okay, I was a genius puppetmaster, but now all I wanted was to get out the room and be myself again. I was starting to feel claustrophobic inside this act. Finally she let me go, so excitedly I returned to the kudos of my peers. Not only had I avoided genuine failure, I had won over both sides – nurtured by the teacher and heralded by the students.

It must have been on everyone’s mind the next week when we had the same class, as those already seated welcomed me through the door with reminiscent smiles. The afterglow of my actions lingered on and my legacy was being born. I couldn’t help but feel puffed up by this, though obviously I tried to not let it show. As I found my place I realised that those knowing smiles knew something that I didn’t. A wave of terror engulfed me as I looked up at the tender, understanding eyes of the same substitute teacher. Her again. There was no escape. It would soon be revealed to us that our regular teacher was actually on maternity leave, meaning: 6 months with this substitute. 2 terms with this fucking speech impediment. I needed a way out. Ironically enough this was what landed me here in the first place. I prided myself on my ability to get out of things, so I thought fast and settled on a plan to phase it out. The next few weeks would contain some of the most stressful days in my adolescent life as I would experience the overwhelming anxiety of anticipation before this particular class. I would prefigure my approach to talking – essentially rehearsing how to sound nervous. On top of this I came up with back-up excuses and fail-safe plans. In avoiding petty work I had created a true mission for myself – trying to avoid reading aloud for fear of the pressure and attention, I had made myself the focus of every class as people would sneer and openly comment on the ironing out of my stutter. I had become trapped in a prison of my own creation, and decided to follow in the footsteps of Andy Dufresne, clawing my way out inch by inch with a measly rock hammer. Eventually I’d be free, but I would be changed by the experience.

In this brief window I had acquired and overcome a disability that many have for life, though I’m assuming most sufferers didn’t adopt it voluntarily in order to manipulate a situation.. (I am reminded of Derren Brown’s head-nodding-tic which he did in fact bring on himself through relentlessly trying to persuade people as a hypnotist at college) In half a year I had experienced new depths of anxiety that would make me all too aware of the power in perception and persona. An awareness that has become a true affliction.. but more on that another time.

December 20, 2014 0

Watching the wires

Having adopted a deconstructionist approach to watching horror films so that they would no longer scare me, I had accidentally affected the way that I would watch all kinds of films by proxy. In trying to protect myself I had accidentally broken this readily available form of escapism. In one sense at least.

As time passed, I found myself growing fascinated with cinema and its inner workings – when it came to choosing subjects to study at college I was sure that I wanted to learn about human psychology to learn about persuasion and study marketing so that I could understand the influences of advertising. I studied Film as an additional course, but soon dropped another class so that I could take it full-time alongside extracurricular world cinema. Everything else became secondary. And though I couldn’t lose myself to a story, by believing it’s characters and being taken into the world created through sight and sound, I would be immersed in a different sense, amazed and engrossed by the processes of cinema. For this reason I feel like I am separated from a true experience. As though there is a barrier between me and the transporting fantasy on screen. I feel like a robot fascinated by love – interested in the mechanical elements, how the pupils dilate and the lips redden, able to understand the functionality but never able to feel it. At least not without being conscious of the fact.

wizard

It would take me a while to understand that my own personal fascination with how things worked, how film and television had their own methods of persuasion and manipulation, was not shared by others. I assumed that others would be taken by the methodology at work in things that they saw everyday. I had glimpsed behind the curtain and was excited to share my knowledge, unaware that most people were happier believing in the wizard. Excitedly I would dissect the reality shows that my mother enjoyed watching. ‘That stranger in the crowd is mic’d up. How did they get a camera inside the house before the crew turned up? There’s only one camera, the interviewer is nodding at no-one right now.’ I couldn’t understand that they were better off than me, where I knew there was just a bloke and a machine, they had magic. I had assumed that, like me, the more interesting part of a magic trick was in working out how it was done. This was the appeal for me, and so I would never truly appreciate the magic of cinema in the same way as others.

September 8, 2014 0

Scared Straight

I feel like I can’t watch horror films properly. I no longer find them scary – not as much as I used to anyway – and so feel like I’m missing out on a huge part of the experience. Like the audience at home watching cooking shows I can only comment on the things I admire aesthetically because I don’t really experience them – not how they were meant to be experienced anyway. This I blame on my parents.

When I was 9 years old my parents split – that is to say they separated and not that they doubled-down in some form of mitosis, although I did have twice the amount of Christmases and birthdays from then on. I moved with my mother from an increasingly rough area in East London to a surprisingly rough area in Surrey. My mother continued to work in Islington and so I would go to a childminder’s before returning home. This was before I became a latchkey kid. Often I would spend nights in the house alone and would have to put myself to bed if mum was home late. Perhaps like many children my age I found the empty house unnerving at night – think: Macaulay Culkin screaming at the furnace. I would turn off the lights methodically, hurrying in turn as I imagined that a predator hiding in the dark would now make its move in the engulfing darkness. If I imagined it I was willing it into existence, so I thought.

Then one night I was lying in bed when I heard a noise from downstairs – and so began the battle between the frightened child and his rational mind. Now the area wasn’t that bad really, there wasn’t really the threat of a break-in unlike my house in East London which was robbed while we slept in the run up to Christmas – think: Guy Richie’s The Grinch. I knew that this was unlikely in our new house, or at least I wanted rid of the fear; so I got out of bed and went to explore the noise so that I could prove to myself that there was in fact nothing and I could go to sleep safe in the knowledge. This became a routine of sorts. If ever I heard a noise and was frightened, I would check it out in an attempt to condition myself out of fear.

Then I was faced with darkness. I had hurried to turn on the lights in case there was something lurking, biding its time. I knew this was my imagination but I frightened myself. So now to apply the conditioning: I would turn out the lights and walk slowly in the dark, if I felt scared I would make myself stand still until I wasn’t anymore. From then on, if I heard a noise in the night I would go to check it out and if I felt scared I would do so in the dark. This I realise may seem quite deranged but it made sense to me. I didn’t want the fear. The fear was worse than the threat.

During this time my father had moved to a few different places with different people until a few years later when he landed on the house and family that he has now. When they were moving into the house they found that the loft was still full of odd bits and pieces. I helped my dad to clear the loft, looking for anything interesting or salvageable and stumbled upon a trove of VHS tapes. Some vintage pornography, some Video Nasties, but mostly horror films in cardboard sleeves. I put all the videos into a black bin-liner and took them home. They sat on shelves opposite my bed for a while before I realised why I hadn’t watched them: I was scared. I was back to my pre-teen feeling of vulnerability that I thought I had shed.Horror films scared me. I remember after my parents initial break-up, I was at my dad’s then flat with his then girlfriend where he was watching An American Werewolf in Paris. I must have looked frightened when I glimpsed it on the TV as he honed in on that expression of weakness. Playfully goading me he asked if I was scared – I lied – he told me to prove it and stand up-close to the screen whilst the wolf-transformation was happening – I did. I was proving myself to him, but lying to myself. Now I was looking at this collection of classic horror cinema and saw it as a challenge to the scared child that was still in me.

I began watching each of the films when I was alone in the house: The Exorcist, Basket Case, Cannibal Apocalypse, if ever I felt myself getting scared I would turn off the lights, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Brood, still scared I would move closer to the screen watching The Evil Dead, Society and The Hills Have Eyes. I watched them with such focus, telling myself that they were just films, deconstructing them in order to understand how they were just films, that I managed to lose my fear which I kind of regret now, but it might just have sparked my interest in cinema. Swings and roundabouts I guess.

June 30, 2014 0

Snooze

A fan of Frank Ocean’s Nostalgia/Ultra album, I was never fond of this opening track – a take on Coldplay’s Strawberry Swing that ends with a snooze alarm for just that bit too long (fading in and out over the last minute of the song).

It was only recently however – when I was playing the album loudly through a decent soundsystem – that I came to appreciate this particular detail. An album based on the theme of nostalgia, Ocean recounts the fondness of his childhood memories from within a dream.. (a theme of blurring dreams into narrative that resonates with the twice referenced film Eyes Wide Shut)

Snooze alarms, like office-phone ringtones, are set to a certain pitch that irks you to stop the noise – waking you up or answering the call. So when this part of the track came on over the speakers, I rushed to my Ipod to skip to the next track… an impulse that I have since found to be engrained in my muscle memory when hitting my alarm off come the vulgar morning chirps of my phone. It placed me into the song – the narrative of Ocean waking up resentfully out of his dream to the rest of his album.

Still don’t like the song, but appreciate it a little more.

November 10, 2012 0