I don’t go to the theatre often, ‘cos I’m generally put off by the stuffy atmosphere, cramped seats and exorbitant prices — for thirty quid, I can have an entire night out, involving beer, curry and table dances. But on special occasions, for special people, I have been know to let myself get dragged along, and generally have a blast: the last time was on my mother’s 60th birthday, for ‘Riverdance’.

And so, I found myself in the front row at Her Majesty’s Theatre in the Haymarket, alongside a host of tourists, awaiting ‘Phantom of the Opera’ with some trepidation, since I’d always viewed Andrew Lloyd-Webber as the spawn of a particularly easy-listening Satan, fit only for Radio 2. On the plus side, at least it would be Grand Guignol easy-listening, given the subject matter inherent in Gaston Leroux’s source novel, much adapted in Hollywood since, with everyone from Lon Chaney to Robert Englund putting on the mask.

Luckily, however, it was nowhere near as bad as I’d feared, with the story being fairly faithful to the original, dispelling doubts about Lloyd-Webber tacking on a happy ending. It’s still dark, melodramatic and fairly heavy on the Gothique, while the costumes and sets were very impressive, especially given the rapid scene changes. Indeed, they were occasionally perhaps TOO impressive, you found yourself admiring the backdrops and the other technical aspects, rather than paying attention to what was happening.

And what was happening, to Lloyd-Webber’s credit, was also a lot less banal than I anticipated. The opera-within-a-musical format seemed to give him some leeway for experimentation, and while there were still the obvious hits i.e. ‘Music of the Night’, they were gratifyingly unrepresentative of the overall thing. Though it IS a little hard to pick out the lyrics, when you’ve got half a dozen people, all singing different things at the same time.

Not that this was a major problem, since we all know the story. Roughly: hideously deformed freak meets girl. Hideously deformed freak loses girl. Hideously deformed freak gets very upset and starts offing people. Given this, it’s no surprise that the overall feel was as much Lamberto Bava or Michelle Soavi, ‘Demons’ or ‘Stage Fright’, than ‘Cats’ or ‘Aspects of Love’. That is wasn’t yer usual musical fodder was probably a good thing in the circumstances. The girl in question was not what you’d call a ravishing beauty (Asia Argento need lose no sleep), but I suppose you have to take what you can get when you’re a hideously deformed freak…

This being live theatre, there were a couple of embarrassing moments, notably when the Phantom’s mask fell off a little prematurely while singing to his love. To both their credits, she affected not to notice his (sigh…) hideously deformed face, while he swiftly covered up with his hand, while he groped around for the mask, not missing a beat along the way. Some of the pyrotechnics were distinctly of the “damp squib” type, but I guess you can’t expect ‘Armageddon’ on stage.

After two and a half hours (including interval — drinks not too badly priced, to my surprise), the curtain came down. I must confess to stifling a couple of yawns in the second half, but I was never in danger of actually falling asleep. Admittedly, this WAS because the seats were less comfy than your average bus — they really need to sort that out, if they want to compete with other entertainments. In no way has it usurped the position of cinema in my affections, and it’ll probably be another couple of years before I go again, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy it.

Summer’s over – the leather jacket had its first outing this afternoon – and we are now careering towards Christmas at an alarming rate. I think I have probably got another two, possibly three weekends, before Oxford Street on a Saturday afternoon becomes just too problematic. [Never mind the hordes of dawdling tourists, it’s the hordes of dawdling Christmas shoppers who are the spawn of Satan]

This Christmas, however, threatens to be even worse than usual, since it’s quite likely that I’m going to have to WORK for most of the festive season, since the company have banned anyone in the department from taking any holidays in December. The reason for this was described, in their usual understated way, in the Sun newspaper earlier in the week: CHAOS IN STORE screamed the headlines. Apparently, there’s this thing called EMU, which is going to happen on January 1st and will really screw up all the shops and things.

The Sun, in their limited, low-brow, non-intellectual way, have only just realised something that has been painfully freakin’ obvious to me and the rest of my colleagues in the IT department (motto: “have you tried switching it off and on?”), as we struggle to come to terms with most of the major currencies in Europe vanishing, and being replaced by ECUs. With the standard of decision making we’ve come to expect from our bosses, the task of converting all our systems to appreciate this little fact is taking somewhat longer than expected. That’s “somewhat”, as in certain managers are now looking forward to Christmas with all the enthusiasm of particularly overweight turkeys.

Now, my area of responsibility is particularly the Millennium testing – yep, I’m not looking forward to Christmas 1999 either – but this has not exempted me from being sucked into the general milieu of…well, panic is perhaps too strong a word (yet…give ’em time…). This weekend saw my beautiful, pristine, calm and peaceful Millennium environment invaded by a load of unwashed EMU databases and programs, filling up all the error logs, using up disk space and generally making a nuisance of themselves.

Admittedly, the reason my system was beautiful, pristine, calm and peaceful was that hardly anyone was using it — tumbleweeds roll majestically across the disk drives, etc, etc. Millennium testing is SUPPOSED to be completed by the end of ths year. It won’t be, since we’re all too busy attending meetings about EMU. The only positive thing is that I have no evidence which suggests that any other financial institution will be any better off. One set of panic-stricken programming is enough for anyone to cope with, though the two were initially largely lumped together under one umbrella; fortunately, someone realised, in the back of their lizard brains, that you need to do DIFFERENT THINGS to cope with the end of the millennium, and a change in currencies for 300 million people. I guess this stroke of genius explains why I’m not a manager…

However, I doubt very much that the banking world will collapse as we know it. At least, being painfully aware how it usually teeters on the brink of chaos anyway (again, not just in my company, this is fairly general). If you saw the things that went on, you would pull your money out of the bank, switch it to gold bullion, and leave it in a sock under your mattress.

Having been with my current employers for almost ten years, it’s been a long time since I’ve been in the job marketplace. But I still shake in terror at the recollection of nightmarish interviews, in which smirking members of the personnel department — sorry, that’s now “Human Resources”, isn’t it? — would unleash sneaky questions like “What do you think is your biggest weakness?”. You would mumble something totally implausible like “I am too ready to sacrifice my health through overwork for the greater glory of the company”, and pray they’d hurry up and move on to your O-level results.

Needless to say, when the chance came to put the boot on the other foot, I leapt at it with both hands [pausing only to mangle severely a few metaphors en route]. For the company was having an open night, and for my sins, I’d been selected to act as a screener. This is not-quite-an-interviewer; you go through people’s CVs with them to make sure they have the necessary experience, and filter out the real deadwood before passing the rest on. However, it was still enough to provoke visions of shrieking “Kneel before me, mortals, and QUAKE at the POWER I hold over you” at bemused applicants for the post of business analyst.

Sadly, this was to remain unfulfilled — as did the one about desperate supermodels prepared to trade sexual favours for employment in the IT department of a major, but somewhat backward, financial institution. I largely found myself interviewing a series of grey people whose major personality trait was the complete lack of any. The disturbing thing was that the people I’d actually want to work with, inevitably lacked any sort of relevant experience — people with years of web experience are not really required by a company which still views the Internet as a tool of Satan. How many ways are there to subtly tell someone, “You don’t want to work here”?

The organisation of the whole event left a bit to be desired, not least having the event at an old brewery, but only supplying orange juice. It is my belief that interviews (and indeed all business meetings generally) should be conducted down the pub; after three pints, you get a far better idea of what someone is really like. There was also a startling failure to realise that some positions would be more attractive than others: they didn’t seem to realise they’d get more “analysts” turning up than “database administrators”, so there were queues for the former while the latter failed to see ANY applicants during the entire evening.

For the first interview especially, I think I was probably more nervous than the interviewee, especially as we had no time to prepare, by looking at their CVs for example. For some people this was no problem, they’d would happily witter on for ages, while you frantically scanned their application form for anything you recognised — “oh, so you live in Brighton? Do you come up to London on the Thameslink trains?” was one of my more desperate ploys. But in other cases, the answers were monosyllabic in the extreme, and when you know sod-all about the position in question, this means that you run out of steam inside about two minutes. It seems churlish to chuck them out on that basis — you tend to err on the side of caution and send anyone through to the next stage, as long as they possess the right number of limbs (plus or minus a couple).

This is thus somewhat in the nature of an apology, to those individuals who were keen enough to turn up, hoping for a job opportunity, only to be faced with a gibbering wreck, slamming back the orange juice and droning on about trains. Sorry. But, hey, I was probably doing you a favour…

or “TRASH CITY RULES” or “VINDALOO…BUCKET!”

Phoenix Arizona Saturday 19 September 1998 – All Freaking Day…….

The Phunk Junkeez - out on 'work furlough'

Let’s see.. where do I start? Picture this: A baseball stadium, big enough for 30,000 humans – and several more sub-humans – harboring a music festival of epic proportions, in an area of Arizona bordering a retirement community, which houses only ONE policeman. Picture the old farts paying extra money to hire Phoenix police as serious backup just in case we get a little ornery. Hehehe… Then, picture one of the bands being very late for the concert because they got busted in Buckeye, a town south of Phoenix, for “smoking controlled substances”, and being given a “work furlough” in order to make the concert at all.

Then, picture quite the number of strange and unusual people, some carrying inflatable dates (I witnessed that) and quite the number of vendors selling everything from stickers that said “nice people swallow”, to adult novelties (which included to my utter delight an inflatable sheep that came with its own KY jelly), to free condoms and old, used cd’s… Where else to find the tent for Trash City? Right in the damn middle of it, where else? Yes, folks, your American Ambassador squatted her team of Trash vendors and journalists here, at the Peoria Sports complex for “That Damn Show” sponsored by a local alternative radio station and a local American beer company. All my fans who read my stuff on a regular basis should recognize the Peoria Sports Complex when I had to take my son’s class on a field trip there to see a baseball game and wrote about it.

The festival itself started at 11:00am and went on till almost midnight. I arrived at the stadium at 7:00am to set up our tent. The bands were great, let me try to remember all of them, here goes:

Harvey Danger, not sitta-ing on a flagpole

• Urge
• Harvey Danger
• Cake
• Fuel
• Jackie the Jokeman
  from Howard Stern’s show
• Blink 182
• Sugar Ray
• 7 Mary 3
• Goo Goo Dolls
• Phunk Junkeez
• Lenny Kravitz

There were more, but I can’t remember…my brain was fried. The temperature was 109 degrees and I got a serious-ass farmer tan on my neck and shoulders. There was a ton of people and I set up the camcorder to do “man on the street” interviews for Trash City. At some future point we will show you photos of just how weird people can be and just how willing they are to do anything, and I mean ANYTHING, in front of a camera, if they have the smallest inkling that they may be on TV. I just neglected to say that it would be MY television they would be on, not network TV of any sort. But hey, you know my favorite saying: “fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke.”

And we all love vindaloo...

I got a good 28 minutes of hysteria on tape. Lots of TC fans telling the camera just what they think of Trash City and most of the responses were funny, witty, neglible, ignorant, unintelligible and downright obscene (may be considered offensive by British Customs and Excise). But despite the moral turpitude, one of the best parts was introducing the fans to the exercise of learning the lyrics to your pep rally song “Vindaloo”. [Oh, dear. I have to raise my hand at this point as the guilty party who sent Chris the CD… JhM] They began to think it was part of “Trash City Rules” so a lot of them used the chant “Vindaloo… Bucket!” in the videotaped interviews. Some day we may make that tape available for viewing to the general TC public, perhaps a “director’s cut” with everything left in, including a special wide-screen edition of “Trash City Bloopers”. But that’s only on the back burner of this American Ambassador’s charred flesh-for-brains.

One charming thing that stood out was “Miss Kathy’s Concessions”. I was reminded of the nostalgia days of ballroom dancing, of Fred Astaire dancing in night clubs, of the atmosphere of the 50’s and the romanticism that were “night clubs”, except these were Concession girls “Retro style”! They pulled up in a hot pink van and piled out of it, inflating plastic furniture and changing into costume: sequined miniskirts, fishnet stockings, 7″ spike high heels and bustiers that pushed their cleavage out into huge mounds under their chins. Then they hung trays from straps around their necks, filled to capacity with all manner of concessions, including lollies, chips, cigarettes, cigars, Ultra-sour Mega Warheads, and each girl went out into the bleachers spouting Betty Boop-like “Cigars, Cigarettes, Candy”. They were constantly selling out. I wonder why. I thought the concept was brilliant. It was retro, it was nostalgic, it was perfect. They told me they travel all over the country to different festivals doing this. I was impressed — and I am a female, and NOT a Lesbian. After saying that, I am sure that a huge percentage of the male populace enjoyed the visual displays they had on offer. And I don’t mean the trays around their necks… I just thought it was original thinking on Miss Kathy’s part.

All in all, a fun day, full of wild fans, great music, crappy food and expensive beer. This is the second year for this concert and judging from the enthusiasm shown, more than likely to become a tradition, unless the old farts from Sun City have any say about it. But we know what we’ll say if they try to stop it next year:

TRASH CITY RULES! VINDALOO…BUCKET!

Chris Fata

The month of tee-totality finally ended on Friday night, with the sound of popping Kriek corks, and a hearty “Thank God that’s over”. Though there are a couple of plusses as a result, most noticeably that you lose your tolerance for alchohol real fast — one bottle on Friday night, and I just crashed out, though I was up to three on Saturday. By the end of next week, the period of sobriety will be little more than a dim, vaguely unpleasant memory.

I also managed to lose half a stone during the month, which was also a pleasant surprise, as this was without too much effort. Sure, I didn’t have any kebabs, but then, I never really WANTED one — it’s the culinary equivalent of getting tattooed, both being things that only make sense after a few pints, and eating a kebab stone-cold sober is something of less than limited appeal. Whether the weight will return or not is uncertain, but it seems likely, especially if I attack many more Haagen-Daaz Chocolate Sundaes, as I did at the weekend. Though if you are going to put on weight, there can be few more pleasant ways to do it.

It is largely as a result of this, that the editorial is late, ‘cos I couldn’t be bothered to do anything more strenuous than slump in an armchair last night, stuffed to the gunnels as I was with industrial quantities of chocolate. “Sloth” and “gluttony” were definitely the chosen sins for the weekend — though it would help if I could remember what all the other ones actually were. Lust, I know, but for the rest, it’s really a case of perm any four from: avarice, pride, envy, blasphemy, jealousy, and several other things ending in Y. [Poetry? Barnsley? Broccol…er, time to watch ‘Se7en’ again, methinks]

But I don’t think you were really supposed to use them as a checklist, even back in Biblical times. A more up-to-date version is the renowned ‘Purity Test’, which is supposed to give you an idea of how morally corrupt/life experienced you are, by asking you a large number of questions about what you have or haven’t done. This has been around for well over a decade – I remember it from my days at university – and it’s not the individual answers, but the overall percentage of Yes’s that matter. Also, being self-administered and marked gives it an obvious advantage.

It would be interesting to compare my answers, and see how much my moral fibre has fallen apart since then — I suspect the answer would be “severely” in the sex category, “a bit” for the alcohol questions, and “not in the slightest” under drugs, though we are dealing with somewhat different baselines in the three areas! Unfortunately – or perhaps not – I don’t have my answers from the heady days of student life. But the Purity Test does live on, albeit in a nifty, Excel-spreadsheet version. It’s all fairly self-explanatory; sheet 1 is the questions, sheet 2 is a chart of your depravity. It not only asks you the questions, and calculates your score, it also sends me a copy of your answers for blackmail purposes. Ho-ho-ho, only joking about the last bit, though if this were a M*cros*ft product, it would probably contact the FBI and turn you in — not for sexual or drug-related crime, you understand, but you WOULD be in deep trouble if you admitted using Netscape.

Blimey. This editorial HAS stumbled quite some way from talking about Haagen-Daaz and sobriety, hasn’t it? Still, I look forward to receiving your thoughts and scores — at the very least, you might get some good ideas for future evenings. I feel I ought to offer a prize for the highest score, but in the light of current events unfolding in America (indeed, on TV there as I type this), it would seem unnecessary. Perhaps Kenneth Starr should just have given the Purity Test to Bill, and let him get on with it..