Another extremely positive review of That Night Follows Day from the Tramway performances here (second piece on the page, with the title slightly wrong!), this one from the Scotsman.
*
Liking this violent and endlessy convoluted Guardian piece on drug gangs in Liverpool, especially the overload of nick-names, and jargon explanation.
They call it Easydrugs. With counter-narcotics officers able to monitor emails and telephone conversations, the latest modus operandi of Liverpool's cocaine dealers relies on catching budget flights from Merseyside to contacts throughout Europe, relaying messages and instructions in person, often returning the same day...
Smigger decided to front it out. He was a good blagger. He told the
people from the Faraway Place [the Liverpool mafia's nickname for
Colombia] that the load [of cocaine] was probably rotting on a dockside somewhere in
Holland and that he knew nothing about it.
And later in the same piece:
The Colombians contracted a top emissary in the Flat Place [underworld
slang for the Netherlands] to recover the debt. He went to Amsterdam,
but he was shot by Smigger's firm.
Spending hours on this kind of thing at the moment. Great chunks of time getting transcribed from video tape, compared, annotated, re-done, rehearsed, edited, tweaked then re-transcribed, annotated and re-done. It can get to feel like you're in Tom McCarthy's Remainder (I wrote about it here). All towards the new Forced Entertainment performance Spectacular which opens this Thursday here in Essen. See the FE site here for more details.
Overheard from the troubled looking Tour Manager, talking on his mobile in the hotel breakfast room.
Yeah.
...
Look. The problem is that onstage theyre just not the same sympathetic band they were before.
...
They're all past their 40th birthdays and they're all complaining about the breakdown of their marriages.
...
Yeah.
...
Well, you can deal with Greg then...
Usually, the AI is reactive to the player's actions, while the story dictates the order of events. Left 4 Dead switches things around. The AI, based on a new system known as Director, manufactures a unique experience for every player, in real time. If the survivors have been through a nightmarish gun battle, Director stops spawning enemies and holds things off, allowing everyone to catch their breath; if they've been wandering around doing nothing for a while, the AI steps things up, throwing in a bunch of zombie aggressors or even a quick boss battle. These flashpoints can happen anywhere at any time; it all depends on the actions of the players. "Director creates highs and lows, without it being tied to navigation," says Faliszek. "There is an over-arching story, but it doesn't try to explain everything."
Excited about GTA4 and I don't even own a copy. Left 4 Dead (discussed here) sounds like it might be pretty interesting too - I watched M. play on Portal (same makers) which was pretty amusing - esp things like the impossible geography of creating a tunnel in the floor of a room that brings you out into the same room via an entrance in the ceiling.
I mentioned before that working is underway on a German translation of my Endland Stories for the Swiss publisher Diaphanes. The new book will feature the stories from the original Endland collection, as well as a collection of further stories in related territory, many of which were written for other projects, notably Barbara Campbell's 1001 nights cast and Kate McIntosh's performance Loose Promise. From time to time I'm getting emails with language questions from my friend Astrid whose got the inenviable task of translating Endland's blunt vernacular into improper German. The following arrived from her this morning - a list of the words, names and terms from the book, for possible inclusion in an ironic/messed up glossary that we're discussing. I liked the list at least - and how it gives a strange, off-centre map of the book, or the kinds of things in it.
Tesco (à Aldi)
Grebo
Lock-In
Norton Commando
(Edale)
Hillsborough
(Mighty Morphin Power Rangers)
Bonfire-Night
Scalectrix (à Carrera)
Yates' Wine Lodge (à Weinlokal)
Fred and Rosie West
Leah Betts
Joe Haldemann
? Baby Sham (Fake Kids)
Lucozade (à Red Bull)
Dick Turpin
Shepperton Studios
Jonestown
Toddington Services
Ironside
Ken Livingstone
Pig Trouble
? Mr. Twinkle, Mr. Bumpy, Mr. Stretchy
Stripagram
Tarzanogram
Diet Lilt (à Diät-Fanta-Exotic)
Chain Gang
Dunce cap
Hammer House of Death (à Haus des Grauens)
Gormenghast
(Palitoy)
Game of Life
(100 Club)
Grimthorp
Blue Boar Services
Leicester Forest East
Fair&Square Club
Robot Beach
(Peter, Paul&Mary)
Dunblane
Penn and Teller
(Gin Palace)
Jackanory
? George Davies
Plague Dogs (à Hunde des schwarzen Todes)
Skylark
(Dorothea Lange)
Cromwell Street
Manor Estate
(Donkey Jacket)
Images of the Delsarte system of expression, popularized in the 1880s
and found in the volume: The Popular Entertainer and Self-Instructor in Elocution, here, at the blogRoom 26 Cabinet of Curiosities.
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