Dear Person Standing On The Right Side Of The Escalator

Hey, it's funny how everyone else is just standing on the left side, isn't it? Leaving that convenient vacant pathway on the right side. It's almost as if it's vacant for a reason, isn't it? Almost as if people leave that side free so that people in a rush can get through.

Isn't it weird how sometimes you almost get the feeling that there are other humans in the world who have goals and chores and places to get to? Like, totally weird.

Ah well. Look at all this extra space on the right side. The perfect place to stand perfectly still and ignore everything that's happening around you. I mean, it's a space, it's empty, might as well put your body in it. Go ahead. Ooh look, an advert for hats! Rad.

See you fucking again tomorrow, inevitably.

Hugs,
Ciara

This has one day left on iPlayer and you should watch it now

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p01x5k4n/under-milk-wood

Alas, I'm late on the mark for the second time this year. This new production of the damply lyrical, Welshly brilliant and brilliantly Welsh classic turned up on BBC iPlayer about a month ago then buggered off. A few days ago it buggered back again. You've a few hours yet to enjoy it.

If you've never watched/listened to/read/absorbed through osmosis Under Milk Wood, it's a shortish play for voices by Dylan Thomas, describing a day in the life of a seaside village. Cockles and milk bottles and that. Also bigamy, poison and death. The latter elements though are never heavy or self-consciously dark. It's funny, grim, stunningly beautiful and hungrily melancholy, not by turns but all at once. Just a phenomenal thing to listen to, really. Get a hot beverage and take it all in. I listened to it at dawn, not through a fussy sense of romance but through circumstance (it's humid as shit out here in Nagoya and sweaty sleepless nights plague me like flies); quite frankly it's the best thing that's happened to me in weeks.

This version is new, as far as I can tell, and it's mint. It has Joneses Tom and Griff Rhys in it. (Those guys are brothers, right?) And Charlotte Church, as a surprisingly well-casted Mrs. Ogmore-Pritchard (usually more easily pictured as an angry old fishwife than, well, someone who looks like Charlotte Church). Michael Sheen kills the opening lines. The variety of actors and delivery styles, and the slightly stop-start nature that it brings really works for me, as it stops the stream of words from becoming lost in sameiness (something which I find happens with the well-known Richard Burton version, and a great shame it is too since the words are so bloody unbelievably ace all the way through). The only duff casting for me was that of Polly Garter, which just felt a little odd and out of kilter, but I'm willing to have my mind changed on that. I was a little skeptical at first of the standard "ooh look, they're texting and using Skype, look how modern we've made it!"-type stuff, but it doesn't detract or become cloying, and acts more as a vaguely interesting framing device than something which actually involves itself in the narrative.

Overall, I definitely prefer this to the Richard Burton version, which I know is beloved by many but I've never really connected with it. For me, that version relies too much on RADA-steeped actorly voice and not on the wonders of the language and the ideas. Burton cruises on the back of his impressive vocal chords, skating briskly through the lines without allowing for pauses, nuance, enjoyment. I'm intrigued to seek out other productions and see what they do with it, but for now I'd just like to recommend that you watch this, now, now, and then I'd like to take my computer off my lap because it's still this fucking humid and my knees are sticky.