Silence and the Grumbling of Mackerelled Bellies

Well, just as I promised quite some time ago, WAKE UP co-creator Derek Young has returned to the fold. Fittingly, his returning article is related to one of our shared cultural obsessions: a certain Mr. Samuel Beckett. I'm very pleased to hear from Derek, and I hope that this will be only the beginning of many more articles from him. So, without further ado:



Silence & the Grumbling of Mackerelled Bellies

A review of Silence & Darkness

The author himself would cringe if he learnt that I thought of his plays as a potential place to meet women. (I don't really.) His quadruple bill, posted as Silence & Darkness, consisted of characters dreaming of love, missing love, in a void of love, scorning love and so on, and yet I found that the pleasant dolly who sat aside me would most definitely be worth pursuing, even in the cramped environs of the lanky-legs-inappropriate seating of the Focus Theatre, Pembroke Street.

The plays consisted of Rockaby, Catastrophe, A Piece of Monologue and Play, punctuated with a few moments of silence wherein I needed to hastily reshuffle my legs to save from unintentional amputation by a blunt object, markedly the facing chair. It was prefaced by a reading of what my dolly (I think unreliably, but it would have been improper to challenge her) informed me was "from mirlitonnades", after probing me to first see if I was familiar with his poetry. Now I shan't say that I quoted her lovely verse or whispered sweet Beckett in her ear (how charming!), but we spoke briefly of certain lines and poems.

The inherent romanticism (not relating to the mot now, but in general) with which I look back on the evening in this curious little theatre comes from the trimmings more so than the plays themselves. Namely, being Good Friday, some members of the audience were obviously fasting or were not indeed used to gorging themselves on fare that once swam, and so the blatant hunger of three or four bellies rang throughout with fantastic volume to the extent that I was half-expecting one lady in particular to leave. (Reminding me of a time last year when I saw Happy Days on an empty stomach: I moaned and swayed with Winnie as we willed the night to come, so she could rest and I could dash the cobbles to Dame Street for a hasty chicken roll.)

The safety notices at the beginning were also rather quaint: the back row being warned about the lamp that tended to get quite hot and the punter who then joked about hairspray and explosions. The quality you want from a Beckett audience is unity, ready to take it all together, it all.

Some punters arrived back after the interval with clandestine glasses of red, served off-off-licence, I'd imagine, and on the one day… As interested as I was in the performance, I was anticipating a garda raid and the ensuing hilarity when this fish-fed crew had to explain their consumption as strictly medical, to combat their upset tummies caused by the ever-potent mackerel fillets they had that evening fried in a light batter.

When the play elapsed and we all emptied back on to the sober streets of Dublin, most equally sober but in the midst of the odd tippler, she joked with me as I unlocked my bicycle, slipping into the night with a farewell, down the one-way street toward Baggot Street, the bitch. Do not rely on anyone for company who goes to Beckett plays solo, myself included.

The plays were excellent, by the way. "Birth was the death of him" boomed from a young heart with great effect, Alan Rickman's bloke in the middle was hysterical, the rocking colleen had an all too ghastly facepaintjob but her 'more's were justly haunting and Catastrophe was and always is my least favourite play of Beckett's. (It was given new lease of life however, by my musing that the woman I mentioned earlier related capably with the shaking man in the piece, the woman too shaking of the pangs, of oily white fish though, and not whatever ordeal he had suffered.) But when he penned these plays, did he imagine their audience on a fish-diet, their stomachs in dissent over repeating mackerel? I say he would have thought it funny that even the theatre-going lot could be physically uncomfortable in themselves as he put his characters through the motions.

Silence & Darkness, Samuel Beckett, Focus Theatre, Pembroke Street.

For no foreseeable reason, I append a newspaper headline for my night's escapades:

"Mackerel-eating audience grumble in darkness at play "

or

"Fasting mot on mackerel moves too fast for bloke on bicycle"

The Great Pioneer?

In profile. Get it? "PROFILE"!

"Oh, look at me, I've got a girlfriend!"

In about a month's time, we celebrate the 70^th birthday of Bob Dylan. As such, you can expect to see a lot of articles on the great man for the next few weeks; the unparalleled impact he had on popular music through his influence, his struggles with his own identity throughout his life, his arguable status as the greatest American poet since T.S. Eliot. He has, however, had another important effect to which I wish to pay tribute now. You see, Bob Dylan was history's first Facebooker.

"Oh yeah, I play guitar. It's no big deal."

Blurry AND holding a guitar. Pretentious or what?

Yes, it seems strange, but give some thought to his album covers. The vast majority are posed pictures of himself; from the faux-casual "Oh, I don't know I'm being photographed at all!" style of The Freewheelin' and Desire, to the frequent posing with guitars (Nashville Skyline,  

In his Tom Baker days.

All black and white and moody.

Time Out of Mind), to the "crazy" effects (the blurring of Blonde on Blonde, the black and white of Love and Theft, among others) to the crude drawing on the cover of Self Portrait. All of these things are styles that are most frequently witnessed in Facebook profile pictures.

This is what Bob Dylan thinks he looks like.

If incontrovertible evidence of this point is required, I can easily oblige. Take a look at this:

There you are. The ultimate pose. Not only is he wearing clothing picked to emphasise his "rebel" status, he stares at the viewer with a hostile, moody expression. What's more, his hand is out of shot, suggesting he's taking the picture himself. He's even holding sunglasses. Indoors. If ever there was a more quintessentially Facebook photo, I certainly haven't seen it.

Quite apart from these pictures, Dylan's general demeanour suggests a Facebookian view of life (yes, "Facebook" is a root for many neologisms). He has a generally self-involved air, often doing odd things like retreating to a cabin from the pressures of fame; the real life equivalent of not appearing on Facebook Chat. Furthermore, recently a startling discovery was made – a notebook in which Dylan wrote what look suspiciously like status updates:

"Guys, does anyone else think Lee Harvey Oswald is a pretty relatable guy?" (November 1963) [underneath this, in the handwriting of another, is written simply "dislike".]

"Omg some bastard just called me Judas! WTF?!!!" (March 1966)

"Such a klutz! Just crashed my motorbike lol!" (July 1966)

"Sara's such a bitch sometimes" (September 1974)

"Guys, Jesus is the answer!" (January 1979)

"Lol jk" (January 1990)

In addition to these, his rambling, stream of consciousness liner notes often have the appearance of a loosely connected series of status updates (albeit ones written by someone not in full possession of their senses).

Thus it is clear: Bob Dylan was a dedicated Facebooker before Mark Zuckerberg was even thought of. Even the Dylan biopic I'm Not There predates The Social Network by a few years. In the film, Dylan slips between performed identities over a number of years – just like many Facebookers. The invention of social networking etiquette is one of Dylan's many achievements which will fall through the cracks as he is celebrated in the next few months, so please join with WAKE UP in celebrating a man who truly blogged early, blogged often – and hasn't stopped since.