In defence of the souless commuter

Or why I wouldn't have stopped to listen to Joshua Bell play in the subway.​

Recently, a friend of mine reposted one of those Facebook/email stories stories about violin virtuoso Joshua Bell busking in the New York subway and how all but two people and a few small children ignored him. It was paraphrasing an article called 'Pearls Before Breakfast', a 'social experiment' engineered by Gene Weingarten and the Washington Post in 2007. Weingarten won a Pulitzer Prize for it. Interestingly, his second Pulitzer was for a (very insightful and moving) article about the deaths of children left in their cars by forgetful parents - I suggest you read them both, not just for the quality of the writing, but also to understand the common point he is highlighting.

Most people I've heard react to the Bell story with 'oh yes, isn't it terrible how we just rush through life and don't enjoy the beauty, we must stop and smell the roses more often, it's so sad, we've become such automatons and slaves to the modern industrial world' - Weingarten compares the video of Bell's busking performance to that of Koyaanisqatsi ('Life out of balance'), an 80s film illustrating our descent into robotic antdoom, becoming cogs in the great wheel of progress and industry, the loss of beauty, art, music, self in the layers of urban consumerism.

Weingarten, Bell, the Washington Post and the makers of Koyaanisqatsi make a good point. There should be space for art, music, beauty, peace in everyone's life. But I resent the implication that because I work 9-5 as part of The Great Corporate Machine, I am ignoring the opportunities for beauty in my life.

For the record, Weingarten's article is not judgemental. He presents the facts and statements from the people interviewed and allows us to draw our own conclusions - as a journalist should. What I resent is the way his objective view has been regurgitated into chain emails and Facebook posts, with the obligatory 'oh it's too sad', inviting similar comments lest you be one of the unenlightened, the spiritually void, the Tin Man without a heart.

I work 9-5.30, five days a week. I travel 75 minutes each way to reach my office so I can live in a three bedroom house with a garden instead of a studio apartment. My office is in a modern high rise building made of glass and steel and I have a desk in a cluster of six other desks in a giant room that I share with 150 people, computers, phones, printers and photocopiers. My firm provides financial services and I am the sole 'creative' on staff, providing branding, formatting, application support and layout design for pitch documents, presentations, client reports and process flowcharts. I like my job, but it's not what I dreamed I'd do - I tried that for 15 years and got tired of being broke. Ten years ago I made a conscious decision to work ​40 hours a week and get paid enough to be able to spend my evenings and weekends filling the parts of my life I don't spend at work with things that made me happy.

Now I give 48 hours a week of my life in exchange for more money than I've ever earned in my 23 years of working. And that money means that in the last 12 months, my partner and I were able to afford to go to the theatre a dozen times, visit art galleries, museums, travel to Australia for two weeks, spend a week driving around the island of Ibiza, eat out at nice restaurants and buy so many CDs and DVDs we had to buy more shelves to accomodate them. I also bought a camera. A good one, which meant I could finally start working on photography, a hobby I've been interested in since I was child.

Working for 'the man' also provides me with private health insurance, life insurance and a pension I'd never get if I'd stayed working in the arts.

Yes, the commute gets frustrating. Yes, the workload can get tedious and open plan offices are noisy, distracting and tiring and yes, I could fit all the work I do in five days into three - but that's not how the system works. You're required to spend a portion of your 40 hours chatting to colleagues about fairly irrelevant topics, offering cups of tea if you're making one and showing an interest in other people's holidays and photos of their children - if you don't, you don't 'fit in'. Apparently 'fitting in' is key to getting the work done. And getting the work done is key to getting paid.

Once, a delivery made to my home had to be left on the front porch and I asked my boss if I could go home to ensure it wasn't stolen. It was 11am and my firm provides me with remote access to our systems, so I offered to work from home for the rest of the day, rather than waste three hours of my work day making the round trip. But my boss asked me to come back to the office as 'it looked better' for me to be present in the office. For a time, I worked at home two days a week when we were commuting from further away, but was relieved to give it up when we moved closer, as I was forever being asked 'Now, you're not in tomorrow are you?' and explaining that while I wasn't physically present in the office, I would be performing the same tasks and often working harder to justify that fact.
I have no illusions about how 'pointless' my job is in the greater scheme of the universe, but I work a lot less hours and make a lot more money than I ever did in the theatre. I also have a lot more time for myself.
Long distance commuting was one of the most stressful experiences I've ever had. And it wasn't about how much time I was spending travelling to and from home. It was about the physical and mental abuse of the public transport system. In a city like London, and I'm sure this applies to New York, Washington and any other city with a mass transport system and sprawling suburbs filled with people who work in the city centre, there are more people than the system can cope with. Trains are expensive, crowded, dirty, smelly and aging at an exponential rate.

We used to position ourselves on the platform where we knew the door would be on the incoming train and arrive 15 minutes early to grab that spot so we'd at least have a chance of getting a seat. It was that or end up standing in the aisles for 90 minutes of creaking, jerking, juddering into London, only to pile off and be shoved about by people made late for work by signal failures, overheating rails in summer, frozen points in winter, or my all time favourite - llamas that had escaped from a farm and were wandering over the tracks.

​ The result of this is that more often than not, I was rushing through the station, either late for work, or, worse, late for the train home, meaning I could be standing on the platform for another half hour until the next one. And I was one of a couple of million people in exactly the same situation, sardining ourselves into overcrowded train carriages, weaving through platforms fill with people, jostling for a place in the queue for the escalator, hoping we didn't end up pressed up against someone with body odour, bad breath or the tinny screeching of pop divas through plastic earphones. This is not an environment for appreciating art, music or culture.

A few year ago I heard about an organisation called 'Slow Down London' whose mission statement is 'to inspire Londoners to challenge the cult of speed and appreciate the world around us.' They went to the papers with a campaign stating they would be walking the streets of London during rush hour, stopping people and encouraging them to slow down. I am here to tell you that if one of those people had stopped me rushing on my way to catch my train home, which, had I missed, would mean 30 minutes less of my evening at home, I would have punched them in the face. I challenge any of them to match my record of cultural experiences over the past 12 months - all done because I can afford to do so - because I work a 40 hour week in The Machine.

​So I say, not so much to Gene Weingarten and the Washington Post, who performed the experiment in what I hope is an unbiased piece of reporting, but to everyone who has ever forwarded that email, reposted that Facebook article or commented with a 'oh I know it's so sad' - you try commuting through a metro system with a million other people on a daily basis and see how keen you are to stop and listen to a guy playing the violin. Experiencing beauty like Joshua Bell playing the violin is one of life's imperatives. But you cannot tell me that experiencing that beauty when I have time, space and energy to actually enjoy it is not just as important.

Dead things

Earlier this week I came home to find a dead pigeon on the glass roof of the little porch over the front door to our building. I’m guessing it flew into the glass windows that front our building and broke its stupid neck. It stayed there for three days before I decided I would have to be the one to call the building maintenance company to bring a ladder and a bucket of disinfectant. I took some photos and emailed them as evidence, but it’s been three more days now and the bird carcass is still there. I’ll spare you the day-lit ones, but thought this one was worthy of a bit of gruesome fascination.

Disclosure – I hate birds. The thought of little bags of tiny bones covered in soft, slightly oily, seed-scented feathers creeps me out on some deep biological level. Pigeons occupy a special place in my scale of loathing, for their lack of navigational skills and capacity for crashing into innocent humans on their way back from the bus stop (the humans, not the pigeons, pigeons don’t take the bus as far as I’m aware).

The bird on our porch roof is not yet rotting, but the corpse is starting to flatten out as gravity overrules the muscular structure. One of its feet is curling into talons, more like a Poe-style raven than an idiotic flying rat. But I find myself oddly intrigued by the fact that this creature, living earlier in the week, is now formless, inert, at the mercy of the elements and helpless. In a word, dead. And I wonder about humankind’s preoccupation and fascination with death. Funerals, cremations, burials, religious and otherwise, Halloween and festivals like Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead). I wonder at my predilection for horror films and novels, for vampires (before it was decided they ‘sparkled’ and drove Volvos *grits teeth*), for Frankenstein and his monsters and just how much I enjoyed Christopher Golden’s recent undead anthology Zombie.

I’m sure studiers of human nature have better explanations than I, but I’m assuming it’s because it is the final Great Unknown. Because we really don’t know what happens after death, because, well, we’re dead and no-one’s come back to tell us (I’m not talking about people who die for a few minutes and are revived by the way, I mean properly dead like my six-day-old pigeon-corpse buddy). Humans aren’t good with unknowns. We don’t like to have unexplained mysteries, we like certainties. Uncertainty is frightening. So death really pisses us off. So to deflect that anger and fear, we make stuff up. We hand out stories of tunnels of light and angels with harps on clouds, or fire and brimstone to keep the kids in line. Or that you’ll come back again, in another body (but conveniently won’t remember your past lives). Or that you won’t die at all, you’ll simply change form, into a ghost, a vampire, or a spirit, floating in the ether around your family and friends, protecting babies from falling out of their cribs.

But I look at ol’ pigeon here and I’m not convinced. His feathers are limp in the wind, his insides are now his outsides, his eyes are glazed over and he’s a soft, damp toy without any batteries. He’s not coming back, he hasn’t moved on, he’s just stopped. He’s not aware of the rushing traffic. He’s oblivious to polite behaviour in public, he won’t hear his pigeon buddies taunting him about his choice of ankle cuffs, the daily food shop is no longer required. He doesn’t have to pay his rent to sit on a lion in Trafalgar Square and his wife won’t nag him about coming home late after a night out on the seed with his mates. He won’t have to go into his boring job sitting on ledges outside office windows. Everything is quiet in his world.

People might be frightened of death as a Great Unknown, but I think they’re more frightened of not getting everything done, of not following through on those childhood dreams, or parental expectations. Lately, having been in a romantic relationship for nearly six years, I find myself frightened of what my death would mean to my partner, but my fears about what death means to me lessen as I grow older and my life is fuller of memories and adventures. No, I don’t want to die yet, but I’m not as frightened of my mortality as I used to be. Because in my noisy, busy, adventure and information-filled world, the finality of death seems like the best, last chance to sit down and have a rest. Peace. Solitude. Tranquillity. The ultimate quiet time.

Then of course my chap suggested that it would be cool if the pigeon turned into a zombie. Thanks babe.

Reviews and a new blog

When I started this blog, it was intended as a tool to get in some reviewing practice in case that paid opportunity ever arose (ha!), but instead, it evolved into tales from my life, rather than my cultural experiences and overly poetic opinions on live entertainment. So while it’s not updated frequently (guess what my only New Year’s resolution was?), it’s been lots of fun, so I’ve decided to keep it that way.

To that end, I’ve started a sister blog with actual reviews and have included my first two theatre adventures of 2011 — the gorgeously gorgeous ‘Flyboy is alone again at Christmas’ by Matthew Robins and a one night stand with the equally fabulous Tom Lenk.

You can find my review blog at blues-reviews.blogspot.com (Blue’s Reviews) and this blog will now be known as Miss Blue’s Views (for that is what they be) at the original address.

Even if no-one reads them, I’m having fun :)

How to dissuade a bicycle thief

One of the managers at my office has had his bicycle stolen twice in the past few months. I suspect this has rather a lot to do with the fact that he can’t be bothered chaining it up in the secure car park underneath our building, but insists on keeping it at the public bike racks outside on the street. As he often works late, and the area around our office gets very quiet once the suits have headed home, there's a good chance it will be a prime target for thieves when the sun goes down.

As he still can't be bothered putting it in the secure car park, he has come up with a slightly more... innovative... deterrent. Click here to see.

Body adornments

I like jewellery. I don’t wear it often, especially not at work for a) comfort (rings and bangles are not conducive to eight hours hammering on keyboard and mouse) and b) talking points. I dress as frumpily as possible at work for the specific reason of avoiding the ‘oh, that’s unusual, where did you get that?’ conversation. The people I work with are accountants and statisticians and fit those stereotypes, anything beyond pearls and charm bracelets is ‘unusual’ and therefore worthy of a mildly-horrified comment on my fashion rebellion. I cite an example from a few days ago - another girl, younger than me, but so quiet and socially inept she makes the average church-going librarian look like Madonna. She’s more straight-laced than anyone I’ve met and I find that interesting, because I suspect she has a dark gothic side that she doesn’t show at work. Wouldn’t surprise me to learn she’s a dominatrix at a biker bar on the weekends. My example, however, is an overheard conversation between two of the other secretaries about this girl. Apparently they’d been sitting beside her in a meeting and her skirt had ridden up slightly, revealing, not sensible 70-denier pantyhose, but stocking-tops and the hint of a suspender belt. You’d have thought she’d stripped down to rubber underwear and given the managing director a lapdance, the shock of it was so conversation-worthy. Hence my reticence for any attire beyond a pale blue Marks & Spencer shirt and sensible shoes. If I came in dressed in black, with biker boots and chandelier earrings, there’d be whispered conversations for weeks.

I also have a problem with spending a lot of money on jewellery (unless it’s handmade and unique), so tend to leave my jewellery shopping for markets, antique shops and thrift shops. Not only will I never afford Tiffany, Cartier, Harry Winston, I can’t tell my diamonds from my cubic zirconias, so it’s all a moot point. My tastes are wide and varied, but head towards vintage, Goth and art deco - drives my chap insane in terms of buying gifts, but he has exceptional taste and hasn’t gone wrong yet - see Figure 1.

When I was younger, I didn’t consider myself a ‘jewellery person’ - ie someone who bought and wore jewellery. I was a stage manager for years - a career in paint, power tools and rigging also incompatible with jewellery, my mother didn’t and doesn’t wear a lot of jewellery (she doesn’t even have her ears pierced) and growing up in the 80s in rural Queensland didn’t provide a lot of options for anything that wasn’t made of plastic. So I grew up assuming that because I wasn’t a ‘jewellery person’, all the lovely things I saw at markets in London, Paris, Venice, weren’t for me. I confessed some years ago to one of my oldest girlfriends, that I wished I was a ‘jewellery person’, because I’d love to wear some of the things I saw. She looked at me quizzically and said ’well, why don’t you become a jewellery person?’. The simplicity of her solution floored me. Why couldn’t I? Would people who knew me be shocked? Would they think me pretentious to try and change my behaviour after a life time? Would they even notice? Or, as my friend pointed out as I bought a necklace and some earrings, wouldn’t they just enjoy the beautiful adornments as much as I did? 

Speaking of adornments, this is my latest acquisition, an early birthday gift from another of my extremely talented, beautiful and creative friends, Kriket Broadhurst. See more of her work at www.kriketdesigns.com and make sure you check out her Etsy shop and read her blog. As a fully-fledged ‘jewellery person’, it thrills me to have such gorgeousness in my life.

Sanctuary in the city

The city felt empty yesterday morning. It wasn’t, by any means, still hundreds of people in suits trudging along the footpath, weaving in and out of slack-jawed tourists hauling giant suitcases, tutting at those who cause them to pause in their single-minded get-to-the-office-by-nine scurry. But the air was cooler, cleaner, than it has been for a few days and summer holidays meant the train was less crowded. The lack of closeness in the air, having a seat to myself, the streets free of jostling, shouting school children, made me feel like there was more room in the commuter chaos I find myself swept along with every morning. I wear headphones with my iPod, rather than earbuds, in an attempt to force out some of the ambient noise: other people’s tinny, over-loud earphones buzzing sibilant hip-hop, whining secretaries bitching about colleagues on their phones, housewives incapable of turning off the keypad tones on their mobile devices, which chirp incessantly as they fumble through text messages. Sometimes I wonder if commuting deadens brains to the existence of other people.

The tranquillity I felt yesterday might have been the lack of these distractions on the train. Or the kind of English weather I moved here for - blue sky, cool sun, slight breeze. Or Chris Isaak’s ‘Speak of the Devil’ on my iPod. I felt indulgent as a result and as I was about 20 minutes early for work, I headed to Prét for a coffee and one of their tasty salmon bagettes and snuck up to a place I know behind my office that is usually empty before the working day begins. The building owners have termed it somewhat grandly as a ‘roof garden’ and technically it is a roof and there are things growing, but it’s mostly concrete and steel, looking over more concrete and steel. It’s quite pleasant in a sterile, corporate way, but the best thing is that in the morning there’s no-one there. So I sat, reading, eating my breakfast, looking up at the buildings occasionally when the sun came out. I like my job, I like the work I do and the office I work in, but yesterday, sitting outside, drinking coffee and contemplating the city around me, was by far the most enjoyable part of my day.

Collectormania! (or why I went to Milton Keynes)

On a recent trip to Dorchester, for a music festival my chap was involved with, we decided to stay in Abingdon, about 15 minutes drive from Dorchester and an hour from Milton Keynes – the UK’s answer to Canberra (ie a ‘planned’ city with all the excitement and originality of a rat maze). This is only significant because this particular weekend it was host to *dramatic pause* COLLECTORMANIA! Now, historically I’m not a big attendee of communal sci-fi-related events, there’s a little too much interaction required for my taste and I know I’d look ridiculous in any form of character costume (though as a faux-redhead for the past 20 years, I have considered going as Agent Scully if she discovered Krispy Kremes). But I like seeing all the fans in their natural habitat and I love the chance to buy cool sci-fi and horror secondhand DVDs and CDs at very discounted prices. In the past I’ve acquired some funky jewellery, posters and unusual genre-specific books that I’d have to spend twice the money on ordering on the net – if I had even found them in the first place. Collectormania isn’t sci-fi only, there are also opportunities for those who collect sports merchandise and soft toys (no, mystery to me too), but the driving force behind this event appeared to be the myriad of ‘famous’ guests they’d managed to round up to get paid for photos, autographs and handshakes with the salivating general public. The Milton Keynes website is gone now, but the list of famous faces included, among about fifty others, Kate Mulgrew and Tim Ross (Star Trek Voyager), Barry Bostwick (Rocky Horror, Spin City), Chris Barrie and Norman Lovett (Red Dwarf) and most interestingly, Linda Hamilton and Sir Patrick Stewart. Most of these people weren’t there on the Friday, which is probably just as well...

Now I’ve written quite extensively about my views on 'drive-by' fans (a phrase coined by an astute Twitter-mate of mine named Phil), so I won’t repeat it here, other than to say I understand it (kinda) but I don’t like it. Not from the actor’s point of view - why the hell not make money from saying hi to people agog with your famousness – but from the fans’, collecting an autograph, a photo, a three second ‘experience’ that’s about as genuine as paying for a Big Mac and having the server wish you a good day. But as I was happy to circumvent the queues and head straight for the merch stands, I figured the thousands of fans in their homemade Princess Leia and store-bought Star Trek costumes would be a good people-watch while I pored over books on the art of Ray Harryhausen and behind the scenes photos from the Indiana Jones films. My chap, supportive as ever, agreed to come along on the same basis – and I think he was curious about the mysteries of uber-fandom. Plus, in my role as railway-enthusiast WAG, I’ve been to enough model railway exhibitions in pokey church halls to make up for this geek digression.

The event was held at Stadium MK – a football stadium (this is not my photo, there are people in it) – and the organisers had set up stylish white lawn tents  and desks with chairs around the top level of the stadium (the covered bit behind the seating) – the weather is always dodgy in the UK, and the risk of damp celebrities too high to have them set upon the field. We arrived quite late in the afternoon, an accident on the M1 turning our two hour drive into four and half, despite trying two different detours around it, and although I wasn’t expecting hordes of people, being late on the first day of the show and it being a week day, I was anticipating a crowd. First indication something was amiss – not many cars in the car park. We could hear a variety of sci-fi themes being piped through the stadium Tannoy (we arrived to Space 1999 and departed to Voyager) and I shared a ‘watch out for tumbleweeds’ look with my chap as we got out of the car. Inside, we didn’t fare much better. Asking the volunteers at the front entrance where all the merch stands were, my chap was directed to ‘all the celebrities are on this level, round to your right..’ at which point another volunteer corrected our young helper with ‘we don’t use the ‘c’ word, dear, they’re ‘guests’’ (*snort*).

We walked round to the right, glancing into the tents to see Barry Bostwick in a very sharp suit discussing something with the folks at the ’door’ to his tent, Tim Ross and some ’lesser’ Voyager actors chatting and tapping pens on tables and Kate Mulgrew, rugged up against the chill stadium breeze, smiling and looking very blonde, sophisticated and lovely. But there were NO fans. I’m sure there were massive queues right round the stadium over the weekend, but at 3pm on Friday, you could hear crickets, even over the piped Best of Sci-Fi. To be honest, we felt a bit sorry for them all. My instinct was to offer them a cup of tea, just to break the awkward silence and relieve the boredom. I’m sure they’d had a lot of people offering them tea. Biscuits too, at least for the big stars.

We spent about an hour wandering around the vendor stalls, blinking at the vast array of action figures, puzzling   over tables full of Beanie Babies and signed football tshirts, admiring a large set of hand-painted Alien dioramas and pondering the proliferation of ‘Team Edward’ badges (which I explained in rather too much detail to my chap when he asked what it was). We got three DVDs for £6, my chap bought a book on the history of Sherlock Holmes in film and TV and I spent entirely too much money on a silk-screened poster commissioned for a screening of The Lost Boys at the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema in Austin Texas. Behold its awesomeness.

Then we got McDonalds and sat in a strategically designed park beside the motorway with a man-made water feature. Milton Keynes. It’s all happening there.