The showreel of writer and director Ellen Waddell, featuring clips from her hit movies.
Wanna know how to make it in Hollywood and make loads of money and kiss George Clooney with tongues? Then watch my very informative and accurate video.
Source: youtube.com
Not sure what to get Donald Trump for Xmas?
More cards for the occasions where you didn’t think you needed cards here
Sundays is for lovers and families. Forget Christmas. There is no other time that makes you feel more alone then Sundays. The collective units, urban and nuclear families, strolling along the river, fighting cobbles with a pushchair, arm in arm in winter coats, enjoying bitterly cold sunshine, indulging in rich foods and rich drinks and rich laughter. Yes, you are all going to watch ITV later. Afternoons in food and book markets buying rustic onions and rustic books and rustic salt and peppershakers, biting into apples that taste like dirt, but at least it’s authentic. Drinking in scattered groups by the water or on the water, up on hills, but with a view and everything is infused with rosemary and bay leaves. But jogging past them, straining and grunting and the shift of the deserted home, the freedom and relief of a Sunday to yourself transformed into a pointed statement, and you feel childless or friendless or partner less, real or imagined. You don’t even have a fire at home, and wearing a oversized jumper and indulging in papers and tea and repeats of childhood films suddenly seems unseemly to do solo. Christmas is once a year, but Sunday appears every week with it’s judgement, until you want to retreat back to bed wishing you had arranged for the warmth of others.
His Plans for the Single Life
I will become a far more boring person when I start to date again. I will be marked by the ultimate rejection and it will lead me to be an agreeable undynamic mess of a man. I will be drawn to women of a similar ilk; messy sooty-eyed desperate lumps that want someone to notice them. We will be inoffensive to each other in inoffensive restaurants, and there will be a explosive minefield of upsetting subjects neither of us will bring up, my divorce, her abusive ex husband, whether we believe in God or not…
I want inoffensive conversations with inoffensive women over bland food.
I have been looking at interesting neuroscience experiments for the past couple of days, and keep getting lost in the vacuum of “my brain does what now?!!”
I have spent a lot of time on the website You Are Not So Smart, which explains how bits of the brain and subconscious work citing famous and interesting neuroscience and psychology experiments as evidence. It’s all in easy to understand non science prose. Yay.
You Are Not So Smart groups its subjects together under banners such as “Coffee,” “Procrastination,” and “Misattribution of Arousal.”
I know what your thinking.
Not like Radiolab actually.
It doesnt present it with the same upbeatness/sense of wonder/ emotionally manipulative “CRY DAMM YOU.” There is less “OHHHHH, everything is just a little bit mysterious and wonderful” and more “this is how it is, suck it up.”
It keeps it real. It ruins all the illusions. It’s kind of mean. It told me how many calories were in the signature hot chocolate I use to get from starbucks every day for a year. Its about 500.
(It didn’t really but it would point at the cup if it could and go “you know that will make you fat, right?”)
But I like it. I like to know I have less control over my actions and brain then I could possibly imagine. I like to know how my robotics work. I like to get my sense of individuality squashed a little. It’s something to fight back against, even if its only imagined fighting back, and i’m actually just deeply conforming (I am on tumblr right?)
It’s nice for someone to give you a head map to explain….
Why do I want to eat cookies when people are mean to me?
Why do I have a tumblr? (Other then the abandonment issues/Avengers Gifs)
Why have I not gotten over everyone laughing at me at Hannah Sneath’s Party simply for turning up? Whatever. Someone drove her dads porsche into a field so I got the last laugh. Although I did get trapped in her downstairs toilet for half an hour and have had claustrophobia ever since.
I think the most important take home message from the website is this….
Sugar makes you less likely to make rash decisions. Next time your thinking Tattoo/crazy hair style/Vegas wedding, have a freddo, wait five minutes. You might just have been hungry.
Literary Stimulation.
I know little to nothing of the work of Martin Amis, or that of his father Kingsley Amis but I listened to a podcast today in which he was interviewed about both.
You can find it here
It’s number 94.
As someone with a father, who likes to write (me not my father) I found it a pretty interesting listen, although it didn’t make me feel inspired to read any of his work although I know I should. It’s on the list.
Here are the two ideas I liked
Firstly, he talks about “failures of tolerance” and the attributes, both positive and negative, are fathers pass on to us.
He mentions how he viewed increasing “failures of tolerance,” in Kingsley as he got older, and how he can see the same ones in himself but is quick to stomp them out. This articulates, better then I ever could, a fear I have about procreating. I fear I will be a dick to my kids the same way my dad could be to me as I grew up. Those little lapses in patience that you pass on like a nasty virus. I fear the pain of childbirth, and the expense of clothing and dropping my child on its head, but mostly I fear being a dick.
I can picture myself shouting at a smaller version of me
“Why did you put banana skins in the hallway?”
“I was scientifically testing the truth behind segments in my morning cartoon.”
“What did you learn?”
“it’s all lies and the world is a cold dark place.”
“Okay. Well I’m sorry for shouting. I had a genetic tolerance failure.”
“Whatevs.”
The other idea I liked, (which I shall put in quotes to illustrate) is “Literary stimulation.”
Martin talks about his fascination with America, and how he visits the country for no other reason then for “literary stimulation.” He says England is too evolved for writers. His anthropological approach to the culture of America seemed both honest and insulting, like the most perfect back handed compliment. Your interesting, like a bug under a microscope.
I guess professional writers may not always be talking to you for the right reasons.
In summary I like “Genetic Failures in Tolerance,” and feel it could be the title to the follow up of “They Fuck You Up,” and “Literary Stimulation,” and feel it could be where sex is going wrong.
Definitions.2.
When I was 12 my babysitter use to bring around highbrow fashion magazines for me to read, not thinking about all the see through blouses, and in turn nipples, that were on display. The subtly sexuality dressed up in high concept positioning and gravity defying orange hair.
The fashion pages of those advert thick glossies fascinated me. When I grew up would I be wearing sheer clothes and stroking tigers? Would I have adventures in soft pink lighting in Japan with delicate looking male models? Or would I grow up podgy because I ate too much microwaveable bacon between the years of 1995 to 2000?
I also loved the celebrity interviews. In the opening paragraph they would ramble on about how beautiful and charming their interviewee seemed as they wafted into the foyer of the London Hotel with a piece of designer cloth draped around the nape of a swan like neck. How kind they were to waiters! How they drank that red wine and ate that potato which willingly drowned itself in the thickest double cream just for the privilege of being in the presence of their tongue! How that throaty laugh lit up the room with its undertones of sexuality and freedom, and when that fan bravely approached the table, how they smiled appreciatively and thanked them for their custom!
Or the interviewee would turn up hungover from the night before, charming and determined but having slept no more then four hours in the past two years.
I was thinking about interviews, or character descriptions, someone else’s perspective of you written down for the world to take as red. If I ever became a fictional character in a landscape of first chapter introductions what would my memorable tick be?
At this point, I suspect it may be, “she chewed Nicorettes a lot.”
(some idle fiction)
If all the framed portraits and certificates that my mother put up really represented my achievements in life, then wouldn’t they mark the moment I learnt my afternoon naps were due to a vitamin B deficiency and I wasn’t actually depressed?
It’s everything in her house. Handprint drawings. School reports. Merit certificates. Sports day medals. Diplomas. Degrees. Marriages photos. Trampolining certificates. Nothing exceptional. My two sisters and I, we were fairly also ran but at the same time, content. None of us had ever conquered Everest or been the absolute best at anything.
We did quite well if we tried and had brief periods of winning competitions no one else entered, but could not be summarised with an adjective. “Oh, she cooks,” or “Oh, she long jumps.” To cook or to long jump implies passion and skill that far surmounts anything else in your life. You are the cooker or the jumper who is better then the other cookers and jumpers.
We muddled by. “Oh, she muddles by.”
We dated average men. “Oh, she’s dating average man.”
We had straight teeth, and kind of straight hair, and normal sized chests and my older sister used to be able to tap dance, I was in choir for a while, and the youngest went through a phase of really wanting a rat but other then that our wall displays were fairly uninspiring.
Incomparable to the neighbors kids or our more ambitious best friends.
Sunday visits to my parent’s house involved a reality check. I am faced with the faded dregs that use to summarise me. Blu tacked, framed or poster mounted to the wall, corkboarded up and planted on the glass shelves in the living room are my achievements. My progress. I digress mentally. I tell them I don’t want it, that’s not what makes me me! I am not an overpriced portrait in an ill-fitting hat holding a fake scroll. It is not a deadsea scroll. It is a business studies 2:2. I ask them to take them down now.
But I am missing the point, because these are her achievements and not mine.
I have a house, and I have a marriage. It is new, exciting still. I insist we put pictures up of the things we want to remember, the obstacles we overcame. That’s why there is blown up picture of him with a weeping leg wound in our living room. He overcame in. He didn’t loose the leg. He didn’t die. We thought he might.
(I am considerate enough to make sure the white and green pus is not visible in any eating areas.)
We have resignation letters, suicide letters (my attempt at an attempt when I was 21 and just really down, you know?) dismissal letters, doctor’s letters, abortion appointments, old love letters from other peoples pens (we must be reminded of what could have been) and photos of us at our worse. We document our despair and sometimes our ennui.
Every day is a gift now. A mystery to unravel. We don’t have the awards and achievements to remind us that we are no longer young and sprightly and full of unfulfilled potential, instead we have mudslides and avalanches.
We have the things we have overcome, the self-fulfilling prophecies we work hard to avoid everyday, and we comfort ourselves with the continued threat that shit happens, and some things you just can’t plan for. Like tinnitus or cats with personality defects.
Some more idle fiction.
Didn’t get a place in drama school. Failed to pass my driving test. Wasn’t chosen to go on the school ski trip or hockey trip. Couldn’t buy that blender.
I look for meaning in everything when I have these crises of faith, searching for the deus ex machina in my life. The event which will turn things around or at least give me an answer. I don’t believe in God, but I do believe in plot devices.
I walk around in my lunch break looking for an external impetus, just something to make my decisions easier, a person I don’t know to say something I can interpret as a sign or a reflection of my own unconscious desires. Where are you wise hobo? Where are you elderly woman with the bright red hair and the mystery bag of crap?
I hope upon hope for a stray cat or a piece of graffiti that will tell me everything is going to be just fine. I was never meant to be a dancer.
I was never meant to stay with Walter or that guy called Josh or any of the five thousand before I was here, married then inevitably divorced. But there was never really five thousand you see, it was a private joke with my former husband. I slept with as many as there were in this old parable. How about you? Ball park figure? If they were all animals and there was a flash flood and Noah came along with a ship, would they all fit on it?
The ending of something, it reminds me of trying to distract myself from tinnitus. It’s a dull ever-present hum in my ear, like a mosquito that flew into my brain. I can get use to it as long as I never let it be the only thing I can hear. I fill the silence with voices from the radio, and from friends, and with the conversations of strangers. I might take up zumba, or yoga or aura reading. Never poi. I try and fill uncertainty by looking in windows. I wonder, can I relate the ending of a cult TV series to the ending of relationships? It never really finishes; it just carries on in a lesser format…
I buy a coffee and think about wonder-woman for a while.
There was a woman with plenty of deus ex machina moments. She never had to make any decisions, not really, just inevitable choices with there being only the illusion of choice. I never have anything occur which requires such gravitas self sacrifice.
I walk for hours, considering. Do I pull the plug? Do I funnel a different path? Do I confront a former husband/lover/friend? Do I quit my job in legal and become a cage fighter? Do I put my eggs in storage? Do I move south for winter?
I was getting really thirsty, close to vomiting or collapsing after walking in the sun. I spotted a water fountain outside a library. I can never work water fountains. In a past life I had no opposable thumbs. I feel every bump and crevice and ridge and push down hard, but there is no spurting forth of the elixir of life.
An elderly man wearing a blue hat watched my struggle for a while, my iphone in one hand, my oversized headphones hanging around my sweaty neck. I will forget to exfoliate this neck later, no doubt. He reached over and pushed the small button to the right of the stainless steel cube, and yes, water flowed.
“Its amazing how they get those computers to be so small,” he said, gesturing at my iphone before shuffling away. No doubt to change a tire. Wait, come back? Was that a moment? What shall I do with my life? I stare after him. He shuffles away, his back and blue shirt lovingly sticking together, glued with sweat. He doesn’t turn around, he is meant to turn around and nod. Knowingly. Mouth at me that he isn’t God, he is just some guy who grew up in the 1920’s. He is meant to get hit by lighting. Instead he presses a traffic light and waits for it to turn red. I have to go back to work, but for some reason I want to make sure he gets to the other side of the road first. So I wait.
When the bunch of strangers I have been trapped with in a eerily empty beacon of bloated materialist western culture are trying to figure out exactly what kind of monster has been stalking us, I want to be the guy who screams ”but who are the real monsters? IT’S US! INEVITABLY IT IS US! AWWWWW!” before I run into the street and get eaten by the 50 foot half shark/half winged rat with diamond shards for teeth and limited psychic powers.
Recollections of Encounters with Lauded and Respected Artists by their less Notable Peers often Mention an Odd Quirk held by the Normally Enigmatic Figure.
The people who make money using their imaginations turned up in force at the opening of the chic Parisian hotel “La Fleur de Mes Reins,” last night. First to arrive was the conceptual artist who posed for photos with a daffodil in his hat, a cigarette in his mouth and a glass decanter containing the finest Single Hiland Malt Scotch. It remained firmly attached to his side all night, and likely long into the next day. Soul mate and muse to the conceptual artist, the writer, arrived shortly after leaving a trail of disposable white gloves in his wake. The gloves were replaced with each new person he met or room he entered, leaving behind such a trail of latex that the hotels previous and less ostentatious use was bought to mind.
As the other guests arrived and the party progressed, discussions about new work, philosophical ideas and proposals for ten minute plays about death filled the air as writers, artists, thinkers and geniuses feasted on truffle oiled vegetables and morsels of pink, grey and neon blue.
Animal flesh prepared by a renowned decomposition chef.
Cocktails and champagne flowed freely as singer songwriter performed his newest collection of songs, never removing the dark glasses said to hide smaller eyes then you would expect. His androgynous appeal wafted over the crowd, and people who hadn’t questioned their sexuality in years questioned their sexuality, and wives and husbands fell in love again, but not necessarily with each other.
The art collective made a brief appearance, pouring Moet de Chateaux onto bowls of cornflakes and claiming odes to Hemmingway and Fitzgerald convoluted through the medium of Kellogg’s, convincing no one of anything in particular but providing a distraction.
After a few strong cocktails, and the osmosis effect of the opium grove outside, the crowd of fabulousness began to swap tales of sexual depravity, each individual charming the other with an aura of charisma and appropriately timed self-deprecating jokes. The ordinary folk, who shared not an evident emotional or facial tic amongst them, found it increasingly difficult to communicate what they were about as the evening progressed.
The model decided to depart early, screaming about sensibilities objecting to the non-symmetrical spread and bed of fish eyes in the foyer. She claimed it just wasn’t any fun anymore.
The philanthropist got tongues wagging. For someone who has built a career on never being on time but never later then 45 minutes, the charismatic star arriving just a little bit after the hour left everyone surprised and upset. Although she made up for it by carrying her recently deceased pet fox around in a beaten leather bag, slipping into dead languages when talking to the theatre directorand even more disturbingly, proving to be far more pleasant company then her reputation allowed.
The jazz quintet played long into the night, mixing up freshness and vintage with a spot of impossible time signatures, a focus on stripping away-preconceived notions and the ability to take requests. They were followed by an opera mash up medley and a choir of angels.
The evening started to draw to a close when the energy levels of the crowd began to dip due to a lack of individual focus and worship, and it became frighteningly clear that there was simply not enough adulation to go around. Yes, the others had gone home. There was no one left to look over the shoulder of. The bar was beginning to run dry, the drugs had all but disappeared, the singer had decided to take up acting and the philanthropist wanted to go back to college to learn how to disappear.
Reading Woman’s Own
She was reading a yellowed magazine in her doctor’s waiting room. It was filled with stock photos of people sitting in front of unpaid bills or windows smeared with rain, staring contemplatively into space. The people would look vacantly or despairingly at the piles of paper, through the glass, into the abyss. It bought out an odd feeling in her. Like she had missed out. It made her feel alienated or uninvited in a schoolyard kind of way.
Later on they couldn’t decide on a film to watch. They were wasting the allocated relaxing time trying to choose. They eventually settled on something they both thought sounded puerile, and nestled down in his red couch. The disgusting red couch. Half way through the main character told his panic stricken younger cohort to shut up, he needed to think and he needed to do it real fast. There was imminent danger and time pressure, and both real and imaginary structures were in danger. She was only half watching at this point, she had been thinking about her foot resting on his foot, and whether his feet were too big for his body. She didn’t know if this was a problem yet.
She focused on the screen long enough to watch the hero work through the problem and defuse the bomb. She felt the oddness again, slimy and kicking in her stomach. She thought to herself, I never do that; I never deliberate step by step. Or deliberate at all.
She tried to put it into words the next morning. She was having breakfast with a friend in a café an equal distance from both their houses. They were waiting for their shared order, one vegetarian special and one meat. She told her friend about the pictures and the protagonist, how they made her feel, what they made her realize. All the thoughtfulness within the imagery.
“But I don’t really do that,” she said. “I don’t sit and just think very often…”
The waitress came over with their pot of coffee, and she became itchy and self-aware.
What a blasé and vague statement, she thought, I should have some kind of self-deprecating follow up to protect against the inevitable internal conclusion by my friend that this, was no surprise.
But she decided to press on.
“Who attacks problems practically?” She asked. Although it sounded rhetorical she wanted to know, she wanted a list of names, and their successes too.
The waitress brought over their breakfasts, but they hadn’t delegated who would have what, and there was some confusion. The waitress hovered whilst they waited for the other to decide, the stagnation at the round about, the stale mate of three followers. They eventually settled it by placing the meals side by side on the table.
“What are your problems?” Her friend asked, cutting into her poached egg.
She shrugged, the smell of the leaking yolk was making her nauseous, and she wasn’t sure how to answer that without missing the point. She didn’t know what her point was, but it wasn’t that.
In bed that night she tried to explain it her partner. They had been together long enough to know the correct spellings of each others tricky middle names, but not long enough to put forth their strong opinions over film choice. But she decided to risk it all.
“I feel like I’ve been doing something wrong all these years. Maybe I should have been staring at the living room wall, searching the confines of my brain for the answer to the question? And the question is always the first question I wake up to, which is never the same question. It depends on the year, on the day, on the weather. Sometimes it’s a question of time, what to do with it? The reminder of my time that day, that week, the rest of my life, and whether time spent trying to think past practical time constraints is pointless. Sometimes the question is why do I care so much if T Mobile like me? They hate me. I know it.”
He pulled her close, told her she worried too much; they would pick a better film next time.
She decided to try out the method in the pictures. She desperately feared she was missing out on an important technique for correct living. She wasn’t sleeping.
She went to the park and attempted to sit and shift through her thoughts. She started with her problems over her health, it was nothing serious, but she suspected she had a dairy allergy. It brought her out in hives. Her doctors weren’t sure, uttered things about more tests and told her to avoid yogurt. She didn’t really feel fulfilled, but that seemed normal. But maybe there was something else she was missing.
She hunkered down and refused to move until she came to a solution about the unease that occasionally unsettled her.
She figured when feigning contemplative thoughts it is best go for the powered down android look, underneath she knew there was no activity-taking place, but her glassy eyes told a different story to the nearby dog walkers.
She sat for three hours. Her legs cramped and died, and she felt the grass grow over her fingers.
She didn’t solve much that day, instead she found herself lost in the corridors of false narrative, randomly traversing through memories and piecing together interweaving thoughts and ideas in a haphazard matter in an attempt to file things away in her brain. She still couldn’t work out how to put her skill set into everyday action, or get over her fear of being locked in a train carriage. She kept going back to his feet. His too big feet. They padded, they smacked the wooden flooring in her apartment when he left in the morning. He wasn’t even funny.
They went to a bar near his home, and she asked him what he did when he had a problem.
“It depends on the problem,” he said. They sat on high stools that soon became uncomfortable, but made them look picturesque to the casual voyeur at the bar. The thirty something couple who share a bottle of wine, but one is beginning to suspect the other, whilst the other suspects one of them is too serious.
“Say you have a financial problem,” she hypothesized.
“Ok,” he said. “I don’t.”
“And you need to work it out. Do you ever do this?” She asked, selecting a cutting from the growing series she kept stashed in her bag.
It showed a man with glasses on holding a calculator in one hand, a pen in the other, and tipping his head to the side as he gazed at his piles of bills, mentally working through his monthly outgoings.
Her partner laughed and held it away from him like a repellent child. Embarrassed she crumbled up the picture, put it back in her bag and feigned a headache.
She walked home and wondered if she should travel to isolated mountains or fields, or hold her breath at the bottom of swimming pool and reflect. She wondered if her friend thought she was stupid, or he thought she was trying to be smart, or if it’s best to just wait for the solution to come to you after all. She heard your brain works things out best when you aren’t looking, and that every single singular task is in fact a multi task as your subconscious whittles away at the conundrum before presenting you with the solution.
Later he rang her, and he asked if she wanted to get away for a while, meet his parents or get a dog together.
She said yes. She would never presume to understand how anyone else’s brained worked again.
The new Lynx advert enrages me, enrages me so much I’m not even going to put them on my tumblr. The context of my rant is going, you can not understand better the context of my rant. There easy enough to find on youtube and I hate trying to embed anything and I can describe them for you, I can paint moving images with words. Words about deodorant, but alas, alack they are in fact shower gels. Five showers gels, five types of women, a shower gel to match each girl, the Brainy girl, the High maintenance girl, the Sporty girl, the Flirty girl or the Party girl. I’m sure we were all of them, age and sobriety dependent. Is there room for a sixth type of woman, unsure girl, hasn’t found herself girl? Doesn’t date men who shower…girl. In the adverts the dry american voice of reason, of God, gives advice to boyfriends of five women with the one note personality traits. The God of Lynx, he reminds the bored and tired and under the thumb that it’s worth putting up with idiosyncrasies because these women will have sex with you. They will reward you. No deed unpunished, no sin forgotten, no act dismissed. I watched the Brainy girl advert at the cinema and I felt the anger I direct at inanimate objects I walk into, the metrosexual revolution had never happened, lazy gender depiction is king. I choose to buy Cosmo, so I can only blame myself for participating in the empire of pigeon holing but it’s harder when an advert is unfolding in front of my eyes and the only other thing to look at is the abyss of darkness. Is this funny or is this clever or is lazy? which is disconcerting. Take home message; lie to secure sex. The women will be too stupid to notice, or easily pleased by a man doing whatever they want, they don’t want a partner, they don’t care about your needs, they just want someone to agree with them. Men are long suffering and women are unbending. Women have all the sexual power, and are holding it back from men, until they perform for us like ponies or dogs. It’s still a faux instructional manual on how to trick a woman into touching your penis. It’s not ridiculous or over inflated enough to be ironic, neither tongue in cheek or funny enough or even clever enough to paint itself as post modern. The Judd Apatow casting and the woman are beautiful, the men are below their league chancers, and in the Smart girl advert she is shown to be smart because she is wearing glasses. Did I mention lazy. Wouldn’t she notice the douche next to her putting eye drops into his eyes to make it seem like he was crying? Yes we like sex, but you don’t have to be in a relationship to get that and surely it’s not worth putting up with someone you dislike in order to get it. The only way to get it is to pretend to be someone else! Put up with the arduous task of sharing your partners passions. We adapt ourselves when dating to appear impressive, but that’s not just for sex. That’s because of crippling insecurities, a need to be loved, companionship, taking an interest. And sex. No one comes across well. What if you’re dating a woman who is both flirty and high maintenance? What gel do you use then? Do you use two and mix it up and hope for the best? Will she still want to touch your penis if you have two opposing smells on it? Pitch: An advert that shows their shower gel with the slogan “use this and women will want to touch your cock.” I’m keeping that one Lynx. Pitch: Dove bring out an advert, there’s a woman at the side of the road unable to change a tyre, smearing herself in “Handy Man,” body lotion and waiting for the inevitable slew of men to turn up. Later she explains she doesn’t actually have any money. Just loads of body lotion.
I want to rent out the corner of my room, would you be interested? There isn’t enough space there for me to keep anything worth much. I could get a hat rack I suppose but I don’t own enough hats for such a purpose. You could stand in the corner and watch me sleep if you want? But not in a breathy kind of way, in a protective way. You could make sure I don’t get bitten by mosquito’s and that I don’t suffocate, or sleep in such a way that I wake up with a dead arm. You can hand me my glasses in the morning, and I would dust you regularly and keep you hydrated. I really just want the corner of my room to look more busy.
The Mental Illness Happy Hour
When I was in LA I had the pleasure of having lunch with Paul Gilmartin, the presenter and creator of The Mental Illness Happy Hour podcast.
The Mental Illness Happy Hour is a weekly podcast which features a conversation between Paul and a guest, normally a creative/actor/writer/comedian type, who bares their demons, comes clean about their inner crazy or delves into the recesses of their past to share stories of personal survival.
The writers, therapists, actresses, neuroscientists and authors who appear on the show talk about their lives, careers and upbringings with total honesty. They discuss the things which make them tick sexually, or have stopped their tick tocking, as well as incidences in their lives which knocked their confidence or caused issues with anxiety, insecurity or depression. They eloquently describe the inner workings of their heads, in a way many wish they could and we learn from them. We empathise, or we come out of it understanding human nature a little better, amazed at the resilience of some people. Grateful for what we have got.
The shows cover everything from everyday negative thoughts to OCD and childhood abuse or neglect. Yes, it can be a hard listen, but the frankness, honesty and the bravery of the guests is commendable and cathartic. At times moving, (I was sobbing during the episode with Brenda Colonna) and other times darkly humorous, (comedy is the best defence method) it takes itself seriously, but still manages to find some light with in all the dark.
Yes I did just type that.
It isn’t like earwigging in a therapy session, more a incredibly honest conversation between two adults who have survived difficult personal traumas and come out of the other end more self aware. More healed. Still fighting but brave enough to expose their vulnerabilities and unravel their inner demons, aiding their acceptance of the wonderful intricacies which make them human and not superhuman.
Sometimes the guests talk about forgiveness, of themselves or other people, and sometimes they talk about surviving, coming out of those tricky childhood/adolescent/post adolescent/university years/graduate/adult years intact.
Sometimes Paul will just focus on how we should be a lot kinder to ourselves. Buy ourselves more scarves. Everyone needs more scarves.
I tweeted (twatted?) Paul about my admiration for the podcast and we started talking via email. I told him I enjoyed the podcast because I love knowing what makes people tick. How the subconscious operates. How people became who they are. And because I am nosy. I also told him that I, like most, like all, have some inner crazy which felt comforted by it.
(Sometimes your inner crazy needs someone else to share the inner crazy with, or at least a reflection to look into, so your inner crazy doesn’t feel like it is too singular. I like to think everyone is a tad crazy, has a couple of thoughts and fantasies they wrap up really tight, but all our inner crazies should hang out together sometimes, hit a club. Play a round of golf.)
Myself and Paul arranged to have lunch/coffee when I was in Hollywoodland.
Obviously meeting up with someone who you have only ever spoken to electronically is tricky, not that it is a frequent thing I do, but sometimes you want to put a face to a voice and tell the person to keep up the good work because you can, and sometimes you should.
Paul was ace, one of the warmest and most honest individuals I have met, and I think it takes a huge amount of bravery to do what he does. He helps people. I imagine more then he knows. He talks about things which most people keep locked up tight, close to their spine, or in a wardrobe they have thrown into a metaphorical sea with a screaming ghost inside. Or something. The podcast encourages self love (I know how that sounds. Stupid. But god damm it liking yourself is COOL) and he does it with total sincerity. I love sincere people. I want to be a bit more sincere. I want to give out a hallmark card and mean the sentiment on the front. Or at least be able to be as honest as he is.
Anyway, this boils down to me recommending the podcast, because you probably know someone who will benefit from it. Even if it’s not you.
Go to the website
Follow him on Twitter
@mentalpod
and subscribe to the podcast