Ray Schaufeld's blog

Last night went very well. Many thanks to Chris Launder our Library Manager for his helpful hospitality again. Thanks to my co-organiser Trish Leake, we work as a pair,and thanks to our great readers; Jenny Keevil, Jenny Johnson, Joy Edwards, Marian Ridgewell, Dave Woolger, Noel Harrower, Malcolm McLennan, Mike Baker, Leo and George. We all did well and the great thing about Open Mic is the diversity of theme, mood and style. A gift box of good...

It's the day after the day after Boxing Day. And it's not Thursday it's Wednesday. Yes, I've got it right.

OK, I gave in. Yesterday morning I listened to 'the 20 best carols' on one of the freview channels, might have been E4. Much to my surprise they were - not bad!. Destiny's Child's 8 days of Christmas was the closest to a trad carol. It kept the original tune and the key line 'On the first day of Christmas my true love gave to me etc'. The video, ah yes, these carols truly brought home to me the power of pop videos, showed a happy Beyonce and...

Could be an age thing...When I was young the drama, the story, the scene of fiction - this to me was the real reality, cutting through the pedestrian precincts of organised logical thought and reaching to 'the significant heart of everything.' These days I'm jaded with fictional passion and prefer the metallic jolt of hard fact. Fact can explode preconceptions it can brighten my mind with the unexpected, the harsh, the funny, the telling...

Clinton or Trump? Sometime tomorrow we shall know the answer to this nasty, brutish and very long Presidential campaign. My money's on Trump. 'Brexit plus, plus, plus' - the man said it himself. He would not get my vote (and I voted Remain) but we have to look long and hard at where these massive protest votes are coming from. Yeats made a prescient point in his poem The Second Coming, written in 1919 'The best lack all conviction, while the...

'The ticker, the curse of the Fitzpatricks.' It's a one-liner inserted by Irvine Welsh within the first 50 pages of Trainspotting. Did Irvine and Lilian whose maiden name was Fitzpatrick ever meet? It would not surprise me; they were the same age, both from Edinburgh housing schemes and both enjoyed a night out. Lilian was not a user of illegal drugs but in her younger days she went drinking and dancing and the two may well have met at a disco...

'You could describe it in colors, red and dead like old blood, brown like dirt, clay or shit, white like soapy water... ghetto is a smell...sometimes sweet: baby powder women wear on their chests..the rawness of recently slaughtered goat.. sour chemicals in the detergent'. (Words of Alex, an American music journalist at the time of Bob Marley's death). Most of the multitude of narrators in Marlon James long book are Jamaican gangstas chatting...

Discovering this, 41 years after it came out I am astounded these these young men who had nothing extra about them apart from probably some classical training created a work so big, individual, beautiful and unpredictably hypnotic. It's mainly instrumental with great crescendos into glory, some little voice bits, a few deliberately comic some more serious singing of love or loneliness. It's a huge bright elaborate canvas, music by image rather...

Birdman, the tale of a semi-retired blockbuster fantasy hero who makes a comeback by going 'serious' on Broadway is violently in yer face funny. A bunch of raving egomaniacs are confined within the theatre; the only environment in which they can just about function. Their fights about who has the best reality often switch from verbal to physical battering. A lot of slapstick, a great underpants sequence where Michael Keaton our ex-superhero goes...

Subtitled 'Living with Schizophrenia a Father and Son's story' this is a factual account. Henry first goes off the rails when he is a first year student at Brighton Art School. He swims in the freezing cold estuary near Brighton while guided by voices and is rescued by fishermen. Seven years of acting irrationally and believing that there is nothing wrong with him follow. During this time his father tries to understand what precisely his son is...