Whatever my reasoning, there is no doubt that I relished the drama, which is somewhat appropriate for a budding actor, although I’m looking back now (as I often do while writing this book) and thinking, what a prick.
Look At Me! Actually, Don’t Look At Me
A
p.
s musicals go,
Carousel
could be said to be have affected me more deeply than any musical has ever affected any straight man, as it also provided me with my first brush against the complexities of celebrity. Specifically, how the desire to attain self-validation can ultimately have the opposite effect. It’s something I remain conflicted about even today, and this small incident may have been implicit in shaping my feelings on the idea of personal visibility to this very day.
I was hanging about backstage in full costume shortly before the show began, my older crew having given me the slip, or perhaps found somewhere safer to hang out and ‘forgotten’ to tell me. In the show, the Snow children were dressed with Von Trapp uniformity in velvet jackets and little straw hats and knickerbockers. I needed the toilet before curtain up and I convinced myself the only way to do that was by leaving the backstage area, walking through front of house and out into the foyer where I knew there were male and female toilets. My memory tells me I knew this because of the Galaxian machine which stood against the wall between them; Gents on the left, Ladies on the right. However, having checked this out, I find it cannot be true because Galaxian didn’t appear until 1979 and this was 1977.
Space Invaders didn’t come out until 1978 so I have no idea what was between the doors of the male and female toilets on the first floor of the Gloucester Leisure Centre in 1977. Nothing? Was there really a time before video games? Strange to think of these invisible voids that exist around us, waiting to accommodate advances in technology that will soon become commonplace. So much so that it will be hard to imagine life without them. There were spaces on walls before light switches, let alone plasma TVs. Desks without computers, roads without cars, hands without mobile phones. Conversely, as microtechnology and digital storage maximise space and convenience, voids are opening up, subtly erasing any memory of the three-dimensional objects which filled them. The spaces occupied by photo albums, the box TV, filing cabinets, cassette decks, record players, books, ashtrays or more short-lived necessities like CD storage units, VHS players and tapes or hard-drive towers.
Computers have been shrinking since they first appeared. I wonder what the rooms that were filled with those huge, whirring, tape-spewing early computers are used for now. Are they empty? Or are they perhaps being utilised for an altogether more analogue form of storage? It makes you wonder what spaces will be filled or created by the next arrival or obsolescence. The mobile phone may well shrink out of our grip as the era of the cyborg approaches. Sounds like science fiction but we are inexorably approaching an era in which the phone will no longer be something we ‘pick up’.
The threat to the key has long been a possibility since the magnetic strip began to give us access to hotel rooms and office buildings, but now contactless technology has equipped us with locks that recognise corresponding chips when brought into proximity. How long before the chips housed in those keyless entry fobs creep under our skin, making us technically part machine, recognisable to our houses, cars, workplaces, parking spaces? Who’s to say these chips won’t be able to communicate over longer distances and ringing a friend will only require you to think their name? Although this would potentially lead to a lot of unintentional calls answered with the question, ‘Did you mean to call or were you just thinking about me?’ Could be quite embarrassing.
The space around us has an intriguing potential to be cleared of things we need or
Look At Me! Actually, Don’t Look At Me
A
p.
s musicals go,
Carousel
could be said to be have affected me more deeply than any musical has ever affected any straight man, as it also provided me with my first brush against the complexities of celebrity. Specifically, how the desire to attain self-validation can ultimately have the opposite effect. It’s something I remain conflicted about even today, and this small incident may have been implicit in shaping my feelings on the idea of personal visibility to this very day.
I was hanging about backstage in full costume shortly before the show began, my older crew having given me the slip, or perhaps found somewhere safer to hang out and ‘forgotten’ to tell me. In the show, the Snow children were dressed with Von Trapp uniformity in velvet jackets and little straw hats and knickerbockers. I needed the toilet before curtain up and I convinced myself the only way to do that was by leaving the backstage area, walking through front of house and out into the foyer where I knew there were male and female toilets. My memory tells me I knew this because of the Galaxian machine which stood against the wall between them; Gents on the left, Ladies on the right. However, having checked this out, I find it cannot be true because Galaxian didn’t appear until 1979 and this was 1977.
Space Invaders didn’t come out until 1978 so I have no idea what was between the doors of the male and female toilets on the first floor of the Gloucester Leisure Centre in 1977. Nothing? Was there really a time before video games? Strange to think of these invisible voids that exist around us, waiting to accommodate advances in technology that will soon become commonplace. So much so that it will be hard to imagine life without them. There were spaces on walls before light switches, let alone plasma TVs. Desks without computers, roads without cars, hands without mobile phones. Conversely, as microtechnology and digital storage maximise space and convenience, voids are opening up, subtly erasing any memory of the three-dimensional objects which filled them. The spaces occupied by photo albums, the box TV, filing cabinets, cassette decks, record players, books, ashtrays or more short-lived necessities like CD storage units, VHS players and tapes or hard-drive towers.
Computers have been shrinking since they first appeared. I wonder what the rooms that were filled with those huge, whirring, tape-spewing early computers are used for now. Are they empty? Or are they perhaps being utilised for an altogether more analogue form of storage? It makes you wonder what spaces will be filled or created by the next arrival or obsolescence. The mobile phone may well shrink out of our grip as the era of the cyborg approaches. Sounds like science fiction but we are inexorably approaching an era in which the phone will no longer be something we ‘pick up’.
The threat to the key has long been a possibility since the magnetic strip began to give us access to hotel rooms and office buildings, but now contactless technology has equipped us with locks that recognise corresponding chips when brought into proximity. How long before the chips housed in those keyless entry fobs creep under our skin, making us technically part machine, recognisable to our houses, cars, workplaces, parking spaces? Who’s to say these chips won’t be able to communicate over longer distances and ringing a friend will only require you to think their name? Although this would potentially lead to a lot of unintentional calls answered with the question, ‘Did you mean to call or were you just thinking about me?’ Could be quite embarrassing.
The space around us has an intriguing potential to be cleared of things we need or
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