Jamie Drew has a blog

Re: Airports: Questions Requiring Answers

Tue, 29 May 2012 00:16:00 +0100

Which of the following is true about airports:

the airport is a place where mummy plane and daddy plane go to make baby planes
it is legal to cook and eat your most annoying friend if you are more than 50 feet from a Costa Coffee
the actual murder-suicide rates in Gatwick are quite low, but the incidence of murderous/suicidal thoughts are higher than in the rest of the UK
someone is going to bring up the fact I wrote that when I try to fly out of Gatwick airport tomorrow

TRICK QUESTION! The only true thing about airports is: 5. an airport is a monument to our species’ ability to take something wonderful (human flight) and make it terrible (airports).

Everything else about airports is a lie. Airports are just there to remind you that we will find a way to make the future terrible. Space travel? You’ll need to register at the spaceport three days in advance for depressurisation. Once you get to Mars we’ll sort out that cancer of yours by injecting the remains of your childhood bunny directly into it. Yes! That’s right! We cloned Flopsy just for the purpose.

The good news is, with this treatment you’ll live up to 300 years! The bad news is, we didn’t cure ageing. You’re still going to develop Alzheimer’s at 70.

Party hard.

Sun, 27 May 2012 22:54:00 +0100

A couple of nights ago I went along to a fundraiser for Kill the Beast, (who were, f-y-i, really good in the preview for The Boy Who Kicked Pigs) and to cut a very long paragraph short, I tripped myself up right in front of a group of really attractive people. I’m not talking about an ‘oh no, someone left a thing here’ sort of trip — I mean I tried to walk down one solitary step, which as it turns out is not a thing I can actually do. I ended up on my back. I don’t know if any of the attractive people saw me; I hid in the gents’ for a solid five minutes.

(From this fact, the hiding in the gents’, we can deduce that I may have also been dealing with some anxiety-related issues.)

I woke up the next day with a pain in the side of my foot when I tried to step on it. Not in the ankle but in one of the bones, which might have meant I’d fractured it, broken it or bruised it.

After whining about my situation for a few hours I decided to up and take myself to the walk-in clinic to sort it out. I walked there, thinking “well, it’s a nice day,” even though:

at 26°C, it was far too hot for that kind of thing, and
I might have broken my foot.

It was not a fun walk, and it gets worse: the walk-in clinic round the corner from my house is only open until noon on a Saturday, and I’d have needed an appointment. I don’t have the forethought to make appointments when my health is at stake, so I didn’t have one, and I needed to get myself to an Accident & Emergency room.

The nearest was about a mile and a half away. “It’s such a nice day,” thought I, “I might as well walk there,” even though:

see above.

So I walked, right down to St. Ann’s Hospital, with a podcast in my ears and a skip in my old-man hobble, almost getting run over every time I crossed the road and getting the offer of an escort from people who clearly didn’t think I was fit to be outside on my own (they might have been right), which took about an hour from the walk-in clinic to the sign at the gate that said no A&E here; nearest A&E department is at North Middlesex, two miles away, now what are you going to do?

There was a foot health department at St. Ann’s, but they didn’t even want to know. ”But you can see why I brought this to you,” I told them, pointing at my broken foot. “The nearest A&E is at North Middlesex,” the receptionist told me, aiming the electric fan at herself. “You can get the bus there.”

So I got the bus there, as nice a day as it was.

The upshot of all this is I haven’t broken my foot, but I have sprained both tibio-fibular ligaments. I’ll need to elevate my left foot for the next couple of days and keep them in bandages, which I should try to keep away from water, putting a stop to all those ideas I had about going swimming while I’m in Finland this week. As to how I managed this, the nurse was very confused. “What did you do?” she asked.

“I partied too hard,” I told her. “And I want that in my file.”

Following up on that story submission to Granta

Tue, 22 May 2012 18:28:00 +0100

I had to post the manuscript through an actual postbox, so obviously I forgot to write down any of my details when I posted it to them. So while they’re obviously going to accept and print the thing they won’t have any way of letting me know about this or paying me anything.

Score 1 to Granta, 0.5 to me.

What? I’m 25. I’ve been looking at the internet for more than a decade. I don’t know how to post things; I don’t have the skill set. I get half a point just for finding and recognising a postbox.

I won some cinema tickets recently in a McDonalds/LoveFilm promotion and I could either attach the winning coupon to a bit of paper, write down – with my own hand – what cinema I’d like to win tickets for, and then post it off to them using an envelope and a stamp, or I could just sign up for a second LoveFilm account and ask them to send the tickets to my registered address before cancelling that account two weeks later.

Why are you leaving LoveFilm? they asked me when I clicked the “cancel account” button. Don’t you love us any more? What is it? Is it that you enjoy paying late fees and having to manually download episodes of Lost, which are available for nine more days, by the way, you could definitely squeeze in a six-season marathon before then?

Sorry, I replied, I’m only 25. I don’t know how to post things. I wish I could help you.

"I have always been a wretched speaker. My vocabulary dwells deep in my mind and needs paper to..."

Tue, 22 May 2012 16:41:00 +0100

“I have always been a wretched speaker. My vocabulary dwells deep in my mind and needs paper to wriggle out into the physical zone. Spontaneous eloquence seems to me a miracle. I have rewritten—often several times—every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasures.”

- Vladimir Nabokov is better than I am at explaining why I don’t do stand-up, but kindly left out how I’m not actually very funny.

"If you write from the heart, you’ll never run out of ideas. If you aim for masterpieces, at least..."

Mon, 21 May 2012 20:59:24 +0100

“If you write from the heart, you’ll never run out of ideas. If you aim for masterpieces, at least you’ll learn from the failures. And if you never give up, there’s no way you can lose.”

- Screenwriting Tip #1000, Xander Bennett

"Schools are full of middle-management types. They like to take “learning walks” around..."

Sun, 20 May 2012 18:01:00 +0100

“Schools are full of middle-management types. They like to take “learning walks” around the school and “quality control”. They sit at the back of my class and want to know if the students have been told their “learning objectives” and if they are sat in a “seating plan”. They believe that learning simply cannot take place if the students haven’t been told what to do and where to sit.”

- From The Secret Teacher writes an honest letter home, in yesterday’s Guardian.

There’s a hopelessly “one size fits all” approach to education in the UK, particularly in the primary school years, which makes economic sense if not actual, proper sense. It’s largely propagated by a group of people who don’t realise that educational theory is useful up to a point and then when you’re staring down the barrel of thirty kids, that rat bastard Vygotsky has abandoned you.

My housemate and I were actually talking about our school days yesterday. He hated them; I figured I had to be somewhere for six or seven hours a day, and what are you going to do? One of his complaints was that lessons were too ‘slow,’ being geared towards the lesser-able end of the class. This is basically true, but as one of about six former so-called “gifted” students in a school with no provisions for them, I have very little sympathy.

(#explainabrag)

Five Classic Movies You — Yes, You — Can Watch Free on YouTube

Fri, 18 May 2012 23:31:00 +0100

Five Classic Movies You — Yes, You — Can Watch Free on YouTube:

For those of you who didn’t read the title of this post, today’s Friday Five is a collection of classic movies you can watch for free on YouTube. At first I wanted to collect a list of public domain movies online, but most of them are too crappy to endorse. So this is a list of films you watch freely on YouTube if you so choose until such a time as they are inevitably found and wiped from the internet, probably in about two hours’ time.

The Sandwich Wizard Tries to Branch Out

Wed, 16 May 2012 20:50:00 +0100

Over the first and second weekends of the Olympics there was a sudden epidemic of street food between Green Park and Chancery Lane, like a portal had opened to another dimension of falafel-based life-forms: mostly human, but about one-quarter tahini. Within the micro-festival, if you were inclined to look for them, you could map out the micropolitical boundaries between, say, the Greek and Mexican quarters, just across the Long Acre from the cheeseburger vans encroaching on Peruvian territory by the day. No blood in the air, yet, but a lot of foreign swear words.

Somewhere in the shanty sprawl, a forkful of makeshift restaurants had parked themselves in Red Lion Square and refused to move until the council actually came down there to drag them off with their own hands. One of them was a great white broken thing without even its wheels to hold up the haphazard collection of chipped-paint boards. Sagging slightly at one end, it looked like a beach hut had come through the portal and got turned around on the set of a Californian sitcom, getting confused and plonking itself down just outside Soho.

A legend built itself around this funny little beach hut and the ageing hippie inside it, and the people picked their way towards the square to have a look at these things. All of them asked the same question. The so-called hippie was sick of answering it.

“Yes,” the hippie said. “I’m a wizard.”

And he looked like a wizard, with the waist-length grey beard and everything. The outfit could have used some pizzazz – a little bit of showmanship, a hat maybe, would have gone a long way – but even in his stained black apron and his long grey hair tied up in a neat ponytail, he still looked like an actual, real-life wizard. That and the eyes, which sparkled in what could only be described in non-real colour terms like blurple or azurequoise.

“An actual wizard?” whispered the Australian, like he was the first to ask about this. He gripped his girlfriend’s hand while she Instagrammed the wizard’s weird little food hut with the other.

“An actual wizard,” he confirmed, “but only with sandwiches.”

The Australian looked confused, like they always did. “How does that work?”

“Well,” said the wizard, “I can do magic, but only with sandwiches.”

“Nah, I don’t get it.”

“He’s a wizard,” his girlfriend murmured from her iPhone, “but only with sandwiches.”

The Australian took a moment to process this.

“Okay, close your eyes,” the sandwich wizard instructed, and the Australian did that. “Now think of the best sandwich you ever had.”

“It was a—”

The sandwich wizard cut him off. “Alright, you don’t have to tell me. I can make that sandwich, but better. I can make you a sandwich you never even knew you wanted. Like, yesterday I made a beef chilli sandwich with marmite for this one guy—”

“Urgh,” the girlfriend chimed in.

“— yeah, that’s what he said. But he took one bite. One bite. Then he just fell to his knees and wept.”

“Sooo,” said the Australian, dragging out the vowel, “you’re like Heston Blumenthal.”

“No, not like Heston fucking Blumenthal.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s fine. It’s just that, Blumenthal… he’s more of an alchemist.”

There was an awkward silence, then, while the girlfriend let go of his hand and tapped out a tweet. Enquired re: Blumenthal. Apparently a food alchemist, NOT food wizard. “Can I have a sandwich, then?” she asked.

“Certainly,” he said, and his voice had taken on a different quality, like he’d cooked it up from somewhere else entirely. When he said “just clear your mind,” she heard a sizzling deep within his throat, the pop of ethereal mustard seeds, the whoosh of a flame as the clouds gathered over the cobbled-together food cart to swirl and dance above the sandwich wizard. Not that she could see them – without knowing it, she’d torn her eyes away from her Twitter feed and locked her gaze with his while the sandwich wizard reached inside her mind, taking a pinch of this and a spoonful of that directly out of her hippocampus. The hairs in his beard straightened out and crackled like someone had turned up the sharpness setting on the world.

And then there was the ding of a till being opened and a sandwich wrapped in greaseproof paper was in her hand. Instinctively, she tightened her grip, releasing an invisible red cloud of smoked paprika, feeling the crunch of onions fried just to the point of being slightly warm and oily. A few sesame seeds spilled out of a hole in the wrapping, and when they hit the floor a gang of ants battled one another over the tiny scraps at her feet. She blinked, tried to speak but failed; she was having a situation with her saliva.

“That’ll be three pounds,” said the sandwich wizard.

Three quid being pretty cheap, she swallowed and fished out a few pound coins.

“Can I ask a question,” said the Australian, and he didn’t even bother waiting for a response. “Do you ever get sick of making sandwiches?”

The sandwich wizard avoided eye contact for a second. His shoulders tensed up, went all stiff. “I don’t know,” he mumbled. “I’m awfully good at sandwiches.”

“Well, what about a wrap? Could you do me a wrap?”

The sandwich wizard shrugged his shoulders. “I haven’t made a wrap since… you know… but, I suppose…”

In the trail-off, he clapped his hands together with a great boom and locked eyes with the Australian. Overhead, again, the clouds pulled themselves back together in a swirling mess. The sandwich wizard furrowed his brow, gripped onto the wooden counter almost to the point of pulling it off entirely. He made a noise the English alphabet doesn’t have the letters for.

A moment later: ding. There was a parcel in the Australian’s hand and three pounds in the till. Three drops of rain spattered onto the wrapping. The Australian and the wizard looked to one another, the wizard with hope in his wide eyes. The girlfriend was curled up on the ground twitching and drooling with a half-eaten sandwich in her fist.

Tentatively, the Australian peeled open the greaseproof wrapping and already it smelt wrong, like the wizard had emptied a day-old bag of kitchen waste and dishwater into it. But, no, on further inspection it was a tortilla wrap. Even if it looked like it was about to burst open and give birth to a tiny alien creature. He looked back up to the wizard, who was forcing a smile onto his face. The Australian was either going to take a bite or have that look break his little heart forever. So, taking a deep breath, he brought the thing up to his mouth and took a small bite.

He immediately vomited all over his shoes.

Inside his funny little food hut, the sandwich wizard smacked his forehead. “Stupid,” he told himself. “Stupid.”

According to the internet, it is (Inter)national Flash Fiction...

Wed, 16 May 2012 14:43:00 +0100

According to the internet, it is (Inter)national Flash Fiction Day, so I’m reposting this in case you’re interested. Why wouldn’t you be interested? You get to print stuff out and cut it up and staple things together!

It’s a fun afternoon activity!

jamiedrew:

Notes on Being Lost is a very short sci-fi story about a friendship crumbling under the pressures of semi-controllable time travel. Internet favourite Ele Jenkins did the cover illustrations, and they are amazing. I butchered a section of the cover to make that header image. See? Amazing.

In the interests of doing something interesting with it, Notes on Being Lost is designed to fit on a single sheet of A4 paper — with a bit of DIY — and I’ll be leaving copies in silly places, e.g. London. Here’s how to put it together.

If you don’t live in London, you’re in luck! You can download it for free at Ge.tt. And as a bonus, Ele posted some process images for the cover on her sketchblog.

Download: PDF • ePub • Kindle

Hawkeye was rubbish, though, wasn’t he? There’s a...

Sat, 12 May 2012 12:44:38 +0100

Hawkeye was rubbish, though, wasn’t he? There’s a bit in the last act of the film – I know, I know, but I’ve seen it now so spoilers aren’t a thing any more – where he reaches for an arrow… but oh no— he has no arrows left!

What a completely surprising, totally unforseeable turn of events!

I guess that’s just what happens when your super power is fucking arrows. “Guys,” says Hawkeye into his earpiece, “I’m out of arrows!”

Iron Man rubs the bridge of his iron nose. “See, Barton, this is why I left you up there.”

(That didn’t actually happen.)

Everything I Knew About 'The Avengers' Before I'd Even Seen It

Sat, 12 May 2012 12:37:14 +0100

Everything I Knew About 'The Avengers' Before I'd Even Seen It:

It took me a while to see The Avengers so naturally I was fair game for spoilers just for being on the internet. This is all of them. Question: how long can you – yes, you – leave it until you start spoiling films for me? I’m thinking “forever.” Just assume I didn’t see whatever film you’re talking about.

Ever since my housemate murmured after Cabin in the Woods that Chris Hemsworth might be an...

Fri, 11 May 2012 00:47:17 +0100

Ever since my housemate murmured after Cabin in the Woods that Chris Hemsworth might be an objectively attractive man, my favourite thing to do is elbow him whenever Hemsworth appears on screen and say “hey, Adam, it’s your boyfriend.”

So far, this has yielded a statistically significant amount of hilarity.

That is to say: 100%.

Rules for "Supernova Johnson" (working title)

Thu, 10 May 2012 19:19:19 +0100

Don’t be cheesy;
Don’t be “meta.”
Just be funny.

I'm Torn Between "Fuck You!" and "Thank You?"

Wed, 09 May 2012 20:19:37 +0100

— the reason I brought you in for an interview is your background in film. I like a messy CV; I hate the assembly-line CVs that come through here.

— well, I’m glad it was messy, then.

— so where did this interest start? Was it childhood?

— yes, my mum had a shelf full of of Schwarzenegger videos when I was little.

(This is an interview for a marketing job, by the way. This is only tangentially related.)

— I assume your taste has broadened since then?

— ha ha, yes, I’m more of a Kubrick guy these days.

— so what is it that brings you here today? What are you looking for? What is it you want to do eventually? What’s the goal?

— well, I’m looking for a career that’s creative, where I can utilise my ‘natural talents,’ and I want something challenging. I go a little bit mad very easily.

— okay, but what do you want to do? What job, specifically?

— er,

— not necessarily right away.

— …blue-skies thinking?

— yes.

— well, you know, I do a lot of writing in my spare time, always keeping busy.

(We have discussed this at length earlier in the interview. The interview has actually just been a series of questions I wasn’t prepared for because they were so unexpected; tell me about yourself, no, university is too far along, what do your parents do, where did you grow up, what took you down this path, and so on. He seemed interested in this aspect of my life, so I told him. I am very confused by this point in the conversation.)

— I guess, many years down the line, I’d like to be a working screenwriter. Oh, you’re writing that down. That’s interesting.

— I’m going to stop this here. I don’t think this is going to work out.

— oh. Okay.

— it’s not that you aren’t talented; I just think you should be doing that instead. Working towards that. You need to be a little more tenacious, I think. The trick is just to not go away until someone offers you a job.

— well… all right. It was nice meeting you, and I appreciate the… quick feedback.

— there’s no time for fucking around.

thedailydoodles: “You’re Going to Die in Space!!” Jamie Drew’s...

Wed, 09 May 2012 13:37:38 +0100

thedailydoodles:

“You’re Going to Die in Space!!”

Jamie Drew’s mother’s last sneer echoed in his head every morning of every day… “You’re going to die in space, little man!!!”.

The words powered him all the way through college, the Pre-Astronaut masters program, Astronaut school, the residency on the Moon, and even the revered Space Academy, motivating him to show her she was wrong and fat and stupid and dumb.

“What the hell do you know about SPACE?!” he’d scream at her memory in his head, “I’m a goddamned astrophysicist, MOM, you don’t know anything!!!!!”

But as the cheap twine safety rope that hadn’t been replaced for years due to budget cutbacks caused by the profit-centric privatization of space SNAPPED, severing him from his tether to the celebrity gossip channel’s satellite he was repairing, he realized… dammit.

My stupid mom was right.

And that was a fate worth than death itself.

Posted 5/8/2012

Wanna star in your very own Daily Doodle? CLICK HERE!
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I’m famous! I knew it would happen one of these days.

I actually did an unpaid trial shift at a Victorian gastropub in Holborn last week, even though...

Tue, 08 May 2012 18:16:16 +0100

I actually did an unpaid trial shift at a Victorian gastropub in Holborn last week, even though I’ve done innumerable unpaid shifts in the past and none of them has ever led to an actual job. It was eight hours long, incredibly busy on a Thursday night: 5pm until about 1am. My prospective employer decided to work in another room for the evening so he couldn’t actually observe me on that shift but left me with a wonderful, helpful supervisor who worked here to support her blossoming acting career. I did well. I got along with customers, learned the ropes pretty quickly, made a lot of money in tips.

“I hear you did really well today,” boss-to-be said at the end of the shift.

I smiled at my supervisor for the evening: thank you. ”It took a while to get the hang of where everything was.”

“Well, so,” he said, yawning and checking his diary, “what I’ll do is, I’ll write up the rota and get you in for a second trial maybe next week.”

“Brilliant,” I said at the moment, but after I’d woken up a little on the bus half an hour later — “wait.”

A second trial shift? Eight more hours of unpaid work? All for a job which – to be frank – could be done by a trained golden retriever? Nobody had ever said anything about a second shift, and what then? How many hoops do they want me to jump through, exactly?

So, long story short: I didn’t answer the phone or return any calls the next day. I may not have a real job, but I still have that last, tiny scrap of self-respect.

Variations on the Phrase "You're Probably Overqualified for This Job"

Tue, 08 May 2012 18:08:20 +0100

and what did you learn from your second degree?
and the first was an M.A., is that right?
so why did you decide not to go into speech therapy?
I see from your CV you spent a bit of time in healthcare…
so why are you looking at the hospitality industry — would this be a career change or a quick stepping stone?
would your freelance work interfere with the hours you can work here?
what kind of skills can you bring from your volunteering?
what kind of hours do you work at the… ‘Ministry of Stories’?
wow, that’s a real place?
so you give away your time for free.
that’s interesting.
would you be interested in an indeterminate number of unpaid trial shifts?

The snake, Basil, was introduced into the film by Stanley...

Sun, 06 May 2012 17:58:00 +0100

The snake, Basil, was introduced into the film by Stanley Kubrick when he found out Malcolm McDowell had a fear of reptiles.

A Clockwork Orange (1971)

Hypothesis: fuckyeahbehindthescenes is the most addictive blog on all the Tumblrs. When I was a pretentious sixteen/seventeen-year-old boy I discovered the IMDB’s ‘trivia’ section and spent more hours than I’d like to admit trawling through it. Then someone added behind-the-scenes photographs to that concept and ensnared me for the whole afternoon.

Anecdotes like this one made Stanley Kubrick (along with Tarantino, as discussed) the model for the kind of filmmaker I wanted to be until I realised that directing bored the hell out of me and the meat of the thing was usually in the screenplay anyway.

A truth: you can’t make a good film out of a bad script. Take Children of Men: undeniably it’s a beautifully-directed piece of cinema, but a terrible film. The exposition, so awkward! The dialogue, so on-the-nose! Clive Owen, who let you out of acting school?

The inverse isn’t true. You very much can make a bad film out of an amazing script. I can’t think of any examples off the top of my head. Maybe the shot-for-shot remakes of Night of the Living Dead or Psycho. The lesson here is that directing is harder than it looks. Also, kind of boring.

But, I don’t know. I haven’t given it a shot – oh-ho! – in years. Maybe if this whole ‘jobsearch’ thing works out I’ll invest in a new camera. What are they, £300? I could get £300 through a Kickstarter campaign. “I am bored. Give me a camera to make some terrible short films and maybe they’ll be good one day.”

“I know I have a lot of ideas and plans, and yes that whole start-doing-comedy-again thing didn’t work out but I promise this one is different.”

“Come on, guys, it’s £300.”

“Update: Oh, also, I’ll need money for herbal cigarettes and moustache wax. What is that, £50?”

Joss Whedon on Comic Books, Abusing Language and the Joys of Genre

Sat, 05 May 2012 17:20:37 +0100

Joss Whedon on Comic Books, Abusing Language and the Joys of Genre:

“I have abused language. I love it and I abuse it…. I don’t write just to be clever. But sometimes I do. And if you don’t have an understanding of the language, then the way in which it’s bent doesn’t actually register. It’s the old you-gotta-paint-like-them-before-you-can-paint-like-you thing.”

Recruitment Agency Guy: okay, Jamie, I'm going to send you in for your interview now, okay? But I've got one piece of advice for you. Do you want to hear it?

Sat, 05 May 2012 14:49:00 +0100

Recruitment Agency Guy: okay, Jamie, I'm going to send you in for your interview now, okay? But I've got one piece of advice for you. Do you want to hear it?
Me: ...yes?
R.A.G.: you're a nice guy, obviously very sharp, very educated... but you've got to stop being so nervous.
AND THEN THE TIMELINE SPLIT INTO THREE:
What I wanted to say: oh, thank you. Where were you when I had my huge anxiety-related breakdown a year ago? No, no, that was really helpful advice — never mind all the therapy I went through so I could get back to a baseline level of functioning where I could actually leave the house. Never mind that. Never mind the depression that shunted out the anxiety and ruined my summer. My therapist never mentioned "stop being so nervous," so I'm really glad you're here to help. That never occurred to me. Thank you. Bless you.
What I should have said: *fart noise*
What I said: [incoherent whimper; panic attack on Oxford Street]