Simian Substitute Site for January 2024: Monkey Run

MONTH END PROCESSING FOR DECEMBER 2023

Books: One of my favourite gags by the comedian Andrew O’Neill is based around the social media pastime of sharing deliberately unpopular opinions. Whereas most other people’s opinions are weak sauce like ‘The Matrix Reloaded is just as good as the first one,’ Andrew goes in hard with ‘AGRICULTURE WAS A MISTAKE.’ It’s the gargantuan leap of scale that makes it such a fabulous joke, along with the slight twinge you get when you wonder: what if it's true? What has our insistence on generating as much food as possible done to the rest of the planet’s ecosystem? It’s a question that’s come to mind as we’ve been listening to the audiobook of Wilding by Isabella Tree. As owner of the Knepp estate in West Sussex with her husband Charlie Burrell, they tried and failed to make it work as profitable farmland. So they decided to go in the other direction – letting the land grow wild, and adding free-roaming animals into the mix. Wilding is Tree’s retelling of the story of how this experiment progressed over the space of a couple of decades – and if the bare bones of the story sound familiar to you, it may be because The Belated Birthday Girl saw a documentary based on the book at the LFF a couple of months ago. She’s enjoying the book because it fills in the detail that a 75 minute film has to leave out. For me, it’s a terrific piece of storytelling: Tree (who narrates the audiobook herself) lays out the details of how they managed their project in an admirably clear fashion, making it more of a story and less of an agricultural stocktaking exercise.

Music: We’ve already celebrated the triumph of The BBG’s 2023 Undiscovered Gigs project, where the plan was to see twelve live shows by people we knew nothing about beforehand. But it’s worth spending a little more time talking about the 13th show on that list, where we didn’t know where the venue was until the day before, and didn’t even know the names of the people on the bill until we were in the building. Welcome to the slightly unnerving world of Sofar Sounds. Since 2009, they’ve been building a community of performers and gig-goers, bringing the two together in a series of secret-ish shows where the audience has to trust completely in the curation process. All you’re told at the time you buy the ticket is the approximate location and the type of venue you’ll be in – it could be anything from an already established performance space to sitting on the floor in someone’s living room. All other information on the show is subsequently dripfed to you on a need-to-know basis. For our first one, we played it safe and went for a venue-type venue in the Barbican area, which turned out to be Piano Smithfield. All three of the acts we saw that night - Jeanie White, Okiem and Jackson Rouse - were excellent: it’s possible that if we’d encountered Jackson Rouse before I’d locked down the track listing for POTY 2023, his single Wash My Hands might have ended up on there. We may have to do this again, possibly somewhere where we’re expected to bring our own cushion to sit on.

Theatre: Christmas is very much a time for certain types of theatrical experiences, and though we didn’t get around to seeing a panto this year, we did at least manage a family show with puppets and a performance of The Nutcracker. To be honest, we really should have caught up with My Neighbour Totoro during its first run at the Barbican last year, but were too slow off the mark: we were better prepared for the show's return visit, now running till March 23rd. It seems like an impossible task to take the wild fantasy of Hayao Miyazaki's animated classic and reproduce it theatrically, but director Phelim McDermott has form in making the improbable happen on stage, and his team rise to the challenge spectacularly. Crucially, this adaptation maintains your attention even during the long stretch in act two that doesn't involve puppets. As for Nutcracker, it's safe to say that this isn’t anything like the Russian State Ballet of Siberia’s traditional version we saw in Cardiff five Chrismasses ago: the cheeky tone's set very early on when a TV set can be heard playing the old Frank Muir Fruit & Nut advert. They've converted the former Spiritland bar on the ground floor of the Southbank Centre into a lovely popup venue called The Tuff Nut Jazz Club, where a cast of six dancers (choreographed by Drew McOnie) kinda sorta retell the story of the Nutcracker, to a jazz rearrangement of Tchaikovsky’s music by Cassie Kinoshi. It's all compressed into a ridiculously entertaining hour that's incredibly camp but somehow never cheesy with it. And after some performances you get the bonus of Nutcracker Nights, where guest artists convert the room into a proper jazz club. It's running till January 6th, so you've still got a few days if you missed it.

In the meantime, your Simian Substitute Site for January 2024 is Monkey Run, a project by a group called The Adventurists who seem to just enjoy doing all manner of dangerous shit. I'll let them explain: "There’s nothing quite like the sensation of a monkey bike between your thighs as you thunder, slowly, along dirt roads with absolutely no idea where you are. As you glance up, there, staring down at you like a baby ant in a tinyness competition might be some of the highest mountains on Earth. Imagine endless jungles lying in wait to punch your cheeky face with the fist of adventure. Imagine deserts that stretch far beyond the horizon chuckling at your woefully underpowered 2 wheeled children’s toy." If you fancy trying that out for yourself - I mean, obviously, you don't, but I've got to lead into this next bit somehow - then they're booking dates in 2024 for Peru, Morocco and Mongolia.

Meanwhile: happy new year! As ever, this January 1st post is being written while I'm recovering from December 31st, which this time round was spent at the Age Against The Machine clubnight. It's a club that has three simple rules. 1: nobody admitted under the age of 30. 2: no music that was recorded this century. 3: all music played will be absolute sodding bangers that everyone can sing along to. Basically, it's the old School Disco concept reworked for people who aren't school uniform fetishists, and I'm all for it. And as is traditional, a few of the Pals are meeting up with us today for our New Year's Day lunch and movie outing, where at the very least I should get to hear a few new Neil Hannon songs.

Beyond that, there's probably not much going to happen on the site this month apart from a few bits of admin. Hey, you got plenty of decent content last month - don't forget to buy a diary and enter our CD competition - so hopefully that should tide you over until things start waking up again in February. If you feel you have to pick a fight about this, the comment box is down there.