04/04/07
An evening with Kevin Smith -
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First off, you will be relieved to know that I came through my training without throwing up yet again.
On the downside, I have a very slight ball-ache (in the left one)and whilst there's every chance I may have just knocked it or something, it is regular enough for me to have already narrowed it down to either a hernia or cancer. So, getting fit is clearly not all it is cracked up to be.
My muscle increase has however also increased my bravery, no more evident than when I was walking upstairs from the tube at Leicester Square this afternoon. A man was barging down the steps telling everyone in his way to fuck off out of the way (we had been shepherded into the incorrect side by the staff), and hitting out with his elbows. When he reached me I tensed up my entire right side and when he attempted to barge me out of the way he came off significantly worse, stumbling a little and banging against the wall. In my peripheral vision I saw him spin around fast to look at me and slightly pull his arm back as though he was going to take a pop.
I glared at him.
There was a beat.
He turned around and carried on down the stairs.
That should have been enough, but I was feeling so strong and tough that I shouted after him, "Yeah, you might well think twice". He cast a brief glance over his shoulder and ran off. I think it's good that there are sort of vigilantes like me protecting normal people like you on the harsh streets of the capital...
Course, I could have just as easily got my fucking head kicked in, he was much bigger than me, but it shows that sometimes merely acting like you're hard is sufficient in order to avoid unneccesary violence.
And if that display of testosterone has upset any of my millions of lady readers then please take into account that straight after the stand off I saved a puppy from a burning building and then did some work for charity or something.
Anyway, I was in London to go and see Kevin Smith do a Q&A thing.
Kevin Smith, if you are unaware, is a writer and film director. The usual quickest way of explaining who he is to folk who can't place him, is he is the bloke that plays "Silent Bob" in "Jay and Silent Bob". If you don't know who they are, then you need to stop reading this and go down to Blockbuster video and rent out any (or preferably all) of the following movies; Clerks, Mallrats, Chasing Amy, Dogma, Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back, Jersey Girl & Clerks 2. Kevin Smith wrote and directed all of them, and bar Jersey Girl he features in them all too.
They are exceptional films, every last one of them, and the dude has become something of a hero to me over the years. I have never counted myself as a fanboy (by which I mean a geek) despite my well-known reverential approach to Star Wars, I have never been to conventions and stuff like that, I couldn't sit around and have a discussion about who would win in a fight between Darth Vader and Optimus Prime without saying "It's not real" very early into it, but this is generally the sort of person that becomes enamoured with Mr Smith's movies.
In fact, I witnessed it first hand only this afternoon in the queue whilst listening to the boys stood behind me discussing Red Dwarf and the boys stood in front of me posing that exact hypothetical Vader vs Prime battle with increasing breathlessness. At one point, Kevin Smith's wife Jennifer emerged to give out badges to the people at the front of the queue, and I thought we may lose some of the poor young chaps. If I was in a kind mood I would suggest they were just dumbstruck by the fact that Jennifer was out talking to them, but I fear it had rather more to do with the fact that a woman was that close. A real one too.
Now, I can play the superiority card all I like, but the fact remains that I was one of the people in that queue to go and attend the Q&A, so I must be tarred by association, and anyway, they couldn't all be that flawed as they are clearly as taken with Smith's work as I am, so they must have some credibility about them, but...well...I'm pretty sure I'm not like that.
Please don't let that put you off the movies mind, I assure you that you will like them. You may even decide that Clerks 2 is the most beautiful movie you have ever experienced - it really is that good.
So, onto the Q&A itself. My attendance had come about because I happened upon a MySpace bulletin from Kevin Smith saying he was doing a couple of them in London.
Oh, and whilst I remember, somebody told me recently that my MySpace page has been set to private for a while so I have changed that and you can stop by whenever you wish at www.myspace.com/raypeacock.
The Kevin Smith Q&A's have been on dvd for a while under the title "An Evening with Kevin Smith" - (add them to your shopping trolley in Blockbusters - they're fantastic) so the opportunity to check them out in real life was not going to pass me by. To have seen Tenacious D, Neil Hamburger and Kevin Smith live in the last couple of months is quite an achievement, and one that I thought living this side of the water would simply not happen, but there I was this evening at the theatre, sitting not ten foot away from the dude.
For me as a stand up comedian, it was both inspirational and depressing. Predominantly the former. The man was on stage for three and a half hours - no interval, and working purely off the questions fielded by the audience. So, if we place it into comedic context, that's three and a half fringe shows. And it is as tightly structured and perfectly worded as you would expect from a show that a comic had worked a year on. Yet, this is off the top of his fucking head - he's literally just answering questions, but rarely in less than twenty minute stories. Funny stories too. But I mean, reeeally funny. It's genuinely staggering.
And you start thinking, well is it because I like the guy? Am I just cutting him some slack? Is he just getting away with this because we are fans of him and his work?
Gotta say, hand on heart, it really isn't that.
It's because the man is a natural writer, the performance (whilst pretty much immaculate) is secondary, you are just watching the guy do what comes naturally to him - tell stories. And because he is a writer, the stories build, they go somewhere, they draw you in and call back to other tales from the evening, it's something that many comedians strive to attain and he does it off the cuff. You start to realise as you watch that you really should be working harder as a comic to translate your ideas to the audience, that there are tricks you haven't come close to mastering, that there is a fundamental importance in structure, even if you bury it so deep as to not be noticed, and most importantly, honesty fucking sells it. When Kevin Smith talks, you truly believe that there is no bullshit. He holds little to nothing back.
When I first began writing this blog during the Edinburgh Fringe back in August, as I have said before, being open and honest with what I was writing about was an absolute pre-requisite for me. It meant that I had to be honest about the low points with my fringe show, about my personal state of mind, about my career, most recently even about sex toys. Of course there is stuff that I have withheld about myself on here, as I need to retain some degree of privacy, but broadly speaking I've done my best to be an open book. You may think this could be difficult, but it's made writing it all the more rewarding and, to be honest, easier.
During the Q&A this evening there was a discussion about how, again generally speaking, the most successful folk within the entertainment industry have a degree of mystery about them - they reveal little about themselves and shy away from talking about themselves at any deeper level than is neccesary in promoting whatever they are promoting at the time. But this success is measured with monetary value, not in terms of how they have touched people artistically on a far more profound level. I shudder to think that there may ever have been a time that I was striving to measure my success in pound notes. I have arrived at a place in my life, both privately and professionally, where that really doesn't sit well with me at all. It's very telling that when people talk of the success of people like Jordan or whoever, they can only quantify it with the statement "She's worth a fortune - got millions".
There's got to be so much more to this than that.
And this could not be clearer than in what I witnessed during the Kevin Smith Q&A this evening. Here is a bloke who is never going to make a blockbuster movie, because (I assume) he knows that genuine artistic success can never be measured in box office receipts, it is far more profound to be able to stand up in front of a full theatre of people who share a genuine respect and gratitude for what you have created, and for three and a half hours (I'll say it again - three and a half fucking hours) have them hanging on your every word.
Well...
I say "hanging on your every word"...that is, apart from the bit where they are making a 15 second film on a camera phone so they can brag on their blogs that they were in a movie with Kevin Smith.
Not that I would do that.
Not even if you CLICK HERE.
I only had the one line ("hello") - but it's a start. "Silent Bob and Silent Bob" - I'd go watch that...
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