I Need Alps

I promised myself I wouldn't write about improvisation on this blog. This is the third consecutive Tingtinglongtingtingfala post to mention the "I" word. Never apologize. Commit to your decisions. If you're going to break your promises, use a sledge hammer.

But, following the "rule of three", it's time to move on. I need to take a break. I need a holiday. I need Alps. Am I tired? I don't feel tired. I ought to. That's the problem.

The other day I was watching an unusual improv show. Midway through, I spotted a fellow improviser in the audience – someone of unquestionable talent – exhibiting a face that was twisted into a clear sneer of disapproval.

I became distracted from the show, and found myself focussing on that ideological sneer. It depressed and outraged me. We need improvisers who are generous and humble, not superior and snobbish. Heaven knows my limited accomplishments give me reason enough to be humble.

But how wrong was I? It was I who was passing judgment, who wasn't giving the show my full attention. I'd crassly allowed the sneer to infect my face. Ego creeps up on me, even when I tell myself I'm defending a principle. It blinds and deafens me.

When the opinions of others matter too much, when it becomes too easy to categorize fellow performers, when improv theory outweighs playfulness, then it's time to escape to the Alps. I'm off in mid-July for a fortnight, to listen to windy forests and cowbells. Two weeks without improv will make me a better improviser.

Is Improvisation an Art Form?

Is improvisation an art form? I will attempt to answer this using logic. I don't know very much about logic. I'd love to be able to tell you what this is:

But I have no idea.

Hagbard Celine had this to say about logical thought: "All propositions are true in some sense, false in some sense, and meaningless in some sense."

When someone tells you that x is y, this is may appear to be a very straightforward assertion. But it's actually complex and ambiguous, and the conclusions we draw will always depend on a successful understanding between the speaker and the listener. We have to agree on whether a) we're being asked to change or develop our definition of x in the light of a pre-agreed concept y, or b) We all know what x is, and we are being asked to amend our definition of y.

The ambiguity of the "x is y" forms the basis of all jokes along the model of "To call you stupid would be an insult to stupid people": I'm not redefining you in relation to stupid; I'm redefining stupid in relation to you.

Propositions that are tautological, irrefutably true or self-evident – such as "Virtue is good" or "Too much fruit is bad for you" – don't mean anything at all. They are too true to carry meaning. And if I say "San José is the capital of Costa Rica". This statement is only meaningful if you either don't know where San José is or if you don't know what the capital of Costa Rica is. If we already know both these things, or neither of them, the utterance becomes a worthless. A statement is only meaningful insofar as its truth is debatable or its logic ambiguous.

According to this definition, it is certainly meaningful to ask whether improvisation is an art form. We can agree either that

"Improvisation is more than just a bunch of idiots clowning about in a pub. It should be taken seriously. It can be the equivalent of high drama, great painting and literature."

or that

"Art forms encompass more than traditional highbrow entertainments. Art forms can be experimental, popular, funny, transient and daft."

depending on what you want to believe.

The meaning of these statements don't exist in their truthfulness, but in the dissonance between the x and the y terms. By taking almost any two loosely defined concepts from a pair of columns, even a machine can create propositions that crackle with ambiguity, and can be asserted as "meaningful", even "inspired". 

Column A                            Column B
Courage                is               Hope
Movement             "               Understanding
Learning                "               Progress
Motivation             "               Chaos
Experience             "               Fragility
Honesty                 "               Sacrifice
Strength                 "               Madness

In the interests of full disclosure – or lack of it – I should add that my proposition "Meaningful statements are ambiguous" is itself an assertion of the "x is y" type. Am I asking you to guess whether the target of my logical satire is "ambiguity" or "meaning"? There exists a third option: I have no idea, and I am deliberately hedging my bets in order to appear clever. This is what most people do every time they open their mouths.

The Improvised Wizard of Oz – Story versus Plot

There's a lot of fun to be had asking members of the audience up on to the stage to improvise a play with us. Of course, this has to be done with care. It works best in a chummy environment where the audience already know each other well. It often helps if we can win their trust by playing a shortform game like Pillars or Puppets in the first half, to demonstrate that we're in the business of making them look good. Volunteers with no stage experience at all tend to get more out of it, and are easier to play with, than those who think they're going to be brilliant. We choose stories that everyone is familiar with, so that no one has to worry about what happens next. A Christmas pantomime is ideal. The show is guided every step of the way by a narrator.

In the past, we have held on-stage auditions for the role of protagonist, hoping that the audience will vote for their friends to play the lead. For the most part so far, this hasn't worked: the audience plays it safe and votes for an improviser to play the main character.

At the weekend, The Inflatables did shortform games in front of a village hall crowd of about 125, and persuaded eight volunteers to join us on stage for the second half. Backstage during the interval, we played a quick warmup game of Zip Zap Boing, then went straight into improvising The Wizard of Oz. Abandoning the audition process, we reassigned the role of Dorothy on a scene-by-scene basis. She was denoted by a blue gingham apron that was quick and easy to swap between actors. The remaining volunteers played scenery, Munchkins, flying monkeys, etc.

Dorothy is almost the perfect passive protagonist. She barely does anything and hardly changes over the course of the story. She is the perfect role for someone without improvising experience. She can be pimped and prodded along and made to look good, while the seasoned improvisers take the more difficult supporting roles.

It was great, energetic fun: fantastic to see the shyest of the volunteers start to come out of their shells on stage, and heartwarming to watch them being congratulated by their friends afterwards.

Dorothy serves as a good illustration of the distinction to be drawn between "story" and "plot", two words that are commonly used interchangeably. What is Dorothy's story? If we define her story has governed by the choices she makes, it could hardly be simpler. 1. She is unhappy at home. 2. She runs away. 3. She misses her family. 4. She goes home again. The two main decisions she takes (there are a couple of subtle other ones along the way) are marked by memorable lines: "Somewhere Over The Rainbow" and "There's no place like home". Almost everything else that she experiences consists of people telling her what to do, explaining what's going on and reacting to her. She kills two witches, both of them by accident. She even needs to be told to make the decision to go home.

By contrast, the plot of The Wizard of Oz is remarkably complex. It involves a twister, a pair of ruby slippers, flying monkeys, an egg timer and a hot air balloon. It is colourful and arbitrary, very much like the absurd nonsense that improvised comedy often creates. We can play around with it – embellish it using audience suggestions, send it panging off in random directions, do scenes in different genres – without ruining Dorothy's story. In our version, Dorothy won over the Wizard by growing a Ferrero Rocher tree from a magic bean. What the Scarecrow lacked was not a brain, but a sex drive. The plot was different, but the story was the same. She returned to Kansas at the end.

I don't wish to imply that plot is so insignificant it can be dispensed with. We cannot simply fast-forward to the emotional heart of a story without allowing the action to unfold in a colourful and coherent way. We included enough of the plot of The Wizard of Oz for the story to be recognizable, but lots of details – most notably the Tin Man and the Lion – were omitted, only for reasons of limited time.

In summary, the story belongs to the protagonist and is fixed. The plot belongs to the story and is arbitrary. The story is "what happened". The plot is "how it happened".

Improvisers who don't engage emotionally in the characters they play can easily get bogged down in plot. Without empathy for the characters and an understanding of how the decisions they make create the story, it is necessary to fall back on clever reincorporation of material in order to create a satisfying conclusion. And while some improvisers are amazingly good at this, and have fantastic skills of listening, memory and reincorporation, most improvisers struggle to tie everything together in this way. They could make their lives easier if they focused less on the plot and more on the story.

Curiously, when you allow a character to follow the story that is laid out for them, the plot often seems to look after itself. The mountain of miscellaneous stuff that you created through free-association in the first few scenes will uncannily include exactly what you need in terms of plot to allow the story to make sense, rather than be a burden that needs somehow to be accounted for. I cannot explain this phenomenon, but it happens with practice.

I'd be lying if I claimed that our Dorothies were three-dimensional and emotionally well drawn, or that The Improvised Wizard of Oz engaged the audience in deep empathy for her. Our show was little more than an affectionate (and occasionally bawdy) romp. But I wonder . . . Would we would have created such a delightful atmosphere in that village hall – with the audience singing joyfully along with our improvised choruses – had we not been faithful to her story?

Holiday Reading

I don't read as much as you think I do. Although I usually have several books on the go, this often amounts to little more than carrying them around until I get tired. I do read for work, often quickly (or too quickly), but being paid to do it removes a chunk of the pure pleasure.

I normally have to wait until I take a holiday to get any proper reading done. But I haven't had a proper holiday in years (Edinburgh doesn't count as a holiday). I read David Bellos's biography of Georges Perec while lying on a beach in Thailand in 2009  (his account of Perec's reverse-syllable poetry gave me the idea for this), and I got through most of Finnegans Wake while relaxing in Crete the previous year. What I need for my forthcoming trip to Austria is something of similar weight.

Before you start suggesting stuff: save your breath. I always react badly to recommendations. It's an involuntary and irrational reaction, and I'm sorry. Tell me to read something, no matter how appropriate, and chances are I will never go near it. I've no shortage of books I need to read. Some of them have lurked on my shelves, gathering dust, for years. I've kept them like guilty secrets. It's about time I blasted my way through The Complete Books of Charles Fort, which so far I've only dipped into. I'm deeply ashamed to admit I've never read Moby Dick. When am I going to make a start on the Arsène Lupin novels? 2012 might be the year I finally tackle H.P. Lovecraft. Top of my must-read list is probably Michel Leiris' epic autobiography The Rules of the Game, but I own stacks of Gustave Le Rouge (untranslated) in cheap paperback editions that are also calling out to me. There are, in addition, books I feel I need to reread from time to time throughout my life in order to keep in touch with myself: Rabelais, Tristram Shandy, Life: A User's Manual, The Great Fire of London, etc. I just wish I had more time.

My Austrian reading dilemma will be resolved soon, however, since I recently heard that Daisy and Greg are finding new homes for Ken Campbell's magnificent library. They are using occultist methods to discover which books go to whom. This is completely generous and brilliant of them. And all I have had to do is to send them the postage. My own choices will have to wait for another year; it would be sheer folly of me to devote my holiday to anything other than what fate decrees. I'll let you know what turns up.

The Human Loire (Repetition)

Do you sometimes notice things about yourself? I don't mean the big things – the mighty foundations of your personality that you discover and learn to build upon, and which form the architecture of your entire adult identity. I mean the little things, the character equivalents of a mole on your leg, a rogue eyebrow hair or a patch of dry, flaky skin – things about yourself that make you think "How long has that been there?"

One thing I've recently noticed about myself is that I don't like repeating myself. "But you do that, Michael," you will say. "You repeat yourself all the time. You tell the same stories again and again, sometimes within the space of a few hours. Even within a single utterance, you will say something you think is funny, laugh at it yourself, and, if no one else laughs along with you, tell exactly the same joke again with only slightly different intonation, in a desperate (and frankly unattractive) attempt to seem witty. While I think of it, you also persistently laugh at your own jokes. Stop doing that."

It's safe to say that the things I notice about myself are generally negative – the clumsy habits, lazy ways of speaking, poor manners, shoddy attitude. As with a bathroom mirror inspection, once you start consciously looking for things to notice about yourself, it's hard to stop. You could eventually decide that the combined effect of these petty flaws is too great to tackle them one by one. For most people, it's easier to reconstruct their whole persona based on the few bad habits that make them interesting.

My deep-seated aversion to self-repetition, however poorly realised, means that I could never become a standup comedian. Not, at least, a standup comedian of the conventional variety, success at which requires tireless, patient repetition, repetition, refinement and repetition. I also doubt I could write a novel. Not, that is, a novel of the conventional variety, which involves spinning out ideas as far as they will go.

(All of this is preamble to a plug. The extent and manner of my self-promotion is yet another thing I've noticed I do badly. I veer between star-struck mortification in the presence of my heroes and a graceless, churlish pushiness with people I'm trying to impress. I do hope that this soul-baring self-awareness makes this plug appealing, though – couched in such ironic language – that's highly unlikely.)

I first performed "The Human Loire" at Marbles' short-lived talkshow format The Yak, last year. It was intended to be a one-off so-bad-it's-good-no-wait-it's-actually-bad novelty gag act. As the other guests who performed on the show (Sarah-Louise Young and Alexis Dubus) are what I would describe as genuinely talented – unlike myself, who must pretend to be talented – I thought it best to present my contribution as modestly as possible. It went down surprisingly well, and people started to ask me when I would do it again. "Never!" I barked. But then in Edinburgh, I got asked if I'd perform "The Human Loire" at the late-night Music Box cabaret in front of an audience of about 100. I relented, a little reluctantly, thinking "Edinburgh audiences deserve nothing better". This time, the audience reaction was even more rapturous. I swore that would be the last time. Finally, Steve Roe asked if I'd do it for a Christmas cabaret. It was Christmas, so I said yes.

I have started on that dangerous road of repeating myself, of finding something that (inexplicably) works, and repeating/refining it. This feels odd and wrong. On Thursday, I will perform "The Human Loire" for the very last time, assuming it goes as badly as I expect. Additionally, I will be performing my "Homage to Sir Alexander Fleming", which has also been done before.

Thursday 17th May
Chicken Cabaret
Downstairs at The Harrison
28 Harrison Street
WC1H 8JF
Doors 7.30pm £5

This is tried-and-tested material. After Thursday – I promise – I will do something new.

How I am Related to John Peel

In my family, the ability to tell a good story has always been held in higher regard than the ability to command facts and figures.

My Dad (author of the posthumous "Letters from Conrad" blog) did not enjoy arguing as much as he enjoyed watching other people argue, and he would sometimes make monstrous assertions or deny commonsense facts purely in order to see how people would respond. This was in the days before the internet made the instant verification of most facts a straightforward matter. (These days we are reduced to arguing about which one of us has the fastest internet connection.)

Among the stories Dad used to tell was that that his father, also called Conrad (a professional gambler and a professional drinker – subject of many barely verifiable stories) had been named after a racehorse that had died after falling at a perilous fence while running the very first Grand National at Aintree in 1839. Conrad was ridden by a Captain Martin Becher, and the fence thereafter became known as Becher's Brook. The problem with this story is that it gives no explanation as to why a local infant born fifty years after the event would be named after a horse that had failed so spectacularly. When I was younger, such fanciful, groundless assertions used to infuriate me, and I argued with my Dad about the truthfulness of his account.

But another story my Dad used to tell was that he was related, via his mother Mary Moore (1909–83), to the DJ John Peel, whom he would describe as "one of those Ravenscoft–Moores". Could this assertion have some basis in fact? John Peel was born John Robert Parker Ravenscoft, in the right part of the Wirral, and there are certainly plenty of Ravenscrofts, Moores and Ravenscroft-Moores to be found in and around Liverpool.

It's not entirely unlikely, but I felt that I needed substantive proof before daring to repeat this rumour. So I signed up for a free 14-day trial of an ancestry website, and got to work, using as my basis the work of Geoff Brunström, a distant cousin of mine (and father of the ever-controversial former North Wales Police Chief Richard Brunström – stories about whom you'd be hard pressed to believe if they weren't well recorded).

And you know what? I came up with nothing. No birth, marriage or death records, nor a single dicennial census entry for either a Mary Moore born in 1909 or a John Ravenscroft born in 1939. It is as if they both entirely escaped the radar of governmental interference (unless some sort of official cover-up has taken place).

With thirteen days remaining of my fourteen-day free trial, I contented myself with a more fanciful use of the website's online resources. It was surprisingly easy to retrieve documents that traced the male Brunström line back to the first Brunström (the Ur-Brunström: Olaf Brunström (1785–1857) – whose story I'll tell you another time).

Thereafter, drawing not on primary evidence but on the wholly undocumented work of fellow subscribers, I traced the the line back further, through a series of patronymic ancestors. Thus, I discovered that I am . . .

Michael O. J. Brunström (1974–), son of
Conrad K. M. Brunström (1928–2011), son of
Conrad K. M. Brunström (1889–1967), son of
Otto Leopold Brunström (1856–1927), son of
John Leopold Brunström (1824–74), son of
Olaf Brunström (1785–1857), son of
Lars Svensson (1768–1827), son of
Sven Olofsson (1727–97), son of
Olof Persson (1681–1766), son of
Per Persson (1650–87), son of
Per Persson (1620–98), son of
Per Andersson (1580–1652), son of
Anders Persson (1550–1614), son of
Per Andersson (1520–1609), son of
Anders Olofsson (1500–64), son of
Olof Eriksson (1480–1540), son of
Erik Salomonsson (1460–1500), son of
Salomon Persson (1420–65), son of
Per Eriksson (1400–41), son of
Erik (1360–1420)

Erik, my earliest recorded ancestor, is therefore my great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great grandfather.

Aside from the grotesque multiplication (19x) of patriarchal primacy, the surprising thing about all this information is how boring it is. Unless we invent stories to superimpose on this dreary list of names and dates, the genealogy is no more meaning to us than a page torn from the phone book. In order to gain any appreciation of the fact that Olof Persson married Sigrid Svensdotter on 12 June 1710 in Anundsjö, Vasternorrland, for example, we must fill in the details of the day from our imaginations. He was 29. She was 19. Was the weather fine? What was her wedding dress like? How many guests attended and how much did they drink? How were the couple feeling?

Facts don't make stories. Colourful details do. The more the factual information is missing, the more of the story we feel we must invent. What's more, when the information is clearly inaccurate, the story gets better. When I stumbled across an ancestor from a different lineage who appeared to have married two different women from the same village with the same surname within three years of each other, but continue to father children with the first woman during his marriage to the second, it is clear enough that a careless genealogist has muddled up two individuals. But the story it implies is better than the reality. The story of the bigamous Swedish ménage à trois is the one I want to hear.

The slenderer the collaborative evidence, the bolder and more entertaining we must be with our assertions. Have I learned my lesson yet? I must admit – the story that I am related through my grandmother to John Peel is simply too good to subject to the tedious scrutiny of facts and evidence, which will only point up a reality that is less colourful and compelling. So yes, I am related to John Peel. I will continue to insist on it, while working on my version of his warm, Liverpudlian drawl.

Backgammon

I have a confession to make. I am addicted to backgammon. I am addicted to playing backgammon on my phone. My productivity and sociability have lately been decimated by my addiction to playing backgammon on my phone. The app is called Backgammon NJ. (The "NJ" is a mystery to me. Is backgammon big in New Jersey?)

Currently, I can beat my phone at backgammon about 50 per cent of the time on the "Medium" skill level. When I have overturned these statistics and gained a positive advantage over "Medium", I will move on to "Hard" and subsequently "Expert". Trouble is, my win rate has been about 50 per cent for some weeks now. I am stuck. I am Heracles chasing Zeno's tortoise. I can never catch up. What am I doing wrong?

I am convinced that my phone is cheating. It rolls itself fantastic dice and dances gaily around the board, while leaving me with the dregs – rubbish 1s and 2s that get me nowhere and leave my pieces trapped and exposed. I love playing my phone at backgammon, but it often drives me to tears. It is an thoroughly punishing, self-destructive addiction and I need help. Help.

The role of cheating is not taken into account in my theory of games. Here's my theory of games.

In most games, there are three variables that determine the outcome.

1 Your own skill
2 The skill of your opponent(s)
3 Luck

The best games are those in which luck and skill have a comparable degree of influence, but skill must always be the more decisive and interactive element.

Luck is, of course, an important factor in every card and dice game, but it also has a part to play in some sports. In Test cricket, one team may be favoured by the weather, which may change suddenly, and the result of the coin toss may prove critical to the overall shape of the game, but skill will normally be the critical factor, unless rain rescues one team from defeat.

Golf is a game in which the weather can be a variable, and might in theory favour the technique of one player over the other. But since the position of one player's ball has no influence on the other's, the game is not interactive. This is exactly what makes golf a stupid game, but not as stupid as darts, in which chance environmental factors are taken out of consideration altogether. The opposition of one player to another is entirely artificial, and they may as well be aiming their arrows at different dart boards in different countries at different times of the year.

Most sports, like darts, attempt to minimize any environmental factors that might favour one player or team over the other. They do often this enforcing a change of ends. Games such as tennis offer an interesting example of this, but it is technically possible to win a game purely through the lack of skill of your opponent, without touching the ball. A series of double faults will give you a game, but the players swap service as well as ends to correct this anomaly.

Other games – such as ludo – are interactive, yet feature more luck than skill in them, so they tend to produce random outcomes. In the case of casino games, the luck is weighted in favour of one of the players (as I suspect it is in the case of Backgammon NJ). The ultimate game of luck, in which both skill and interactivity are excluded altogether, is Snakes 'n' Ladders. (Yet even Snakes 'n' Ladders somehow seems less stupid than darts.)

At the opposite end of the scale are skill-only games such as chess, which constitute a completely interactive battle of wits. Although these involve the purest form of contest, the games that demand an interplay of skill and luck are the most compelling and addictive. These are the games in which bad luck can be overcome by good play and good luck can be squandered. The losing side can choose to console themselves that they were cheated by fate. At the conclusion of each game, both winners and losers are eager to start again, to see if the result can be replicated or overturned.

The two games that illustrate this the best are Test cricket and backgammon. They are the greatest games ever invented, with the exception of such games as "love" and "improv". If "life" is a game, then success and happiness consist in recognizing and understanding the interplay of skill and luck – in other words between those things that are in our control (our own abilities and attitudes), those that are not (the abilities and attitudes of others) and the things from which we may allow to affect us either positively or negatively (chance events).

The reviews on the App Store for Backgammon NJ are mostly glowing. But its perfect 5-star rating is compromised by a handful of malcontents.

★★★★★ Works well both offline and online. Can't fault this app. I didn't think it would be as good as this.

★★★★★ Only trouble is I spend too much time playing backgammon!

★★★★★ Brilliant.

★★★★★ The AI is brilliant and it's a great learning tool.

★ Sorry but I have to agree with others here in that the luck seems to be hugely in favour of the computer opponent. I have lost count of the number of times that the exact numbers required are thrown whenever a computer opponent's piece is "captured" and the enormous weighting in favour of the computer throwing doubles.

The accusations of cheating levelled against Backgammon NJ have forced its creators to issue lengthy statements explaining how the dice rolls are generated according to the Mersenne twister algorithm, which produces what we are assured are "high quality random numbers". We are invited to print out the dice rolls in advance or to roll the dice ourselves rather than rely on the makers' word alone, so as to test and prove Backgammon NJ's superior AI.

In spite of my humiliating record of 50 per cent success at this excellent game, and a gnawing resentment at its apparent flukiness, it is my duty to come out in defence of the creators of Backgammon NJ. For surely, if my suspicions of cheating were to be correct, I would have to presuppose a far greater conspiracy – namely, that the assurances offered up by the makers of Backgammon NJ are a fabrication, and that they have gone so far as to create a fictional cover story for their deception – a remarkably dishonest bluff. They would need to have developed a quasi-random algorithm that gave the impression of being fair, sufficiently subtle to fool most of the people most of the time, while introducing a significant mathematical advantage at an undetectable level that stood up even to critical analysis.

Firstly, if they were going to go to such enormous lengths, why shouldn't they just spend that time and trouble developing an AI that was just really good at calculating backgammon moves? Secondly, why should they perpetrate such a fraud in the first place? In order to cheat and win against random members of the public, customers of the App Store whom they will never meet in person? What sort of vain, tortured, love-starved freaks to they believe these Backgammon NJ programmers are?

I still have a great deal to learn about this game. As it is in backgammon, so it is in life. Think upon that, the next time you're tempted to complain about all the bad luck you've been having lately.