Here are five questions from f4f3.

[danieldwilliam]

1. What's with the sudden fetish for lighting?

 It springs from my position on the committee of the Grads’ Theatre.  Part of it is succession planning and part of it is my desire to be a generally useful chap to have around.

Like a lot of amateur theatre we’re often short of technical people.  There are lots of actors who are competent; who can learn lines, remember stage directions and not turn up drunk. They may not be good but they exist. Even actors who are borderline competent can be useful.  Competent technicians are harder to come by. They take more training. Also, no one was ever killed by an incompetent actor whereas an incompetent lighting technician can kill you in a number of ways.

Competent actors struggle for work, competent technicians can find gainful employment more easily.

So, an amateur company can access any amount of competent actors but struggles for technical staff.

The Grads are fortunate in having the help of several good people for lighting, sound, set design and build but any organisation that allows a key person dependency to exist is asking for trouble so part of my role on the committee is to train up in lighting and the other theatre crafts so I can help out during get in and eventually succeed to being the principle.

I like lighting. I like the combination of Art (oooh pretty colours) and Craft (a Fresnel is too washy, what you need is a Profile, maybe a doughnut too) and the combination of the two (you want noon day sun through a forest canopy? What you need are a couple of gobos in a Profile with a frost and a gel. Now what kind of forest, pine or deciduous? )

The current explosion of lighting related tweets is a result of going on a Royal Shakespeare Company / National Theatre of Scotland Open Stage 

weekend residency in Glasgow. (the great irony being that I owe f4f3 a visit to his home town but couldn’t meet him because he was off doing the Five Ferries ride which I couldn’t do because I was doing the residency.)

I was on a Technical and Design programme for the weekend so I’ve been up in lighting rigs (very cool lighting rigs) talking to lighting technicians and designers. I’ve also been talking to production designers.

I’ll write some more about Open Stages, the residency and so on in the next day or so.

The headlines are that I’ve discovered a love for production design. The combination of emotional, narrative and rhetorical effects; the combination of visual, lighting, sound, costume and set effect really interests me.

And the tools I’ve been shown to work out what Effect I want and so what effects I need have changed the way I think about theatre. The combination of the design method and improv has given me the tool kit to direct a show of my own.

They are interesting for the politics of amateur theatre too.

So, lighting is great and I want to do more of it but the real change in thing from this weekend has been working with Fiona Watt

 
2. Planting vegetables: sexy in a Felicity Kendal way, or taking up valuable flower room?

Felicity Kendal is sexy, isn’t she?

I can see the point of growing vegetables but flowers and gardens make my heart happy.  At the moment gardening for me is about creating two things. First, a visually appealing front to my home. I want something that looks welcoming and attractive to passers-by and visitors and something my family and I can sit in and enjoy being in. So, flowers and visually appealing leaves and berries and changes over the seasons and so on.

Secondly, I want to increase the bio-diversity of the place I live in.  When MLW and I moved in the front garden was two concrete slabs covered with rubberised sprung overlay. The soil was dead for feet underneath it. I want a garden with lots of different species in it. I want something that supports insect and bird life. Whilst I hate what they do to my plants I’m pleased my garden has snails because I didn’t put them there. I’ve lost control of my environment whilst still being able to craft it and that is a beautiful thing.

In the space I have I couldn’t have those two things and meaningfully produce vegetables. On the list for things to do this year is a new experimental herb garden.

 At some point I’ll get an allotment and I’ll grow vegetables and I’ll enjoy that.

 
3. What's the best SF book you've read this year?

Depends what you mean by best.

When reading SF I’m looking for

1. A good story well told which has an integral part of it the effects of science and technology or the exploration of science and technology. I like soft SF if the “magic” has a really interesting effect on people. I like space opera if the adventures take place in a universe that more or less obeys the laws of physics. Adventure, angst, existential rage in SPAAACE it’s all good for me.
2. A story that makes me think about how science and technology interact with people and vice versa.  How does my life change if the future is like that? For me the economics has to be right for this to work properly.
3. A story that changes the way SF works. Something that nudges the genre or changes it significantly or changes the way I think about it.

 The trade-offs between categories aren’t obvious to me.

 I like very much SF short stories so I read a lot of them.

 I think the best SF book I’ve read this year was either Mirror Dance by Lois McMaster Bujold or one of the Mammoth Best Science SF of the year back issues I read (could be 16 or 17, one was mediocre the other was really good.)

 I really enjoy the Vorkosigan saga as a ripping yarn. It also some interesting psychological stuff going on about family, personal motivation, mental health and other important themes. So it scores well on point 1.  Sometimes LMB gets economics and sometimes not but I forgive her for some of the thought provoking she stuff she has to say about science and the ethics of science and about gender and science. So decent scores on point 2. The Vorkosigan saga takes a lot of SF tropes and changes them (Dashing Space Captain, is a “mutant” who suffers from depression. Cloned brothers, who love each other but make themselves as different as they can from each other.) It also talks about gender a lot which I’ve not seen much of in SF before.

The Best SF of the Year I recall having some great stories in but I can’t remember which ones were in it that I liked so much.

4. What's a good time for me to come for a building tour?

 A tour of the Parliament?

 Depends if you fancy hanging out with me after or you want to see the building or the inhabitants.

If you want to see the building I recommend coming during the summer recess. The building is nicest when the sun shines and you’ll be able to bet into more of it and there will be fewer people around to get in the way of the architecture.

 If you want to see the building in use come on Thursday and try and get tickets for First Minister’s Questions. 

If you fancy hanging out with me afterwards then come later in the day and I can knock off early and we can go the bar and I can buy you a whisky. 

5. And, of course, what are your views on Scottish Independence?

I’m in favour of it. I will almost certainly vote for it and I may campaign for it.

I’m an Orwellian patriot rather than a nationalist.

I’m for in a way John Kay talks about here.  Starting from the premise that government is an economic agent for us which collects revenues from us, negotiates the exploitation of our natural resources on our behalf and spends our money on things we want. The nation state we happen to live in says not a lot about the kind of people we are.

I’m not ethnically Scottish, if that means anything. I’m not just Scottish. I have duel nationalities. I’ve spent as much time out of Scotland as here.

I think that Scottish independence will probably mean that people in Scotland are a bit better off.  I think the combination of a smaller and arguably less complex country to run and an ability of the government to pay closer attention to what is going on here will mean we get better government. This should translate into a better economy or a more efficient government and we’ll all be slightly better off.

How we divide that better off is up for discussion. I hope those less well off get most of it but I think this has to be thought through.   My reservation about independence is that we try and emulate the Scandinavian countries but with a Greek attitude to public finances and end up pouring money into supporting the perennially unemployed until we go bust.

The shock of not having “they English” and their manifest oppression of Scotland as an excuse should jolt us into sorting out our own problems in our way.

We never have to a Tory government again. Specifically, we never have to have a Tory government made up of Old Etonians,  focused on the South East of England. At some point in Scotland’s future the eternal social democratic government will lose its way and become a bit corrupt and a bit fat and bit stifling of any enterprise and a dose of liberal, enterprise friendly, small government minded government will be needed but I’d rather it was home grown not imported.

The other benefit of Independence is that it allows us to sort out our politics.  I think there are three problems. 

Firstly, some parts of our government are not elected democratically. Independence is a short cut to proportional representation. We might even get to use the Single Transferable Vote.

Secondly, quite a lot of our politics seem moribund and corrupt. It’s not just that the Labour party seems to have run out of ideas and taken the electorate in Glasgow for granted and then mistaken Glasgow for the rest of Scotland. There appears to be some genuine corruption going on in some parts of Scotland.  It’s not just the Labour party either. The SNP are corrupted by their desire for independence.  Every decision is taken in the light of whether or not it paves the way for independence.  I think they are so focused on making policy for Scottish independence that this compromises or corrupts their ability to make policy for Scotland.

Thirdly, we seem to have a social democratic oligopoly in our polity at the moment. You can have social democrats who wear red and like the English and trades unions or you can have social democrats in yellow tartan who aren’t so keen on them. Either way you are going to get social democrats and the same type of social democrats. Big state social democrats, where big state means not just spending a lot of money but also interfering in how you spend what money you have and worrying about the state of your soul and your liver. Social democrats whose first solution to any problem is to reach for our collective cheque book or for the criminal law.  A social democracy that would use the phrase “Only the guilty have anything to fear” with a straight face. The key political division in Scotland isn’t about economics or about individual or collective responsibility or about the state vs non-state action; it’s about flags.  There are so many social democratic parties with different flags that no one else with a different idea can get a look in. So my ability to choice between liberty or the environment, between state-funding or co-operative action between economic growth or social growth is very limited.

So I hope independence will give us an opportunity for a more democratic, more diverse, more lively politics.

£500 an year and democracy. Put me down as a Yes.