Cyberclogs

Well tonight I witnessed something rather interesting in that we went and saw our current acting tutor's play, Utopia, which he directed and made the concept for, which involved acting students who had done acting units 1,2,3 and 4. And the play was actually not bad and the actors, whom this was their first public appearance ever, did exceptionally well, they seemed very relaxed and in the moment and didn't make any mistakes at all with their delivery. Its amazing to think that they were just a bunch of acting class beginners like us just a year ago and they went on did a play in front of an audience, it was very impressive. I guess it shows that if you put in the work and effort you can do it. The actors as I said were all pretty impressive, I must admit it looked good also to see actors and actress be on stage and get a snog out of the evening, there should be more of that in our classes!!

Ah well, because of the play we didn't get a class this week, so our third acting 3 class will be next Thursday, so it'll be interesting to see what we will do next. From what I understand we will be covering some Romeo and Juliet, which is naturally one of the more confounding Shakespeare plays as you have to learn all that thi, tho, therefore where art tho, bla bla dialogue (well the bla bla stuff doesn't come into it). Should be interesting, so we'll see how the rest of Acting 3 shapes up, and maybe one day we might get to appear in a play.

Finally after nearly a 4 month hiatus I went back to my acting class, Art of Acting 3, and it was pretty much as good fun as the ones in the past. Our new tutor, Ian McAleese seems like a decent enough chap (although my fellow acting bud, Scott, told me he lacked decent body hygiene!) and will lead us through the next 8 weeks. The first class tonight was a good little intro and breaker in, with some usual warm up exercises, which are always fun, it was good to return to walking round the room really fast and changing direction (believe its more fun than it sounds).

Tonight we also did some improvisation which was a good laugh, as we got into pairs and did some scenarios which Ian gave us to work on, mine involved me and Alan (from my acting 1 and 2) pretending to be a couple, and I was pissed from a party and came home late and had to pretend not to be very drunk, which I admit I didn't do too well, but it was a great laugh still. Other improvs that were fun included two new girls in our class one of whom was terrified to do a parachute jump and the other convincing her to do it. Scott also did a very good patronizing manager of a singer who wanted to do different songs for her act.

So hopefully Acting 3 will turn out to be just as good fun as the previous ones, another bonus is the class is smaller than the previous ones as only 12 of us showed up, so it relieves the pressure a bit when it comes to performance. Ian also seems to be quite a level headed tutor, we heard he doesn't mince words of hold back on critique, but so far he seems fine, perhaps his true colours might come out but so far, he seems pretty good as a tutor. Anyway it was a good first night, cue part 2.

So, I'm finally getting round to writing about the momentous and rare occasion when one of the world's biggest touring bands came to town (no, not REO Speedwagon), Rush, who played at the SECC on Wednesday there, and well, they were terrific as usual.

With their new album Snakes and Arrows out Rush came to Glasgow and put on a great show, starting off with Limelight, they ploughed through as much of their prolific repotoire as they could manage in the space of 3 hours. There were some songs they played which believe it or not I didn't actually recognise (the second one in fact, what the hell was it?!). But the highlights were plenty, which for me included Tom Sawyer (which had a funny South Park intro video to it), Dreamline with its terrific green light show, XYZ the finisher of the night, but the main highlight for me was Natural Science (off of Permenant Waves) which was terrific and one of their best songs from the early 80s period. Also I can't go without mentioning Neil Peart's terrific drum solo, which involved using an electronic drum kit aswell, which sounded like something out of an 80s video game!

Rush as usual displayed their quirky Canadian sense of humour throughout the show with their funny backscreen projection videos, not to mention the one at the start which saw Geddy Lee dress up as a Scotsman, affecting the best Scottish accent from a Canadian since Mike Myers (ok slight sarcasm there). The only slight criticism I could speak of is probably the price of the tickets, at 45 quid, they were very steep, no matter how good Rush were it is a bit exorbitant. But Rush put on one hell of a good show and they don't come here often enough and I look forward to when they do again.