The other side of the Lectern.

I was on it yesterday yu know.
I had to give a talk at a University,
Well I say talk, it was more just an introduction,
and I say University, it was actually Demonfort.
I was actually introducing one of the special guests they had for the cultural exchanges thing that's been going on all this week.
Big up Demontfort for this week, there's been some good people on, Lemn Sisay, Billy Brag,

They got me in cos this time their guest was my mate, JONZI D. so it made sense for me to big him up eh.

if you don't know Jonzi then click his big name up there and have a look.
He's basically one of hiphop theatre's pioneers. Hiphop theatre is basically theatre made in the audio/visual language of hiphop and it's elements. The hiphop elements are basically rapping, breaking, djing, graffiti and beatbox. so that's basically it.
Basically

see I worked with Jonzi since 2006 and we've spent a lot of time talking about hiphop as a language so if yu want I can get less basic.
in fact that shit gets as deep as time travel.
Right I ain't telling yu bout Jonzi's talk cos he does um all over the place so catch it yu self. Trust me though it's worth a listen.

here's my role in the day as a list of actions and observations.

Enter building,

follow signs to hospitality suit,

sit watching excited faces talking through smiles at nodding Jonzi,

watch Jonzi process information before spilling answers into hungry ears,

hungry myself now,

ask about buffet and smile as am pointed in it's direction,

sandwiches spread thinly over mostly empty table, run my fingers through them,

fillings unfamiliar,

put tea bag in cup,

fill cup with hot coffee,

realise mistake and back away from table empty handed,

they're calling me now,

follow people down stairs and into room,

more excited faces pregnant with promise and anticipation, naive vestals ready to be filled from Jonzi's fountain of hiphopology,

2 o'clock now I stand at lectern,

recant story of our first meeting

Jonzi smiles, story finishes,

We awkwardly embrace,

I sit, writing this,

Jonzi finishes speaking people leave,

we leave to.

Tell yu what yeah,

Have you ever had one of them really busy days? 

I'm talking about the 12 hours of workshops in 2 different cities, 

50 cups of coffee and a pack and a half of bacco, 90 miles on road kind of days. 

Well yu know ain't nothing more refreshing at 

the end of one of these kind of days than 

half a bag of mixed cans.

Costs £3.50/£3.60 

(depending on whether they're 50p or 60p) 

and yu get half a bakers dozen (6/7)

Drink 'em wi'yu cheese-on/beans-on eh.

Birthday Suit.

It was my Birthday t'other week.

Below is a picture of my favorite Birthday Present.

Nuff said.

Thanks Nat x

You know me so well.

I'm retracting that retraction

Right yu know the whole thing about the me not making it to the radio and it all being my fault?

Well Fuck that shit.

I ain't in the wrong on this one.

It all comes down to this woman.

Jen Roberts

Look if your a poet/musician/comic then heed the name cos I reckon this woman is out to rip you off.

This is the woman who runs the 2-bit piece of shit radio station that don't fucking exist and if it does don't get any fucking listeners 'sept for folks tuning in to be disappointed that I ain't onit.

Well last night I done a gig for her again. (I know, I must have dickhead written on my forehead).

But seeing as how I've not performed both the last 2 times I was supposed to be in London I figured this time I had to do it. Either that or get a reputation. 

Anyway the gig its self was at the Library on Upper Street. Crazy thing for me is that this venue is on the corner of my Auntie and Uncles street. Small World eh. I didn't ring 'um cos I figured they'd of seen the flyers etc what with it being like 45 seconds from their front door.

So I've arrived met this woman and sat down to write a set list. To be honest there were maybe 25-30 people in the venue and probably about 40% of them were there for the event. The rest, as far as I could tell looked like they'd come out because they like having poetry in the background as they talk really loudly about how cultured they are. Dicks.

I'd talked my mate Steve into filming my performance and had decided to do the whole set as a homage to Bernie Mac. 

"Straight off the bat, I ain't scared of you mother fuckers"

Turns out that's not what they wanted. In a moment of panic I tried to fall back on some A material (a joke about wanking off midgets), but again not what they were looking for.

Here's a video so you can see how much they weren't into it. Note the amount of other people talking over me eh.

I'd managed to win a few people round by the end but generally they weren't into what I was doing. Still I only had to do fifteen minutes and Steve enjoyed it.

Sound of Rum were also performing on the bill and that's about 80% of why I agreed to do the gig. After the gig I was chatting to Kate Tempest (S.O.R) and it turns out neither one of us could remember making any arrangement about money. (I know, Dickheads init.)

Well i approached this Jen Roberts woman putting on my best gentleman's goloss all like 

"hi Jen I can't remember if we made an arrangement about money, am I invoicing you?"

She comes like "No we didn't make an arrangement about money and I've only just broken even so I'm afraid I can't give you anything."

I'm like, "sorry what do you mean?"

She's like "You should have made an arrangement about money before you came because we didn't make any money. what do you want me to do? pay you out of my own bank account?"

I'm like, "yeah you could at least cover my petrol that way I don't have to pay money out of My bank account for your night." 

She's like, "Well I didn't even know you were coming from Leicester."

I'm like "Yeah maybe on Tuesday but after the message you sent me regarding my blog and driving home etc,"

She's like, "Well you can't expect to get paid for gigs if your not, yu know, right up there. This is good promo for you."

I'm like "How's UK Slam Champion for right up there? How's 4 star reviews in the Sunday Telegraph? that up there is it? To be honest Luv I probably didn't need to drive all this way to promote my self to 25 people who are more concerned about being seen here than they are about listening to the acts, also I have family that live on this street and they usually travel all across London to watch me and my brother perform, If they're not here that's down to your promotion."

It was part way through this sentence that she just turned her back and started walking off and it was at that exact moment that I switched.

I'm like, "Oi, Oi, OI. Don't be just walking away from me mid fucking sentence"

But she did.

went and hid in the toilets for like half an hour. I waited in the bar and eventually she came out and went over to the bar manager. I watched her talk to him. I saw him take money from the till and give it to her. Then she walked over to me and Kate and she's all like "The Bar Man will give you both petrol money and I'll sort it out with him next month, I hope you're happy." Then she scuttled off no doubt to try and find her next mark.

Well anyway we waited about till like 1 in the fucking morning. (I was on at 8.45) 

Eventually when we are the only people left the bar manager comes over and asks us 

"What are you still waiting for?"

I explain what This woman said to me and he's like "No, I gave her the money for you from the till."

I went off a little bit but it weren't this geezers fault. Eventually he gave me and The Rums £15 each but that was only because he knew that if he didn't I wasn't leaving.

Brass Tacks.

If you're a poet, and a woman called Jen Roberts tries to book you for an event called behind the mic, then do us a favor.

 Agree to do the gig and on the day don't show up. If you do this I'll give you £10. 

Trust me that's £10 more than you'll get out of Blood-Stone Roberts

and Jen if you're reading this and I hope to fuck that you are then I'd like to take this opportunity to tell you to go fuck yu self you pretentious vacuum of shit. Oh and fuck your piece of shit nobody's-ever-heard-of radio show an all. That's what I think.

This is not a retraction

In regards to my blog about the radio last night.

My second cousin half removed Tom has pointed out that I should have just called the lady runing the show.

He's right. The whole thing was completely my fault.

Sorry.

War Magazine

That's an article about Pillers in the first issue of the relaunched 

War Magazine.

Here's a review I've sent them for the next issue.

See if they print it eh.

The Man in The Mirror

By John Berkavitch

Have you heard the expression Turkish Cousins? 

It’s when instead of actually touching each other, 

a man and woman just watch each other masturbate.

 

See I was keen to try it and I'd heard about this technique 

for stand-up-show-wanking, (wanking for an audience). 

In the absence of any woman willing to consent to my experiment 

I used a mirror, but the basic principals are the same. 

Here’s the theory. I stand naked with my left side facing the mirror 

and grip my erect penis with my right hand. Holding the hand in place, 

I thrust with my hips simulating the action of sex. 

Basically fucking the hand.

That’s the pretence. The reality of it was very unsatisfying. 

It was a lot more tiring and time consuming than your standard wank 

and eventually I just gave in and finished off as usual. 

I also found the mirror very distracting. Looking at myself really 

brought home the reality of what I was doing and inspired feelings of 

disappointment, guilt and shame. So in that respect a lot like actual sex. 

I’ve been trying to put the whole thing behind me 

but still can’t make eye-contact with my reflection. 

Next month I plan to give myself a stranger. 

Long Drive to nothing

Yo,
Sposed to have a gig on't' Radio in London yesterday.
Yeah I drove down.
South London so 2 hours drive from Leggy.
The address I had was number 144.
I got to the building numbers 140-148, I rang all the buzzers and waited


I continued to ring buzzers every couple of minutes for about half an hour then decided to drive home.

Yeah 2 hours back an all.

Turns out I was knocking on the wrong door, idiot.
The woman who runs it said I should have come to the side door.

I didn't know that till today.

Look, the long and short of it is that for a wile some people close to me have been calling me "No-Show-Berko" cos I tend to not show up to social somethings.

I'm not sure if I'm completely to blame this time, but I am pretty sure that as far as the radio listeners were concerned I was a No-Show. 

So now my side of it's out there eh, .

Self portrait

I've been doing quite a few of these.

Get in the Van.

Yo, picked up some hitch hikers yesterday.

I took them from Junction 23a all the way to Junction 21 of the M1.

They were doing it for Charity trying to get to Berlin. They'd come  from St Andrews in Scotland. Yeah the school where the princes go/went.

I said to the geeza, "you don't look like the stereotypical Hitchers."

He's like "What do you mean?"

I's like "Well you don't look like some potentially psychopathic murderer with a thick beard and a red-neck hair cut that hangs about on motorways looking for strangers to murder."

He looked at me then looked away and was silent for a bit 

Smoking and Wanking.

Remember back in the good old days of 2004 when they changed the law regarding the classification of Cannabis?
Downgrading it from Class B to C.
Well they've decided it's going back up.
B again.
Plus apparently now if you get caught with it in your possession then it's an instant £80 spot fine and potentially 5 years in jail.

My experience with weed tells me that 

if someone's got green on them, plus they've got £80 in cash. Then they're probably selling eighths. 

Also none of the information I've been reading about this says anything about how much is considered to be, "for personal use" and the decision to fine/charge you comes down to the individual officer involved. 

So basically the police can operate at their own discretion. 

Which means that all it takes is for some jumped up little oike with a can of CS gas and a chip on his shoulder to come at you on some power trip and out of nowhere your up on a 5 stretch for smoking twos on a spliff.

Bullshit.

The other law that's changed or changing recently is about porn.

It's now illegal to own/view porn that is considered to be of a violent or aggressive nature.

To be honest if you where going to think up a statement like that then you probably haven't watched any porn since the 70's.

All porn is aggressive.

In fact I'll tell you what porn isn't aggressive.

Shit porn.

I mean where does it stop?

 What about if the dudes like "Take it you bitch" That's quite aggressive. 

Or if he's got his hand round her throat for a bit of sexy pseudo-strangling? 

Or what about just smacking the girl's ass while he rocks it from the back?

What about that eh? And again as far as I can tell this law is only about watching it. 

Actually doing it seems to still be allowed, provided everyone involved knows what's going on and safe-words have been established.

But yeah I was just a bit surprised to hear that if

If I want to smoke a little reefer while I'm watching a bit of fuck-fighting then I'm potentially looking at an 8 year bid. 

It's almost enough to make me take the satsuma out of my mouth, put the bong down and turn the web-cam off.

Telly

Right, New year New Telly.

As we approach February and 2009 is starting to lose it's shiny edges. you're probably having a cheap weekend as you wait for the no doubt anti-climatic arrival of next weeks long awaited first pay day of the year.

Good news for staying in though.

After months of wait it's finally here.

LOST SEASON 5 

If you haven't seen it yet then I ain't going to ruin it for yu. To be honest whatever I said probably wouldn't make any sense even after you've seen it.

In fact my mate Eddy is offering £200 to anyone who can come up with a way of ending the whole thing with out it seeming really disappointing.

See we've been trying to scrape some sense of what's-going-on since episode 1 season 1 and to be honest I do better than most at this but am still way off figuring out where it's going. 

Right I will give you this and it's not a spoiler cos it's been all over the net for months. 

Time Travel.

Yeah exciting init. 

But you probably could have guessed that by the fact that Marty McFly's one of the main ones this season. 

It's not actually Marty it's his cousin Daniel Faraday-McFly Jr. Him and Doc Desmond Brown are gunna either arrive at a reasonable conclusion to four seasons worth of unanswered questions or bring about the instantaneous end of reality. As Lost is planned to finish with season 6, that means they've only got 44 episodes to do it in. I personally believe that the last episode is going to start with Jack waking up and realising it was all a dream.

If you want to down load the first two episodes of season 5 then here yu go.

Lost S5E01  Lost S5E02

Heroes is back on Feb 2nd

Now a lot of folks that I've spoken to seem to be getting a bit frustrated with Heroes an all.

In my mind the second half of this season is set to be the most exciting yet. 

The government's after them all.

Peter's got his powers back

Silar's still reppin hard

SPOILER(apparently one of the main ones dies)

Plus due to the fact that the whole season is 23 episodes and the first 13 were fairly light on special effects I'm under the impression that the post production budget for the second half of Season3 should be pretty high. Hopefully translating into more CGI violence.

The frustrating thing for me about Heroes is that I've been banned from posting on the online forum. 

The reason for this is a 17 year old administrator called Darth Carp. 

He's a bitch.

Basically he ruined season 2 of Dextor for me by posting a spoiler in a heroes thread. I called him a dickhead in my reply to him and he deleated my post. I posted again including the signing off line 

"If you deleate this post you are a bitch."

He deleated it again so I took it upon my self to reply to every post he had on the sight with the comment "You're a bitch." By the end of the second day of this, the site administrator sent me a message saying that if I posted again he would block my i.p address from accessing the site.

If you fancy telling Darth Carp he's a bitch then his name is a link to his Forum-Profile.

Also Flight of the Conchords is back for a second series episode 2's on Sunday.
Here's a link to the first episode of the new season

and a video from the first ever episode.

Supposed to have a gig last night..
Supporting Kat Vipers for the launch of her album.
Didn't go according to though.


I'm not completely sure what happened but I know the end result was that the drummer +drum kit was unable to get to the venue in time for the doors opening so the venue decided to pull the night. It wasn't anybody's fault but I did feel bad for Kat because I know she put a lot of work in.

I dunno if yu can see in the photos but on stage there was a full size harp, a whole load of percussion, 2 double basses, keyboards and a myriad of other instruments.

 

It was a sad moment when they turned the lights on and everybody realized that it wasn't going to happen.

Still it was also Kyle's Birthday and him and Jon had come down with me so we went out with a few of our London mates and hung around Brick Lane for a bit.

We met these 2. Our new mates.

These two look and speak like Guy Ritchie created them as a bit of comic relief.

I imagine that at the end of the film they'd be the ones walking off with the money after a series of amusing and almost implausible coincidences. 

Proper pair of chancers

Plym off

Yu know the last Lord of the Rings Film?

Yu know how it feels like it's reached the end and then it goes on for about half as long again.

Well thats what it's like going to Plymouth from Leggy.

Seriously long yu get me.

and Bristol is like that fake ending 'cos it's still another 2 hours to the Moff

I've been here befor so I sort off knew what to expect.
They've done a bit of remodeling though.

Check that out for a dynamic juxtaposition of the old and new.

Anyway I was working in a school doing poetry init.

Then there was a gig in the evening organized through the same people.

Thing is I didn't realize is it'd be in the school.

Thankfully I wasn't alone in my awkwardness.

I had a friend.

 Byron Vincent. 

If you don't know his name then check him out.

I personally believe that neither one of us is really suitable for a performance in a school.

But they give us free wine so that took the edge off. 

But it sort off fucked up the self editing 

I'm sure that I said a few things that were pretty far from suitable

I went and chilled with my old mate Lacey after drank some Red Wine then went back to my hotel

I was supposed to go home today but instead I stayed on so I could go breaking in the evening with my mates Mike and Ricky.

I'd had a little bit of time off dancing since finishing Tag last year but I've been back on it since November and I'm almost ready to start posting videos.

Anyway I managed to find something to do with the rest of my day.

I went for a photo-shoot.

Thanks to Tim Cresswell

Clash and Clash Photography for the hook up

The studio space was dope and we made this funny thing to tunnel the light.

Here's some of the pics

that's the action shot

Blue Steel

Stick um up

Check out this billboard down near my house.

That's last night                                 

This is this morning.

Good init. It's nothing to do with me.

They asked me if I wanted to go help them do it but I didn't go.

People I want to punch

Have you seen that program on E4 called Rude-Tube. 

It used to have Alex Zane presenting it.
Well I sin it t'other day and it's got a new presenter.

I tell yu what though I have never wanted to punch a stranger in the face as much as I want to punch this guy.

Almost as bad as him but not quite is the new host of Big Brothers Big Mouth.

You're number 2 mate.

New year.

So it's a new year then.

2009

Year of the ox.

Only 3 years left till the end of the world

If I were you I'd start accruing some debt cos there's no point in saving

My plan for this year is to sort my life out a bit

I'm gunna start actually looking for work rather than just waiting for it to rock up.

I also plan to try and be a little bit more serious in my approach to a lot of things.

That's why I've not been on here for a week or so.

Because I've been being really serious about my self.

Seriously.

So anyone who's got a job offer can get hold of me via

myspace facebook or by email johnberkavitch@yahoo.co.uk

Right that's bout all I wanted to say.

I've recently realised that I must have at least 8 or 9 regular readers so hello to you.

Feel free to send me topic suggestions or things to review.

I'll try and keep it interesting.