Live Comedy at the Glee Club Oxford

Situated across the street from Upper Fisher Row and just a ten-minute walk from the Stanford House, The Glee Club Oxford is a charming venue for a night of live comedy. Tickets are £13 for adults, but at just £5 for students the Glee Club is hard to beat on a budget.

Though the performers were obviously the highlight of the show, the venue was a character in and of itself. The orange and yellow theme not only dictated the wall color, but the color of the seats, tables, and the front of stage as well. The large white letters spelling ‘glee’ at the front of the club were bathed in a warm, oozing yellow light that evoked a psychedelic lava lamp. The whole venue feels like a tongue-in-cheek 70s throwback, and encourages jokes and prods even before the comedy begins. The bartenders were friendly (and apologized profusely when they couldn’t get any pressure to the Amstel tap), as were the waitstaff.

Maff Brown was the first comedian onstage and served as our host throughout the night. The frizzy-haired comic had an easy way about him, joking at both the audience’s expense and at his own, though always more kind than malicious. His jokes were good but it was his delivery made him one of the standouts of the night; he was completely comfortable onstage, working in and out of jokes like a professional. As a host he was upbeat and lively, getting the audience warmed and riled up for each act that came after him.

The second comic, Dave Twentyman, is hard to have an opinion on. He was charming and endearing, but his Scottish accent was so thick that neither I nor my date could understand him. Granted, his last joke we did get (if only because it had to do with phalluses, and those are the kinds of jokes that are easiest to understand), but much of his humor was aimed at the local crowd and, as Americans, it went mostly over our heads. It went over well with the audience, which didn’t seem to have any problem understanding him, but unless you were a local most of his jokes were not applicable.

The third comic, however, was a revelation. Nick Helm’s brand of comedy was abrasive, fear inducing, crass, punchy, and gut splitting. He stormed on the stage and announced in his raspy, deep, self-deprecating, angry yell, “Good news! It’s me!” He then started berating a man he picked from the audience. “Do you like jokes?” he yelled, “Do you like jokes? Do you like jokes? Do you like jokes?” Everyone in the audience was roaring as the poor man finally said “Yes, I like jokes,” to which Helm responded, “Good! I’ve got six of the cunts!” It’s hard to describe the delicate mix between offensive, frightening and hilarious Helm managed to achieve. He angrily yelled a song that’s lyrics went, “I love you, you love me, we love each other, we’re family.” The disparity between what Helm was saying and how he was saying it was the source of his comedy—it was like watching someone occupy two personalities at once. Helm did not break character once, and at the end the audience was left wondering whether or not the depressed, angry man who just screamed at them for 20 minutes was the real Helm or not. Either way, his act broke through the barriers of the safe, storytelling comedy we are all familiar with, and created for Helm a space which he can wholly call his own.

Seann Walsh had the unfortunate task of following Helm’s act. He did an admirable job and was a good, if conventional, comic, but after having been brought to tears by Helm the audience did not respond nearly as well to Walsh’s familiar brand of comedy.

The Glee Club has locations in Birmingham, Cardiff, Nottingham and Oxford, and has live shows every Saturday night.

Ghost Forest - Global Preservation from an Artist’s Perspective

For my second art experience project at Oxford, I chose to see the Ghost Forest exhibition at Oxford’s Natural Science Museum. The Ghost Forest art project is a major art installation of 10 primary rainforest tree stumps which were brought to Europe from a commercially logged forest in Western Africa by artist Angela Palmer. The purpose of Palmer’s work is to call to attention the rapid rate of deforestation in today’s world and the rapid depletion of the world’s natural resources in general. The tree stumps in Palmer’s piece represent the rainforest trees of the world.

This work of art, which took up a substantial amount of space, was both original and effective. It is the first time that I have seen an artist use raw materials from nature, of such an enormous scale, to express her concern for the environment and make a powerful statement about the effects of human consumption on planet Earth’s resources and environment. First, the work maximized its use of space and relative size in an extremely effective, contrasting method. The tree stumps that Palmer chose are enormous in size, and when set on display in front of the museum they are stunning to the audience of this work. The viewers are reminded that these are only the stumps of the trees, only a glimmer of their prior glory and grandeur. This then prompts us to imagine what the rest of the tree looked like before it was cut down for commercial use. The trees are arranged in a circular layout. If we stand in the middle, we can imagine the trees upright, in their full splendor, and gradually, our imagination enables us to feel that we are in the middle of the rainforest in Western Africa. This is the purpose of bringing in several tree stumps and explains why Palmer chose this specific special arrangement when preparing this piece. Finally, a typical Wellingtonia tree, common and prevalent in the United Kingdom, continues to grow in the middle of the exhibition. The purpose of the Wellingtonia is to compare the size of the African trees with the size of a typical tree in the UK. In using this technique to illustrate the relative size of the dead tress to the living one, we realize just how enormous these trees are. To think that there was an entire forest filled with these trees, now gone only for the purpose of human consumption, is a powerful effect of Palmer’s art.

Another jarring observation that rises when viewing this piece is the idea of a living organism forcibly uprooted from its home and its source of life, Earth. The tree stumps that surround this living tree are uprooted from their homes, but the Wellingtonia remains rooted and connected to nature, its source of life. The Wellingtonia contrasts with the tree stumps, which heightens our awareness that these African trees are indeed dead. In the exhibit, we can see the tree’s roots. Once connected to the ground, they are now exposed in the air. The cause of their deaths is right in front of us. This is the purpose of the art – to place the issue of deforestation and natural preservation so close to us that we, the viewers, cannot possibly ignore the effects of the human race on the other living organisms and the environment on the whole. Bringing the tree stumps, from a sparsely populated region of Africa to a bustling, populated city area like Oxford does this very effectively. Overall, I thought that this art project was original, and though ambitious, it is effective and successful in its purpose and its message.

Blenheim Palace

It is only in retrospect that I realize we missed much of what our visit to Blenheim Palace had to offer. Blenheim was built in 1724, and is the only non-royal, non-episcopal country house in England to hold the title of palace. A UNESCO World Heritage Site, Blenheim Palace boasts a collection of award-winning gardens, a butterfly house, a giant hedge maze, 2,000 acres of beautiful countryside, and is the birthplace of Winston Churchill. All this, however, I only learned after having left Blenheim. It could have been the fact that we only had a limited time to explore, or that I simply did not pay close enough attention to the map, but there seemed to be little guidance for such an enormous estate.

Our attention was immediately caught by the miniature train taking guests to the Pleasure Gardens. The train, which stopped at the aptly named “Palace Station,” was an attractive and fitting addition to the Palace grounds. It traveled between the main entrance to the Palace through a small portion of the countryside, and dropped visitors off at what was known as the Pleasure Gardens. The train was a perhaps superfluous show of wealth, yet so too is entire estate, and it was on the whole charming.

If we had looked at the Blenheim Palace website (or indeed taken more careful heed of our maps) we would have known that the Pleasure Gardens was a place for “family fun” (quoted from www.blenheimpalace.com). Imagine our surprise when, having arrived at the “gardens,” we found a small patch of (albeit beautiful) hedges and a trellis. “I thought their gardens were supposed to be famous,” I remember saying to my companion, “Where are all the flowers?” Though the garden’s name was slightly misleading, the garden itself was still a visual feast. The butterfly house had an anteroom, which held large, transparent boxes filled with dozens of both cocooned and hatchling butterflies, leading to the main house. It was warm and humid to simulate the butterflies’ home environment—a pleasant surprise considering the relatively bleak English weather outside the house. The house was relatively small, but the plant life inside was well-maintained and had a variety of color. At first glance the house seemed void of its titular inhabitants, but with a sharp eye one could spot large, colorful, and exotic butterflies perched discreetly around the exhibit.

The main area of the Pleasure Gardens delivered on its stated purpose: to entertain a family. There were model houses recreating an 18th-century Woodstock (the town Blenheim calls home), a sun dial where your own shadow tells you the time, an oversized chess set, a playground, and an enormous hedge maze. The hedge maze was something to behold: hundreds and hundreds of yards of perfectly-manicured shrubs twisted in on themselves, playfully inviting the visitor to dead ends and false escape routes, but never being so sinister as to actually get him lost. An elevated structure in the middle of the maze afforded a stunning view of the pleasure gardens (see Heidi’s post for the panorama), and, I couldn’t help thinking, the perfect vantage point for parents to find their wandering children.


Though the Pleasure Gardens were great fun, it was a shame there wasn’t enough time to see the award-winning Italian- or Rose Gardens Blenheim is known for. This, however, ended up being not as much of a travesty as one might imagine, for the best part of our visit to Blenheim was to come at the end, and quite by accident. On our way out we decided to take one last look at the grounds, and in doing so discovered the Queen’s Pond. Though called a pond, it appeared more like a lake, and stretched far in both directions. Trees with lush green leaves lined the edges of the pond, and in the middle a small island looked like a scene from Narnia or Wonderland with its purple-leaved trees shooting into the air. Though it was obvious that the grounds were manicured, there was a natural, other-worldly beauty to them. This, it turns out, is a good way to summarize Blenheim Palace as a whole: though the estate has been designed down to the last rose petal, its beauty is both undeniable and enchanting.

Four Weddings and a Funeral: Love and Liturgy

Four Weddings and a Funeral is a romantic comedy about marriage, funerals, and true love. Hugh Grant (About a Boy; Love Actually) plays Charlie, an inveterate bachelor. Like the eponymous title, the film is four weddings (almost) and a funeral. The setting is in England. In the first wedding, Charlie is the best man. The highest decibel element of the film is its satire on ceremony. Charlie is running late to the wedding. He forgot to set an alarm. His morning ritual involves a series of expletives that is repeated throughout the day. Arriving at the chapel, a man asks Charlie if he remembered to bring the wedding ring, at least. Charlie pats his pocket, and opens his mouth in shock. No ring. Luckily, Charlie is bound to a group of friends who improvise for him, and continue to do so throughout the film. At this first wedding, Charlie meets Carrie, an attractive, daring, and confident American woman, played by Andie MacDowell (Groundhog Day; Short Cuts). Charlie spends the night with Carrie, and in the morning, is asked by Carrie if he will get engaged with her. As you can guess, while Charlie is handsome, educated, and charming he is somewhat scattered, even for a Brit, especially when it comes to rituals and commitments. Carrie leaves, and becomes engaged to an elder, stodgy, Scottish man. The audience, both young and old alike, are sure to cringe at a beautiful woman like Andie MacDowell passing up Hugh Grant for a plain, aged, and kilted politician.

The second wedding is hellish for Charlie, and serves to move the plot forward. There is a hilarious scene, with Rowan Atkinson (Mr. Bean) as a priest who is doing his first wedding ceremony ever. He screws up the bride and groom’s vows by asking them to repeat hilarious opposite gender names and says the trinity is, “Jesus Christ, our lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Goat.” Announced in fancy cursive on an envelope on Charlie’s bed is the marriage of Carrie and Hamish, the third wedding. Charlie bumps into Carrie while Carrie is shopping for a matrimonial dress. He does not tell her he loves her. At the wedding, one of Charlie’s friends has a heart attack. This friend of Charlie’s is the most eccentric of the group. He is the one who mocks ceremony with intricate and colorful vests while at the same time taking immense joy out of it. To Charlie and his friends, his death means an end for the group’s fanfare about marriage, and a return to being serious about such events. After his funeral, Charlie hardens his heart about ever finding true love, and wishes for marriage, before it’s too late for him.

Charlie is actually on time to his own wedding. Everything seems to be going smoothly, until Carrie shows up. Carrie tells Charlie that she separated from Hamish. For Charlie, his facade of propriety comes crashing down. He will not say, “I do,” to Helen, a woman who was a bittersweet ex of Charlie’s. Instead, his brother signals to him in sign language, because the brother is deaf, that the groom (Charlie) is having doubts and is in love with someone else. Charlie repeats it in front of the entire clergy and guests. Helen punches Charlie in the face, and that is the end of that.

The fourth wedding is Carrie and Charlie, soaked and drowning in a sporadic English rain. Carrie and Charlie seal their vow not to marry each other, for the rest of their lives, with a drenched kiss. While marriage was the spur to Carrie and Charlie’s relationship, ultimately, their love could stand no such imposition. Their love is all heart, and no obligation. It’s a kind of love we should all aspire to, rather than the one with white dresses, tiered cakes, flowers, and strings attached. It is an especially poignant message, coming from a country that still tries to keep medieval ritual, with Kings, Queens, Lords, and within universities. The theme that will stay with the audience, whether they are civilized Englishmen, uncultured Americans, or somewhere in between, is that we have these ceremonies, but some of them matter and some of them don’t.

Four Weddings? Think of the Crazy Hats!

“I think we both missed a great opportunity here,” states Carrie (Andie MacDowell) as she reluctantly departs for the United States after a one-night-stand with protagonist, Charlie (Hugh Grant). Despite an unexpectedly overwhelming success in the box office domestically and internationally, “missing a great opportunity” is the sentiment of Four Weddings and a Funeral. This 1994 British film includes clever and heart-felt moments, but ultimately fails to elevate itself above the ranks of so many other generic, cute-yet-forgettable romantic-comedies. While it uniquely addresses the loneliness, lust, excitement, uncertainty, and regret of love, the story concludes with a feel-good resolution and overtly cliché kiss in the rain. The envelope is pushed, but when the plot reaches its culmination, the moment where this movie could truly make a statement with an honest or even slightly unexpected conclusion, it fizzles out, trading substance for cheap emotion. However, if the goal was to create a film that produces consistent slight chuckles and a naively optimistic view of the world, then it is a smashing success.

The strongest aspect of Four Weddings and a Funeral is the well-developed characterization of Charlie and his close friends. Mike Newell and Richard Curtis, the respective director and writer, do a fantastic job creating distinct supporting characters without drawing too much time and attention away from Charlie. Each member of the group has his or her own unpleasant flaw, but the way they accept, support, and celebrate each other throughout the movie make the close friendships realistic and endearing. This creates opportunities for bizarre, comedic minor characters, like the sloppy speaking priest or the senile old man. Hugh Grant’s portrayal of Charlie, the well-intentioned bachelor prone to social mistakes, is commendable. He subtly, yet effectively wears his heart on his sleeve, allowing the viewer to truly feel his character’s nervousness, embarrassment, disappointment, and joy.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for Andie MacDowell starring opposite him as Carrie, Charlie’s American love interest. Her uncomfortable delivery of lines meant to reveal quick whit and strong emotion come off unconvincing and unnatural. This further accentuates certain areas of cheesy, poorly written dialogue. Carrie’s character lacks the charm and charisma of the other supporting characters. Coupled with her emotional flippancy toward Charlie, there is little appeal for Carrie in this film other than the anticipated happiness of Charlie.

The plot is not the strongest, often relying on major sporadic events to propel the characters from one emotional episode to another. The contemplative emotional low of the film is induced when Gareth, the lovable older friend, drops dead completely out of the blue. The possibility for resolution comes when Carrie conveniently shows up at Charlie’s wedding and announces she is again available. The film moves from wedding to wedding to wedding to funeral to wedding, lurching over large gaps of time in-between, making the death of Gareth and the reappearance of Carrie even more jarring. It feels as if the story grew stale and the writer had to inject a sudden immediate event in order to carry along the plot.

The film exhibited the renowned British quick, dry wit very well. Jokes and jabs at others’ expenses add to the charm of the close friendships and provide a majority of the comedy. The film is directed well, with moments of awkward pause and enjoyable body flailing for even more laughs. It cleverly places characters in humorous situations that require even more humorous solutions. Still, it touches upon major emotional undertones as it chronicles adults coming to terms with the difficulties of loneliness and the search for love. This film is a decent comedy and an above average friendship-comedy, but it falls short of being an exceptional or noteworthy romantic-comedy.

"On the Pleasure Train to Blenheim Palace": A Review on the Pleasure Gardens at Blenheim Palace

Located 30 minutes away (via bus) from Oxford in Woodstock sits Blenheim Palace, a monumental country house and a certified World Heritage site owned by the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough. Blenheim Palace is known and advertised to be the birthplace of Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Designed in the English Baroque style by Sir John Vanbraugh in the 1720s, Blenheim Palace stands today as a historical monument of past grandeur with its extensive garden grounds as an evident aesthetic strength. For the purpose of optimizing time and content, I purchased the £8 concession ticket that allowed access to all the public gardens and the railway.

The Blenheim Park Railway and the miniature locomotive, tenderly named Sir Winston Churchill, seemed like a peculiar, inorganic addition to the older, historic palace grounds. Established in 1975 as a tourist attraction, the jarring modern quality of the train instantaneously draws a visitor away from the preserved Baroque atmosphere of the palace and its grounds. If not distracted by the novelty of riding a miniature train, a visitor might be forced into the realization that this monument to English architecture and horticulturist splendor has been transformed into a Disney-esque tourist attraction. However, the 10-minute train ride does provide a panoramic view of the grounds, which is essential for a visit to Blenheim.

This strained, yet whimsical juxtaposition of old and new continued to pervade the visit to the Pleasure Gardens. The first thought when entering the Pleasure Gardens was a speculation on how the word "gardens" was defined by the modern architects and horticulturists who designed the blueprints for the Pleasure Gardens. As a recent addition to the Blenheim grounds, the Pleasure Gardens seem to have been designed as an amusement park of tourist attractions, a corner of temporary diversion and profitability for those who find trees and lakes rather "boring." In fact, an older woman approached me, sensing that I was a person with reasonable sensibility or observed that I owned a map of the grounds and asked if I knew where the "actual" gardens were. We both concluded that there were no "gardens" at the Pleasure Gardens.

The Pleasure Gardens is primarily composed of the Butterfly House and the Marlborough Maze. The Butterfly House is a temperature-controlled greenhouse containing butterflies and plants native to their environment. As an aesthetic piece, the Butterfly House is a deceptively plain and homely room containing a number of exotic plants with no butterflies in sight. However, the beauty of the Butterfly House only exists through the same lens and attention to detail as those who admire Pointillism. In Pointillism, the realization of its innovation lies within the moment of epiphany when the viewer realizes that the detailed painting is actually composed of irrelevant tiny dots that create lines and color when placed close together. At the Butterfly House, the art is in the symbiotic unity of plant and butterfly in a form that is so undetectably natural. If a viewer doesn't actively search for a butterfly, its detail in the greater art scheme goes unnoticed.


The Marlborough Maze applies the same concept of Pointillism to its beauty, but observed through the reverse effect. The beauty of this piece relies not on the detail, like the Butterfly House has, but on the panoramic aerial view of the maze. From the ground view, the Marlborough Maze appears less magnificent than advertised on Blenheim's website. However, upon entering the maze, it is made evident that the Marlborough Maze contains an intricacy and complexity in its pathways. This delayed gratification of awe emphasizes the value of the piece as more than just aesthetic or visual, but also as temporal. The aerial view of the maze displays the symmetrical design of the piece, which simplifies and complicates the experience of getting lost within the maze.

As I walked away from the Pleasure Garden after hours, the juxtaposition of the modern aesthetic and the ungroomed countryside seemed less like an imposition of mass-produced entertainment and more like the inevitable union of old and new artifacts in a changing world.

All photographs are copyrighted to Lucas Loredo.

'Ghost Trees' Transforms the City of Dreaming Spires

The lawn in front of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History stands out from the usual sights of Oxford’s stone academic landscape, though not just because the grass is open to the muddying tread of passers-by. The lawn is covered with the massive trunks of rainforest trees.

Oxford alumna Angela Palmer’s environmental art exhibition Ghost Forest, currently on display in front of the Oxford Museum of Natural History, consists of ten imposing tree trunks situated on irregularly oriented concrete platforms. Palmer calls the trunks ‘ambassadors’ for all rainforest trees facing the threat of deforestation. She deliberately selected trees from Ghana because of the country’s progressive laws towards the timber industry—only three of the tree trunks were felled by an axe; the others by natural means. In consequence, Ghost Trees offers a balanced message of dire warning and hope. True to their title as ‘ambassadors’, the trees have already had an impressive history of exposure through installations in London’s Trafalgar Square (November 2009) and Copenhagen (December 2009).

Now ten months into its twelve-month residency in Oxford, Ghost Trees seems to have grown roots in this community. On a sunny Monday afternoon tourists and local residents wander through the collection like a sculpture garden, taking photos or eating a late lunch in the shade of a six-foot tall root network. Despite the relaxed atmosphere, Palmer’s design reinforces that the exhibition is not a substitute for the community park. Polite signs remind visitors, and their children, that the tree trunks are not to be climbed on like jungle gyms. Informational plaques demand the respect for knowledge that one would more likely expect inside the Museum of Natural History than on its front lawn.

Overall, Ghost Trees evokes an atmosphere that is more like a cemetery than either a park or a museum. While the baroque coils of roots suggest life and energy, the dry and weathered texture of the wood affirms that every one of these magnificent trees is dead. The large rectangular plinths that the trunks rest on are distinctly monumental. Their haphazard orientation elaborates the cemetery metaphor, suggesting how deforestation constitutes a massacre that is both quick and indiscriminate. Through this lens the plaques for each tree read like obituaries—sober yet ‘humanizing’. Palmer endeavours to personalize each tree by focusing on the etymological origin of the species name, when possible. She also includes narrative anecdotes about the trials of transportation for particular trees. These ‘obituaries’ always end with a list of common cultural uses for that particular wood. Poetic coincidence or no, the wood from a surprising number of these trees is frequently used to build coffins.

Palmer’s exhibition runs the risk of being too straightforward. The aesthetics are largely conventional; the methods—put something on a pedestal and call it art—familiar. Ultimately the trees are transported, not transformed. The crowning glory of Ghost Trees is not its concept, as it is easily uprooted from London to Copenhagen, but rather the fortune that has ended up here, in Oxford. The organic, sculptural curves of the roots and bark stand in elegant contrast to the intricately-hewn masonry of museums, colleges, and libraries. Liberated roots reach towards the sky like a superior order of Oxford’s dreaming spires. The architecture of nature asserts itself over the architecture of humankind.

Instead of feeling overwhelmingly morbid or artistically pretentious, Ghost Trees feels right at home in a city where cryptic churches and moss-covered graveyards are casually integrated parts of history. However, this particular cemetery is not emblem of the past but rather the present and the future.