New iNCD Website
Doing some work for mum, re-thinking and mega simplifying her website. I also want to try and make it very simple for the Twitter generation. So far we created a great landing page video for introducing NCD.
Stand-up Comedy Course
So the weird thing is I have actually written and delivered a course on stand-up comedy for drag queens and I use stand up for when I am doing drag. So why am I doing a course on it? Well, this really was my opportunity to check for gaps in my knowledge. I figure if someone is well received on Udemy for delivering a course then it must have some good content and I can use that to add any little extras to my stand-up course.
Once again… this is a notes dump. This will not contain all the content and it’s easier to listen to than to read. Also my notes will be full of my own experience and flavour and perhaps missing some important parts that didn’t seem relevant to me at the time. So if you want to know about comedy get onto Udemy. Order this course.
https://www.udemy.com/course/stand-up-comedy-mastery-writing/
So in the course they try to tell he person to be themselves. I think I said this before. I have a whole section on getting permission (from the audience) to be funny. A huge part of that is being authentic. But that’s not the limit of it. There’s a whole part about alpha – beta relations. Often a joke teller is assuming the role of alpha in the relationship and the audience is assuming the role of beta so there is a consent that is required. Often in the UK when a person is forced into a beta role they will be to polite to actually say anything, but they are uncomfortable and the longer the performance goes on the worse it is going to be received.
Different levels of energy
There’s different levels of energy in comedians. Compare Robin Williams to Jack Dee.
The key thing is to structure your material around your personality. If you are low energy like Jack Dee who often has low energy his comedy meets that by being grumpy.
Content
Be different. Stick out from other performers / comedians. Also if an audience is used to one type of joke or another switch into a very different format.
The course focuses on being the most authentic version of yourself… I’m a little bit nervous of this because the average person just isn’t THAT funny. So if we be ourselves then we’re not going to be that funny. I think we all have things we can work on to help us with our stage presence, charisma. (I personally quite like Charisma on command, a YouTube channel that looks at things people do and the effect their actions have on other people. It’s worth a listen. ) But the more we apply things like this… the further we get from our natural selves and I genuinely argue that’s good for comedy at times.
I guess we move the frame of authenticity a bit because when you learn something that works it becomes a part of you. You tell a certain joke and people laugh… dopamine hit. Do it again with another group of people, they laugh and dopamine hit. You end up retraining your brain and your personality authentically changes you become more prone to tell jokes like that. Have you ever heard of phantom phone vibration? It’s the same thing. So I guess you can maintain authenticity while still doing something different. But remember that an audience paid for a performance. So they are in a way permitting that to happen.
Most young boys will perform throughout their adolescence looking for where their performance gets accepted. This is how they establish a social hierarchy and alpha male. Testing to see what they can do. Testing to see if their flirting is accepted by the female. It’s like watching discovery channel. We can perform with people, but be clear about, what we are doing. Switch it on and off again. “I was approaching her like this… Hey baby.” She was all “tee hee.” You can have the audience recognise that it is an act and accept it as that.
How long does it take to write material
Sometimes you just need to sit down and plough though it. This does work for me, but it can be frustrating. I make a few jokes you just need to find a few lines to string them together.
Supposedly the average comedian will write around 5 minutes of comedy per month. Do you want to know more? Buy this course:
https://www.udemy.com/course/stand-up-comedy-mastery-writing/
I’m not paid to advertise…. I just hope that if a large chunk of the course is written here on this page they won’t sue me if I keep linking to their course… remember reading it is boring…. when you pay for this then you got it read to you. It’s as effortless as a baba having story-time. Far less work involved. Nearly all of this material is available somewhere on the internet, probably in more depth too, but this is a chance to have it read to you in a timely format with as little effort as watching some TV.
The course talks about trying material out, with an audience. The audience is going to give you the key thing you need. Feedback. Sometimes a joke is too inappropriate for an audience to let you get away with it. This again is related to my previous comment of permission to be funny. Sometimes you will need to edit it to put the punch line on the end. Sometimes it works well, but you might still want to try somethings to improve it. Don’t worry about trying to write material in less time try to get material perfected in less cycles, but never stop improving it.
Improving
Often a comedian goes through stages. They begin with real inconsistency and over time this becomes a more consistent personality. Eventually you can begin to just refine it.
When you have 3-5 minutes of consistent material then ideally you want to make it fit more and more with your personality. I spoke about this at length within the getting permission section of my talk. Having a character, refining the character writing the jokes around that character. I guess I was in a hurry to the end point. The speaking in this course homes in on what point that I didn’t think of, which was that when your jokes match your character they’re more likely to remember your character. I like to think of Tanyalee Davies. When you see her, you can’t help but notice that she’s a little person. Anyone that pretends they can’t see it, is just so scared of being considered prejudiced that they actually end up acting more prejudiced than other people because they can’t bare to acknowledge it. Since she then performs a full routine where at least 25% of the jokes are immediately related to her stature. They relate it to something very visibly undivorceable from people’s first experience of her. The end result. They don’t just remember the joke they also remember her!
Don’t be afraid to bomb. It’s like soldiers. There’s often a point in the battle where you have to accept your losses. “We are going to die… but we will at least take out as many of those enemy soldiers as possible before we do!” The same works for comedy. Except, less killing; more slaying. You are going to bomb. It’s going to happen. Sometimes it will be the way a night will go. Now you’re on this path, that’s done. It’s happened. The wheels have been set in motion. The best thing for you to do is to just go “I’m dying on stage again tonight… what can I learn from this?” You can even tell the audience that. It makes you authentic.
How much material do I need?
Okay so this section of the course is very different from what I am going to be doing. Because I am using drag as the medium of entertainment rather than stand-up alone, the amount of prepared material is very different. The course talks about having something potentially as short as a 2 minutes slot in a show. This is very possible for stand-up, but doesn’t work for drag. Often drag queens when they’re first starting out will prepare a a lip-sync as their first performance, which could be anything from 3-4 minutes long. If they’re good with a microphone they might talk a bit before the song and a bit after the song to work with the audience making a piece as long as 7-10 minutes, this might be after a few lip-syncs. Often Drag competitions in the UK, for example Drag Idol, you will have a 10 minute slot to fill and you need to be careful because you can be penalised for going over.
In the course he talks about open mics. You sometimes get them as drag events, but rarely. They are a great chance to get your drag out there and better known. What’s more common is where a Drag Queen who has a good social media following groups together a load of queens who all fill a 5-10 min slot and share a bit of the income. This is the equivalent of what the course calls a Showcase show where you still have a very short spot, but you’ve been invited and picked to join in or an opening act. You are unlikely to get more than 15 mins in a drag show where you are not the host so you need to book your own shows for that.
If people book you for birthdays / hen-dos, this is your chance to try longer material. You’re good to go for 30 mins to an hour, but remember most people did not come for you. They came for the birthday boy/girl. So you should focus on variety and make it all about the special guy/girl. If you show up just doing an hour set, then you might have some unhappy customers who didn’t care to see you. If you mix together 3-5 mins segments of stand-up with songs and games then you end up having a better show. If people don’t like the stand-up it will be over in 3 mins and back to a song, if they’re not a fan of the games then they get a chance to cheer on the birthday boy or the bride or whatever. It works really well to have a good mix of stand up, music and other things. I actually really like delivering my set on a tour bus going around London because the buildings that you see provide talking points. “See that chuch? It was originally built around 1050. That’s even older than Angela Lansbury. Now since we are outside Parliament I’ve got a song for Boris, hit play my darling!”
Just a side note. If you’re reading this to see what’s in the Udemy course … don’t bother. I’m not going to successfully include everything in the Udemy course. I’m just dumping notes of my take from it, so they have somewhere to go; I’m not bothering to make this readable or communicative. You’re going to find it hard work to read through. Why bother to read when for a low low price you can learn it through videos??? As should be clear from the paragraph above, my focus isn’t even just stand-up. So just go to Udemy.com or follow the link below.
https://www.udemy.com/course/stand-up-comedy-mastery-writing/
What I took from Joan Rivers’ Enter Talking?
So aside from doing the course I also read a lot from authors and one book from Joan Rivers which was an early biography leading up to her breakthrough. I learned about her “hook”, a short phrase to grab attention. Which for her was “can we talk?”. I thought about some of my own potential expression “just between us…”, “ssssh don’t tell her but…”, “let’s be honest”, “I don’t want to be mean but…”, “we’re friends now, I can be honest with you…”. As I watch comedians I’m going to look out for hook lines from now one see what things I notice. I like the expression which are very open because you can repeat them over and over again.
Typical hooks
- In the middle of a story… “suddenly”
- “Let me honest with you…”
- “You want to know how I made the biggest mistake of my life”
- “how many of you have”
- “I’ll tell you one thing.”
- “I’ve been married X years and …”
- “I said to my friend, you know what?”
Joan has to distinguish between high comedy and low comedy and sniff out what’s working with an audience. If somethings not working with an audience she quickly changes subject or reacts to the audience not liking it. “Oh look we lost the gays now …. Insult Elizabeth Taylor and we lose the gays.”
For the most part, I took from her that I just need to get out there and keep working until I make a breakthrough. That’s easier said than done when you’re a drag queen who takes 2 hours to get make-up on. But it’s worth giving it a try.
Singing Course
So anyone that knows me. I sing… a lot. But my singing is mostly average. I find I often get moisture in the lungs, probably from being overweight and the impact this has on the heart. So I have to deal with a few issues. I hope to use this article to record my work as I go and keep me aware of whatever the last thing I was doing when I come back to the course. I find blogging helps me keep focused somehow and I like to be open with people about myself so I might as well publish the results.
Why? What’s the Application?
For the most part I just love singing and I love self-improvement, so why not? But other than the odd bit of karaoke, why might I seek out a course like this? Anyone who has seen me in drag, knows I work singing into my entertainment so there is an immediate use of this course! My voice is pretty good for a voice that isn’t coached, but it really isn’t at its full potential. Luckily for drag you don’t need to have voice that is a dead ringer for Shirley Bassey. So it has worked a little bit, but no-one wants to hear someone who is shit.
My voice does need a lot of work. For a long time I have wanted to pay for vocal coaching, but I decided before I fork out a lot of money I would try and see what I can do with a reasonably cheap course first.
What Course?
I picked a rock singing course from Udemy because I am particularly interested in techniques such a vocal fry and shouts that are more common place in rock singing. Sadly so far the course doesn’t seem that great, but it at least gives me something to work on and investigate each time and comes with exercises so I will try to withhold judgement until the end, but for now I will not mention the name of the course.
Regular Practice
Once again this is another exercise that needs to be practised a lot. In fact the course has a section called train like an athlete. So I guess this would precede my training for 5k which in turn precedes any kungfu training.
Voice Range
I find it hard to identify my “Fach” or vocal range. There are 25 different fachs to compare to and I don’t know them all. Very often my range, which I estimate to be around G3-E6 undeveloped, allows me to cover quite a few of them including: Bass (using low techniques), Baritone (using low technique), Tenor (easy), and Soprano (using resonance). I can also hit most of contralto and contratenor, but the practice pushes me into head voice. Tenor seems to be the most comfortable for me.
Stretch the Voice
Techniques for lower voice. Working with your growl, fry and subharmonic register, according to this video. Having practiced these techniques I think I need to practise them regularly to smooth it out.
To go higher and still sing with power you need to use a belting technique. Often this can be achieved by using a resonance chamber behind the nose. Unfortunately the Youtube artist, Felicia Ricci has removed most of her videos from when she was teaching belting, but I was able to find this one below where she talks about using the resonance chamber.
When I was going through her videos there was one where she helped people find the voice by saying “Nya” in a whiney child voice. (If you listen and emulate the sound from this video of the most annoying sound in the world. Then you will feel where this sound occurs.) This sound causes a vibration behind the nose. If you then try to combine this with a voice that vibrates in the chest to get rid of the nasal quality then you can use it for loud and high pitched piercing notes.
Mixed Voice
The interesting part of doing singing courses is that you really need to learn the human anatomy that is involved so you can train each muscle in isolation to allow for better singing and use all the chambers inside the body to create a resonant sound.
What is a resonant sound?
In physics resonance is where identical waves begin to overlap creating a more powerful wave. For example bridges have a natural frequency they vibrate at. That vibration is a bit like a really fast swing moving backwards and forwards. Now if you always push a swing as it moves away from you, you get a greater and greater swing movement. In some cases with bridges the wind has had that affect of pushing the vibration in a similar way and just increasing the vibration over and over.
A similar affect is created when a glass which vibrates as a natural frequency has someone sing the frequency at it which increases the glasses vibration until it vibrates so much that it can no longer hold itself together.
In singing there are different sounds created by causing resonance to occur within different air chambers within the body. Chest voice is the sound of singing when resonance occurs within the chest. Head voice uses the huge nasal cavity to create resonance. Now these different places have a different range of notes they an produce known as a vocal register. I used to think falsetto was the same thing as head voice but it is actually more open and airy with less vocal chord vibration as a result. This is a vocal mode rather than a register because it is about which parts are used rather than the range achieved (other modes include vocal fry and whistle).
With a good amount of effort you can blend these different registers together so that you can move from one voice to another seamlessly to create a single overall range. To help this process it is often worth working on the mixed voice which is the point where you are using both nasal resonance and chest resonance at the same time. This allows for an easier cross over between different registers.
One of the major issues I am hitting is that for years I have always had a lot of mucus around larynx. I will need to see if regular irrigation of the ENT passages helps.
30th Jan – more to come
Basic Websites for Family
Spent a few days setting up some basic websites for some family of mine. So while my mum’s website suffers mostly under the hand of people who think they knew how to run a website changing and she desperately needs updating I’m avoiding the unsurmountable task of updating her NCD-UK website with no media to put on it.
I have also set up a basic WordPress for my cousin Sam to run his two sites Protrainer.uk and Next Door Works on and my sister’s coming soon beauty empire DDB Beauty.
Machu Picchu
Me and my best friend Charita are up for climbing Machu Picchu we have set our sights high and it’s quite a lofty goal to go along the Incan trail. We have never done anything like it before. In the mean time we are looking at climbing in the UK starting with Box Hill on 22nd March 2020 and Blencathra on 3rd April 2020.
I am a little over excited and can’t wait to climb Ben Nevis and Bein a’Chrulaiste before stopping by my plot in Glencoe woods.
Unfortunately the spread of the Coronavirus in 2020 prevented us from being able to work on this!
Dragged Around London: Christmas Charity Event
For the second year in a row, Dragged Around London has announced it’s Christmas Charity event.
This year the Drag Queens of Dragged Around London are holding it Upstairs at the Ritzy Cinema, Brixton.
I’m so proud of my girls and this mini-project!
Dragged Upstairs at the Ritzy | Drag Queen Show in Central London
Dragged Around London is Family
Probably not one of the best pictures of us, but an indication of the effect a group of people can make working together yet encouraging each others diversity. Together we brought attention to the Outside Project and raised awareness of them and frankly we will never stop doing that so long as they are continually supporting the community.
Dragged Around London Ticket system
So as you may have gathered Dragged Around London is a company that I helped form, of which, I own half. It has lots of potential to put on the books and we hope to have more and more tours and events coming up.
I hope to use the company to build my understanding of money, business and to give me a few hobbies in the mean time, but we have hit a huge snag! Our ticketing system Ticket Tailor is great, but only allows us to put a limited number of tours on the system. On the profit and loss analysis, it just doesn’t look like it is worth paying for the upgrade. In order for us to host more events we are left with few options. We are going to have to create a new ticketing system.
I have begun building the system in PHP! I thought I had forgotten this language having not touched it in a few years but it’s like riding a bike.
Interestingly I can now build using better structures so this should be more organised code.
I have begun building the Data Access Layer and the front end separately. The front end I want to put into our WordPress CMS so I am learning to use WordPress Custom Pages to build it. I need to work on the Data Access Layer and make sure everything is secure which with PHP is no easy task! Injection potential galore!
I didn’t think DAL would stand for two things at Dragged Around London. Can’t wait to get this finished and fill the books with events!
Piano
Also in the new year, I took up piano. I was able to race through my first grade 1 sight reading book from years ago with relative ease, but the more advanced exercising in the grade 2 sight reading book gave me trouble. I’m much further behind where I was as a 16-year-old kid, but it’s clearly like riding a bike stuff keeps coming back to me like I already know it. Even things I found difficult as a kid are easier now.
I was able to re-memorise all the major scales C, C#, D, D#, E, F, F#, G, G#, A, A# and B and I was able to spot the changes to make it a minor such as the 3rd, 6th and 7th notes of each scale were different. I reminded myself of all the chords including 2s and sus4s and finally re-learning Aug and Dim chords. I practiced the scales until they all flowed nicely.
I hope to get my sight reading to around grade 5 and also work on playing by ear. I have 2 sight reading books for grades 1-3 and one for grade 4. I have a couple of books of playing by ear to work from as well. I’m also printing off the occasional song when I want to practice it such as Beautiful by Christina Aguilera.
I hope one day when I have learned a full set perfectly from end to beginning I will be able to do a funny cabaret act through Dragged Around London as a beary man. This would give me a chance to make use of the deep parts of my voice which I can’t do in drag and maybe play some video games tunes.
Dragged Around London
So I did drag what seems like a long time ago… well more came of it than I ever planned. I am now the proud owner of Dragged Around London. A company that provides drag-queen-lead tours of London. Business is picking up faster than I expected and it’s hard to keep it as a part-time project in my spare time. This could be big, but I doubt it would be lucrative.
Check out the website draggedaroundlondon.com.
Drag Queen in the making
So we have been watching too much Ru Paul’s drag race and my ex partner decided to come up with a birthday idea that we dress up as drag queens and do lip syncing. Well if you know me, you would know I don’t lip sync; I sing!
Well the new drag queen “Widow Ivanna Hairietta Thistlethwaite” hit the stage to celebrate the passing of her imaginary rich husband. Sadly, results were not recorded, but a video was…
E-commerce venture
A new small shop in Glastonbury is looking to get online with E-commerce capability and I’m helping them. I’m very happy to use WordPress to give them access to their own Website to write what they like on the pages of their website and I’m going to use OSCommerce to provide the framework for the online shop.
They specialise in very specific products used mostly by Neo-Pagans and Thelemites in Britain as their market is very small and very specific having an online shop with methods of delivery will be very important to the working of their business.
Yale Old Testament course
I am currently working through an incredible course published online by Yale University. It appears to be mostly the efforts of Christine Hayes who demonstrates a vast understanding of the culture within which our western religions grew up and matured. She balances many different views concerning the origins of biblical texts and presents views that many religious zealots avoid. These views often seem potentially heretic or deviating from standardized Judaism and Christianity but they are views based more on archaeological discovery than most other forms of religious doctrine.
So far with this course I have discovered the incredible similarities between the paganism of the near east, its literature and the content of the bible. The incredible similarities between Akkadian gods such as Baal and El when considered next to the god of Abraham as represented in the bible appear to reveal much of the demonstration of monotheism for the pagan masses which was going on at the time.
We have even explored multiple source theory for the bible and I reviewed the possible difference between these sources and the doctrines upon which they are based. I am somewhat sceptical about the ability of scholars to distringuish completely between different sources where E sources use the name Jahweh and J sources use the name Elohim (which is contrary to their respective definitions).
This course is incredible in its content and I can’t believe it is available for free online. I wish I could afford to buy all the books for the accompanying reading for this course but I can’t afford the money or the time and yet have determined to spend a substantial amount of time working through the material as what I learn is reward enough for the efforts of this endeavour.
For anyone who is interested in this material, click here : http://oyc.yale.edu/religious-studies/rlst-145#overview
iNCD website
iNCD and NCD form a unique company in which my mum is on the board, so I am honoured to have the opportunity to work with them and humbled by their acceptance of my advice. I would not have had the opportunity to work in such a leading role on the marketing strategy of this company, if it wasn’t for my mum noticing my extensive knowledge of digital products and their use in the marketing process.
NCD provides churches and charities in the UK with a system designed to measure the enjoyment and loyalty of their customer bases and iNCD is a consultant team that provides methods of improving the growth rates following the research performed by NCD in to a company. NCD UK is one of the fast growing franchises of the NCD international movement and it is seeking my aid in providing digital marketing and IT services.
Recently we have used a CMS called WordPress to provide the iNCD team with control over their website. Many of the members of the team are consultants with expertise in church growth, but not in web technologies such as HTML and CSS. Providing these members with a website which can easily be modified was an important step in the marketing process. Following the implementation of this website a far greater number of people had access to the website and could update it.
Now we are looking to improve this website and give it a basis which represents the new way that most website express themselves these days with sliding images and changing screens. See www.foftravel.com for an example. We will be looking at how we can represent the two different bodies NCD-UK and iNCD in a similar way giving all employees access to the representation of these bodies and therefore an ability to strategic change the reputation of the company to better meet the customer’s needs.
See these websites for our progress: