This week, Venue's SPOKESMEN have bee CHAINED to their desks, PUMPING UP a big piece about bikes. They're now WHEELY TYRED, so don't leave the newsagent SADDLED with all this week's copies for re-CYCLING. It's got:
BIKES - Latest reports from the cars vs. pedestrians vs cyclists battlefront, plus an update on Bristol's £23m Cycling City project and a look at the best two-wheeled fun round these parts.
CLASSICAL GAS - As loads of serious classical music events come to town, let our beginner's guide help you tell you Bach from your Beethoven and impress your friends with how culchered you is.
TEASE MADE - Another fine show by Bristol illustrators - dedicated to the Brits' lifelong love affair with tea-drinking - comes to the city's newest gallery space this month. Two sugars for us, please...
PLUS - Johnny Depp and Tim Burton on the gloriously psychedelic 'Alice in Wonderland' ... Mother's Day dining ... Eternal stoner Howard Marks ... Sex scientist Rosie Wilby ... Bath Lit Fest ... WIN! Circus of Horrors tickets! ... And loads more, including your complete ten-day local entertainment guide.
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Some sides of the Bristol cycling 'debate' from local websites
"The majority of the normal people of Bristol are hostile to this elitist, pious, graduate-led bunch of hypocritical eco loonies. The moral high ground is certainly not held by those who cycle two miles to work in the Council House or Create and then take their very frequent, extended and well-paid holiday entitlement trekking in the Hindu Kush or 'studying' the indigenous tribes of the rain forest and then kicking the cars of local pensioners who are collecting their weekly shopping." - Angus, Ashley Down
"How do we get through to you car potatoes that you're killing yourself with lack of exercise? As Dr Johnson said, 'those who cannot make time for exercise must make time for sickness'." - Arthur Nesbitt, Bristol
"If an alien landed in Bristol today, would he/she/it not find it strange to see such passion and anger around the issue of a choice between two non-conflicting modes of transport? Do we not have bigger fish to fry? Come on, people, stop being so petty and do something constructive." - Jamie Sangway, Bishopston, Bristol
- From the big cycling article in this week's Venue
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Classical for Beginners
Classical music is the 'love that dare not speak its name' - though 'dare' might be putting it way too strongly. The sold-out signs are less frequent these days when Welsh National Opera fetches up at Bristol Hippodrome, but unless there's something extremely challenging in rep, upwards of 8,000 people will still go with the operatic flow over a five-night run, and at St George's a recent Shostakovich string quartet cycle (hardly a crowd-pleaser) was pretty much returns-only once word got out.
Of course, the trouble for classical music is that the sort of word that usually 'gets out' is how feral teenagers have been dispersed from yet another shopping centre by a broadside of Beethoven, how Covent Garden is only for toffs and how you have to be born with marble ears, dodgy dress sense and an IQ the size of a banker's bonus to be able to come within spitting distance of a Haydn string quartet. This issue, there's American composer John Adams and the A-list London Symphony Orchestra at the Colston Hall, more pukka Shostakovich at St George's, dazzling Monteverdi in Bath Abbey... Time for classical music to be out, proud and - cue Mahler's 'Symphony of 1,000' - very loud. But where to start if you don't know your Verdi from Monteverdi or think that Copland's Appalachian Spring is a new mineral water from M&S?
- How to bluff your way in classical music, only in this week's Venue
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Drawing conclusions
"The mood is quiet and serious but friendly. Felicity sets my easel up for me while tonight's model, a fortyish man in a white towelling dressing gown and pink Crocs paces slowly around. He looks perfectly zen about this but I find myself mortified by proxy. When he disrobes and sits down, I look anywhere but at him. Putting pencil nervously to paper, I am soon, however, far too preoccupied with making him look like he has a neck than the fact that his todger is out in public... An hour later I appear to have drawn a neckless, mono-nippled man on a floating coffee table. Time for a tea break."
- Anna Britten tries a life-drawing class this issue
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Jokes
In a small town in America's 'Bible Belt', Joe, the owner of Joe's Bar started construction on a new building to increase his business. The pastor and congregation of the local Baptist Church were appalled, and started a campaign to stop the new bar from opening, with petitions and prayer meetings.
But the work continued, right up to the week before the planned opening date, when there was a big storm. The bar was struck by a bolt of lightning and it burned to the ground.
Naturally, the churchgoers were delighted at first. But then Joe sued the church on the grounds that it was responsible for the destruction of the building which had cost its owner 200,000.
The church denied all responsibility or any connection to the building's destruction in its reply to the court.
As the case made its way into court, the judge looked over the paperwork. When the hearing opened, he announced: "I have no idea how I can resolve this case. From the paperwork it seems we have a bar owner who believes in the power of prayer, and an entire church congregation that does not." (Thanks Mel)
I'm a woman, and I'm tired of you all claiming that men are smarter than women.
My husband has finally proven you all wrong.
He texted me just before - "Jane my little blonde bunny I cannot wait to have a night of loving tonight! Hope you're ready for the best sex you've ever had ;). xxx"
What an idiot. First of all, my name is Sarah, secondly I'm brunette, and thirdly he's away at a conference tonight! (Thanks Jack)
Q. Who's the coolest person in the hospital? A. The ultra-sound man. Q. What about when he's on holiday? A. The hip replacement guy. (Thanks Gemma. You win this week's star prize.)
Please send us jokes. Best one each week wins some stuff. OR you can send us a joke on behalf of your firm, club or conspiracy, and we'll tell everyone your web address. So don't delay - email editor@venue.co.uk and make our inbox chortle.
Gordon Brown's temper, as animated by Taiwanese TV (below)
John Carpenter's The Thing. Only British, home-made and sort of rubbish (below)
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Competitions
Win stuff!
Ten years after 'Ivansxtc', director Bernard Rose and star Danny Huston are reunited in 'The Kreutzer Sonata', another digitally shot Tolstoy-based thriller set in the dark underside of privileged Los Angeles society. This frank study of sex, obsession, paranoia and Beethoven is based on the Tolstoy novella of the same name. 'The Kreutzer Sonata' runs from Fri 12-Thur 25 Mar at Watershed (www.watershed.co.uk) and we have a pair of tickets to give away, as well as five copies of Tolstoy's book 'The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories' (Penguin Classics). Buy this week's Venue and you could win.
We also have tix for the one and only Circus Of Horrors. Back like a bad case of herpes, this time with a brand-new freakshow, 'The Day of the Dead'. Expect "witch-doctors, voodoo acrobats, pickled people, bendy bodies, demon dwarfs, flying vampires, Toltecion beauties, curvaceous creatures, Aztec warriors and some of the world's greatest, grotesque, most daring and bizarre circus acts". The Circus Of Horrors freaks out Bath Pavilion for one night only on Sat 13 Mar (see www.circusofhorrors.co.uk for ticket info) and we have five pairs of tickets to give away. To be in with a chance of winning a pair get this week's Venue and answer a ridiculously easy question.
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Round These Parts
On 13 March 1755 one of the most famous/notorious fights in the history of Round These Parts took place. Champion bare-knuckle fighter Jack Slack, 29, a butcher from Thorpe, Norfolk was matched with Cornelius Harris at Kingswood.
Harris, known as 'King Cole' was nominally a coal miner and almost certainly a psychopath. He had probably previously killed a woman and her boyfriend, but he was so big and scary that nobody in Kingswood, which was a pretty rough place back then, dared touch him. He regularly fought people on village greens after issuing pub challenges and may well have killed more than one of his fellow miners.
Harris was also a bully. He amassed a small fortune by never paying for food, rent or anything else, but simply intimidating people into giving him stuff. This was how he could put down most of his money in a 100-guinea wager against Slack.
Everyone thought Harris would win, but he was just a thug. Slack's technique and self-discipline won the day after a gruelling, brutal fight. Finally, Slack landed a punch between the eyes that left Harris unconscious for an hour. When he woke, Slack had left with his winnings, and Harris, according to one account, "shrieked with the voice of a thousand devils, and blood and foam came from his mouth, making his blackened face hideous".
Prize-fighting was very popular in Bristol at this time. Another fight in the same year left one combatant with an eye hanging from its socket, eight broken ribs, a broken shoulder blade and a jawbone broken in three places. He died. The other guy had a broken collarbone and an ear torn off. And that was just the men. Bouts between semi- professional women fighters were popular in Bristol, too.
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