Care and Attention, Atom by Atom - two predictions from 2009 and a motto.

 When I started this blog back in 2007, this was probably the mental image I had of myself: Transmetropolitan's Spider Jerusalem - a twenty-first century Hunter S. Thompson, keeping painstaking track of the traffic below, blowing knee-caps off a worsening world with his cyber truths - but while the world seems to have kept its side of the bargain, I turn out to have kept my head down a lot more than I anticipated, because what I hadn't predicted is that of course everyone else would have the same idea, and there simply aren't enough perches for the lot of us. Even if there were, we're not stuck in the traffic - as the saying goes - we are the traffic.

 Transmetropolitan was a utopia of sorts, ultimately*. For example, because I'd grown up so simplistically dismissive of Star Trek, Spider's world was my first encounter with the idea of a "maker" - a machine that could produce anything from nothing, including copies of itself - and  therefore my first introduction to the idea of a world without scarcity. A future of abundance. This was also the subject of a superb radio one-off made by James Burke back in December 2017, which I've been meaning to write about for two Decembers, and which you can still listen to here. Burke is an extraordinary speaker. He presented the moon landings on British television in 1969, back when the BBC were choosing Arts graduates to present science shows and Science graduates to present the arts, and his show "Connections", made fifty years ago now, did an extraordinary job of predicting the future whilst also offering a revolutionary idea of the past (for example, it wasn't the invention of printing press that revolutionised literacy, Burke argues, but the invention of disposable linen underwear, whose recycling could finally facilitate the mass production of paper!) He has form, in other words, but his predictions from 2017 are pretty similar to those made fifty-four minutes into this lecture from 2009, which Joel Morris, Jason Hazeley and I were lucky enough to hear an unforgettable version of at the Royal Society in 2012, all of us agreeing it was one of the best live gigs any of us had attended:

 I wonder, though, if Burke's changed any of his predictions in the past two years. Because the one thing he didn't account for, I think, is the one human need no amount of technology can be guaranteed to assuage: attention. In Burke's world of abundance, where no one is now required to interact with each other, no one does. But people do seem to need attention, even more so since the internet has given us such a dangerously unweildy tool for attempting to command it. Which brings me to my second prediction from 2009: an article written by David Mitchell calling into serious question Gordon Brown's assertion that online commenting was "democratising". In it David quotes a superb idea from a mutual friend of ours, Jon Dryden Taylor:

 He wants people to post, as a comment, on as many opinion-garnering web pages as possible, as often as they can be bothered, the phrase: "It just goes to show you can't be too careful!" It's perfect; it seems lighthearted without being a joke. It's vaguely pertinent to almost any subject without meaning a thing. It's the ideal oil for the internet's troubled waters.

 Jon's management of online traffic has always been exemplorary. He hardly ever blogs for example, but when he does, my God it's unmissable (there's a link on the right, under "where I get my ideas from"). And I think he's right, as well. This decade has gone to show you can't be too careful, which is something to carry into the new year, along with all the plans we'll make about how to cope with having everything we've always wanted.

*The letters page of Transmetropolitan was responsible for one of my favourite all-time quotes too: "No, you're only entitled to an informed opinion". Good times. People don't like being told off. Fascism thrives on division. Happy Twenty-twenty! X

I made a video to honour the passing today of Neil Innes and Norma Tanega. It is very bad and at the bottom of this blog.

Goodbye and thank you, Neil Innes. Here's three of you, offering superb advice on how to avoid extinction in 2020. In the Bonzos - a band that always managed to do its own thing - you still managed to stand out, doing your own thing squared (and never blacking up). You were very cool, never impressed by yourself. I remember, off my nut on steroids over a protracted stay in hospital ten years ago "Humanoid Boogie" was one of the only songs I could bear to listen to, and once I was out I managed to get a friend of yours to text you that I thought it was the best song ever written, and you texted back saying I was kind but wrong. And I never knew this about you:

 And goodbye and thank you, Norma Tanega. I know of you because the opening theme to "What We Do In The Shadows" used to hit me in the heart with anger, joy, despair and yeehahs all in the space of ten seconds. I heard we lost you today too. Here is my terrible double tribute:

Sorry.

Black Lagoon. Black Lodge. Whatever.

 Most images of Millicent Patrick online show her cradling the head of the creature she designed (although she wouldn't be fully credited for thirty years) and the most viewed of these is cropped and tilted so it looks like the two are dating...

 Before

 

 After

... which is why I've opened this post with a publicity still of Patrick actually designing, but that's not really what I've come here to talk about.

 I'm still in France. Dad screened 1954's "The Creature from the Black Lagoon" for me a couple of nights back (we watched "The Shape of Water" the following night and "The Lighthouse" the day before, so this year's Christmas viewing has been a triple-bill of mer-person erotica). I'd never seen it before, and even though I'm already a fanatic for those early Universal Horrors, it was a smarter film than I'd been expecting, not least in its use of 3D. Here's a still from the opening scene - if you can't make out what it is, it's because you're not seeing it in enough dimensions...

 That's a claw reaching out of the screen. Not the jump scare you might expect, but the fossilised hand of the creature's primordial ancestor, completely still. Staring at this through my 3D specs I imagined audiences of the fifties likewise watching it hang in front of their faces, waiting for the gigantic thing to flinch. Which it doesn't. Because it can't. It's dead. It's the past. But it might... and it's always been there and that's what's scary, although only in 3D. Something I love about Universal's best monster movies is how impossible it is to read too much into their goofy iconography, how easily they carry out their duties to the mythic. This particular creature for example was generated in an atomic explosion far larger than the norm, depicted in this second still from the movie's prologue. Again it doesn't impress nearly as much in 2D...

... but what you're actually looking at is the moment before the Big Bang (underscored by the first verse of Genesis), a hell of thing to throw in an audience's face on a first date. Claws emerging from the darkness are a staple of horror movies from at least "The Cat and the Canary" onwards, but to have that claw emerge not from a false bookcase but from the same waters that produced the rest of us provided a very different context. Basically this film had me at "In The Beginning." I'd like to write more about those old Universals; I picked up a lot of touchingly remastered classics on the Finnetour. You can see for yourself the opening scene zoom all the way in from bang to claw on youtube here but you really need 3D to fully appreciate what was attempted, as I said. I wonder if David Lynch was a fan...

No use hiding behind the sofas, it's all in your ears!

 

 The Monster Hunters released another Special on Christmas Eve! I'm not in it, but it's The Monster Hunters so that really shouldn't matter to you by now. If your nerves are not already too shredded by whatever seasonal horrors you've ingested thus far then - musty tomes, greasy mirrors, that weirdly toothy rocking horse - here's a clip!

 You can hear "The Vampire Tree" in its entirety for free HERE, and if you hit that link you will also see that thanks to a splendid turn of events not yet heralded on this blog, you can now hear every single other episode of "The Monster Hunters" either beautifully remastered or engineered from scratch (screech, tapping and slurp) by the loft boffins at Definitely Human, and I'm in loads of those! The Definitelies bravely took the show under their wing ealier this year and have done incredible things with it since, creating beautiful artwork for each series (not this header, that's one of scrapnick's awesome tumblr contributions - oh yes, there's tumblr art now!) along with a host of "Steel Got It" extras on soundcloud, which is a thing (they even let me do one), as well as additional fireside chats at the end of each old episode from the creators themselves, Matthew "Woke" Woodcock and Peter "Dirty" Davis. (Not their real nicknames of course. Matthew's is Bishop, and Peter's is, if I remember correctly, Tiny Mook the Woodsman, although I'm not sure he still has the hood. Maybe he never had a hood. Maybe I dreamt Peter's hood.) So even if you already heard all these when they first went out, listen again! My sister's in them too! And Series 2's Beast of Albion now reads like a massive metaphor for Brexit! Boo! Here's another beauty from scrapnick, illustrating "The Box of Desires":

Parallels (or: Who got the pain when they go "Bwooorp"?)

TOUR NEWS!!!!

 John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme did a tour! Yes, the radio show I'm in! It's over now though, sorry. But I bought some great stuff at CEX. And the Finnemore gang were angels over those two months, only funnier, and John wrote an incredible show obviously and I prefer saying lines when I've memorised them anyway, which I did! Here we all are, peeking at how good the show was, not believing our luck:

  If you fancy some photos of lovely theatres, cities, wind turbines and shopping, further details of "John Finnemore's Flying Visit" can be found over on my Instagram under the hashtag #Finnetour. We played twenty-six shows in total, including the matinee in London, hence those second, artfully Cabin Pressure-inspired hashtags: #Anewcastle, #Bleeds, #Cnottingham... etc... #Treading! That one works.

 Yes, it was a good-looking show. Here's a thing though: there's a sketch in which Patsy Straightwoman interviews Cabin Pressure's Arthur Shappey which made me suddenly notice a parallel between Martin Crieff and his far less irritating creator that had never before occurred to me in over a decade's acquaintance: Arthur explains that Martin has to take a citizenship test in order to get married, but it's okay, because you only have to get sixty per cent. But it's not okay, Arthur then clarifies, "because Martin does NOT want to get sixty per cent!"
 Now that sounds very John.
 Remember the finale of last year's Souvenir Programme? The one with the heist? The most impressive single episode of a sketch show possibly ever written?

 Of course we had to do another series this year. How do you follow something so perfect? Well I have a theory about Series 8, and it's been online for almost year now, fortunately so you can go and check it out for yourself. Here's my theory: The only way John could follow the finale of Series 7 was by pretending he'd never written it, nor indeed written any sketch show before, ever. This is why, for example, the first two Since You Ask Me's of the new series (our name for the plays at the end) sound so much more like actual spoofs of M. R. James and Conan Doyle than anything that has gone before... why there's no sense at all of what-have-I-not-done-yet about any of the material, yet it's all still so miraculously fresh... because Series 8 was in fact - subliminally at least - not the eighth series at all, but the first series again, only now from a Parallel Universe! Now obviously this theory is nonsense, or so I thought... UNTIL I happened to look back over John's own blog written when the show's very first episode aired back in 2011... and there, on the disused leg of a spider diagram illustrating how he'd come up with the idea for the sketch about the man who wants to make the noise for the Tardis... I was dumbfounded to find notes for a sketch that appears in Series 8's episode 3 about a princess who wants to become a police dog handler, notes which John now claims to have no memory of writing!

 Some things one just cannot unknow. As for what ghastly deal John must have struck to be able now to mine such pan-causal seams, however, (because I honestly and absolutely believe John has never had the time to read through those old notebooks), or with whom he struck this deal... or what... that I shall leave unguessed. But note, even in that post from 2011 celebrating the realisation of "the one thing" the author claimed to have wanted more than any other, he provides in the Tardis sketch a clear warning against the sanity-extinguishing consequences of "following your dream", a warning made all the more stark by closer examination of the illustration chosen to accompany it: Pooh tied to a balloon, trying to steal honey from some bees, or to quote the show, "the reckless desperation of an addict!"

 Series 9 records next year.

 (John also drew both of the superb diagrams above, of course. More photos of the show can be found here in lieu of me actually being able to find out who took them, although I know our excellent sound engineer Nick Burkinyoung took the one of our bums and shoes. Thanks entire to all who turned up as, well. I loved that show. I still love it. I hope John never loses his addiction. And in other news, here's hoping your today has been, oh go on then, this:)

Refreshment Time!

In a similar vein to yesterday's post, I hope all readers who celebrate Boxing Day are today enjoying an intermission from the hurly burly every bit as relaxing as this lovely film about food:

Peace and tranquility, all.

Fedoraheeewourghhhe

Dear readers, treasured guests, I hope your Christmas day is better than this terrible song from Bing Crosby's flat children about a snowman who... well, hear for yourself:

Love transmitted regardless.

F.T.O.D. (my rubbish Thank You note)

 

 From 2015 (trigger-warning: Mogg)

 Well, we saw.
 Again.
 This election should never have been agreed to while so many of its participants were under investigation, but it was agreed to, and the self-styled "Grand Wizards" now have their majority. To everyone who campaigned against them: thank you from the bottom of my heart. But if it's any consolation, I don't think the Wizards won because they named themselves after the KKK, I think they won because most people are scared of free broadband. Honestly. And they won because their campaign was the issuing of a simple three word sentence followed by an unprecendented fucking off, while the opposition's campaign insisted on being a narrative centred around its most obviously off-putting not-fucking-off-er.

As the exit poll came in last night, I was talking with my mate Tom about performing in front of crowds without a demographic, and he noted that, yes, people are superb when they're paying attention. Jeremy Corbyn however was an attention repellant. Every wonderful, brilliant, compassionate canvasser for Labour knew that his name was a handicap, they heard it again and again, and reported back, but the man himself never seemed to care... And, wait, I love.... I love... that he addressed how abominable things are for so many... that he noticed, as just one example, postal workers are now penalised for standing still, nobody else was talking about that! But... as I also noted when I first voted for him in 2015, he does love telling people off, and people really do not like being told off, and while I'm repeating myself, he was also... is also... a terrible, terrible boss. If only his claque (a clique that claps, true word) could have brought itself to get behind that motto of the London Olympics: "This is for everyone." But no, it had to make gospel the caveat "Not the few", and whether that qualification was simply tone-deaf or pitch-perfect dog-whistle, it was never going to win an election, ever. You cannot spearhead a popular compassionate campaign with threats. Momentum also enjoyed telling the electorate off of course: austerity was Tony Blair's fault now (just as the Tories had argued) - why would you vote for Tony Blair, you stupid idiots who voted Labour into office three times in a row! So I hope Momentum get in the fridge too. I am excited by that prospect.

 Similarly exciting is the fact that both main parties promised an end to austerity... although voting for a lie doesn't make it true, so who knows what will happen next? We have our Nixon now (not our Trump, that's potentially Rees-Mogg), and Johnson is absolutely incompetent enough to let this country slip into civil war, but I've no idea who he'll have around him with this majority, maybe this larger pool will provide a greater chance of non-maniacs in office, a group less Steve-Bannon-y. And even if it doesn't, there is still the law. And there are still lawyers. Things change, is what I'm saying... although that's easy to forget while watching yet another Labour leader take to the podium and, just as Miliband and Brown did before him, blame the fucking media. Well no, hon, you chose to post that appalling Celebrities Read Mean Tweets video when you're not really a celebrity and those weren't really mean tweets, and you can't really read. You chose to make this election about you, when so many feel threatened by you, not just because of shitty political coverage, but because of literal threats continually being issued by your defenders, upsetting the work of the thousands who played nice. 

 Here's why I'm writing though. It's not because I have anything new to say (hence all the links). I just think that now that the campaign is over - and I count myself so lucky not to be terrified, so it's easy for me to say this - we might stop filling our feeds with nightmare worst-case scenarios, just for now. Nobody in the history of talking ever "won" an "argument" anyway*, and twitter's not a hole in the ground to scream into. It is the exact opposite of a hole in the ground, in fact; it's possibly part of the problem, so we should probably stop feeding it. We can't hate the electorate. Fascism Thrives On Division. People are simply scared of free broadband, that's all. And they don't like being told off.

 And thank you again to those who played nice. You make me happy, you give me hope. And when Corbyn goes, oh my goodness, the hope then...

 What she said. Again.


* Update: This was not a reference to Corbyn's  "We won the argument". That was published the following day.