Mardy cast call, 1995. I'm the top row, slunk third from left, and between me and Tom Lyall is Jamie "Apollo" Bamber who played my dad.
Here is the final act of the first run of Richard the Second. Below, not above. As I'm going to be doing the play all over again I won't say much about Act Five this time round, except that I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. Having a proper argument to perform, like that between York and the Duchess, is much easier to get a handle on, as are soliloquies that are actually spoken alone. Richard's talk of populating his cell with imaginary kings and beggars tempted me to perform King Lear next, packed as it is with absurdly shifting personalities and brutal fortunes and written, according to the convenional wisdom, in plague-occasioned isolation. But that would be giving up. I'll stick with the Histories. One detail: I was going to let the viewer choose what music Richard heard, as I'd done with previous musical cues, but he mentions it going a little out of time so I decided to insert the track myself so I could have a bit of a fiddle with it. It's iMovie's "Fifth Avenue Stroll" and I chose it for its simple instrumentation, and its associations with the eternally intered employees of Lightning Fast VCR Repair. Thank you to everyone who's seen this through with me.
And here is the whole first run, if you fancy it. I'm definitely pleased with bits. I'm by no means disowning it, just interested to see what it will be like with less screaming...
Oh and here's me rattling the cup for millionaires...
And let's skip over the fact I managed to misspell not only "definitely" but "just". Don't worry, Act Five of Richard II is still on its way, even though I don't know how to stop iMovie having a maddening twiddle with the exposure every cut, but it doesn't matter any more because it turns out those recordings were just a dry run and yes, I'm going to do it all over again. That is how I've decided to solve the problem posed in the last post. I'm not sure the decisions I've been making have been the right ones, but at least they were big, and that means I can make another performance with all different decisions and, I don't know, people can pick their favourite. Not that I expect anyone to watch both (Act Four currently has fourviews), but they can choose between a shouty one or a recite-y one. I mean if the Clarenden Press, Oxford can have two King Lears in their complete works, I can have two Richard IIs, and maybe that's how I'll learn something. I've just finished re-recording Act One this evening on the old phone, with - I think -
a very different playing of the King, and just a little more care over
what's being said and a bit more stillness. And maybe this one won't be as good, but that doesn't really matter as I'm excited about the project again, excited by the freedom of it again. And, most importantly for me, I'm showing off again.
Here are some SPOILERS!!!! for Act Four of Richard the Second, which is posted below... Excitingly the far better resolution of this new phone means you can really make out the details now, like the unnoticed mote of schmutz beneath my eye for the majority of a scene in which I'm supposed to be staring into a mirror. Maybe Richard can see the speck and chooses to leave it. Maybe it reads like that. Other innovations include: swapping which hand holds the crown when switching between Richard and Bolingbroke and then working out how to edit this so I don't look like I'm speed-milking a cow - sparing myself seven years of bad luck by simultaneously running at different speeds a recording of me tapping a mirror rather than actually breaking one (that came out alright I think) - and having nearly everyone turn Scottish it seems. The biggest decision though has been where to mark the points of injury while tracking the increasingly inevitable, the moments of genuine distress, since there's such a sustained performance of grief from both Richard and the Queen, and they must be enjoying some of it. What's surprising then? What's the worst news? It was watching Mark Rylance when I first realised that Northumberland is essentially asking Richard to sign his own death warrant, which was useful. As was the BBC's Richard II with Derek Jacobi (not pictured) when I first saw the King's surrender at Flint Castle played as a private aside to Aumerle, rather than howled down to Northumberland, which makes a lot more sense, or is at least a lot easier to act. That's what's hard: working out how to make this easy. Nearly there.
No Richard the Second video today I'm afraid as my laptop keeps phutting out - don't worry, we'll get there and it will be amazing - but I hope this introduction to the extraordinary work of Soy Luna 2 makes up for it in the meantime. They're the channel that produced that tribute to Wilfrid Hyde-White I enjoyed so much back in May, and I know I always seem to be banging on about youtube videos on this blog but really the amount of care going into some of them these days is absolutely breath-taking. I literally can't breathe. I'm dead. These videos are perfect.
Of course no sample this small can ever do justice to the astonishing variety of Soy Luna 2's nor the scale of the project being attempted. For example, I'm not even sure I knew who Peter Baldwin was before I saw this video. Having watched it, however, I feel like I've lost a friend...
And I'm always finding new details to enjoy. The detail and sheer amount of research evident in each and every one of these "Spanish Films" make me just happy to consider what humanity is capable of given the right tools. So yes, this is a tribute to Roy Kinnear. But it's also in its way a tribute to us all...
.
Before the Globe reopened and this could be tested, it was taught for
some reason that open air theatres in Shakespeare's day required a broader and bellowier, more unrealistic performing style to compete I
suppose with the visible bustle surrounding the actors, but this theory never considered the possibility it might actually be easier to connect with an audience you can see than one sat in the dark,
no matter how hermetically sealed, or that broad daylight might actually require greater realism. Mark Rylance, the Globe's first
actor manager in nearly four hundred years, proved this beautifully. He
was not a bellower. He mumbled. He even stumbled. I last saw him at the
Globe playing Richard the Second as a man who, like Alfred Ill in
Dürrenmatt's The Visit, realises long before everyone around him that they're going to have to kill him (The Visit's very good), and he was superb, and there was
a flub: As the King's world suddenly collapses around him he feels
compelled to admit to his followers "I live with bread, like you" but when Rylance played the scene Richard, apparently in a state of shock, said instead "I
live with Fred..." and I still remember that flub seventeen years later, a mistake made completely in character, a sign of craftsmanship. So when I found the speech on youtube yesterday I admit I was surprised to see, three minutes and twenty-eight seconds in, Rylance making exactly the same flub. "I live with Fred..." It's possible I saw him on the same night this was recorded. But it's not likely. What an artisan. Here's me bellowing, and
Bolingbroke being a cock...
This evening was the first time I'd been to the South Bank since lockdown, and dumb as it might sound, the first time the reality of these closed spaces really sunk in, taking me with it. I didn't often go to the National Theatre or the BFI, and I hardly ever went to the Hayward or Royal Festival Hall, but I went here all the time. Just to be here. A public space made possible by things that are no longer happening. The space is still there, but not the public, and I felt a bit awful. Speaking of awe, in this week's Ships, Sea & The Stars I got to read some Carl Sagan. Absolutely no one delivers Carl Sagan better than Carl Sagan, but it was still a joy. Ed Bloomer makes a beautiful point in the video about Sagan's writing that's often overlooked: "It's quite kind." I once looked up the derivation of "kind". Like "like", it means both how we'd prefer to be treated, and also "our type". We like our kind, and we are kind to those like us. Sagan welcomes us. Aw man, so did the South Bank Centre. I really look forward to the welcome resuming.
Greetings
beep! I am the mighty robot Maximilian, sent to Hell though a Black Hole after losing a fight to a comedy robot voiced by Roddy McDowell, there to serve as a sort of tight prison for my master, the evil Doctor Hans Reinhardt, played by German actor Maximilian Schell which is also my first name... Sorry. SPOILERS! But can you
match the visions of Hell below with the big names sent there? Or name
the movies. Or
do whatever you want. I don't mean that aggressively, I'm just saying. Look, Simon has recorded all of Richard II now but not edited it yet, so here as every other Friday is his round of the quiz. He's not expecting you to
recognise all of these big names but they are Robin
Williams, Johnny Depp, Burt Reynolds, Michael Keaton, Keanu Reeves, Salvatore Papa, Olsen &Johnson,
Albert Finney, Ian McKellen and Kenneth Cranham. And the answers as ever are in the
comments.Enjoy tour of Hell, Figure-Outers...
Act Three won't be up before midnight now I'm afraid, as my laptop crashed five hours into a six hour load, so apologies. Also I've just this moment decided that once I'm done with Richard II I might switch to posting an act every other day now, rather than every day - planning and performing one day and editing the next - so as to leave a little more room for discoveries and see if this makes for a happier hobbying (and also to give me time to work out what I'm actually going to do for a living). Now that my days are more ordered it's clear that I've definitely been working more than eight hours a day on these, which wasn't the plan at all, but I've also managed to get outside every day, an improvement on two months ago, and today I found a door to a secret society, so that is what I'm sharing. Annoyingly you can't necessarily tell it's a secret society from this photograph, because the narrowness of the alley down which I found it meant I had to photograph the door in portrait mode and panaroma. Therefore it looks a little distorted anyway, but the tell, of course, is that the door is narrower at the top than at the bottom. All doors to secret societies are narrower at the top. The narrower the top of the door, the more secret what's behind it. (Alright, this a church. But for buildings that anyone can just walk
into, some churches have really nailed that "House Of Secrets" look.)
"Fortress built against infection" my bum. (Source)
Who's pulling the strings in Richard II then? Who's in charge?I used to think it was just, I don't know, "History", and maybe that's a grown-up narrative, but more likely it's just more mythologising. Maybe this is why it's such a relief when Northumberland turns up. Finally here's a character who not only wants something but actually seems to be doing something about it - it's called a "plot" for a reason - but even he turns out to be just a messenger. Bolingboke's already landed. So what are we watching? It's not unlike the News. Not the current News I mean, just News in general. No criticism of Richard's abuses of power goes without an even deeper criticism that he's Bad For The Brand. Really it's all about "judging the mood", and only looks like Democracy because it can take down anyone. Typically though, Richard's ability to push so many buttons seems to be the quality Shakespeare finds most attractive. Here's Act Two then, and if Gaunt's death bed scene feels a little like Dennis' Dad's death bed scene from Jabberwocky, well I can only say "you're welcome."
Okay, that wasn't really the line: what the Duchess of Gloucester was meant to say was "Grief boundeth",
but I think "bounceth" actually makes more sense as a metaphor so that's what I went for. Oh, the
power! The power of doing Shakespeare all on my own. And the shouting! Doing all of the shouting on my own. Here then is episode twenty-one of "Simon Goes Full
Shakespeare" in which I finally test the waters of the Histories by doing the one with the most standing around in: The Tragedy of King Richard the Second, an opaque anti-drama that still nearly managed to get its author executed for treason, but more of that later in the week.
Gemma Brockis fans might be also able to spot in this photo a Gemma Brockis.
Maybe I'm a little too acquainted with this play (see the photo above from 1995 of me asking if Bolingbroke might have, in addition to hair, fingerless leather gloves). There were quite a few things I forget to explain in the video's introduction for example, like what a
"gage" is, or "lists", but hopefully it'll still make some kind of sense. I look forward to hearing any thoughts you might have, whether you know what's coming, or have no idea. According to Simon Schama's History of
Britain, Richard II introduced both
the handerchief and the spoon to England. Might the play be about that? Let's see!
(I like that Mowbray gets played off in the middle of one of his speeches.
The fanfare was just too long so I brought it in early, but I do like it.)
I recorded the first act of Richard the Second today, on a new phone which didn't come with a compatible cable, so I'm bluetoothing it over to my laptop instead and a little box is telling me that this will take six hours. And then I can start editing. There won't be a Shakespeare transmission tonight therefore, but it'll be up tomorrow, and apologies but it's four minutes to midnight so I'm going to see if I can turn in instead. Incidentally I find that Sean Raynard's, Stephen Evans' and "Quentin Smirhes"' QTV Closedowns provide great closure to a day's viewing - stark reminders that it's probably time to stop looking at a screen. Enjoy the following then, and have a very pleasant and peaceful night. Good night.
If people didn't love special effects we'd never have had the Renaissance. Leonardo and Michelangelo didn't study the sciences out of idle curiosity, but because mastering their art meant fooling the eye, and that meant understanding perspective, light, physics and biology. Even John Dee started out in special effects at Trinity College. I arrived at this conclusion after a couple of days down a rabbit hole with Los Angeles-based Visual Effects youtubers, the Corridor Crew. I'd come to them through their "stuntmen react to stunts" videos, which led me to their "VFX artists react to VFX" videos, and I was just enjoying the clips and vicariously getting off on their work ethic, but then realised I was also beginning to learn some science. The penny dropped when they were reacting to 2012. I knew from Helen Czerski's zero gravity reports over on the Cosmic Shambles Network that physicists have been after a general theory of granular material, but it hadn't occurred to me that CGI artists working on disaster movies would also be after exactly the same thing. Here. (I think all these videos begin at the appropriate point)...
And it's not just a one-way street. Instead of producing concept art for the black hole in Interstellar for example, an astrophysicist was approached to provide equations to feed into a
purpose built rendering engine, and the resulting visualisation produced two
research papers...
I've also learnt from these videos how light acts beneath the surface of the skin, and how
important an understanding of this "subsurface scattering" is in
producing non-gummy-looking CGI humans. (I've also learnt that far too
many artists think there's a muscle linking the filtrum to the upper
lip)...
Less universally applicable, but still fascinatingly, I've learnt that being set on fire as a stuntman is surprisingly feezing...
And that for all the battle scenes in which you may have seen a flying arrow sliced in half, it turns out you
shouldn't actually try to intercept a missile with a weapon specifically
designed to pass through things (that's my conclusion, not
theirs)...
These are just examples of the science I picked up by the by. The Corridor Crew also produce more traditionally educational videos, and they're also superb. As Visual Effects Artists the Corridor Crew are first and foremost communicators, so they don't just understand the science that they're explaining, they understand how people receive information. For example here's a very simple idea that's hard to communicate: the scale of the Universe. As a potentially unfair comparison, here first is Arvin Ash, zooming in and out a lot, wasting our time on how a shrew is bigger than an ant, and throwing in a weird amount of stock footage of blondes in their underwear.
And now here's the Corridor Crew's contribution. A problem has been identified and addressed, and fun has resulted. First scaling down...
Then scaling up. (In summary, if the planck length were the diameter of a tennis ball, an American penny would be ninety thousand times wider than the entire universe)...
There's such a glorious clarity to all their stuff, and I really can't recommend their channel enough. And it reminds me how much I love Los Angeles. The city's a workshop, and as was true in the Renaissance, the polymaths are all there, working in VFX.
For these past two days I've headed south out of my front door, and a lot has seemed suitable. Some shops are open now, as you know. I went to Forbidden Planet. You have to enter through the rear door, where the people behind the desk explain happily and quietly the new one way
system, and how you're not supposed to touch anything that you don't want to buy, and as I moved through the shop I looked at these vinyl wotnots with new eyes and realised I was now in the mindset of a visitor to a regional toy museum, and that felt like an improvement. When I exited, everything else seemed improved upon: Shaftesbury Avenue seemed suitably free of traffic, with a suitable number of people in masks keeping a suitable distance even as far as Oxford Street. And the evening seemed suitably warm. And by suitably I mean perfectly. I mean just right, which it strikes me is something London hardly ever seems, which is fair enough. I've known the city deserted, sure, but not simply uncrowded. With one possible exception: the Summer of 2012, when the Olympics saw a lot of Londoners leave because they thought it was going to be unbearable, and then it turned out to be more bearable than we'd known in years. However, according to my daily Covid reporting-on-myself app the number of new cases has risen twenty five percent to two-thousand a day, so perhaps this feeling is madness, but it feels like the opposite, that's the point, and I thought that worth recording. Look at it. Thank you, like the banners say, and hashtag stay safe.
I feel I should have known who Pinto Colvig was before this week. He had arguably one of the most influential voices in comedy. Like Mel Blanc, he is probably best known for the cartoon characters he voiced, but while Blanc was a well respected character comedian with a regular showcase on The Jack Benny Show (basically the Seinfeld of its day, only more so because it came first) Colvig had to slum it as unrecognisable nightmare fuel in terrible circus-based shorts for Capitol Records.
In creating the role of the Wendigo-mouthed "Bozo", Colvig certainly proved influential enough in the world of horror (a Wendigo by the way is a flesh-eating, First Nations xenomorph notable for chewing its own lips off with hunger), but that's not why I feel he should be better known. He was also the voice of Grumpy the dwarf, and Sleepy, and Bluto from Popeye, and Pluto from Mickey Mouse, but most importantly, surely, he was the original voice of Goofy. That's a voice with big ripples. You can hear it in Dan Castellaneta's Homer Simpson, Spike Milligan by his own admission straight up stole the voice for Eccles, it is the dopey voice (although of course Dopey didn't have a voice), and his nervous "gollum" debuted years before the publication of The Hobbit (it's surely a nervous swallow that gives Smeagol his nickname, rather than Andy Serkis' odd cough). So I'd love to tell you more about Colvig. Unfortunately I can't get beyond the first ten seconds of this video (so you should feel under no obligation to, either):
The Royal Museums Greenwich's weekly webcasts are back, with an episode on the newly reopened Cutty Sark (or "Skimpy Skirt" if you don't speak Scottish). The glamour of pineapples is discussed, traders who still sail are buttonholed, and Helen Czerski is on hand as usual to ask every question playing on your mind as if by magic. I give a couple of readings too, including a dramatic account of a storm at sea for which I had to repeatedly say "poop" with a nautical accent and a straight face. And in other news...
God, I'd have loved to seen Gene Wilder play Richard II, but in his absence I've decided I myself shall take on the role of that most pineapply of monarchs as well as every other role in Richard II of course as I return to Simon Goes Full Shakespeare next week. I know I said I'd do the War of the Roses next, but this play comes earlier historically even if it was written later, and has far fewer characters than Henry VI, far fewer explosions, and far more sadness, self-indulgence, and sass, so seems the more comfortable choice. Also I've got the hair. I'll save further spoilers for next week, but here's where I found that painting of Richard looking like a pineapple, andhere's where I found that pineapple that looks like Richard II.
Colours aren't reflected light in the concept art of Mary Blair, they're light sources. The Disney films she worked on were nocturnal fairy tales, intimately sunless and perfect for dark rides. There were concepts in her concept art too, like filling Wonderland with signage for example.
That seems apt. If Carroll's stories had a villain it was probably words. Tangentially, it's possible that I've been misusing the word "liminal". I've used it describe the location of an act of the imagination, but strictly speaking it doesn't mean pretend-y so much as between-y, coming from the
Latin word for threshold.
It was the video below that brought this to my attention. I know nothing about the contributor but my algorithms made a hell of a recommendation because Solar Sand's search for the fabled "backrooms" is absolutely packed with potential rabbit holes: "noclipping", kenopsia, the actual length of a fire hydrant, what kind of rooms inspire nostalgia in Russian millenials... Wait. What does the word "threshold" come from?
"Lose the mask."
"Mm?" I had earbuds in.
"Lose the mask, man" said the passerby yesterday at the top of Mount Vernon before collapsing in a heap immediately, blood falling out of his ears in clots, probably, I don't know, I didn't look back but probably. That evening, to signify the risk of my days becoming more structured I not only chose a film but attempted to make popcorn, and with every window wide open finally sat down to watch A Quiet Place.
Peter had recommended it. He and Phil had picked it for the third episode of their new podcast Horror Movie Maniacs, with no idea that when they would finally come to record it the whole world would be self-isolating. You can hear it here, and there are also spoilers below, but I love Ryan George's hair-splitting Pitch Meetings. And I love having horror fans as best friends. We follow the rules.
I'd never picked up a book by Schuiten or Peeters until today, but my excellent sister gave me Samaris for my birthday back in November, and finally reading it has felt a lot like nostalgia. These are the dreams I'd had as a nineteen-year-old, of being assigned to investigate a city and finding only scenery, something to climb or climb into, whose passages and ledges might take you to a roof from where you could finally see it all. Kafkaish adventures where the twist was that nothing will happen, that the city is ultimately unvisitable, these were fairy tales of tourism, and although I may have forgetten how big a part they played in my adolescence, I still find it hard to know how to engage with a place beyond just heading to its highest point.
I've just finished watching Don't F*** With Cats on Netflix. It wasn't what I expected, and I think I might have hated watching it. This is not a recommendation. But I wanted to see how it ended, and as someone who's worked with both Jack the Ripper and Shakespeare I felt maybe I should keep abreast of contemporary developments in self-mythologising monstrousness. One of the problems of course is that everyone always joins in with the mythologising, and this documentary confesses to being as guilty of that as the next ghoul, but in its adoption of horror tropes it brought to my attention one I'd never considered before, even though I as a writer have also used the trope (and I can't find it on tvtropes.org either), namely that of the Scary Number.
A camera cranes in onto the "19" on the door of an apartment in Paris for example, or an internet café owner in Berlin will point to a stall and say "This is it. Number 25." The cliché is that certain numbers have a power, but they all seem to, just the fact of them - the factiness even. 10 Rillington Place. Room 237. Inside Number 9. Arithmobia is a fear not of specific numbers, but of numbers in general. And that's what I can't work out - whether the Scary Number is simply a horror trope borne of True Crime, or whether it speaks to something more primal... The Matrix.... The Prisoner... Like shadows, snakes and skeletons, have we always just, secretly, found numbers inherently evil?
Because if we have, I can see that becoming a problem.
Something about the light on Hackney Marshes reminds me of Seurat. I'd walked here from Camden, invited to a picnic, and for the first time in four months spoke with strangers. There were teachers and doctors and musicians, one of whom pointed out to me that I wasn't wearing walking shoes, which is something to consider. It was midnight by the time I got home.
Before I headed home though, I took a detour up the Lea, past the filter beds, to visit what I think must have been the marsh office described by Ken Campbell in The Furtive Nudist. Here he'd sit beneath a fishing umbrella, pockets stuffed with stationery, and await "a commission". The last time I came here was in 2016 just after the first recording of Time Spanner, possibly also awaiting a commission.
Happily this detour also took me past a friend, Mischa from shunt who was standing at the bend in the river. I wasn't expecting to bump into him, or anyone. It's nice out, I suppose is the moral, but I know nothing's changed. I wore a mask. But also I showed my face.
I love my fortnightly quiz companions so much but my only interaction with them for the past three months is framed around an activity where I'm at my worst and most competitive. My worst is probably tolerable though because we've done another. This time my round was just an excuse to look at some nice pictures. I posted examples of early concept art, they had to name the film, and there's a bonus not film above. Answers in the comments.
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9. (The name's not a clue. I think they changed it.)
That seems apt. If Carroll's stories had a villain it was probably words. Tangentially, it's possible that I've been misusing the word "liminal". I've used it describe the location of an act of the imagination, but strictly speaking it doesn't mean pretend-y so much as between-y, coming from the
Latin word for threshold. 
