The sun again but the world will never

 Unlike almost exactly twenty-seven years previously, there wasn't a cloud in the sky when I clicked publish on my previous post with a still-weirdly-minstrel-adjacent white kid glove – (or is it a butler's hand? Is the cursor meant to be my servant's hand rather than an extension of my own? And should I still be using yellow-handed emojis even though everyone else seems now to have switched to their own flesh tone, just because yellow's the colour of the emoji's faces and I'd always assumed the hands belonged to the same guy? Did Harvey Ball ever stop to think what a storm of care he was seeding when he invented the smiley?

 

It looks like he might. Close brackets) – and so when I did indeed leave the laptop and race off to Brixton for the solar rematch, there was no filter this time to shield our glimpses. I use the first person plural because it felt so obviously communal, as it had in '99. And Iceland was still there, and Boots. And I realised as I revisited that intersection of Electric Avenue and Brixton Road where Fin and Jeremy had filmed each other at the last darkening, that this is also where I had Gabbie meet Martin in Time Spanner in 2016. Here's the trip to that spot as I try to desmear my phone.

 

 

 The sun had moved of course, it does that, and was now directly at the end of the road at almost eye level. At the end of every road facing west in fact, and the bus stop opposite Brighton Terrace at the stroke of seven gave you a dangerously uninterrupted view. I shielded my face with the phone, but the eclipse would only show up on my screen as a green crescent glare (see the thumbnail below). Those without special glasses also tried our luck with a reflection in the window of H&M. I wonder if the guy inside knew what we were doing, why so many of us were just standing there, staring into his shop, our backs to an event that wouldn't happen again for another sixty-four years. As I said, really the event was us looking at it though, so that's what I've cut together below.

 In other news, it is midnight in Highbury and finally raining.

 

The safest way to watch the eclipse

Is probably just to watch the last one, so here it is. I was ushering at the BFI on August the 11th 1999, and watched the solar eclipse from Waterloo Bridge, but had given my camera to Jeremy and Fin to film it where they were. That's them, Fin with the glasses, Jeremy without. Fin's also made his own cooler cut here. I moved in with him the following year. Brixon, which is where we came in. Actually, I might revisit Electric Avenue for today's. It's crept up on me; I think the next one is in 2090. I won't look directly at it though because I don't have the special glasses. I haven't seen Jeremy in years. (The image above is sort of from here.)

By the Picking of my Thumbnail

Hello friends/fellow students. As anyone who's subscribed to my YouTube channel might know, I've started a second one. And there, for the past four weeks, I've been reposting videos of me from 2020 tearing through the complete works of Shakespeare in lockdown in case giving Simon Goes Full Shakespeare its own channel made them easier to stumble across. I also added little introductions to the introductions, which I shared on my first channel too, which is why you might know. Here's the opener to the opener.

 

 Apart from these fresh intros, the only new material, if you don't count the compilations, or the date stamps (and you are absolutely welcome to count date stamps as new material, by the way... it's been an unhelpful old year for me so far in terms of the old fight-or-flight) are the new thumbnails. Ideally, your typical YouTube thumbnail contains both the presenter's likeness and some text, and after a series of botched cut and pastes...

 

Bold. But rejected.

 

... I realised the easiest – and also quite pleasingly Dave McKean-iest  –way to achieve this was simply to pause the introductions as they fade into the titles, and take a screenshot.

 

 "Ta-daaa!"

 

 The compiled Julius Caesar went out this weekend, on both channels, meaning that for the second time Season One is now done. But another reason I bothered to give this project its own channel is that, this second time round, I hope to get further into Season Two and beyond on its return. I've time enough anyway, and a room. And I'm still very proud of the whole thing... The only reason I haven't plugged it until now is that, as I learnt in my previous post, apparently it helps the algorithm find you an audience if you don't. But that hasn't thus far worked the same magic it did on The Sitting, maybe because that video's only sixty seconds long. I don't know. It's a learning curve.

 As a fat, four course taster then, here are the compiled introductions. The Two Gentlemen of Verona's features a new attempt to explain what I'm doing, plus archival bonus material of me seeing if it will work if I sing the songs rather than just reading them out, which it didn't so I don't know why I've included it.

 

 

 The compilation of introductions to The Taming of the Shrew features no new introduction, but bonus material of me going off into the kitchen to throw some pans around for some sound effects, which I did use.

 

 

 

 More foley work is included in the collected introductions to The Lamentable Tragedy of Titus Andronicus, where I cry like a baby. Donald Trump was President back in 2020, remember. It was a different time. Ha ha ha.

 

 

 

 And finally – inspired by this bit in an excellent documentary about the old BBC2 cult film strand Moviedrome in which Alex Cox reckons he got the gig because, as the only film director not living in London, he couldn't just film everything in his living room and so his Film Club pieces to camera looked much more dynamic...

 

 

...  I head out of the flat for the final compilation of introductions to Julius Caesar, and attempt to explain what I'll do next beneath the green man of Parkland Walk. (Some thumbnails are better than others. Like I said, it's a curve.)

 

 

 

 Now play them all simultaneously! And if you fancy taking your own tour of the new channel, you can like, share, subscribe, scroll, swipe, dive, run, push, bomb, and pet heavy HERE. I hope you're all doing tremendously.

Those Little Grey Cells

 well, A4-sized grey cells

 

 When traditional paint-and-trace animation was explained to me as a child, in arts programmes of old, I was never able to understand how, when the painted cells were placed upon a lightbox to photograph, the brushstrokes showed up flat and brightly coloured as though lit from above, rather than as smeary, backlit shadows. When I was finally given the opportunity to make my own cartoon in Moving Image Class, as a seventeen-year-old foreign exchange student at Milton Academy Massachusetts, I was able to find out for myself.

 

 

 Except I didn't, because I was right. The Sitting looks exactly what you might expect a light shone through a series of increasingly opaque painted body parts to look like. The white patch above, for example – intended to mask the coal miner's legs as he's coughed up by the Gibson Girl – does not match seamlessly with the wall behind, so I guess I'll never understand the properties of the lightbox. But I'm still incredibly pleased with it and proud of it. And, as you can see, I still have every hand-painted cell from it in a box under the bed, so I can always reshoot. 

 See if you think this next bit is interesting. I posted this barely discernible digital transfer of the VHS transfer of the American NotTheSameColour transfer of the original film shot in class to YouTube towards the end of last month, but didn't immediately get round to telling anyone. It turns out not telling anyone is actually what you're meant to do though, because it lets the algorithm get to work unmolested by acquaintances, and within a week I was surprised to see the video had received over six hundred views, which I know isn't much, but it's more than most videos I post. I guess it helps it's short. That number's plateaued however, so I reckon I can declare the accidental experiment over now and let you loyal, ugh, losers in on it without fear of nobbling the stats, therefore enjoy!

 

 

Sometimes this blog will just be me guest reviewing on Collins and Maconie's Movie Club.

 To know this show was to love it but if even you did neither, both Movie Club and "guest reviewer" are pretty self-explanatory, so enjoy as I continue to digitise my teetering VHS stacks. I think to be considered for the gig you had to leave a sample of your work on an answerphone, and I left a review of the Demi Moore version of Scarlet Letter where Robert Duvall dances round a bonfire with his head stuck up a stag – Christ, is there nothing about this I don't remember? Riverside Studios. 1998. Everyone was fun and pleasant. It wasn't paid. I didn't know what to wear so I wore what they wore. They asked if this was my first time on television and I told them I'd appeared in Z Cars when I was three months old. "Did you play a baby?" asked Andrew Collins. Rest in power, Brenda Fricker. Forgive me, Keifer. And that's my Dad and Mum at the end. 

 

 

 

It was the nineties.

The Other "Lucy and Friends"

 Staying with messy artists, any record at all of the work of The London Dungeon's own Lucy McCormick (pictured above, © Holly Revell) is always worth seeking out. When I her caught her solo formidable* Lucy and Friends back in 2024, I eagerly went looking for a trailer online so I could plug the show here, but while one does now exist, all my search turned up two years ago were the videos below. It didn't take me long to realise this was not what I was looking for, but I couldn't tear my eyes away. I don't want to give you any warning of what to expect, so just see how you get on...

 

 I hope you agree this find was worth sharing. In its way, its almost as coruscating, nourishing, and unstoppably funny, if only – as Americans say – on accident. The central message of "Emptying Yourself for God" is a hell of a hook, and the total lack of rapport between unrehearsed host and puppet creates a tension I find it hard to grow tired of, however much the deranged animated inserts start to drag.

 

 

  This Lucy and Friends is also the kind of reminder I always enjoyed getting, that before hitting its stride with wall to wall, parasocial direct address and crafted video essays, YouTube was once a lot more like the show Takeover TV, a kind of petting zoo for anonymous projects as its name suggests. Like Macbeth and the taste of fear, I had almost forgot.

 

 

 

 * I'm trying to make formidable happen as a noun, a bit like spectacle even though that was never an adjective. Pronounce it as French as you like.

The Bed-Daughter and Some Messy Artists

 from Notebookery 1, where you'll also find the Artist and the Exterminator

 Here's another record of a stepladder-set tale told in my dyed-black days of 2000 or so, this time at shunt's cabaret in its original venue of Arch 12A Bethnal Green, and accompanied by Jeremy Hardingham. I'm so happy to have any record at all of anything Jeremy's done, and of the messes we made in those days. His approach to physical illustration looks – at least from what can be made out in this video – more chaotic than Tom's work on Phonella's Shopping, but no less precise. I also included a tiny bit of footage he took of his flat with my Hi-8 camera as prelude, because I liked the pull out and reveal. 

 Inspiration for The Bed-Daughter probably came from the idea a myth is a real person's life mangled beyond recognition, in this case: the biographies of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera – a potentially souring insight I share only because the floppy-haired twenty-something who originally wrote this would want you to know. The music is by Mouse On Mars.

 Content warning: tobacco use, live flames, hair othering, face shaming, insect powder, mention of nails through extremities, an almost entirely passive female protagonist, and David Rosenberg in a vest. 

 

 

UPDATE: As with the Phonella's Shopping video, I added a transcription to run as subtitles because the sound isn't great, but for some reason both still just play the auto-generated captions when I hit CC. Does anyone have a clue what I'm doing wrong?