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?

Address by the Deputy Parliamentary Chair of the Virtual Space Nation of Asgardia

 Sticking with politics, it's been a while since we checked in on the folks at Lembit Opik's zero gravity baby farm. The following is taken from the "Weekly Q and A with the Chairman of Asgardian Parliament" held on the eighth day of the month of Leo in the Asgardian year 0010 (full video posted below) with thanks to YouTube's transcription function...

 

12:31 - Doctor Sarah E v. Clark:  

     Yes, I believe we are live. Um and while we wait on the Chair, Peter, would you like to give a summary of our um chair's meeting from an hour ago?

 

12:42 - Deputy Chair Peter Maughan (pictured):   

     Yes, Sarah. [clears throat] We're looking forward very much in the the meeting of the chairs [clears throat] looking forward to further discussions of our trip aa of the uh Antarctic potential. We also are looking forward to whatever we're going to be able to do to celebrate the uh anniversary of Asgardia and uh we had a lot of chairs there at the meeting tonight. So it was very very good. Um we're waiting for some reports back from Lembit (Opik, Chairman of Asgardian Parliament) with regard to the uh discussions he's been having with Head of Nation and with uh the Prime Minister. So we're hoping we might get some more news from him him at uh at this meeting. But as it stands at the moment, we're really sort of waiting, absorbing, looking forward to what we can do, and hoping that I can find a cure for the hiccups that I keep getting every two minutes, um, courtesy of the new drug that I'm taking and it gives me uh it gives me hiccups. So, don't let anybody tell you that it's easy to lose weight with these injections that you have because it is. But unfortunately, it also gives you ter terrible indigestion which I have. 

 But no, we had a we had a very good meeting and we're now looking forward to what Lembit will bring back to us. Lembit's in a in a conference in London at the moment (GB News' and Jordan Peterson's ARC). So, he's having to work around that. But, uh, we're hoping that he'll have some good news for us [clears throat] in a few minutes when he manages to come to us. So, that's pretty much all we did. We didn't come to any huge conclusions about anything, but we did uh we did have a good meeting and uh and that, and now we're waiting for Lembit. 

15:12 - Doctor Sarah E v. Clark:

        Thank you, Peter. 

 

15:13 - Deputy Chair: 

       But now, now we're live. I should say that uh that my name is Peter Maughan and I'm de deputy chair of the parliament of Asgardia which is the first space parliament and also the first fully digital democracy and that if anybody's watching this who is not a resident of Asgardia this is a good time to join. It's €100 or the equivalent in your currency per year and that gives you access to all of the facilities of Asgardia. So if you're not [clears throat] already a member, get joined. Uh we love it. We come together once every week as chairman of the committees of Asgardian Parliament, but we also we also enjoy ourselves. We're all friends. It's all quite nice. Those of us who've been involved in politics for a long time, as I have, know that politics is a dirty, filthy business. But this is not politics. This is politics with a small P in the sense that we are looking to guide the the destiny of mankind in space and looking to safeguard the residents of Asgardia, but not to fight with one another. It's very easy to fall out with me. I mean, I'm in lo local politics in the northeast of England and everybody falls out with me. Although I try to avoid that, but we're just all friends. If I'm in trouble with regard to anything, I can reach out to all of my colleagues in the Parliament of Asgardia and they're always here to lend a helping hand. So, it's worth it to join to have that constant on constant friendship just at the end of a phone and it's lovely and I wouldn't have it any other way. Now, I don't know who's here. You can't ask Lem any questions because he's not. But if anybody wants to ask any questions of any anyone, I'll try.

 

17:48 - Doctor Sarah E v. Clark:

     Peter, you are you're muted, Peter. And I think Lembit has joined us...

 

I'm glad they've kept the intro, but why change perfection?

"Tread More Lightly On Your Lives"

 That was back in November of 2022. Actually it's 'irreplaceable' isn't it? 

 And apologies, this will be a quite long, largely unillustrated, and not very happy post madly stuffed with microlinks, but if you click on only one of those links this last day of Pride, please let it be THIS. Thank you. I always liked you. 

 Okay. Probably the biggest, if not the only, historical development I've derived any genuine joy and hope from this century is the shedding of my own trans-skepticism as friend after friend of mine found the answer to who they were and came out as trans and non-binary. In the growing light of their revelation the world seemed to me, in this one sense at least, to become better, and richer, and more user-friendly and less exploitative. Then the party I voted into office turned that light out because they thought it's the Government who should decide what human beings are and not human beings. I've heard no one this year wish each other a Happy Pride. So no, I can't say I've grown any fonder of Sir Keir Starmer since I posted the picture above. 

 But now Labour is finally finding a replacement, and perhaps the knots in my brain will loosen. However, as the man himself said: 

"while this is an important moment it is not one for celebration. It is one for reflection. On how a party that has always prided itself on its anti-racism, its commitment to equality, its belief in a better, fairer Britain could have fallen so far as to betray its own principles, as well as the principles of the country. This is also a moment to apologise once again. To all those who were hurt, to all those who were let down, to all those driven out of our party, who no longer felt it was their home, who suffered the most appalling abuse. Today, on behalf of the entire Labour Party, I say: sorry."

 Now obviously that wasn't Starmer's resignation speech. That was the speech he gave in February 2023 after the Equalities and Human Rights Commission said they would no longer be monitoring the Labour Party for anti-semitism – the speech from which the quote "If you don’t like the changes we have made, I say the door is open and you can leave" has so often been taken out of context, that context being it was an untreated stream of white crud. Because, two years later, this same Equalities and Human Rights Commission's devastatingly under-researched guidance on who should be allowed into what toilet prompted some of these trans friends to seek out, in the words of one, "a plan and a passport" as the UK plummeted to 44th place out of 49 European countries in its recognition of trans people’s gender identity. In plain sight and to the accompaniment of countless unmarginalised commentators who genuinely don't seem to know what the word "trans" even means, the British Government became more vocally hostile to the gender non-conforming than I can remember in my lifetime, contributing oceans of piss to a rising tide of trillionaire-sponsored abject cruelty with the openly transphobic trustee of Sex Matters becoming the Prime Minister's director of communications (before resigning over Mandelson)...

 

Oh yes, Mandelson

 

... and, at the very opening of this Pride Month, Wes Streeting's replacement as Health Secretary going on the Today programme to pronounce that a trans woman is a man in a dress, an interview I have literally woken up thinking about most days since. (His exact words were in fact "I wouldn't say trans women are women", but what are they then, fucking UFOs?) 

 

 

Sorry, wrong picture

 And obviously – actually I'll take that "obviously" back, because so many seem to miss it – Starmer-mandated cruelty wasn't just reserved for the trans. Look at Woolwich Crown Court: With plans still in place to speed up "access to justice" by ending a person's right to trial by jury, Mr Justice Jeremy Johnson recently set a couple of unorthodox precedents, firstly by intitiating a prosecution for contempt of court against defense lawyer (and veteran of inquiries into Grenfell, Hillsborough, and the murder of Stephen Lawrence) Rajiv Menon for daring to remind a jury that they were allowed to vote with their conscience, and secondly, by sentencing the four Palestine Action activists left to defend themselves to a total of twenty-five years in prison for a crime they'd neither been charged with, tried for, nor found guilty of. What all four had been charged with was "criminal damage", specifically: taking a sledgehammer to Elbit Sytems UK "products" intended to be tested on Palestinians before being marketed globally as "battle-proven". (Who knows what "products"? Helmets probably.) What they were jailed for however was terrorism, with the backing of a Court of Appeal who had, in deference to the Government, reversed the High Court's overturning of Palestine Action's proscription.

 But that's a tangent really, as is Starmer's appointment of the guy who used to run the UK's most notorious monopsony as a new monopolies regulator, as is the constant downplaying of Russian interference even when it's arson attacks against Starmer's own property, as is anything Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood does, or anything I was ever planning to write about Morgan McSweeney, the not nearly famous enough Liberal-hating, Socialist-hating, Gary-Lineker-hating former Chief of Staff who put Starmer into power with undisclosed donations to Labour Together and a campaign of surveillance against journalists. I'm just getting all these brain-shredding grievances down here now because I don't ever want to write about Keir Starmer again.

 But no, they're all tangents, because the only thing compelling me to write any of this at all was there was meant to be a mass lobby of MPs to reject the EHRC's "bathroom ban" last Friday, but it had to be cancelled because of the heat and so I was hoping we could all write to our MP instead (particularly if any of you live in Makerfield) and here's that link again please. I also hope whoever takes over as Prime Minister has a plan for the heat, and the hatred, and the battle-proving, and I hope it's more than just letting it play itself out or whatever.

 Finally, since I hope never to write about Starmer again, I'll use this post to share his very last interview before resigning, given at the G7 summit. Chris Spargo is a fairly new YouTuber to the scene, whose other videos include "Why is this bin everywhere in the UK?", "Do you really need to preheat the oven?", and "I just want to show you some weird stones". I love Chris Spargo. And Callum, Emma, Sib, Griffyn, Harry, Amanda, Ashley, Billie, Sarah, Alastair, Maya, Pippa, Jack, Jas, Jordan, Jay, Es, Ozzy, Miranda, Mamoru, Oli, I love you too. Happy Pride x