In the end though I decided to leave today's song musicless, so the viewer could choose their own accompaniment. I want to say, not really knowing this play, I was absolutely knocked for six by this act. I love it. I love it so much I used a Vonnegut quote for the title. I love it so much I put Yondu in it.
I'd forgotten how intertwined my love of
Shakespeare was with my love of Alan Moore. I fell in love with the both
at about the same time, when I was thirteen, and coming back to the
full works of Shakespeare now, I'm struck again by how many strengths I see hims sharing with Moore's eighties output. Both writers moved from working in slaughter houses to working in a popular medium derided as poisonous trash, both took the plots and themes of contemporaraneous fantasies - chivalric love in Shakespeare's case, super heroes in Moore's - and tested them in a real world populated by knowable characters with often distressing consequences. Neither seemed particularly interested in heroes either, yet both seemed to find it easy to believe in utterly sociopathic villains, to the point where their becoming the most fully rounded characters in any story would be a given.
None of this has anything to do with the fact Moore gave his final comic the same name as Shakespeare's swansong, by the way. I've only just realised that.
Both love words, and both use loads, and equate writing with magic and magic with world domination, producing not just genre-defining but medium-defining works of cosmic ambition, beauty, fun, never forget fun - works full of lines I wanted and still want to say and references I didn't and still don't get, but also ultimately, merciless works, unmistakably angry that fantasy isn't realisable. Angry, and basically frightened. None of this has It still didn't occur to me though, that Shakespeare's first comedy might prove a more disturbing read than Defoe's account of London in the Plague, but that's because I'd forgotten why I loved him so much. Here's today's then, and after that you'll probably wonder what the fuss was all about. Soho takes its name from the hunting cry used here by Lance by the way. And I also love crusts.
Hmm. 23:40 and I've just finished editing today's Shakespeare youtubery. I don't mind if the videos are going to take this
long, I just need to plan it all a bit better, that's all. But while I wait
for that to upload...
... here in a similar vein is a beautifully
developed and tender bit of love at first sight featuring a travelling brush salesman from Million Dollar Legs (W.C.
Fields' first feature, although he didn't write it and he's not in this scene). Red Skelton was also a travelling brush salesman in that Bela Lugosi sketch I remember. It was
definitely a thing. I'll post today's video below once it's uploaded. I've only cut the one blatantly anti-semitic line from it, and I tell
you what that was in the introduction, so this is still the complete
works.
Maybe this will be the worst one I do. Maybe not. I was certainly nervous. It helped that Shakespeare's first play seems to be almost exclusively dialogues, but even so the conversants sound pretty similar... When I was intoduced onstage for the Finnetour last year (John Finnemore's Flying Visit) my character boasted four voices: Normal, Shouting, Sottish and Lady, and I knew this was joke but I wasn't sure why John had chosen those specific four voices, but then sure enough, as soon as I finished today's recording I realised those were exactly the four voices I'd used,a dn so went to get the T-shirt you'll see in the openind. I hadn't intended to use sound effects, by the way, it's just when I came to edit this my opening lines seemed nerve-wrackingly bare I thought some "atmos" might help give the scene some energy, and as soon as I put it on (it being iMovie's "City Night Crowd") I felt, if nothing else, a less alone. Scene Two had no atmos because it's indoors, but I did add some door sounds, still not entirely convinced about the addition of random effects though, but here's why in the end I've decided to keep them in. Working out which scenes to add the street sounds to, something about the world of this play became suddenly clear to me: I was only adding them to the scenes with men in. Women didn't go outdoors.
Yes! Having finished reading aloud Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year on youtube, tomorrow I'm launching straight into its sequel: the complete plays of Shakespeare. I did think about leaving more of a gap but then worked out that if I start now, reading one act aloud per weekday, I'll hit his farewell to the stage The Tempest in time for Christmas, making 2020 a whole ShakesYEAR! All other excuses are offered below, including tips for spotting a Maveric Complete Works (clue: count the King Lears), but I apologise for the clumping. I don't now what that was, I opened the desk out. And I cleared all the papers off. It was clearly a mistake. It will be addressed. Enjoy:
Hey, do you remember Gearge Wendt and Peter Falk were also in the Ghostbusters video? A number of surprising people turned up in that, but obviously nowhere near as many as turn up in this promo for Gylne Tider, God bless it forever. And God bless Roger Moore's impression of the virgin Mary. And of course God bless the guys who made all this happen: Stein...ay, Byvind and... Something-gar? I can't read it, sorry. Anyway, thank you guys. (And boy, the pipes on Larry Drake!) No Defoe today, because that's all finished, just this.
1870's marketing's answer to sticking "MAX" on the end of "Lemsip" (source.)
Here's the final episode of me reading aloud Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year, in which a number of returning Londoners decide to purify their houses by setting fire to them, and we learn "what befell the quacks". There's a little more to say about this passage than could be fit into the intro, so here goes. It's notable that the fictional narrator specifically pours scorn on the idea that the plague was killed off by the Great Fire of London, for example, and the dates of course back him up. Also, I looked up "Venice Treacle" as recommended by the narrator's friend Dr. Heath, and was led to this wikipedia entry for "Theriac" where I learnt that "treacle" was simply a slang word for "remedy", and so the Treacle Well mentioned by the Dormouse in Alice In Wonderland is actually pun (and here's the original:)
Whether theriac itself was a homeopathic dose of venom (literally "snake oil") or just a load of opium is contested however. And finally, I've just really enjoyed doing these, and so I'm going to do more. I thought I might want a break, but even waiting for this final episode to upload, already not just my brain but my body is reacting to the idea of suddenly stopping this routine the same way it might react to the idea of suddenly stepping off a speeding train, so moving's how I'm going to stay put.
Here's today's Royal Museums Greenwich Live, hosted by Helen Czerski (who gives her own great sea-borne insights into isolation here) and with a couple of readings from me. Victorian sailor Henry Ralph Harvey's discovery of the recuperative powers of ship-bound box-building remind me a bit of Dan Harmon's Minecraft mania, and Sue Prichard's question "but then what do you put in the box?" really struck a chord: I've been given some beautiful little boxes in my life, but I have no jewellery so I use them for hoarding my frayed dongles. Speaking of which, not mentioned above, thankfully (and I'm thinking mainly of Captain Graham Westgarth's feelings here), is something the Museum shared with Helen when she first
emailed them on the topic of what seafarers did to stay sane: "and it is
really grim - but there are accounts of specific species of fish being
nailed to a piece of wood and used as a communal masturbation tool."
Specific species...
I also liked Sue's observation that the increase in sales of crafting
materials during this "lockdown" period doesn't point to our turning
away from a life online, but in fact goes hand in hand with it because
it's only now online we're learning how to use these materials. I can't boast of any improvements in the output of my own hobby, but here's today's Defoe, in which I misidentify a mass-grave at Moorfields as one currently being exhumed outside Liverpool Steet Station. I muddled my Bedlams, in other words.
Since today's Defoe touches upon doctors recommending coal smoke to clear the air, I thought I'd look out some vintage cigarette commercials to post on this blog, but they turned out to be just depressing. However they did lead me to this ad for Mattel's "Tommy-Burst Detective Set" which is a work of art, and also a considerably more comfortable watch than Bugsy Malone. Do kids still want to be detectives? If I was ten, I'd probably want to be that fox detective from Zootropolis - Oh my god, thinking about it I'd absolutely want to be the fox from Zootropolis! I've got the legs for it certainly. Here's today's Defoe.
I joke, of course. Probably the most abiding joy of the Mos Eisley Cantina is knowing these creatures come
straight out of a sketch-book - that they're the result of
designers and make-up artists just making whatever they want.
And it occured to me recently these alien extras were a lot like the gargoyles, or more accurately "babewyn", of a cathedral (strictly speaking "gargoyles" are just the water spouts), anonymously crafted chimerae specifically designed to look out of place, images of sin upon which the workers' imaginations could run wild.
And then I tried to remember which I'd experienced first: Star Wars or a catheral, because other similarities were also springing to mind. Shared ingredients. That Star Destroyer passing overhead in the opening shot of "A New Hope", for example, felt a lot like when one first steps in and looks up at those impossibly high vaulted ceilings. Nearly all the images are of men, apart from one beautiful, robed virgin to whom the world defers. And big pillars.
What else? Luke at the end firing plasma into the reactor shaft is like when you're given the bread, you know, communion wafers. Look, I haven't got very far with this idea which is why today's post is mainly just these excellent behind-the-scenes photos which I found here.
All I'm saying is: one of the reasons Star Wars was so popular might be that it was secretly a cathedral - Wait... That was a set?!
There are more monsters in yesterday's blog, a Grand Unified Theory of monsters in fact, and here's today's Defoe, which opens with me suddenly realising where the word "quarantine" comes from:
There's a whole gallery of Wolverton's wonderful Rubber Ugly designs, both used and unused, here, and huge thanks to Nils for posting this and for constantly updating our Further Research Into Hideous Fun. I've been trying to think more meatily about this subject though recently, the role of monster design in our great big collective unconsciousnesses, ever since I was asked months ago while banging on about Frankenstein, or maybe King Kong, or probably both: "What are monsters for?"
I'd been thinking a lot at the time about monsters as symbols of isolation - Sesame Street was populated by monsters specifically because the message of that show is "nobody is the same" - but I also rolled out to my friend all the usual stuff about monsters as a metaphor for challenge, and also as just things that were fun to draw. I was all over the place, in other words.
One of Peter Klúcik's unpublished "Hobbit" illustrations,
So I thought it might help if I started talking about Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but they hadn't seen it. Then they started talking about The Trap Door, in almost exactly the same terms I'd been trying to explain Buffy (and with an enthusiam I'd never seen them discuss any work of fiction previously), and - well, I was going to say "we left it at that", but we clearly didn't because they're now reading Frankenstein, and I'm writing this. But in trying to categorise the differing uses of "monsters" I think,
tonight, I might have actually, finally hit upon something.
"Heads of Grotesque Animals" by Daniel Hopfer, 1505-36, again from Monster Brains
As a starting point, I thought it would be worth distinguishing between monsters that were unseen "bogey men" - the monsters out there: Grendel, Alien, things that go bump in the night, personifications of a primal fear of the dark - and monsters that existed in clusters and were simply fun to draw: Wolverton's Uglies above, or the muppets in Labyrinth, or the demons depicted in medieval and renaissance paintings of Sin...
"St. Christopher Carrying the Christ Child through a Sinful World" Monster Brains again
... Or indeed whatever the narrator in today's Defoe imagines seeing through a microsocope when he writes of "strange, monstrous, and frightful shapes, such as dragons, snakes, serpents, and devils, horrible to behold" - monsters, in other words, that were always with us. But as soon as I set that division down I realised the categories didn't work, because demons and germs are just as unseen as the monsters out there in the dark. And then I realised, that's the point. Whether it's H. R. Giger's Alien design, or the plasticine critturs from The Trap Door, or Hoppin' Cretins, or Rangda the demon queen...
Or these guys...
... The point of making monsters was to make visible the invisible thing we fear and which is always with us - internal, external, whatever. They didn't even have to look scary, they just had to look different, because they represent the unknown. (That the deep sea monsters sketched by Else Bostelmann,
with their enormous jaws and bulbous eyes, so closely resembled nightmares
imagined centuries earlier is only an astonishing
coincidence.) They could even be turned into mascots (my interlocutor, now I think of it, is very into mascots) as long as they're visible, innoculating us against the unknown. That's what monsters are for.
And I recognise all I've done here is go a very roundabout way to arriving at the most obvious starting point for talking about Horror that there is, but it feels good to have made the journey. Anyway here's today's Defoe. If you only want to hear how people in the seventeenth century tried to test people for the plague (one method involves chickens) you can go straight to 13:57...
TOMORROW: What all this has to do with Mos Eisley.
How's
everyone doing? Here's polyamorous ornithologist and sub-aquatic garden
enthusiast Charles William Beebe* in his "bathysphere", seconds before
being joined in his four-foot sphere by its equally lanky designer Otis Barton, to embark together upon an unprecedented two-mile dive off the coast of Nonsuch Island, Bermuda, and report back to fellow bathynaut Gloria Hollister and illustrator Else Bostelmann, humanity's first ever sightings of in situ underwater bioluminescence:
Bathynauts were basically astronauts, but steampunk, and with open marriages and actual aliens. Here's silent footage of one of their later expeditions (with a bunch of annoying pop-ups over the fish images):
And here's an excellent image of an angler fish Beebe spotted off Port-au-Prince in 1927, I guess as a result of dredging because he was only doing helmet dives back then (source here):
And most importantly here is how I first heard of all this, the second episode of Royal Museum Greenwich's utterly fascinating live stream. To quote guest Jon Copley: "more than half the world is covered by water that's more than two miles deep... it's the reality of most of the surface of our planet." So the Earth is Ocean. And here's a more recent find from the hot springs in the deep Antarctic, BILLIONS OF CRABS:
In addition to the above sources, here's Beebe's wikipedia entry containing a wonderfully comprehensive and quite personal biography of the man (*Robbie Hudson, if you're reading this, I assume you know about this guy, I mean he seems entirely up your street) and here's a contemporary newspaper splurge. And here's today's Defoe:
This is my last Andrew Lloyd Webber post, I promise, but I really buried the lede on Monday, because whilst enjoying Lyndsay Ellis' "Gethsemane" mashup, what I really should have been sharing was Ted Neeley's extraordinary 2006 Farewell Tour performance in its entirety, which it only occured to me to watch last night, and which is above. Neeley played Jesus in the film back in 1973, a Golden-Turkey-Award-nominated onscreen performance so shockingly uncommitted that I'd assumed someone else had provided the singing and Neeley was just a boss-eyed model hired to look confused and mouth along, no offense meant to boss-eyed models.
But my goodness, the sixty-three year-old Ted had me throwing my hand control across the room with excitement. I literally can't stay seated watching it. And if the reactions of his cast-mates in the wings when Neeley hits that high "WHY" seem a little over the top, the full documentary explains that this was actually the first time he'd sung "Gethsemane" since the memorial service of his original Judas, Carl Anderson, meaning he hadn't once sung it in rehearsals, not even in the technical rehearsals, and so this was the first time they were hearing it, and indeed the first time since the death of Anderson that Ted Neeley was hearing it. Here he is again, singing it again ten years later in Rotterdam, still raging against the dying of the light as a seventy-three-year-old Jesus. Importance may be empirical, but things mattering is subjective, and I find how much this matters to all involved incredibly inspiring, even in the face of Tim Rice's reliably shit lyrics... Look, that nobody would say "a new, exciting point of view" rather than "an exciting new point of view" is a hill I'm happy to die on. And speaking of dying on hills, here's today's Defoe:
These posters on Pheonix Road are a real shellacking of content at the hands of form. I'm guessing they're meant to provide comfort, but...
I don't know, I didn't find myself soothed. That's sellotape holding them up too. Sellotape on glass. Other people's glass.
I ventured out tonight for another walk down Wankers Wharf (celebrated in song here). That's an old photograph. Here's what it looked like tonight.
So there's been a change of management, which is a shame, because I'm a fan of what they've done with the place but also a fan of that name.
You can't hear the laughter coming from the windows in this photograph, nor in the following image can you see the couple playing piggy-back behind the bushes.
Going out for a walk before midnight during a global pandemic feels a lot like what going out for a walk after midnight used to feel like. I assume I'm not the only night owl suffering this disconcerting continuity. Doing great, in other words.
Here's today's Defoe, in which I receive a great special effect from my Dad, and our narrator remains indoors but reports many tales of wandering delirium, including one about evil kissing...
I
have started a tip jar! Simply as information rather than a call to action, this is what it looks like:
Literally a rattling cup. That's now up permanently on the profile on the right. Some people
have already brilliantly "bought me a coffee", several coffees in fact,
and I don't know if it's a bug or a feature of the site's terminology that the most
instinctive way for me to say thank you to those people is to "buy
them a coffee" back. But thank you, them, or you! Speaking of Bugs: the best thing about claiming online that something is the worst music video ever made is, in all sincerity, being corrected.
F*c*book was a joy to wake up to today - Joel Morris started it, as he starts so much that is fun - and I thought I'd share some of these
goodies with you now. I was too keen yesterday to lay the entire blame for Steam's rottenness on CGI because its ideas were also irredeemaby seedy, but there's no such contamination in Joel's first contribution. Rush'sTime Stands Still is pure live footage doctored to absolute bollocks for three and a half minutes, at which point the video doesn't stop, we just get our first effect that doesn't look like a mistake...
Far calmer is Yes' Leave It - which is possibly short for "Yes I know it's upside down but it creates tension, leave it" - described by Joel as "a similar video where hard
working technicians are packing ice round the rendering towers to stop
them burning down into the earth’s core"...
Good song though! So thanks be to Jon Dryden Taylor for submitting a terrible song, this one from "the artist I insist on referring to as Zeppo Jackson" (Jon's words, although I reckon Rebbie might be the new Zeppo. Gummo even? I know Gummo Marx never got in front of a camera, but still.) What's hotter than a centipede metaphor? A "hot centipede" metaphor obviously...
What a terrible museum. By this point Joel had started a new thread of "all those transparent attempts to have The Same Hit Again" and it was there I found this contribution from Will Maclean: Just For Money by Paul Hardcastle, starring Bob Hoskins and Laurence Olivier. Having never believed in the existence of any such thing as "a soul", I am at a loss to explain what it was I felt torn from me upon watching this video. All I can say is something is now gone for ever. But enjoy!
Stephen R. Johnson's video for Peter Gabriel's Sledgehammer is
famously ground-breaking. It teamed the Brothers Quay with Nick Park
and seemed an impossible act to follow, but their next collaboration, Big Time, was even better, and made the Sledgehammer video look, if anything, a little one-note...
Hi there! This is also not the video to "Steam".
I think so, anyway (and it breaks my heart that I can't find anything higher definition) but maybe I just like songs about lonely supervillains. Now, Stephen R. Johnson made three videos for Peter Gabriel in total, and by the release of Steam he'd clearly decided to move on from puppetry, stop motion animation, practical effects and the like, and embrace the new technonology... CGI.... motion capture... but some ground is perhaps better left unbroken, because - Well...
I can't honestly tell if the ideas in this video are actually any worse than what Johnson had put on screen previously. Still, more than anything that has ever been made, more than even the Star Wars prequels, it provides blinding, petrifying evidence of the hitherto unachievable stupidity of a thing that, thanks to CGI, could now be made without anyone having to work out how. Readers, this is the video to "Steam". It might be the worst video ever made. Stand back:
Forgive me, Peter.
And feel free to tell me your favourite bits in the comments below. Here's today's Defoe, a tale containing both craft and craftiness:
Here's
a figure from today's Defoe that took me surprise, relating to the number of domestic animals in London at the time of the Great Plague: "I think they talked of
forty thousand dogs, and five times as many cats; few houses being
without a cat, some having several, sometimes five or six in a house."
That is a lot of cats. So many cats. I really didn't think of seventeenth century London as having that many cats. I'm finding it hard to stop
thinking about cats. Ever since I saw the film of Cats in fact, which was like hearing Pennywise the Dancing Clown was back in Derry. Staring that beast in the face once more, however, I realised my uneasiness watching the movie was, if anything, the opposite of the uneasiness I'd felt watching the show as a child. There was no mystery to the movie, it was simply a mistake. But the stage show was not a mistake. It was intentional, unfathomable.
And as an adult I now admire that; particularly as an adult lucky enough to have participated in shunt, incredibly odd but popular theatre made entirely on its own terms, theatre - I guess like Cats - where there was nothing to "get". No questions. And yesterday I found myself actually defending Andrew Lloyd
Webber on f*c*book, when Ed Morrish was having a pop at Jesus Christ Superstar - entirely fairly, he'd just seen it for the first time, and hated it - but I wrote: "A musical's really got to know
what it is, and more and more I'm, quite reluctantly, realising how well
Lloyd Webber's hits do this, given how mad the ideas are... Mad subject matter may actually help a musical, because its only quality can be its total 'itself'iness...Itselfiness is a very fragile
thing though. There's so much not-getting-a-project that can happen down
the line. That's what makes the hits so interesting to me."
Interesting, I said. Not necessarily great.
And I should probably go into this idea in more detail, but my eyes are tired and reasearching Cats does not help tired eyes. Lyndsay Ellis, who makes great videos about musicals, including the
contribution at the top of today's post, does quite a deep dive into the differing fortunes of -
and motivations behind - the Cats stage show and Tom Hooper's intughpretation here if you're interested. Here's today's Defoe, in which an adventure begins, an adventure in editing that I probably won't try again:
And here is today's far more downbeat Defoe, possibly for completists only. (If any reader does have more information about Saint Young Men, please feel free to share it in the comments below.)
As it happens, I hadn't. The "enthusiast" makes a brief appearance in today's episode of Defoe, walking naked through the streets "with a pan of burning charcoal on his head." Further research (this) reveals his real name was Solomon Eccles, and that he was a former musician who publicly burnt all his compositions upon becoming a Quaker. Renouncing "Musick" he learnt how earn a living instead by making shoes, and would be repeatedly thrown out of churches for disruptive cobbling in the pulpit. Being "expelled" seems to have made up a late part of the the Great Eccles' CV.
It should be noted however that nobody at the time considered Solomon a maniac. I've Gemma Brockis to thank, again, for observing that when Oliver Cromwell closed all the theatres many people in the 1650's turned instead to prophets for their theatre, crowding into the homes of witches and the like, and there's certainly a crossover between Eagle's "signs" and performance art, but the man himself insisted that walking the streets naked while balancing burning coals on his head was done only under strict instruction from God, whom he had apparently asked repeatedly to be given any other instruction instead. Anyway here's today's Defoe, in which a lot of people seem to have gunpowder just generally lying around the house:
Contained within my W.C. Fields box set is If I Had A Million, a Depression-era portmanteau from 1932 in which various strangers are bequeathed a million dollars by an eccentric tycoon. Its tone varies wildly and on purpose. One recipient is a former vaudevillian played by Alison Skipworth who now runs a tea room, and spends her million on a series of cars which she and husband Fields proceed to total by slamming into motorists who've rubbed them up the wrong way.
Alison Skipworth and W. C Fields emerge from ther latest purchase.
Another recipient is a convict about to be sent to the electric chair, who knows a better lawyer would have saved his life if he'd only been able to afford one, and can't now quite process that the cheque in his hand has arrived too late.
Noboby in this episode is credited.
It's an extraordinary film, which might be why its owners never allowed the copyright to lapse, and why I can't now post the above clip on youtube. The episode follows directly on from Gene Raymond (above centre) being dragged screaming to the chair. Directed by Ernst Lubitsch, and starring Charles Laughton, it is at two minutes by far the shortest episode in the film, and it is perfect, and it knows it, and that's one of the things that makes it perfect.
Alison Skipworth again, painted by Frank Markham Skipworth (1854-1929)
I received some charity out of the blue today myself, as I explain in the introduction to today's episode of Defoe, whose title "The New Undertaking" is not as obviously a pun as I'd like:
