Notebookery 2 (1993ish)

  This far smaller notebook was filled in during my gap year between school and university, and includes a couple of sketches for a comic that I posted here. It spans my first experience of living in a place on my own - a room in a houseshare in a non-denominational vicarage in Battersea - working frong of house at the Barbican theare, and trip to, and around, North America. I was very into Dave McKeans's Cages, in which an adult would visit jazz clubs and sit sketching, which I tried once. Another model of independence at the time was Snufkin from the Moomins. (Click to enlarge.)

Notebookery 1 (2002ish)

  I want to keep these posts coming, but I also feel quite like I want to take a week off, just to check on myself, so for the next few days this blog's just going to be photos of old notebooks. Today's, as far as I can tell, is from 2002. In addition to water some damage there are sketches for a book of tales I printed up, including Princess Plimsole and Fish-head and the Sibyl, and some notes for Shunt's show Dance Bear, Dance, which is how I dated it, but apart that this one turned out to be surprisingly blank. (Click to enlarge.)

Flooding The Internet With Richard Williamson (Technical Director)

 Back in the Spring of this year, as all the theatres were closing, there was an awkward campaign to flood twitter with images of theatrical professionals at work, awkward because it's only the stuff already receiving attention that normally gets recorded, the stuff on stage, not backstage. I wish I'd posted this:

 Until I went looking for online evidence of Hamlet In Kuwait to accompany yesterday's post, I'd completely forgotten about our technical director Richard Williamson's vimeo channel. It hosts footage from April 2001 taken by a documentary crew hired by the show's creator Sulayman Al-Bassam, and gives just a taste of the extraordinary challenges Richard had to face, none of which I think either he or Sulayman were expecting (the first being the destruction of a giant tree representing Kuwait that the previous show left standing in the middle of the stage). We also see what looks very much like Kuwait Today's first ever phone-in quiz, or at least if it isn't, I'm at a loss to work out how they normally went...

Richard comes to Kuwait from Richard Williamson on Vimeo.

Job Dream

 The most recent one was just this afternoon: We all turned up to a basement wearing masks, invited there by Lewis to perfom the voices of inanimate objects for a Danish Museum. I'd befriended Lewis twenty years ago, on the first ever production of Hamlet in Kuwait (see below). That's also how I'd befriended Nige, and Nige was in the room too of course. Also there were Amalia, whom I'd befriended last year in Gemma's workshop of The Maid's Tragedy, Shim, whom I'd befriended a year earlier on An Execution (By Invitation Only), and Duncan, whom I'd befriended writing for Laurence and Gus back when this blog first started. We were all sat in pairs opposite each other across five tables, reading into microphones because other actors couldn't be in the room, including Fin who was now projected onto a wall, and whom I'd befriended when I first moved into his house in Brixton, again twenty years ago. And I had honestly forgotten what it's like to spend the day with friends making work, and how much the best of these jobs feel exactly like my dreams of them.

Hamlet CNN 1 from Richard Williamson on Vimeo.

Ships, Sea and the Snark

  
A whatsapp map created for refugees,
presented by Professor Marie Gillespie,

in which distances are measured in money.

 This week's episode of Ships, Sea & the Stars from the Royal Museums Greenwich might be the the ships-sea-and-the-starriest one yet, because it deals with navigation. Not just the treasures of cartography, but the Pacific star maps being recommitted to memory by modern Hawaiians like Nainoa Thompson - an account of which you can hear me reading at 5:25 - and the Global Positioning System, or GPS, originally reserved for the American military until it was unscrambled for general use in January 2000. Other systems are now available of course, just not the EU's, because we're leaving it. On a completely unrelated-to-Brexit note, I also get to rattle through some Hunting of the Snark at 34:30. 

"Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and capes!

   But we've got our brave Captain to thank

(So the crew would protest) "that he's bought us the best—

   A perfect and absolute blank!"  (Source.)

 Marie Gillespie also brings a bag refashioned by a refugee solidarity network on Lesbos from one of a million lifejackets now left on the beaches of Greece, and if you fancy further clicks Extra Credits just produced a nice series on Austronesian navigation which you can watch here, and you can give to the Refugee Council here.

"To-Do"s To Hand

 I finally started watching Parks and Recreation last week, and yet somehow I'm already on series three. Thirty episodes in, it seems to have reached a point the American Office wouldn't reach until its eighth season, coasting along on extraordinary charm after losing its motor, and that's weird to feel just two seasons into a seven or eight season run. Basically it's stopped being a show about a woman who wants to build a park, and that's a shame as I was really loving that show. Also Mark Brenadanawicz has left, the one character who seemed genuinely based on observed human behaviour, so I might not finish it. Speaking of not finishing things, to honour the passing of yet another day in which I didn't even get started on finishing the latest episode of Simon Goes Full Shakespeare, for this evening's blog I have photographed a few things left even longer...
 
 Thing One: Putting up my paintings.

Tuesday will mark the second anniversary of my moving into this flat. They're going to look great when they're up though.

 Thing Two: The 2000AD Zarjaz 100-Page Xmas Mega-Special, 2019.

 And all progs following.

 Thing Three: Finally understanding relativity.

Special theory or General, I don't mind which. Back in December I hit a wall roundabout page 54 of Frank Close's Nothing: A Very Short Introduction when he started talking about electric charges without, as far as I could spot, explaining what an electric charge actually is. I mean, I know its effects. But what physically is a charge? Are "positive" and "negative" just names we gave them, and if so what's the point of saying "opposites attract" if they're only opposites becasue we named them after opposites? Without understanding any of this, everything following has to be taken on trust, which given that it's all thought experiments means I'm lost and Do Not Get It. Similarly, I hit a wall in George Gamow's Mr. Tompkins In Wonderland roundabout this illustration (no pun intended):

 

 But since these are the books I'd chosen to read, this means I've also hit a wall in reading generally because I really want to finish these first. Take a sentence like Close's "he made a series of 'thought experiments', more usually referred to by their German analogue 'gedankenexperiment'" though. Are they? Really?
 I should move on. I know.
 I can't.

 Thing Four: The sky above Prague.

 Viewers of my Journal of the Plague Year readings may remember me receiving this puzzle back in April. But it's just sky. Also though, sorry, but "an electric charge at rest relative to you, in an inertial frame, gives rise to an electric field, so in this situation you perceive there to be an electric field where previously you felt magnetism"? So, Frank, are you saying that magnets stop working if you move them, because I'm perfectly happy to believe that and I get that this is meant to be weird, but I just want to be sure that's what you're saying. Also I don't know what a field is.

 Given this is a stock-taking, it's only fair on myself to end by noting that, firstly: I did get something done today - someone online was looking for plays so I ran a spellcheck on, and tweaked yet another ending for, Jonah Non Grata...

 ... and secondly: I am at least neat.

Sometimes this blog will just be a cat I drew in January.

 Because I'm going to try to go to bed at a reasonablish hour now. Wish me luck.

05:51 French Lesson

 These are just random phrases, right?
 I finally got round to downloading the Duolingo app in case I suddenly decide to emigrate. I'm learning French, Spanish, Japanese and Welsh. And I was in fact planning on getting an earlier night tonight, but then I put this on...

... and it made me realise my own balcony could do with a bit of a clean, but when I went to the cupboard under the stairs to look for a tea light to put in the little tea light geenhouse I found the flat had a slinky, which was exciting so -

 OH MY GOD, FINE!

Sepia Footage of Yellow Longhair

 Here's me as "Morningstar", a psychedelic re-imagining of General Custer from Tim Plester's play Yellow Longhair which played at the Oval House pretty much exactly twenty years ago. It was the first London play I'd performed in after finally leaving home in 2000 at the age twenty-five, and as you can see from the photo below I was made pretty comfortable. I thought at first I should play the General as Klaus Kinski in Aguirre: Wrath of God, bursting with boggle-eyed territorial ambition, but after the dress rehearsal director Anthony Fletcher approached me in the café and explained that he'd hated every single aspect of what he'd just seen me do, and that as far as my character was concerned I was actually helping people, showing them the way. We were all very into Alan Moore.

 Too... Much... Neck... (and Cristina Corrazza)

 So we fixed it. It was good advice, and I often think about it. Anthony also said the poetry would play itself, and I think about that too. Tim put some snippets up on youtube years later, and here's one of them, in which I monologue to a journalist played by Sam Rumbelow after a particularly meticulous killing-spree. Back then I was "Simon Kain", waiting for another Kane to leave Equity, and not all the hair was mine, but it is now. I got to keep it. I might even still have it twenty years later. It might even turn up in my introduction to Act One of Henry the Fourth when I finally finish editing that, hopefully tomorrow. Someone's hair turns up anway... I was really fond of this. It was bloody lovely writing. Happy twentieth birthday, it.

Return of the Thwack

A celebrity variant from the Aberdeen Maritime Museum

 This week's Ships Sea and The Stars sees the return of baffling seaside atrocity Mr. Punch, previously squeamed on this blog back in March. I don't really begin to share or even fully understand curator Sue Prichard's diagnosis of cartoon violence as a malign influence on real-world power structures, but I've also just been literally blowing chef's kisses at Release The Hounds on ITV2+1 so what do I know? Dickens agrees with me however, and you can hear me reading him do so at 30:37. I'm back at 40:28 to read from Tales of a Tar a list of extraordinarily-named games carved into tops of masts, including "Jack and Bet footing in a pas de deux" and "the Saucy Temeraire at Trafflygar", both of whose rules I think I'd rather invent than learn. There's also spoken word and a really beautiful biscuit.

I'm guessing this picture was a commission though.

Round Eight Possibly

 Source.

 Welcome to round eight or whatever it is of our fortnightly quiz, in which I finally manage to come up with quite an easy one. It's based on The Miracle Of Birth as celebrated or denigrated on film. As with the Hellround I've tried to arrange the images in some kind of narrative order but that's not a clue. Just give me the names of the, you know, the thing, they're nearly all movies, and I've posted the answers in the comments.
 
1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

   
6.

7.

8.

9.

10.