Thursday, 31 December 2020
THE YEAR IN REHASH: DECEMBER - Door Number 3. (This is going to be a drum.)
THE YEAR IN REHASH: NOVEMBER - The Old Friends In The Basement
THE YEAR IN REHASH: OCTOBER - Just Passing Through (More Ghosts)
Wednesday, 30 December 2020
THE YEAR IN REHASH: SEPTEMBER - Darwin's Bassoon Wasted on Worms
This
isn't him though, this is "Trotsky". As soon as I learnt of his
existence I whatsapped my Finnemore colleagues and... well, long story
short, John has finally decided on a name for his first child.
Unfortunately though, Trotsky – the photographed Trotsky above, not the
putative Trotsky Finnemore – would ultimately be shot dead by a sailor
tragically unaware that "ship's bear" was a thing. A very sad death
then, but I can't say he was necessarily on the wrong side of History.
THE YEAR IN REHASH: AUGUST -"I'm Enjoying This! I'm Enjoying This!" A Final Banging On About the Formal Run of Richard II
Secondly, I recently received some typically clarifying thoughts from Gemma Brockis about the "Formal Run" of Richard the Second (viewable HERE) which I hope she won't mind me sharing: "He's normally played as a bit of an odd ball or outsider," she wrote "But if he's powerful then his descent feels weirder. Which it should... In making it glamorous, and epic, you kind of don't care so much about liking people," which is a relief. She also uses the word "majestic", which eluded me and is spot on; really I should rename these the "Oddball" and "Majestic" runs. But what exactly is Majesty? How does one picture it?
It's not really seen as a heterosexual, cis male quality these days, and I wonder if that's a Post-Revolutionary thing, not just because capital-R, poets-on-crags-with-pamphlets Romanticism promoted a more egalitarian, no-frills idea of masculinity but because – and this is something I only realised yesterday – for the majority of its history since the French Revolution, Britain hasn't actually had a king.1800-1837, a couple of Georges. 1837-1901, sixty-three years of Queen Victoria. 1901-1952, an Edward and a George and an Edward and a George. 1952-2020, sixty-eight years of Queen Elizabeth. Another friend wondered whether if Britain had actually had more kings we'd still have a royal family at all, or would the men have blown it. Playing the "Majesty" of Richard feels apt then but also, at least initially, inescapably female, which reads as camp, which is presumably why noone does it. Even Fiona Shaw played Richard as an "odd ball".
Another problem – and perhaps the source of a lot of my initial impatience with this play – came from unfavourably comparing it to Marlowe's Edward the Second, in which a King's misplaced love for his favourite, and his subjects' hatred of that love, drive the whole story. There it doesn't matter what you think of the Crown; a man is imprisoned for an unrequited love, his tragedy is clear, and in the shadow of that tragedy Richard's own fall feels squeamishly underwritten. But Richard's sexuality or lack of it isn't actually a contributing factor to his tragedy, it just provides Bolingbroke with slurs whose utterance make him as despicable as everyone else. Rather this is a tragedy about a God-appointed show off. When Richard's understanding of himself as a king is contradicted, he reinvents himself as a saint, and in prison we see him discover this is even more naive an ambition, and that he might as well pretend to be a clock. He's entirely ready for death, until it comes, and good for him. This is a play about a failing artist. Audiences like those and so do actors..
THE YEAR IN REHASH: JULY - Goldilocks Zone, W1
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, which felt like an improvement. When I exited everything outside seemed improved upon as well: 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, 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 it turned out to be more bearable than we'd known in years. According to my daily Covid reporting-on-myself app however, 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.
Tuesday, 29 December 2020
THE YEAR IN REHASH: JUNE - #blacklivesmatter and #blackhistorymatters and #StatuesOfRealPeopleAreMainlyDumbAndScary
Here's nothing. I'm keeping vampire hours again. Lacking both heat-reisistant gloves and goggles as recommended by the excellent Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and unkeen on combing through fourteen years of my social media to wipe it of "personal details and anything that could be perceived as inciting violence" as recommended by the excellent Varaidzo, oh and also, you know, just being a hoverer, I didn't get to Trafalgar Square on Sunday to mourn George Floyd until two in the morning.
THE YEAR IN REHASH: MAY - How Antony found the Goddess and what he did to her when he found her.
I'm glad I looked up Atë, mentioned in Antony's curse below. Daughter of the goddess Discordia (above) whose golden apple sparked the Trojan War, Atë is the goddess of ruinous mistakes. According to wikipedia she walks upon the heads of men rather than the earth, possibly another mistake, and like the goddess Brigid she also appears a lot online in paintings by artists who like to use all the colours. No spoilers for Act Three, but I enjoy thinking of Mark Antony as a secret Discordian, a nihilist hedonist, like Charles Manson. There was a time I would have tried to play him less nakedly phoney, but people don't really need to believe a man to follow him, they just need him to give them a role, and it's still astonishing to me how good Shakespeare was at nailing this. The inventor of Rory's Story Cubes might also be a secret Discordian, by the way, given the cubes bear not one but both of the goddess' symbols - the apple and the wheel of chaos - handy for today's opening title anyway.
THE YEAR IN REHASH: APRIL - I've Decided To Read Aloud All of Daniel Defoe's "A Journal Of The Plague Year" On Youtube.
A couple of days ago I started reading Daniel Defoe's "A Journal of the Plague Year" which I just happened to have in the flat, and I found it so interesting I've decided to start reading it aloud on youtube for anyone else who might to enjoy these insights into 1665 (dressed for some reason in "It Only Hurts When I Laugh" pyjamas.) It's a novel rather than a journal, a work of well researched fiction, as Defoe was actually five when the plague hit, and I haven't finished the book yet so there might be all kinds of horrors in store. Be warned, it starts, as much apocalyptic fiction does, with a dry list of the initial death tallies, so if you want to jump right into the human interest stuff with the narrator debating whether or not to leave the city or stay and look after his business (plus some laughs) skip to 12:52, and if you just want to skip my opening waffle go to 1:40. Here then are the first twelve pages.
Monday, 28 December 2020
THE YEAR IN REHASH: MARCH - Sung Blog Sunday! "Je Suis Mermaid"
Continuing this review of my favourite or at least more conspicuous posts from the last twelve months here's the last one for today, composed in what would turn out to be my penultimate week of working at the
Crystal Maze. Starved of collaborators, "Sung Blog Sunday" would soon
grind to a halt, and this is probably the best thing I made all year. It's shorter than Titus Andronicus anyway. From March the first. Un, deux, trois...
My second bash at GarageBand, suggested by a conversation in the green room of the Crystal Maze with Catherine Davies, who also suggested rhyming "bleu" with "azure", and the line "I hear sailors are easy to scare" so big thanks, Catherine. I dip my toe into using loops here, but not equalizers, nor have I yet bought a mic. Attempt enjoyment, listeners! (Cover art from George Leonnec below, and Weeki Wachee Spring's mermaid archive above, photographer and model unknown.)
THE YEAR IN REHASH: FEBRUARY - Frankenstein Wednesdays Saturday: "Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man" (1943)... Scavengers Dissemble!
Here's the headline: I think I've uncovered something in this film not mentioned anywhere else, something quite important. It isn't the fact that Bela Lugosi's place in this film was often taken by a stunt double called Gil Perkins (pictured above), lending the Monster a sometimes pleasingly squished Ötzi the Iceman quality; that's well documented, for example here.
1941's "The Wolfman" was not Universal's first werewolf movie. That was 1935's "Werewolf of London", a surprisingly botany-heavy story steeped in Jack-the-Ripper atmos, and featuring an uptight British type called Dr. Wilfred Glendon. Its star, Henry Hull, fell out with make-up maestro Jack Pierce and refused to don the full muzzle later sported by Lon Chaney Junior, resulting in actually a far more frightening and influential – if less iconic – look for his man beast:
It was WoL which established the mythos of a bite-created beast which must kill whenever the moon is full. However contemporary audiences dismissed the effort as a Jekyll and Hyde rip-off, so when Universal returned to the idea in 1941, they chose for their hero not an uptight English scientist this time, but a visiting American "Larry Talbot" played by Lon Chaney Junior. Talbot was a man of the people, sitting on the wrong bit of armchair in a fancy castle, or in the front seat with his chauffeur like John McClane in "Die Hard". While trying it on with locally engaged Gwen Conliffe, Talbot takes her to a "Gypsy Carnival". There he is bitten by a dog he then beats to death only to have it turn into the corpse of Bela Lugosi. Bela's mother, Maleva, the keeper of the lore, is the only one who can explain this mystery – a potentially problematic depiction of Romany life, unless one considers how much the Catholic Church would literally kill to be considered this powerful an authority on the Supernatural. The now infected Talbot is finally despatched in his wolfman form (not that of a dog, like Bela – never explained) when his father, Claude Raines, smashes his skull in with a silver cane. Maleva then recites over Talbot's dying body the beautiful elegy she previously spoke for her son:
"The way you walk was thorny, through no fault of your own, but as the rain enters the soil, the river enters the sea, so tears run to a predestined end."
But in the end, maybe too much care was taken over this film, because "Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man" predicts the future of franchise blockbusters not only in its creation of a cinematic universe, but in its butchering of a story through posthumous reshoots. Working out what that original story might have been is one of both the happiest, and saddest aspects of watching the film. Because, beautiful as it is, what reaches us is a mess, most remembered for what it got wrong: Frankenstein's Monster.
Bela Lugosi was sixty when he finally got to play the Monster, found by Talbot encased in ice beneath the ruins of a castle in Vasaria. This however, you may remember, is not how we left him at the end of "Ghost of Frankenstein". That ended with the Monster given the brain of his devious "familiar" Ygor, a brain which would give him world-conquering intelligence, but also, because of a blood mismatch, leave him blind. In that blindness the Monster then stumbles into a shelf that was presumably put up by Linda Barker, because everything blows up when it falls over, including the sanitarium of Ludwig Frankenstein, (younger son of Heinrich Frankenstein who first created this Monster,) who mistakenly implanted the brain of Ygor into, oh blah etc... One can understand why, having to deal with both this continuity and that of "The Wolf Man", the studio decided to smooth a few things out for the sequel, scrapping the idea of a smarter Monster voiced by Ygor, and reintroducing the lumbering, mute giant audiences were more familiar with. We also know this was a decision made quite late however, maybe too late. We know the monster was originally given dialogue, but when test audiences heard Lugosi's Hungarian accent they laughed it out of town. We're also told Lugosi played the monster blind, which is why he always has his arms out, in that I'm-coming-to-get-you stance which is now short-hand for the undead, but then all references to his blindness were removed, which is why – the story goes – Lugosi's performance seems so stiff. Even that, though, doesn't really explain how an actor as capable of poetry could wind up giving such a clunky performance, in a film in which everyone else is so very, very good, including this guy:
Rolecall left to right: That's Lionel Awill again in the foreground. Definitely Lionel Atwill this time. Not Sir Cedric Harwdwicke. He's the Mayor, he collects pipes, he's a goody. Next along is Baroness Elsa Frankenstein, played by Ilona Massey. Is this the same Elsa who was daughter to Ludwig in "Ghost"? I'm not sure we're not supposed to be asking. She talks about the work of both her father and her grandfather though, so yes she must be, which begs the question, if she's now inherited the lot, what happened to her cousin
Back to the rolecall: To Elsa's right, bearing down on Maleva, is "Dr. Frank Mannering from Cardiff", played by Patrick Knowles. He loves Science. He's been after Talbot ever since the latter fled his hospital to tour central Europe in 1943, looking for death with a band of Gypsies. (Knowles also played the fiancé of Talbot's love interest in "The Wolf Man", which contributes beautifully to the sense of oppression he feels waking up in care.) He has pursued Talbot by following his "trail" in the newspapers, which suggests that Larry must have continued to kill while on the road with Maleva, and that every damn night must have a full moon. Finishing off the role call, between Maleva and the black-clad policeman Guno on the right, yes! That's Dwight Frye! In lederhosen! One site credits his character as "Rudi the Tailor", but I can't find any evidence of his profession elsewhere. There are some excellent clothes in Vasaria though, so it's nice to think Rudi might have had a hand in them. This is the last we'll see of Dwight Frye on Frankenstein Wednesdays. I love Dwight Frye. So it goes.
While Dr. Frank's oath prevents him from taking Talbot's life, it is still he, rather than the Baroness Frankenstein, who gets the old life-and-death equipment up and running, Lugosi's monster having directed them to the equipment, and the Baroness having found her father's books. In the only version of the film which survives, it is Talbot who first asks to be shown this kaboodle after freeing the Monster from the ice, but this appears to have been added afterwards in Audio Dialogue Replacement, and we know that Lugosi's dialogue was cut – we can see his lips moving – so maybe we don't have the whole story.
Every commentary I've seen suggests this look was proof that, in the orginal script, the Monster's sight had now returned. But as the clip above proves, he could already see, this is just him getting stronger! The moon is full, however, and so Talbot, though drained of life, is transformed once again, and defeats Ygor's evil plans in a final battle, saving the world and finally achieving redemption. Maybe he was still drowned at the end, I don't know, but what a story that would have been! But of course that's not the story we have, as Universal decided as a result of test screenings that people didn't want a megalomaniacal, Hungarian-voiced Monster. Without the presence of Ygor though, the Monster has no agency, and the film's final fight is completely without stakes. Someone simply ADR's "Don't pull that lever", some beams fall, and Gil Perkins takes over Monster duties, keeping things stiff despite shots in which we see can Lugosi move far more fluidly and threateningly, despite his sixty years and his bad back...
Finally it's Vazec of all people who saves the day, Elsa looks on pointlessly as the Dam bursts, the valley floods, and the crimes of her grandfather are finally wiped clean, but this isn't "Frozen 2". The nazis won. And Lugosi's performance will be forever condemned to mockery, without anyone realising that mockery may have been exactly what he was going for. When he roars at the Wolf Man in the final ruckus, he's taking the piss! A beautiful, sly, brave performance which, robbed of context, proved to be Lugosi's last in any Horror film for Universal. So it goes.
"Insane? He's not insane. He simply wants to die."
Next week... well in four days' time I guess, if Frankenstein Wednesdays are still going to be a thing, 1944's "House of Frankenstein". Karloff's in it. And I'll probably write more about werewolves and make-up and stuff. Guys, this is important.
THE YEAR IN REHASH: JANUARY - Why Not Build A World? (Enjoying the Unvisitable)
"Like all books, Viriconuim is just some words. There is no place, no society, no dependable furniture to 'make real'. You can't read it for that stuff, so you have to read it for everything else."I was delighted to see Harrison's name pop up. I've always loved "In Viriconium" – there's a detectable Viriconian influence here for example. Like Bastian's Fantasia in "The Neverending Story" the city is unmappable. In my spare periods at school, I used to walk along the then undeveloped South Bank in the shadow of Bankside Power Station (now Tate Britain) looking for places Viriconium might be, scouting liminal locations. And any reader in any other city could do the same.