When Altman, Bogdanovich, Brooks and Capra Went On Cavett To Talk About Swine Like Harry Cohn

 

 

 It's just after Frank Capra who directed "It's A Wonderful Life" talks about Hobart Bosworth losing his upper jaw to a pill of dry ice he kept in his mouth to produce convincing breath for a movie set in the South Pole, that conversation turns to the subject of Harry Cohn: "At least that era is over," Dick Cavett suggests, as we now know completely mistakenly. But Capra, like Welles, was a fan: "If he could bully you, he didn't want you around, if you could stand up to him, he wanted you." 

Capra allowed to sit at Cohn's table (source)

 

 It's also possible Capra got on Cohn's good side just by being immensely successful, and Cohn got on Capra's good side by letting him know it. Also interviewed is Mel Brooks, who describes his own introduction to Cohn beautifully, watching him wheeled around on his back from messenger to messenger "like a piece of field artillery." Robert Altman and Peter Bogdanovich are there too, it's quite a line-up, although I've never seen Dick Cavett so watery and ineffectual, but Mel Brooks has some fun with that. 

 

Cohn with Larry, Mo and Curly 

(the latter of whom Cohn forced to continue working after multiple strokes nyuk nyuk)

 Cohn seems to have been as keen to be hated as Orson Welles was to be loved, I'm having a ball playing both without the aid of a cigar, and I cannot overstate how easy everyone is making it for me. Love Goddess, the Rita Hayworth Musical returned to the Cockpit tonight. I'm a huge fan of this show. Come and join me. Tickets here!

Where to Find Hippos at the North Pole

 SPOILERS: The answer's underground, and in bits, because fifty million years or so ago the Arctic was a swamp! Did elephants have antlers back then, as imagined in this engraving? Who knows? I mean, absolutely not, according to the fossil record, but unweildy tusks and supernumerary knobbly bits were abundant in the methane-rich Eocene. Also, more recent, scientifically verifiable visualisations of the epoch show a planet ruled by giant parrots, so let's not rule anything out.

 I couldn't find any attribution for the engraving, but it looks as if it might come from a children's book published in 1887 by Henry Davenport Northrop, called Earth, Sea, and the Sky (I wonder if Ursula K. Le Guin had a copy). Illustrations from it are all over the internet, and well worth seeking out. Here, for example, is a Megalosaurus where they sort of get the head right...

 Speaking of windows on the world, the reason I know the Arctic used to be a swamp is because it's one of the many things I learnt playing around with PBS' Nova Polar Lab, as recommended by Sarah Airress after her own trip to McMurdo in Antarctica. The brilliantly engaging, slightly glitchy interactive website takes you round the globe, to visit actual field scientists in their often extraordinary research stations – like David Holland's here, on the Jakobshavn Glacier, which sank the Titanic –

– and then dig up fossils, bore down miles into ice sheets, or send seals out to measure the water temperature, to learn, first hand, the history of this planet, and the stark reality of the sharp change in its climate. You can find it HERE. I really recommend it. It is probably for children.

 

You get to visit McMurdo too.

"Thus ended the worst journey in the world."

A shelf the size of France.

 

 Today was spent finally catching up with Sarah Airress' engrossing account, over more than a year's worth of blogging, of her trip to Antarctica, to research a graphic adaptation of Apsley Cherry-Garrard's memoir of Scott's 1911 Terra Nova expedition, The Worst Journey In The World. I hope Sarah doesn't mind if I share some of it here.

 

From The One Show, April, 2020

 

 Emotional, educational, and beautifully documented with her own photographs, the trip to McMurdo took place two Novembers ago, months before Covid saw the rest of us having to rethink our living arrangements, and Airress was there for a month. But her account, begun in September of 2019, has continued to run on until at least last Saturday, which is what I powered through today, transported by every paragraph. 

 

One of the interesting things I learnt: In dry air, minus 10ºC can still feel "very mild".

 

 Most recently, she wrote about her visit to the remains of an already misshapen stone igloo that "Cherry" built in 1911, during the disastrous journey to find Emperor Penguin eggs that gave his memoir its title, and she quoted his return to the base hut:

Bread and jam, and cocoa; showers of questions; "You know this is the hardest journey ever made," from Scott; a broken record of George Robey on the gramophone which started us laughing until in our weak state we found it difficult to stop. ... Then into my warm blanket bag, and I managed to keep awake just long enough to think that Paradise must be something like this.

We slept ten thousand years ... [301]

 I looked out the George Robey, and could only find something from 1913. Still, I thought it might give me a taste, and tried to imagine men who only twenty-four hour hours earlier had been so uncomfortable that they willingly risked death, laughing themselves silly to this:

 

 It was alright, I suppose. Not as ticklish as I'd hoped, I thought, but tastes had clearly changed. Then I re-read what Cherry wrote: "a broken record of George Robey on the gramophone"... A broken record! And immediately I could hear them, high as kites, their past no more distant than my own. 

 

 

From Sarah's record of the 28-sleeping Cape Evans hut (source).

 

 About her return towards the end of 2019, Airress writes of the "thin places" – an apparently Celtic term, and possible improvement upon the word "liminality" which I've been trying to find a replacement for for years now. You can see, and indeed buy, more of Sarah's work here. And her brilliant visualisations of John Finnemore's Cabin Pressure, which is how I first knew about her, are viewable here.

Un-Slowed-Down Footage Of Those Faked Moon Landings

 In further deep fake news, a lot of people have put music on this footage but none have managed to make it funnier. When I recorded my growing doubts, here last year, about Humanity's Destiny in Outer Space, I hadn't even considered gravity. I mean... look at this! Living on an actual other planet? Every day? Doing this?

 Earth it is. 

 I heard recently on this Cosmic Shambles Q&A that one proposal to combat climate change was the reintroduction of cloned mammoths to the Arctic because they'd break up the permafrost or help create more or something. It was debunked though. Maybe I should stop eating hamburgers.

The Hallelujah Moon

 My guess is Stephen Cheatley took this. It's Blackpool, last night. I saw the crescent myself over Shepherd's Bush roundabout, as I'd finally let myself out for a walk, and I'd been looking out for it because I'd just learnt that it signaled Eid. That's not why the crescent moon's the symbol of Islam though - strictly speaking there actually is no "symbol" for Islam. The founder of the New Crescent Society, Imad Ahmed, gives a beautiful account of his coordination of nationwide sightings of this moon in the episode of Ships, Sea and the Stars below, for which I provide a reading of one of the happier moments in Ernest Shackeltons' life. Beyond its Judeo-Christian roots I'd always known next to nothing about Islam, other than a conversation I'd had in Berlin where I was corrected on an assumption made that Muslims also believed that God was Love: "I don't believe that. I believe God is Time." And according to Ahmed, the Arabic word for crescent moon, hilal, comes from a Semitic root meaning 'to scream out for joy', the same root in fact as hallelujah.

 Still on the subject of outlines, last week's episode featured this map of British shipping routes from 1937. I found it extraordinary to suddenly look upon the land as negative space...

 And the episode's packed with wonderful instances of making the invisble visible. There's a lot about shipping containers to, and the history of Greenwich, so obviously I was reminded quite a bit of The Boy who Climbed Out of His Face, and I'm reading some Conrad in this one (Heart of Darkness was one of the inspirations for the show, besides The Water Babies) and a poem called "Cargoes", which appears to have been something of a set text, but was new to me.

"Boisterous" Goings

The Terror. Or the Erebus, which means Darkness - son of Chaos. One of the two.

From a time before the names of boats were put to a public vote.

 Having uploaded today's Full Shakespeare I realised I'd rushed it a bit - well, it's always going to be rushed, but I wanted another tweak, so it's down now and it won't be up again before midnight, apologies. But to fill the voices-I-can't-really-do void, here's this week's "Ships, Sea, and the Stars" from the Royal Museums Greenwich, featuring another couple of readings from me, including a "nautical". I would not by the way recommend doing an image search for "Terror and Erebus" if you're just looking for nice pictures of ships.

"And the Skinside is the Inside"

 As you can see from the above photographs, Abbey Road studios opened up especially yesterday, just to let me record a couple of pieces, written over a hundred years ago at the South Pole, for the Royal Museums Greenwich's (hum, weird phrase) isolation something-or-other... Podcast? Video? I'll know when it goes out, which is noon today*, but it should be great so – unlike me in the photo above – heads up! (This is not my bed duvet I'm using to deaden the acoustics, it is my living room duvet, it's fine.)

It's now up on youtube. The readings are at 8:37 and 40:50.

 On a bleaker comic note, if you've never heard Dylan Moran's short monologue "The Expedition", I really recommend sneaking a listen to it here, as it's phenomenal. (Moran has always sounded like he's got a duvet over his head.) 

In other news, I myself finally ventured outside this evening, and Regent's Park was full of bats. Here's today's Defoe:

 *Thursday today, not Wednesday today.