Badphone's Last Stand

 

 To think there was a time I balked at the thought of putting my face on this blog. But here's a little record of my business trip to Praha! for another advert, and catching the mood board for my character at the wardrobe fitting, I see who I have to thank for it...

 

 Thank you, Michael Cera, for giving me a type. 

 In my time off, I revisited many sites still standing from my last trip with Lanna in 2011: the crazy babies crawling up TV Tower – I had forgotten the massive holes in their faces – the weird, giant metronome which replaced the statue of Stalin  – the third AD told me they were thinking of bringing the statue back, but pink this time, of which he approved – and there was, of course, new mad shit too...

   The Giant Prague Museum of Endless Glass Cases of Minerals now boasted other stuff as well! Like a life-sized diorama of "dog-bears" fighting Early Cenozioc ungulents, a complete whale skeleton...

 

 I've played smaller. And those beautiful Šalamoun "Hobbit" illustrations I mentioned last post – here are more...

 There were also harps you could play, suits of armour, skulls, typewriters, and that big, empty room in the video, none of which I remember from 2011, but what I really went to the Museum for of course was the stairs, and they never disappoint...

 

 I also – for the first time – went to the zoo, as recommended, which was huge, its enclosures far less enclosing than those of Regent's Park...

 

 At its centre was a giant statue of Radegast on Mount Radhošť. Not just a guano-soiled wizard played by Sylvester McCoy, Radegast is also it turns out a Slavic Beast God overthrown by Christian missionaries – a deeply disappointing legend. 

 With of all this, Badphone did its best, bless...

 

  But my PR's given me her old phone now, which I didn't take with me, and I think it's time to start taking better pictures.

 

 (Reviewing the video, I notice it's actually shot with a different – and possibly worse – Badphone from the one I took to Bucharest in '22. I fell for Prague just as hard [and indeed for Norwich, when I did Polar Express there {and indeed Croydon, when I went to voice video games there}] but while I did make it to the last two minutes of a band in a cellar playing Watermelon Man, I didn't discover any cool, new music to round off this post with like the Bucharest one.

 So here's Alan.)

 

What We Talk About When We Talk About Laser Birds

 

 I've been giving a lot of thought to why the Arrested Development joke above, where Michael finds a bag in the fridge marked 'DEAD DOVE Do Not Eat!' opens it, looks inside, winces, but then says "I don't know what I expected" is so funny (outside of how well it's played and shot), and I think I've got it: People have an unhelpful amount of difficulty processing unexpected information through any medium other than personal experience.

 

  I've also been considering how much I may have overestimated people's desire to communicate with each other in general – or rather, be communicated to – and underestimated how much they might just rather be left to their own opinions, unruffled by information from other people, aliens, or pets. Here are some photographs of a man trying to teach a horse to count: Wilhelm Van Osten, whose work in the 1890's on or with "Clever Hans" spanned a number of moustaches...

 Their story graces the Extra Material of Helen Zaltzman's ever excellent "The Allusionist" podcast, specifically the second of two episodes about science fiction author Mary Robinette Kowal's apparently successful attempts to establish more nuanced communication with her cat, Elsie, through an increasingly large number of "button boards" (as shown below). While aware that no experiment ever showed an animal to be dumber than we thought, I initially approached these episodes with scepticism, but by the time I was hearing about a cat forming compound words – attempting to summon a light's reflection on the ceiling by tapping the buttons for "laser" and "bird", say –  I was asking myself, My God, why doesn't every pet owner have one of these?

 

 Source.

 

And it was this question which led me to consider that, maybe, people would just rather not know what other beings are thinking. Does any of this have anything to do with "Jonah Non Grata"? Not really, which is why I'm posting it. You guys deserve a break. For the record though, I feel that that night at Soho turned out to be both beautiful and useful, give hot thanks to everyone who came – including those who had to because they worked there – and am very grateful too to Rich Cline, for his lovely review which you can read HERE, but that's not much of a post, is it.  

 

Poster suggestion subsequently vetoed by PR. "Faces sell more." 

 

I will also just say that in, you know... these times...  while I may be writing to my MP quite a bit, and while I wish every friend of mine engaging with the Equality and Human Rights Commission's oppressive, ignorant, and unnecessary instructions on gender conformity every success in their consultation with MPs and hope to my core their consultation helps... that, as Rich writes in his review: "absurdity keeps us on our toes," and that we should, more generally, remember Michael and the dead dove and stop putting so much faith in the idea that, as long as we make sense, we'll be understood. I wish that were true. But, less dispiritingly, I'm also excited to start reaching out again to people through a work they won't have to understand.

 Here are tickets for Jonah at Edinburgh.

 And here are those episodes:

Stepping Into 2024 Like...

 As if! As if I'd ever "step into" a year. Years step into me, baby. Particularly last year, although I dimly remember resolving not to blog to see if anything else got written in its place, if that counts as a resolution. Results: I had a good day's writing in January, and then plans. Sitting on those plans I enjoyed a lot of days off. Too many. But I definitely enjoyed them, which I suspect is a skill. But now I'm poor. As anyone who follows me on instagram may know, I did finally land a job in the last two months of 2023, and I really enjoyed having that job, and then the job got busier, and I missed having days off, and I got iller and iller, and now I'm in France recuperating. That's a French boar. 

 

 I think she's a boar. My parents drove me up into the mountains to see a village sat in a crater – the Cirque de Navacelles – and she was knocking around a farm on the edge. We left the vineyards of Languedoc and wound up thick white canyons of pine – the temperature falling around us – until we reached a narrow-horizoned plateau of trees the size of bushes sheltering donkeys at the top, a sudden Mongolian steppe. Looking over the side of it was like looking at a map. Click to embiggen. 

 The sun was in our eyes all the way home. 

 It was a nice drive, and reminded me of a couple of things. One was just how much of the year I've spent playing "Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion", searching crags and plains for a cure for my own vampirism, forgetting which horse is mine, running away from anything really well, and maturely coming to terms with my own white privilege by opting to play as an orc. (Everyone in it really does look like Simon Cowell as well; congratulations, Micky D.) 

Simon Cowell has a quest for you pic.twitter.com/uq6C1PsuK0

— Micky D (@DeMickyD) July 11, 2023

 

 The second was THIS excellent adaptation of "Comet In Mooominland"starring our own John Finnemore which Radio 4 has just brought out for Yule, and which is definitely worth a share. I've missed sharing things on this blog. I used to stare at the cover of this for ages when I was ten. 

 Stepping into 2024 like...

 

                                                                                                                         source.                  

PinonononoNO!

 Just as Autumn was beginning, sitting in a festoon-lit beer garden on the South Bank, I got to thinking about Pinocchio, and about how much of my adulthood seemed to have been devoted to exactly the life choices he'd been told to avoid. To showbiz and hokum. I didn't know the original book very well though, so I then decided to text Gemma Brockis, who'd once made a touring adaptation with Silvia Mercuriali in a car, and ask her what she thought Pinocchio was originally, actually about?

 Gemma answered that originally, actually the story had ended with Pinocchio getting hanged. Carlo Collodi only added the blue fairy and whale-based redemption arc after the success of his initial serial prompted its expansion into a whole book. She also said it was all tied into the Risorgimento. What was that? The unification of Italy. Collodi was apparently deeply concerned with the path his new country would take, and was convinced that education was the key to its prosperity. So, wait, was Pinocchio Italy? Totally, Gemma answered. I dimly remembered a live action television adaptation from my childhood, and decided when I got home to see if it was online. It was. Here's a taste.

 

 Nightmarish. As most live action adaptations of Pinocchio seem to be. That fox at the top of this post is in it too. Want the whole thing? Both episodes? 

 Here!

 

  "What a horrible thing, Simon, why would you share this?" 

 Well, I don''t know, look, sorry, but last night I saw Netflix's new "Pinocchio" – a film Guillermo Del Toro apparently says he has wanted to make for "as long as he can remember" –  and I think that might be even worse. At least the old BBC adaptation is nightmarishly bad. Despite its many nods to Frankenstein and the inclusion of Mussolini, the Del Toro version isn't even that. One of the problems might be that Del Toro said he "wanted to deviate from the original book’s themes of obeying authority by making his Pinocchio virtuous for questioning the rules and forging his own set of morals." But he doesn't, and when Pinocchio finds Gepetto in the stomach of a whale, it's not because he spent the last act of the story searching for him, but because he inexplicably and fortuitously was sent flying out of a fascist military academy by a dropped bomb, which maybe makes the film sound more fun than it is. I promise it's not fun.

 

 I'd also suggest that if you don't like the story of Pinocchio – whatever that is – don't adapt it. I don't care that Mark Kermode gave this film five stars. Well, that's a lie, obviously I care. If anything I care more about this film's reception than the film itself. It actually made me want to watch the Zemeckis version to see how that could possibly be worse, although as summarised by the excellent Ryan George below, that also seems to share quite a few of the Netflix version's narrative malfunctions. Don't watch the Del Toro adaptation, is really all I've come on here to say, quite spitefully, I don't know, you might love it. But if you really want to watch a terrible Pinocchio adaptation this holiday, dim the lights, press "play" above, and let the screaming start.

 

I Demand To Know Who Built This Pig.

 

 

 You may have seen this substantially meme-ified pig before, in its original untouched-up form. Online reactions to the film have been understandably strong but, beyond the fact that it's a 1907 Pathé recording of an old vaudeville act, I can't find much information about what it is I'm actually seeing. Who was the act? How was it being done? What would a cross section of Le Cochon Danseur look like, for example? How many people would we find? Just the one costumed actor, moving his arms in and out of the trotters to swivel the eyeballs? A little child sitting on the main player's shoulders to operate the head bits separately? How does it all look so coordinated?

 

 The dancing pig is shamed.

  

 And how successful was the act? Because, if it was successful, why have I never seen any contemporary imitations? Why would we not see this level of articulation in a puppet again until "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles"? If Vaudeville could come up with something this impressive in 1907, why would a Master of Cinema like Fritz Lang, the creator of Metropolis, have such difficulty building a convincing dragon nearly twenty years later? If I was Lang I'd have gone "Get me the dancing pig people, STAT!" Or maybe he did. Maybe they built this dragon too, but it wasn't as good. Who built this pig!

 

 

(Okay, now I've looked it out, it's better than I remember, but it's still no dancing pig.)

 I have a question too about the technology used to clean this clip up – less about the wherewithal, and more about its effect. I assume it's some kind of rougher, off-the-peg version of whatever Ai Peter Jackson used to clean up the Beatles footage in "Get Back". A few other youtube clips suggested by my algorithm use the same tech. Here's the first I saw...

 

 My old workplace, the Trocadero, and the next time I was there I took a photograph, to compare the two...

 

 Because, when I watch these clips I feel – as I felt watching "Get Back" – that I'm somehow being transported in time, and then I have to check why, because documentaries aren't new, and film has been around for long enough for me not to be surprised by it. That's my question.

 

 So I've decided, it's not that the retouching makes footage look more realistic, but that it makes it less immeditaely familiar as "footage", and so the brain reads it more literally. One can – rightly – condemn the artificiality of this, if what's intended is the creation of a more accurate record. But what this technology reminds me is that, from its inception, film has never been just a record, it is also a genuine marvel. 

 

Everything But Snow. And Snow.

 "Have a fight," said the guy with the camera to the man and child in the small plastic dome with fake snow on the floor, just before I started filming. It wasn't the kind of fake snow you could make balls with, if such a kind exists, but it didn't look like there was much else to do in there. The same seemed true of the reindeer paddock.

 

 There were caribou on Church Street today, as well as the steel band, all right outside the Cockpit, and all gone just as it actually started to snow, between shows. (They went well by the way, the shows, by which I mean I think I've finally stopped rushing. The trouble is I never know I'm rushing until I stop.)

 

 And none of us can work out what this refers to. 

 

 The snow this evening is thick now – as you'll know if you're reading this in London – George-Bailey-come-back-to-life thick, refusing to fall from the tops of spiked fence or the branches of plane trees along Notting Hill Gate, piling up on crumpled inflatable snowmen outside people's big front doors, still falling now outside my window with the terminal velocity of confetti. Flakes got into Badphone on the walk home however, fritzing with its unlocking, so I wasn't able to take any photos. But imagine it. It looked like that. 

 Here instead is some freezing mist I photographed on the walk into work today on the big bridge that curves over Little Venice with the scanty streetlights and the single file pavements where I tend to finally check the time and find I'm running late.

Plural is Singular Plus Time – with reference to Squirrels and Bicycle Shadows

 I've been a little feverish since Monday. Whistling nostrils. Some bug. Not covid. Also, my gums have been playing up ever since I sifted through the dust bag of our Henry, looking for the inmost of a set of Matryoshka, but these two conditions are probably unrelated. 

 Anyway, I've needed rest and fresh air, so I stay in and I go out and stay in and go out with no real plan or pattern beyond just that, and today in Holland Park I noticed how my subconscious had started regarding all the squirrels as simply different phases of the same single squirrel, like the frames of an old film come to life. I tried to take a picture to illustrate this but, as if in confirmation, never managed to photograph more than one. One would think it might be simpler to just accept the reality of there being a lot squirrels in a park, and those squirrels all looking like each other, but no, my absent mind was working on the assumption it could see a fourth dimension. And that was the state of brain when I turned up Queensway, and saw this...

 All the way down the racks, bicycles' shadows had been traced onto the pavement in coloured chalk. Some of the shadows themselves had gone. A day's work.

 

The unaccommodated artist was still there, outside Sainsbury's. "Tee Em," he said, then his name, which I didn't quite catch. Maybe Gareth. He had company, so I didn't ask twice. He didn't want me stealing his work. Very fair. Noone has cash on them these days, but there was a cashpoint outside Bayswater.

Unposted Photographs of September 2022 in Chronological Order

 I found the Powell Estate in Kennington but didn't recognise it because the trees were new.

 

It seems I location hunted quite a bit in early September. Here's Taskmaster.

 

  So I still drift south. 

 

You can now get lost in what they've built around Paddington.

 

 Or be at one with the scum in the Kyoto Peace Garden.

 

 Here Tom and Shim prepare Waterloo Farm for their second wedding of the day.

 

 Once Tom's changed into an apron to clear up after our pizzas.

 I couldn't find whose this was. Barry Letts'?

 

 Finding new walks for Faren.

 

 Filth.

 

 The Duke and Duchess with Jimmy Chipperfield and an unidentified lion.

 

 Forming a dart with my arms did help. (Best family outing since Eurodisney.)

 

But did I?

 A big walk home from drinks with John, and nearly all of London now wards off the low-flying.

 

 Catching a matinée of See How They Run.

 

 Yet another big face. The eyes follow you round.

 

 

 So do the gronking pelicans.

Horniman, Presepe, Gorgon and Queue

 Today I returned to Sydenham Hill. 

 Here's a video. See if you can find the white triangle to press to make it play...

 

 

 Bella (real name unknown – originator of the "Woodlouse or Moth?" round) had invited me the Horniman Museum, to be among butterflies.

 I am an idiot for never having been in a butterfly house before.

 The pyschedelic antiquarian decadence of these animals' final act upstages any flame, and made me want to redecorate. 

 I also loved the remains of a "gorgon's-head brittlestar" in the Horniman proper, and took a picture to celebrate Natalie Haynes' new book.

 

 Elsewhere, in the newly re-de-othered World Gallery, an Italian nativity scene – or presepe – showcased foot-high likenesses of the late Queen flanked by Michael Jackson and Silvio Berlusconi...

 

 It was getting quite cold by the time we took the train to Blackfriars to see The Queue. After all, it was there.

 I'd been told it moved fast, but I was still surprised how fast, and genuinely envied those in line. I would have loved to know what it was like to be in a queue that fast. Maybe not for the full twenty hours, but I couldn't say when the excitement would wear off.

 However nothing about it struck me as "uniquely British", apart from the accents. Isn't lying in state quite an international thing? Don't they all have queues? Does this not happen at Mecca? I wonder if what's actually uniquely British is mistaking community spirit for patriotism. Probably not even that. Parliament Square was closed to traffic. As people had reported, a lot of "just being there together" was happening, which is what I like to think should happen in a public space. I love a good pedestrianisation.