Last month I spent three nights in Bucharest. Beyond the flight times in my diary and the self tape I'd made pretending to look sad at a dog, I knew nothing about either the job or the city that I was heading to. It was only on the plane that I looked up which country I'd even be in, but I didn't know anything about Romania either. Something to do with vampires? I just knew everything would be taken of, which it was. And Vlad the Impaler was on a mural outside the hotel, so yeah, something to do with vampires.
As I hint or mumble in the video above, heading out onto the streets that first evening after a heavy make-up test – (I'm not sure I can say too much about the job, but it was my first professional experience of waiting two hours for glue to dry: proper acting) – felt pleasantly like taking pot luck through a portal, except the changes this multiverse threw up weren't just that the traffic lights are a different colour now and there are more trees, although there were more trees. God, one month on, does that reference make any sense? Did "Multiverse of Madness" even happen?
It's not just my bad phone's fault that this shoddily-ratioed video is so inadequate a record of how thrilling I remember the place. Also partly to blame was my lack of confidence at filming stangers, and the fact that I was normally out after midnight, so of course some of the city was "surreally deserted". For every empty street I trained my camera on though, there were equally cobbled quarters still bustling and pumping with colour, fresh techno and al fresco you name it, down which I idled avoiding eye contact, and enaged in perhaps that most subconscious-baring of games: making up new titles for Bond films.
I still know very little about Romania. I don't know whose any of those heads are in Cismigiu Gardens for example. But I do know the country's a member of the EU, and that the victory mentioned in the place names was over former dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, which might explain all the trees – I was thinking of something Helen Czerski had tweeted about an aspect of twentieth century totalitarian civics I'd never considered.
Also, I can now say "Oh, I discovered this DJ in Bucharest," which sounds cool, doesn't it? Why not bung this in your ears next time you fancy a strut?
Last one for
today. I'd always wanted to be prove useful to a museum, so participating in Ships, Sea and the Stars this year was a huge treat for me. Thanks to Dr. Helen Czerski, not just for inviting me aboard, but for her entire online output this year, much of it in collaboration with Robin Ince whose work on the Cosmic Shambles provided the kind of schooling I would previously only have expected from life on a star cruiser. In a year spent so otherwise sedentary, it felt a bit like being rescued, and I haven't yet seen Helen's Royal Institute Lecture on the Oceans which aired yesterday, but I hear she enters on a wire, and that sounds apt. I could have picked any of these, but here's the final one, from September the 21st...
The mainly non-mythological constellations of the southern hemisphere,
including Chameleon, Compass, Toucan and Telescope (source.)
The final Ships, Sea & The Stars of this series is up now, in which you can hear me read an A. A. Milne
poem that was completely new to me (at 29:00) and a terrific account by
Charles Darwin of his attempts to test the hearing of worms (at 4:17). The theme of this episode – in coordination with Heritage Open Days
– is "Hidden Nature" which, according to guest and "preventive
conservator" Maria Bastidas-Spence, unambiguously means bugs. It's rare
to see an insect expert who actually hates insects, and weirdly
rewarding. In addition to carpet beetles and constellations, the team discuss
ship's mascots. It seems pretty much every species has at some point
been considered for mascothood, including a polar bear.
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 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.
I thought for a second that might be The Concise Home Doctor she was lifting, then remembered that's not how time works. Incidentally, something incredibly important and exciting did actually happen in medicine today according to Helen Czerski so great!
The mainly non-mythological constellations of the southern hemisphere,
including Chameleon, Compass, Toucan and Telescope (source.)
The final Ships, Sea & The Stars of this series is up now, in which you can hear me read an A. A. Milne poem that was completely new to me (at 29:00) and a terrific account by Charles Darwin of his attempts to test the hearing of worms (at 4:17). The theme of this episode – in coordination with Heritage Open Days – is "Hidden Nature" which, according to guest and "preventive conservator" Maria Bastidas-Spence, unambiguously means bugs. It's rare to see an insect expert who actually hates insects, and weirdly rewarding. In addition to carpet beetles and constellations, the team discuss ship's mascots. It seems pretty much every species has at some point been considered for mascothood, including a polar bear.
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 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.
This week's Ship, Sea and the Stars doesn't seem to have gone up yet, but that's okay, because I still haven't posted last week's, so here it is. The subject is "Stranded Seafarers". You can hear me reading accounts of friendlessness from Frankenstein at 4:48, and faithlessness from an old Charles Dibdin ballad at 30:43, but the episode's main focus is a lot more contemporary. At least four fifths of the world's trade is still transported by sea, which is obvious if I think about it, but I don't normally think about it, and Covid has seen pretty much all the contracts of those working these ships extended, or even doubled, meaning they will be at sea now for anything from six months to over a year, their shore leave perpetually threatened with cancellation in order to meet "Same Day Delivery" commitments. One of Helen's guests is a chaplain, and that's not because the workers are doing okay. Another illuminating engagement with something ignored but essential, I really recommend it, even though it ultimately has very little to do with Frankenstein.
HMS Captain, which sank on its first night out with the fleet
because it was too heavy and weird-looking (image source).
At the 3:26 mark of the latest Ships, Sea and the Stars from the Royal Museums Greenwich I read Lawrence Beesley's astonishing eye-witness account of the sinking of the Titanic. The subject of the show is marine archeology and the guests are Andrew Choong, who loves boats, and Helen Farr, who loves time, which is handy. Helen Czerski's the host, and I feel she would have described the Titanic sinking in a very similar manner to Beesley; both share an attention to not just detail but exactly the right detail, and a clarity of insight into just what it is about that detail which makes the processing of it so unforgettable. Catching up with a Science Shambles from a couple of weeks ago, in addition to some excellent talk about astronomy for the blind, what the big bang looked like, and why candles don't work in zero gravity, eleven minutes in I heard Helen offer this great vignette: "I remember the biggest thing I've ever seen - and it wasn't the biggest thing I'd ever seen, but my brain thought it was - and it was a tornado. And the thing about a tornado is that clouds are normally there, but you don't normally see them connected to the ground. The cloud base was probably three kilometeres. So I was looking at something three kilometers big."
I've no idea what the actual biggest thing Helen's seen is.
This evening was the first time I'd been to the South Bank since lockdown, and dumb as it might sound, the first time the reality of these closed spaces really sunk in, taking me with it. I didn't often go to the National Theatre or the BFI, and I hardly ever went to the Hayward or Royal Festival Hall, but I went here all the time. Just to be here. A public space made possible by things that are no longer happening. The space is still there, but not the public, and I felt a bit awful. Speaking of awe, in this week's Ships, Sea & The Stars I got to read some Carl Sagan. Absolutely no one delivers Carl Sagan better than Carl Sagan, but it was still a joy. Ed Bloomer makes a beautiful point in the video about Sagan's writing that's often overlooked: "It's quite kind." I once looked up the derivation of "kind". Like "like", it means both how we'd prefer to be treated, and also "our type". We like our kind, and we are kind to those like us. Sagan welcomes us. Aw man, so did the South Bank Centre. I really look forward to the welcome resuming.
If people didn't love special effects we'd never have had the Renaissance. Leonardo and Michelangelo didn't study the sciences out of idle curiosity, but because mastering their art meant fooling the eye, and that meant understanding perspective, light, physics and biology. Even John Dee started out in special effects at Trinity College. I arrived at this conclusion after a couple of days down a rabbit hole with Los Angeles-based Visual Effects youtubers, the Corridor Crew. I'd come to them through their "stuntmen react to stunts" videos, which led me to their "VFX artists react to VFX" videos, and I was just enjoying the clips and vicariously getting off on their work ethic, but then realised I was also beginning to learn some science. The penny dropped when they were reacting to 2012. I knew from Helen Czerski's zero gravity reports over on the Cosmic Shambles Network that physicists have been after a general theory of granular material, but it hadn't occurred to me that CGI artists working on disaster movies would also be after exactly the same thing. Here. (I think all these videos begin at the appropriate point)...
And it's not just a one-way street. Instead of producing concept art for the black hole in Interstellar for example, an astrophysicist was approached to provide equations to feed into a
purpose built rendering engine, and the resulting visualisation produced two
research papers...
I've also learnt from these videos how light acts beneath the surface of the skin, and how
important an understanding of this "subsurface scattering" is in
producing non-gummy-looking CGI humans. (I've also learnt that far too
many artists think there's a muscle linking the filtrum to the upper
lip)...
Less universally applicable, but still fascinatingly, I've learnt that being set on fire as a stuntman is surprisingly feezing...
And that for all the battle scenes in which you may have seen a flying arrow sliced in half, it turns out you
shouldn't actually try to intercept a missile with a weapon specifically
designed to pass through things (that's my conclusion, not
theirs)...
These are just examples of the science I picked up by the by. The Corridor Crew also produce more traditionally educational videos, and they're also superb. As Visual Effects Artists the Corridor Crew are first and foremost communicators, so they don't just understand the science that they're explaining, they understand how people receive information. For example here's a very simple idea that's hard to communicate: the scale of the Universe. As a potentially unfair comparison, here first is Arvin Ash, zooming in and out a lot, wasting our time on how a shrew is bigger than an ant, and throwing in a weird amount of stock footage of blondes in their underwear.
And now here's the Corridor Crew's contribution. A problem has been identified and addressed, and fun has resulted. First scaling down...
Then scaling up. (In summary, if the planck length were the diameter of a tennis ball, an American penny would be ninety thousand times wider than the entire universe)...
There's such a glorious clarity to all their stuff, and I really can't recommend their channel enough. And it reminds me how much I love Los Angeles. The city's a workshop, and as was true in the Renaissance, the polymaths are all there, working in VFX.
The Royal Museums Greenwich's weekly webcasts are back, with an episode on the newly reopened Cutty Sark (or "Skimpy Skirt" if you don't speak Scottish). The glamour of pineapples is discussed, traders who still sail are buttonholed, and Helen Czerski is on hand as usual to ask every question playing on your mind as if by magic. I give a couple of readings too, including a dramatic account of a storm at sea for which I had to repeatedly say "poop" with a nautical accent and a straight face. And in other news...
God, I'd have loved to seen Gene Wilder play Richard II, but in his absence I've decided I myself shall take on the role of that most pineapply of monarchs as well as every other role in Richard II of course as I return to Simon Goes Full Shakespeare next week. I know I said I'd do the War of the Roses next, but this play comes earlier historically even if it was written later, and has far fewer characters than Henry VI, far fewer explosions, and far more sadness, self-indulgence, and sass, so seems the more comfortable choice. Also I've got the hair. I'll save further spoilers for next week, but here's where I found that painting of Richard looking like a pineapple, andhere's where I found that pineapple that looks like Richard II.
Firstly, apologies for missing out the umlaut in "Öpik" in my previous post about the Chair of Parliament for outer space's first ever pyramid schemezero-gravity sex-farm micronation "Asgardia", but I didn't know how to do them in January. You just have to keep the vowel key pressed, it turns out. Moving on: I'm not sure what those images are behind Öpik, something space-based no doubt, and it doesn't look like wherever he's quarantining himself allows the hanging of pictures, but that print of an aeroplane window looks pretty levelly propped up on the back of his sofa so I've no further notes. Take it away, Lembit!
Clearly.
(The Cosmic Shambles Network, by the way, has also been doing some actual zero-gravity research, here.)
This is methane ice, which is a thing, There's estimated to be more than one thousand trillion cubic metres it at the bottom of the ocean. Not all of it stays there. The warmer the ocean gets, the more of it is released up into the atmosphere, warming the air, which warms the ocean, which releases more methane, and so on. And by "and so on" I mean of course "until this planet is as uninhabitable as Venus" but currently however, fortunately, ninety percent of the methane's absorbed by little flitting microbes as it rises to the surface. I picture them flitting anyway, but not vividly enough to see upon what. Good for them. All this and more I learnt on Monday which was "World Ocean Day", from the frankly exciting Dr. Helen Czerski in World Ocean Autopsy: The Secret Of Our Seas - featuring an actual porpoise autopsy, be warned - which screened that evening, and is now viewable here.
Michael Pinsky's Pollution Pods
Earlier in the day Helen joined the Royal Museums Greenwich again to host an Ocean Day Special, packed with experts, no expert more immediately invested in the fate of the oceans perhaps than Lisa Koperqualuk of the Inuit Circumpolar Council, co-managing the new world as the ice melts. The show is typically inspiring and surprising and just plain kind, and I'm so pleased to have been involved with these (obviously the grumpiest guest is the artist.)
In an article for the Washington Post, climate expert Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Robinson quotes Toni Morrison: "The very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work" and that article's now behind a paywall so I'm also sharing this that she wrote for Scientific American: "To Save the Climate, Look to the Oceans". According to Helen Czerski, they're engine of the world, and that's a hell of an image. To end with here's a great little tour of the engine's highways, cities and volcanoes, accompanying a tuna in May's epic Sea Shambles. And that on the wall behind Helen is apparently a "bait ball". I'll post a real one tomorrow, because they're amazing.
Above is this week's Ships, Sea and the Stars which I think will be the last for a spell. It's about mermaids, presumably organised to coincide with the beginning of Pride month, but
given a little extra pang of relevance yesterday by J.K. Rowling. I don't sing on this one but I get to do a little reading of Oscar Wilde, and the guests are as superb as ever. Watching it, I kept being reminded of the brilliant video essay below about Howard Ashman's work on The Little Mermaid. I'd no idea how big a part his vision played in it, nor that Ashman and Menken's first ever musical was an adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut, which I obviously found exciting. (I also never knew until today that when the cartoon was first dubbed into German, Ariel was voiced by Ute Lemper.)
"The river was a place for children... but it wasn't a nice place for children." Mudlarker Lara Maiklam, maritime historian S.I. Martin and senior
curator of the Royal Observatory Louise Devoy join Helen Czerski for a
look under the hood in this week's Ships, Sea and the Stars, while I can be heard reading a nineteenth-century engraver's gush. It is, as ever, the good stuff.
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 ofThe 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.
During this pandemic thousands of rock stacks have appeared in Whitley Bay. The contributors stand and wait and take their turn, a crowd in time but not space. Nobody's suggested the piles are memorials, which is a relief because they're prolific. Owen Humphreys, who took these photos and more, is a guest on today's "Ships, Sea, and the Stars" which focuses on the coast.
I say "focuses" but it's a pretty holistic episode, taking in everything from where best to see the Northern Lights (an aeroplane with the lights out) to things it's unlucky to say on a boat ("rabbit" is out), and I provide another couple of readings, one a nearly two-centuries-old account of a trip to the seaside by Charles Dickens, for which it was suggested I do a voice, and the other a poem from the Shetlands based on a Viking proverb - Bound Is The Boatless Man - for which it was suggested I didn't:
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.
Here's today's Royal Museums Greenwich Live, hosted by Helen Czerski (who gives her own great sea-borne insights into isolation here) 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. Sue Prichard's question "but then what do you put in the box?" also 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 – 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.
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.
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:
I think this was called the "Arena Space". Everything was much lower-res back in 2007.
The zip's stuck on my jacket, so if I'm leaving the flat, which I very seldom do, I have to climb into it like a hazmat suit, which seems apt. Today was World Theatre Day, and because there's no theatre, and because this is what I was listening to when I went to the shops for salt, and because the Shunt Lounge was such a big, useful focus for this blog when it started over on myspace in 2007, I'm posting a conversation Gemma Brockis
had with Chris Goode about the Lounge in 2018 long after it had closed, (and just as we were working on restaging 2003's Invitation to a Beheading). Chris' retrospective take on the place provides a nice sequel to this post. I know he wasn't fond of the word "spaces", and he still might not be, preferring "places", and this rebellion against Peter Brook's idea of theatre as an "empty space" played a large part in the conversations we all used to have. I'm reminded of them these days when I talk to Helen Czerski about science presentation. She's a practical physicist - more specifcally a bubble physicist - and hates the aesthetic of the lab, as well as the word "discovery". Similarly, M. John Harrison posted recently in the comments on his blog that he hates "ideas". I love sticklers. And I hope Chris gets entirely better immediately.
"But there's now so many ways in which that space is overlaid. Even when we were there in 2010, six years after Tropicana,
the technicians would be referring to the 'Autopsy Space'... even
though they were at school when we were doing that show, which had the
autopsy in that space, and there's absolutely nothing in that space to
suggest it was the 'Autopsy Space'... One space was called the 'Act Two
Space', even though Act One, and Three, Four and Five fell away before
we even opened the show... The cumulative effect of all of these
references, all of which were theatrical, basically, and ephemeral..."
It was even more low-res in 2005.
Make space. Make room. I've just realised the words"space" and "room" are entirely synonymous. If we can have rooms then, I guess we can have spaces. But yes, neither's ever entirely empty.
It's not just my bad phone's fault that this shoddily-ratioed video is so inadequate a record of how thrilling I remember the place. Also partly to blame was my lack of confidence at filming stangers, and the fact that I was normally out after midnight, so of course some of the city was "surreally deserted". For every empty street I trained my camera on though, there were equally cobbled quarters still bustling and pumping with colour, fresh techno and al fresco you name it, down which I idled avoiding eye contact, and enaged in perhaps that most subconscious-baring of games: making up new titles for Bond films.
