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 immediately 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. 

 

Unposted Photographs of November 2022 in Chronological Order

 It's always fascinating to see who's worn your costume before you.

 

 First day of the tube strikes. Choreography starts outside while we wait for the person with keys.

 I see a lot of these signs around Marylebone. I'm forty-eight and I still don't know what American Express is. Is it a credit card? What is it?

 

 We prepare for the plinth. I'm pretty sure it's bigger than this.

 

 After finding out Pizza Express no longer does Veniziana, I start photographing barriers because they remind me of Keir Starmer.

Thoughtlessly shitty quick fixes, looking increasingly unreplaceable.

 We're in the space. We go crazy.

 I acquaint myself with the backstage of the Cockpit.

 

 Show report: I tripped. Where were the barriers?

 

 "Vibrating pockets can still be heard in a dramatic silence." Tickets here.

 

 The Elizabeth Line is not for trypophobes.

 I get lost in Hampstead, and find some cosy blocks with globes in the window.

 Walking home from shows now, I notice the night sky is often coloured in. 

 

 I can't tell by what.

 

  Loughborough Junction has new lights too, where they used to build sets.

 

 Coldharbour Lane is getting a tower block.

 That's not all that's gone up since I left.

 

 I don't remember this book nook. It has a copy of WHSmith's "Treasury of Children's Literature". I sit and read.

 Treasury is a good word for it, although I don't get far with C. S. Forester's "Poo-Poo Finds a Dragon". 

 

 I do consider what kind of brain comes up with protagonists named "Hornblower", and "Poo-Poo".

 

 "Eeyore's Birthday" is also included, the alpha and omega of great sitcom writing. I read it aloud to myself quietly in its entirety, marvelling again, and upon reaching "'Not mine,' said Eeyore proudly" actually get a little teary.

 

 I return to Notting Hill to find Christmas has started. A different vibe.

Bojangles Break

 

 Unfamiliar with the name, I wikipedia'd Bill Robinson – as namechecked in the often brilliant Fred Astaire muscial The Band Wagon – and my belated dance education continued (it beat working on my abs):

"According to dance critic Marshall Stearns, 'Robinson's contribution to tap dance is exact and specific. He brought it up on its toes, dancing upright and swinging,' adding a 'hitherto-unknown lightness and presence.'... He is also credited with having popularized the word copacetic through his repeated use of it in vaudeville and radio appearances."

 So when I wrote that the trick to dancing seemed to be to get my top half to hold up my bottom half, apparently he invented that. And more. Watching the battered, echoing remnant of his work above I realised – later than I would like – that I'd grown up loving Bill Robinson's dancing without ever seeing the man himself do it:

"His signature routine was the stair dance, in which he would tap up and down a set of stairs in a rhythmically complex sequence of steps, a routine that he unsuccessfully attempted to patent."

And who can blame him? 

Heigh ho. 

That's entertainment.

LOVE DUMP!

 Some bouche-amusing, minute-long promotional videos rich with rehearsal footage have just dropped for The Love Goddess. Here's the show's superb star and co-creator Almog Pail first up, with a little bit of me thrown in to illustrate the concept of man-sharks...

 And here's the show's wonderful producer Laura Lundy introducing Almog introducing the rest of us. I'm mostly out of shot but you can trust me, I'm dancing just as proficiently as everyone else. I've absolutely got this...

 

 

 

 And here is our brilliant and patient choreographer "JJ" – the very first British dancer to have a shoe named after her apparently – giving credit where it's due to George "Shorty" Snowden...

 

 And here's some George "Shorty" Snowden! He's genuinely short! We open on the eighteenth, come!

Tom and Jerry used to be Cops.

 Let's endure a mad old cartoon about skeletons for Hallowe'en proper, shall we? 

 Before the famous cat and mouse, before the male leads of The Good Life – but after Pierce Egan's 1821 box office hit that I've only just learnt about* – Tom and Jerry were apparently these two guys on the right, and after last week's dancing, and Saturday's march, I look upon their floating, supple forms now with envy.  

 

 I'm back rehearsing The Love Goddess this week, and the trick to dancing seems to be to get the top half of my body to hold up the bottom half, which after forty-eight years of having my bottom half hold up the top half is quite a revelation. There's a sexy dance in this too, although not on the same level as Tex Avery, or Jessica Rabbit, or Betty Boop, or actually any woman drawn outside of a toilet cubicle on a building site. I think the animators knew too that they weren't up to this task without any reference material, which is why they spent more time having their vamp just take incredibly deep breaths in a low cut top while standing still.

 

  Has David Cairns written about this cartoon? Of course he has. Do the skeletons all start playing each other's ribs like xylophones at any point? Well actually, not quite. We're literally a second into the action when either Tom or Jerry turns his hat into a telescope, so let's not expect too many set-ups and pay-offs. 

 

 Apart from that though, Magic Mummy is just your standard, run-of-the-mill , proudly-gay-police-force-hunting-down-a-necrophiliac-Svengali cartoon from the thirties. I don't think it was one of the ones Dad used to show us on his Super 8 projector, but the scratchy soprano of its wind machine still summons the dread of many he did. Skeletons were such a faff to draw, weren't they? Happy Hallowe'en, ol' unattendees!

 

 

"At last"?!

 

 *UPDATE: I have also just learnt that "Tom and Jerry" was a drink! Okay. I reckon the drink was named after the play, and the cops were named after the drink, and the animals were named after the cops (Joseph Barbera worked on both cartoons) and the neighbours were named after the animals.

Lebanon, Missouri

 

Gwen Verdon in Fame!

 

 Isn't this the best! And now you can add to the names Gwen Verdon and Debbie Allen my own, for I have just completed the first week of rehearsals on The Love Goddess. And while I'm not saying I'm as good as these two yet, it does feel like I'm going to have to get close in order to pull off any of the routines that Jacqui Jameson's taught us. So I look forward that. I wonder how it will happen. That's Jacqui below, far right, if you don't count the reflections. This is a lovely room to be in. Look: Mirrors! Hats!

 

 The absolute best thing about the theatre though is all the foreigners you get to work with: the world shrinks and your view improves and you just feel higher up. Almog Pail, the show's creator, is from Israel, and there's a heavy American contingent too, including songwriter Logan Medland, seen above on the keyboads, triple threat Joey Simon – also pictured – and producer Laura Lundy, who was telling us over a fish supper this evening at The Seashell about her ninety-year old gay mother who got thrown out of a convent and has written a book about it. Laura also asked me to look up her daughter on IMDB, and mate...

 

 After supper we returned to The Cockpit to see Lanford Wilson Talley's Folly which closes tomorrow, a two-hander in a gazebo that I knew nothing about. "Lanford Wilson" is definitely an American name though. One often hears people who work in or for the theatre talk about the unique quality of the medium, a kind of "Here-we-are"-ness that I mainly don't feel at all when I go and see a play, beyond a nudge and a wink, but I felt it tonight.

"We could do this on a couple of folding chairs. But it's not bare. It's not bombed out. It's run down. And that makes all the difference."

 I'm not sure I'd call Talley's Folly a comedy, or even a romance, but it's definitely a thing with a heart, and a brain, and a careful thing, and I loved it. Watching American drama performed live by Amerian actors is a luxury, and also a bit of a relief. There were twenty-one other people in the audience tonight. If you're free I recommend filling the seats on its final day. The tickets are here.

 

Sometimes this blog will be a large oil painting of David Mitchell's face that I found in Alfies Antiques Market.

 Well it calls itself a market, but I'd call "Alfies Antiques" an Emporium if anything, without even looking up what an Emporium is (although I suspect the definition is a building selling wares at least three storeys tall, composed entirely of mezzanines resulting in an uncountable number of floors, and with as many different types of staircase as possible stuck just wherever there's a space – the Barbican does not sell wares so doesn't count). I have no idea why a painting of David Mitchell takes pride of place above this particular shop, but who needs a reason?

 

 Flanked by gigantic prints of Klimt, Alfies Emporium stands immediately opposite the Cockpit Theatre, where this week we have started rehearsing Love Goddess, the Rita Hayworth musical. Tomorrow is the table read, when we're all less nervous. Today we learnt songs and dancing, and I am very new to the latter. Having just the two feet makes it easier though. I'm learning they tend to take turns, and there's only so many places you can put them, and I must now have calves a centaur. We're also doing hat stuff – our choreographer worked with Gwen Verdon I hear – and while it does distract from the feet, I also learnt today what having a top hat land on my balls feels like. It's no trilby. Still, everyone's lovely and I'm trying not to be weird. Come!

 

The Ride and Room

 

 One old friend I was uncharacteristically proactive enough to actually arrange a reunion with before the wedding on Saturday was shunt's David Rosenberg, who instantly invited me to his latest shipping container work in King's Place which I had known nothing about – a mesmerising conveyor-belt-set dance piece called "Future Cargo" (see above) – and just as instantly offered me a job over drinks on the roof on the Standard Hotel. Yesterday saw me therefore, still bouyant as a blue plastic bag from the previous evening's hoo-ha, crawling across gravel and making sucking noises in a black curtained room on Darkfield's Greenwich premises before two more old friends – the writer Glen Neath, who was also at the wedding, and the head on a stick from "Coma" who was not. 

 I won't say any more about the job until it's all up and running, but I think it's something of a departure for Darkfield, maybe even more so than for me. It was a bit of a blur.

 

I remember noticing, on the journey in, how excited I still was to be riding the Docklands Light Railway, and wondering suddenly when I'm more content than when I'm on a ride.

 

(Source)

Sometimes this blog will just be Bruno Bozzetto's Dinosaur Bolero.

 

 My family aren't normally the kind to email links, but Dad sent a beauty this week: A hundred sequences that shaped animation. They tell me "cartoon" was the first word I ever spoke, but there's still a lot here that was new to me, and I recommend a wallow. Nestled, squirming, two thirds of the way down the list, between Caroline Leaf's brilliant The Street, and the introduction of Black Vulcan to The All-New Super Friends Hour, is the "Bolero" sequence from Bruno Bozzetto's Allegro Non Troppo ("Not Too Fast"). It wasn't new to me, just hitherto uncategorised, having turned up uncredited between Peter Pan and Bambi on a pirated VHS Dad bought in the eighties, and I was very glad to see it again. More than just a great spoof of Fantasia's Rites of Spring, it mixes bleak and cute without mercy, it tickles and kicks, the climactic tower blocks bursting from the ground precede Brazil by almost a decade, and I think it may also have taught me a few dance moves. Enjoy.

 

EXCITING SPACE ADVENTURE 26

 

 The overture began. Dimly, but that's what the volume knob was for, or whatever it was one had now to root around for with a cotton bud in place of a volume knob. It didn't really matter who was broadcasting, or why. It never had mattered, which had been part of the problem, but true nonetheless. There were no wings to wait in as such now, but the stool and dresser provided a suggestion of "backstage", and the teetering remains of the unpowered servers enough cover for these few last-minute rituals. Or, at least, what she hoped would become rituals - everyone has to start somewhere... Was that the end of the overture? That was the end. Cyber Security Unit 14-R rose without a squeak and, almost floating, joined her new colleagues. And the ballet began.

 

 

 

From "Cyber Security Unit 14-R's Soft Reboot". Illustration by Mel Hunter.

Robot Ballet by Oskar Schlemmer.

Sometimes this blog will just be Christopher Walken dancing his clothes off.

 Sorry these are going up late, it's just I've... I've been getting jobs! Great little jobs. One after another. Here's a photograph from one of them.

 

   The six prosthetic nipples pinned to polystyrene are part of something I did over the weekend, care of alarmingly young job creators Uncle Shortbread. As is this gorgeous display:

Okay. Now I think you're ready for Christopher Walken dancing his clothes off.

Sometimes this blog will just be something like "Have you seen Crosseyed and Painless?"

 I first saw this video on Talking Heads' VHS compilation Storytelling Giant and I'm pretty sure I stopped sitting out dances soon after. Voluntarily walking onto a dancefloor and moving on the spot had never been something I'd associated with myself before, it seemed too serious and difficult, like sport. I'm not really sure what these dancers were doing that felt so different, but I loved the undercover melodrama of it, the Tex Averish sneakiness, and although I couldn't copy the moves I could happily overact to an improvised internal monlogue in time with some music, which is what I began doing after seeing this, and have been doing ever since. It's choreographed by Toni Basil.

 And like Toni, I've still got it.

 P.S. Full Shakespeare is still happening, but other than a link in my profile and maybe a weekly round-up I'm going to start letting the blog, youtube and instagram accounts do their own thing a bit more from now on. I'll still plug stuff here, I just don't want to get tunnel vision, and I want to let my eyes dart. So today's video is still uploading, but Sunday's can be watched here (controversially The Taming of the Shrew starts a hole act earlier than Act One). I hope like Ms. Basil you're all using it and not losing it out there.

Frankenstein Wednesdays Thursday: "Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein" (1948)... It's a grand New Idea for FUN!

 Up in a bit...

 UPDATE: Okay. It's not. Apologies. While you wait, here is some absolutely excellent burlesque from the opening scene of Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy.

"The Aristocrats!"

Marie Osmond takes us into the Roaring Twenties.

Re: yesterday's post...

 She's not wrong! Personally I'd no idea any of the Osmonds had had a brush with the author of the Dada Manifesto, but here it is and it's wonderful. Thanks for the heads up, Mary!

 According to the youtube comments, Osmond hadn't entirely got her facts straight though regarding Ball's outfit: "The '13' costume discussed in the video was worn by Theo Van Doesburg, not Hugo Ball, in 1922 when he performed 'Does At Mid-Lent' at the Bauhaus." When Ball performed "Karawane" at the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916, what he was actually wearing was this:

 Image courtesy of whatever this is.

 I wonder if the people at Ripley's suggested Marie try it on. The clip is from 1985 by the way, two years after the release of "Stop Making Sense", although Ball's "I Zimbra" never made it into the theatrical cut of that so it's probably not relevant. Shame. David Byrne's little salt-shaker moves are one of the defining memories of that film for me. Like David says, "If you dance you might understand the words better." Hell of a lyricist, that Hugo Ball.