THE GOOMB

 In my first night's sleep after being hospitalised for smoke inhalation in 2009, I had three very vivid dreams. I recorded the details of them as best as I could when I woke up, with illustrations, and here's one of them:

 

 "The freighter that picks me up from the Ice flow is manned by tall silver men with long waterproofs, square heads but aquiline profiles, smooth black dishes for ears and receding chrome spirals on the head. Maybe the cube swivels to accomodate the face. Anyway a nice kind image. THE GOOMB-MEN"

 

 I don't know where I got the name "Goomb" from, but they stayed with me. I tried to put them in a Mitchell And Webb sketch later that year (it was never filmed, maybe I submitted it too late), and I was still contemplating casting them as saviours in some children's book or other until today, when I was knocked sideways to see this image pop up on pinterest: 

 

 

 This is a two-headed Martian from the Twilight Zone story "Mr. Dingle the Strong", an episode I have no recollection of ever seeing. Their heads aren't exactly cubes, and their ears aren't exactly dishes, and their antennae aren't exactly spirals, but that's the Goomb alright, right down to their cheekbones. The clincher for me is that, while I describe them as "silver" in the notebook, I actually dreamt them in black and white.

 Emailing that sketch to Gareth Edwards back in December 2009, I wrote: 

"Hopefully you might find some joy – far too late as it is – in this sketch about aliens I mentioned ages ago, and then didn't write because it seemed you had loads about aliens, and now have written simply because it might turn out to be the very-odd-but-actually-useable sketch I have so far failed to produce." 

 And now UPDATE (April 27th 2023) It looks like it might actually be used now! All hail the Goomb...

 

Sometimes this blog will just be "The Black Dog".

 Here's a good dream. There's the confidence of a lifetime's work behind it, and when it turned up on television sometime around the late nineties, it immediately became one of my favourite things a person had made. I knew nothing about the person though – Alison de Vere – and that changed little in the intervening decades. She had no channel of her own, no website, and it seemed impossible to find any pictures of her online, unless we count this. Even this was hard to find, and I don't know how long it will stay up, which is why I want to share it while I can, so – quick! – let The Black Dog's nineteen minutes leave their mark on you before they disappear. Alison de Vere died in 2001 it turns out, at the age of 73. I found her obituary this week. Everything I'd guessed about her was wrong.

 

The Warm Glow

 An early start to a happily busy Wednesday, on little sleep because I stayed up late, because I'm staying up late. Later and later this week, it seems, like I'm waiting for time to stop – or at least do something interesting, which it normally does around two or three. As I've written before, that's when time leaves you alone. Maybe it's the size of the television screen that keeps me from going to bed. Maybe my body's not yet used to a screen this big. Occasionally, I entertain the idea of curling up on the carpet and falling alseep in front of it, rather than being parted by going upstairs. A change of scene maybe, like camping, which I never voluntarily did. Or sleeping on a friend's sofa, which I do. Maybe my body's grown too used to the screen. I still don't know what to eat in front of it though. Maybe I just want a harder mattress.

 Normally I don't remember dreams if I haven't slept that long, but on Tuesday night I dreamt John Finnemore had set up a series of gentle booby traps in a darkened classroom, talking me through them, one by one. Later on, I found myself in that classroom again, initially disturbed at being jabbed in the ribs and having something fall on my head in the dark, but then recalling "Oh yes, that's that damp towel John showed me." My dreams aren't normally that well-structured. Maybe it was a darkened meeting room.

Méliès' Munchausen's Missing Missing Mirror Routine

 

 First, let's at least celebrate the surprises of Georges Méliès' first flop, including this Cassandran vision of Snorky from The Banana Splits. Best value though is probably given by the manic dragon marionette left over from Méliès' The Witch, four years earlier. At twelve minutes' running time, The Witch was considerably slower-moving than this, but only because something actually happened in it. There's nothing to wait for when you watch someone dream.

 Source

 

 The sad truth is, despite its aesthetic, when it turned up on the Public Domain Review I didn't even recognise 1911's Baron Munchausen's Dream as Méliès' work. It has the feel of a contractual obligation: the spectacle's there but sloppily thrown on, and on and on, the interactions are uninspired – there's only so long one can watch someone pretend to be poked – and Méliès' trademark jump cuts don't seem to be even trying to match any more. Also, the man himself (pictured above), whose amoral charm, spry timing and alpha goatee would have made him the perfect Baron (pictured below, by Gustave Doré)... 

 

Source

 

... is nowhere to be seen. Instead we have a Baron far more ineffective, overweight, and cleanshaven. Actually we have two, which bring's me to the film's strangest omission: Munchausen's dreams are shown emerging from a giant mirror, but use of an actual mirror probably would have been prohibitively expensive, and definitely have reflected the camera and studio, so instead, Méliès constructs the room's reflection as a separate set, and casts a second actor as Munchausen's reflection to imitate the lead's movements exactly, which he does. Without deviation.

 Throughout the entire film. 

 There is no Mirror Routine.

 Georges Méliès – Georges Méliès! – built and populated a studio-sized mirror set in a film about a dream – BARON MUNCHAUSEN'S dream! – and then used it to... just pretend there was a mirror there. In fairness, it's the film's one genuinely effective effect, so maybe the Baron was cast because he was part of a double act, and this was their specialty. Anyway, here it is, but I won't judge you if you don't stick with it.

 

 

 

 Do you know what I mean by the Mirror Routine? I've read that it was already a staple of the music hall when this film came out, but maybe they just meant this illusion, in which case Méliès would indeed have been – so far as I know – the first to film it. But an illusion's not a routine. What I'm thinking of involves the breaking or setting up of that illusion for comic effect, a little like what Charlie Chaplin would do five years later in The Floorwalker...

 

... only there's no fake mirror here, and it's being shot side on, so the illusion wouldn't work for the audience, even if there was. 

 In 1921, the French comedian Max Linder made 7 Years' Bad Luck, in which a hungover toff's staff try to cover up the breaking of his mirror during a canoodle, by electing someone to dress up as his reflection. This is generally considered to be the cinematic début of what I think of as the Mirror – or Missing Mirror – Routine, and it is excellent...

 

 

 In 1924, Leo McCarey directed the even more excellent Sittin' Pretty with Charlie Chase – last seen on this blog man-spreading admirably in Tillie's Punctured Romance - in which, mistaken for a cop, Chase tries to capture a knife-wielding maniac by going undercover as his reflection. The stakes are higher than in 7 years' Bad Luck, but the rules of the game are the same. The routine starts seven minutes in. I'm posting the whole ten minutes though because, frankly, despite its title-heavy opening, I think this might be a perfect comedy. Maybe I should have just blogged about Sittin' Pretty...

 

 Nine years later, in 1933, Leo McCarey found himself directing the Marx Brothers in Duck Soup, which is both generally and fairly considered one of the greatest comedies ever filmed, and just stuck the mirror routine from Sittin' Pretty right in the middle, joke for joke. By this point though, the routine's own familiarity had become one of its ingredient, but this is the version people now know best. And of course it is excellent.

 

 

 I would stop there, if I hadn't on my searches turned up this from Eric Sykes and Spike Milligan. You may have thought there was nothing to add after Duck Soup, but Spike manages it, with an arm through the door. Excellent.

 

 

 Do you know any more? Do you know any earlier? Are they excellent? Let me know in the comments. (Oh, if you're reading this on your phone, there are loads of videos here. I've heard they don't always show on a phone.)

Job Dream

 The most recent one was just this afternoon: We all turned up to a basement wearing masks, invited there by Lewis to perfom the voices of inanimate objects for a Danish Museum. I'd befriended Lewis twenty years ago, on the first ever production of Hamlet in Kuwait (see below). That's also how I'd befriended Nige, and Nige was in the room too of course. Also there were Amalia, whom I'd befriended last year in Gemma's workshop of The Maid's Tragedy, Shim, whom I'd befriended a year earlier on An Execution (By Invitation Only), and Duncan, whom I'd befriended writing for Laurence and Gus back when this blog first started. We were all sat in pairs opposite each other across five tables, reading into microphones because other actors couldn't be in the room, including Fin who was now projected onto a wall, and whom I'd befriended when I first moved into his house in Brixton, again twenty years ago. And I had honestly forgotten what it's like to spend the day with friends making work, and how much the best of these jobs feel exactly like my dreams of them.

Hamlet CNN 1 from Richard Williamson on Vimeo.

Dream City Cheats

Not like this.

 

 Ian Hubert's youtube channel hosts beautiful minute-long performances – "tutorials" in the same way that watching someone make balloon animals is a tutorial. Comparing him to a guest on The Paul Daniels Show is meant as a compliment by the way, but I'm sure bafflement isn't Hubert's chief aim and that for anyone with Blender who understands what he's saying, this patter's packed with practical advice. Still I just enjoy watching him. 

 I wonder if there's something in these shortcuts which might help to answer a question about the human brain that's been bothering me for decades: how every single place we go to in our dreams, from the old bedroom that's not quite our old bedroom, to the cities we're driven through and the crowds we're passing, are fabricated night after night, without gaps or repeats, for just a second. Let alone why. Here's Ian building a city:

 

 And its people:

 And its moths:

 

(art by anon) 

Sung Blog Sunday! "cabbagewhite"

 Another track fresh today! Maybe a bit DJ Shadow-y? DJ Shoddy? Attempt enjoyment regardless, listeners, in this as in all things! (Cover art by Anne ten Dokelaar.)

My favourite film

... is up on youtube. It's very difficult to find elsewhere, so I've posted it below, because that is the reason to have a blog. (It was never released theatrically, it seems, and like another of my favourites – Karel Zeman's "Baron Munchausen" – it's not available on DVD. Nor is Gilbert's Fridge. Posterity's taking the piss.) You should watch it. It's personal, like a dream, like someone's made a film just for you. By which I mean "me". Maybe its rarity explains why I'm so happy to call it the favourite; I won't have to defend the choice because who else will have seen it? But I've sat friends down in front of the VHS and they seem to have loved it, taped on a whim unseen when it played once on BBC2's Moviedrome over twenty years ago. Presenter Alex Cox's introduction is on that tape first, and I force them to watch that too, because I want them to have as great a time as I did. 

 

 

 

UPDATE: That's now up on youtube!

 

It all has to be done just right. In case I'm wrong. And that's why, actually, I'm going to shut up about the film now and instead put up a transcription of that perfect introduction. Then we can talk about it after, yeah? 

 

 

Here:

"Nothing Lasts Forever was directed by Tom Schiller in 1934. Schiller was assistant prop man on King Kong. (It is he, covered in boot polish, who stands on top of the giant gates on Skull Island, shouting 'Kong Konga Kong!' as the giant ape comes looking for Fay Wray.) The same year, 1933, he directed the first of a series of docudramas about the lives of great pianists. Nothing Lasts Forever, the story of the concert pianist Adam Beckett, is the second in his long series of piano-oriented films. Beckett - a vastly popular concert pianist of the teens and twenties - died tragically in 1928, when he was mistaken for John Dillinger at a Chicago rooming house. The young man was leaving the building with a packet of curtain rods wrapped in brown paper, when he was accosted by two nervous FBI men who believed they had caught America's most wanted fugitive. What they didn't know was that Beckett, like Beethoven before, was completely deaf. The tragedy that followed forms the climax to Schiller's moving film. Interestingly, there was also a Russian biopic about Beckett made only two years later. Known, rather improbably, as Last Streetcar to Manhattan, it told the story from a Marxist-Leninist point of view, depicting Beckett as an impoverished proletarian who attempts to organise a Young Workers' and Pianists' Communist League. The Russian version, directed by Boris Turnovski, was later denounced by Stalin at the 25th Plenum of the Supreme Soviet. Even as Turnovski and his fellow filmmakers departed for internal exile, the original American Nothing Lasts Forever began to enjoy a covert popularity behind the Iron Curtain. Both films were removed from the banned list by Nikita Khrushchev in 1959. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn reputedly declared that only Schiller would be allowed to direct the feature version of The Gulag Archipelago. Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev apparently discussed Nothing Lasts Forever at length during their first historic summit, Reagan having tried out for the role of Mendehlsson in another of Schiller's biographies of great composers (the role eventually going to Randolph Scott). Now aged almost ninety, Schiller lives in New England, where he and Solzhenitsyn still meet regularly, discussing their adaptation of The Gulag. The money's already in place for this big-budget, American/Russian/French co-production. The only delay apparently is caused by a disagreement between Schiller and Solzhenitsyn as to how many musical number shall appear in the film.

UPDATE: But the film itself isn't any more!

posted from a phone

(originally posted on myspace here)

Well that was brilliant. I haven't seen Daniel Kitson before and, long as it's taken me to do get round to it I'm quite glad the first time that I see him should have been in a park at midnight. A large crowd, but my initial begrudging of the laughter that greeted him opening his mouth lasted about empty seconds - I meant forty seconds, predictive text. No he said he felt like spending the hour just congratulating us for showing up, and by that point I would have been very happy with that. Instead he read a story from a stool, lit by the lamps through the trees like a moomin, and that was fox too (wow, I meant to type excellent and see I've typed fox. That's incredibly predictive.) And I listened to much of it only drifting off to try and remember when I'd last written a love story, and to wonder how on Earth I'd go about trying to write one again... i don't know how to do paragraphs on a phone... New paragraph... And now I'm sat by the American Embassy in a break from walking home. I've never been here before. I've just a had cool, refreshing all-day-breakfast packaged sandwich and it's two in the morning. Pimm's o' clock. I'm tucking into maltesers now and living the dream. Not a proper dream, mind, the kind you have once you've pressed the snooze button (I have to, the tune my alarm plays is soporific to a fault) then find a spare room beyond the bathroom, and a whole other house beyond that, and a design magazine on the floor, and you know it's French because they're giving away an inflatable woman tucked into the pages like a free scent, and you pull it out and wonder shall I? and then the alarm goes off again. And you wake up and fall asleep.

What's missing from this picture?

 

 At nine o'clock it was still light in Battersea Park, and I'm trying to put my finger on what it is that's missing, and why I feel I'm wasting my time here. I mean, look at it. Where else would I rather be? Just behind me is the vicarage I lodged in when I left school, attached to a round church with a photograph of the planet Earth where Jesus would normally be, or at least that's what was there back in 1993, when I first left home. And it's becoming difficult to maintain that enthusiasm for independence now I'm 34. London has never looked more beautiful, and I'm limping to keep up. Battersea Park is practically deserted and there are party-boats on the the Thames but this doesn't feel like home tonight. It feels like a very well-appointed waiting room. 

 

 I don't know what's missing.

 Maybe this is because of the fire, because my home has gone but I'm only now getting ready to entertain. Maybe it's because of the pain in the right leg. Maybe it's because I should be writing. I've had another week off and done... not nothing I suppose, no, on Tuesday I went to the hospital to blow into a robot and receive a clean bill of health, good, and on Friday I went to "The Hospital" to eat Eggs Benedict and discuss a script about a hitman - but it's not much. I mean, Gemma went over to California for the week and still managed fit in research for the show (from a book about Manet... and there's a mur-mermuh-mermuh programme about him on iplayer right now in fact). It's all good stuff she's found. Here's some:

"This is a quote from the charge d'affaires at the British Embassy in Paris in 1869.

'The second empire has gone off the rails. It is no longer being guided it is hurling itself at an accelerating speed towards the abyss'... 

"The 1867 expo opened late. On the opening ceremony, they were surrounded by builders. because of bad weather, barely half the exhibits were there. Of those that had arrived, only a fifth had been unpacked. The opening ceremony, conducted by Emperor Napoleon was on 'a muddy fairground amid packing cases, tarpaulin-shrouded exhibits and crews of frantic workmen' one observed described it as 'a sickly child that was bound to die', so. That became the biggest show in Europe. It's all ok... 

"London in 1867 had a heatwave. They drank cold tea and gentlemen wore wet cabbage leaves inside their top hats... 

"Abolishment of arbitrary arrest and obligation of workers to carry identity cards... 

"Napoleon went to war in Alsace Lorraine with bladder stones. In a lot of pain, he rouged himself, and tried to die in battle but failed. He lamented he was 'not even able to get himself killed.'... 

"During the seige, they killed all the animals in the zoo to eat. The richer Parisians therefore dined on all sorts of curiosities. Castor and Pollux, the two elephants in the Jardin de Plantes, had been cruelly and bunglingly dispatched with a chassepot firing steel tipped.33 calibre bullets. Elephants had long been the most esteemed and well loved residents at the zoo. They were fed honey cakes and were said to enjoy the singing of patriotic songs. Their keeper, M. Devisme, had protested at the execution (which was watched by several big-game hunters and other Parisians) and afterwards fell sobbing in the snow, huggling the trunk of one of his dead charges. Elephant steak promptly found its way onto the plate of Victor Hugo who was further satisfying his gastronomic curiosity by tucking into bear and antelope. (Horse meat gave him indigestion. Wealthy Parisians were able to choose from zebra, reindeer, yak and kangaroo)" 

The night before Gemma mailed that, I had a dream about dying elephants in the Shunt Lounge, a whole pile of them at the foot of a low ramp being gored by elephants that had failed to make the jump and goring the next ones in turn. It was a mess. Maybe I need a desk. There are four canvasses stuck to the wall of the room I now occupy. They're stuck there with blue tak. Two are blank. The other two bear this picture:

 

 But as long as this isn't my home that's not my problem.

Excuses, excuses and Heather Couper

Ack, daylight.

The sun says hello. Good afternoon then. My system of parallel alarms clearly hasn't done the trick. My sleeping body's learnt how to operate two snooze buttons simultaneously and instead of waking up I make it only as far as REM sleep where Sean Penn's crouched behind me in the back seat of a left-hand-drive Buick tearing through an orchard, saying how shit an actor he thinks Michael Caine is: "He always plays the same damn thing! He always does the same fucking thing with his hands! He should - Like one character should maybe have two fingers blown off so he's only allowed to use three fingers - Find something different to do with his hands. At least that would get him to fucking act for fucking once!" And I go "Well, hmm..." and watch the trees streak past and think "Shall I tell him how over-rated I think he is?" but don't. And then the alarm goes, my lizard brain kicks in, slams it off, goes back to sleep and now I'm channel-hopping with my Dad in a hotel in Spain... I tried to find a graphic to illustrate "lizard brain". I think its proper name is the cerebellum. There's supposed to be a lizard bit and then a mouse bit and then a monkey bit and then dolphin bit, but I can't work out where the lizard bit initially is. It's not the kernel. I think it's more like a little old-man-of-the-sea brain that clings onto the back, curled up like - now I come to think of it -

Anyway by half past one in the afternoon some part of me even tires of being tired, and I reach a hand over to the off-white, Glen-Larson-schemed replacement phone I've been issued with since the theft of the one on which I used to play Sonic, and start playing Snake.

And Heather Couper's on the radio, discussing the anthropic principle. This as I understand it points out that if you throw a tin of paint against a wall it's got to leave SOME kind of mark, even though the chances of it leaving EXACTLY that mark are infinitesimally small. Ergo the presence in this universe of life intelligent enough to ask "Why are we present in this universe, ie here?" proves nothing but, well, itself... It's a very simple principle, confounded perhaps by my decision to explain it in terms of paint. Of course I remember Heather Couper back from when I was a kid watching her on Saturday morning television explaining Space or Halley's Comet or warning us not to look at an eclipse. She had a white jacket and a red shirt and a perm back then. Lovely, warm Heather Couper.

Was she always on because we were sending so much stuff into space? Were we? Or had we just got something back? It's odd to see in hindsight the conditions of your childhood environment revealed as blips, not constants. Are kids still even into Space? I know for a fact they still receive the same basic grounding I did in Ancient Egyptian burial technique, because whenever I ask them what this double-pronged eye-ball gouger's for their first response will always be "Oo, pulling the brains out through the nose!"

And I was reading Michael Palin's Diaries (1969-79) recently, in which he unwittingly charts the day-to-day gestation of the world into which I got born. Everything's so recent. I was amazed. Such-and-such a day saw the rise of the IRA, the discrediting of the Left, the gentrification of Notting Hill etc... I'd hoped, you see, that reading these diaries would help get me back into the act of writing (I hadn't forgetten about you) and bought quite a number of other books by writers about writing in this same vain hope. Read 'em all. Played Sonic. Then Snake. So I've read Brian Aldiss' "Bury My Heart in W.H. Smiths". And I've read Kurt Vonnegut's "A Man Without A Country", where he jots down "the funniest joke in the world" (Last night I dreamed I was eating flannel cakes. When I woke up the blanket was gone) although I found a funnier one I think on page 131:

"When I got Home from the Second World War, my Uncle Dan clapped me on the back, and he said, 'You're a man now.' So I killed him."

Another interesting thing about Palin's diaries: He writes nothing at all about the business of crafting sketches for Monty Python, but will meticulously chart the progress of a possible voice-over gig. (And it only takes him half an hour to write an entry. I can't be a writer. That explains it.)

And here's Anthony Neilson's advice to young writers, if you're interested. I've done some homework. And I don't disagree with what he says about the liberating discipline of "story", but all this stuff is just so self-evident and, as advice, useless. It's unilluminating. "Thou Shalt Not Bore". Oh, you think? It gets us nowhere. Silly, old, fantastic, paperbacky Brian Aldiss would be the first to point out the wrong-headedness of this simply as advice to a writer, let alone someone wishing to write for the theatre - SPECIFICALLY for the theatre. If all you want to do is tell a story then set up stall somewhere unheckleable and accessible to millions. Make no mess. Never fail. And, ahhh BLAH BLAH (I wonder if that Sean Penn dream had anything to do with this) anyway I'm awake now, my fingers hurt, it's dark, that was five hours well spent, and if there's one OTHER thing I learnt from the Palin diaries it's that sketches don't write themselves. So I'm off to play Snake. Stopping only when the measure of my own success makes me bite myself in the ass:

 

(Hm. That's two posts now that I've ended with the word "ass". Maybe I'm a writer after all.)

(originally posted on myspace)

The single most simple invention 2: TE-DEE

 

 

"The single most simple invention" actually refers to that lengthy, and often mardy, tangent I was involved in over at Chris Goode's blog, the one I threatened at some point to try and summarize, the one I printed out yesterday that ran to more than fifty pages of A4, the one where Chris writes about "trying to reinvent" theatre, and I get shirty and counter with "but it's the single most simple invention known to man" thinking I'm quoting "Restaurant at the End of the Universe", only it turns out I'm not, because the passage I was actually thinking of goes like this:

""What about this wheel thingy? It sounds a terribly interesting project."
"Ah," said the marketing girl, "Well, we're having a little difficulty there."
"Difficulty?" excalimed Ford? "Difficulty? What do you mean, difficulty? It's the single simplest machine in the entire Universe!"
"Alright, Mr Wiseguy, you're so clever, you tell us what colour it should be."

... and finally, after two weeks of fractious debate over the nature and definition of fiction, testimony, irony, God, and cats, the tangent ends, as I said, quite cheerily, with me going "this is what comedians do, and it's certainly not candour" and then Chris going "Stand-up comics, yes, YES", and then Chris going "the perfect mix of prepared material, technical facility, responsiveness, interaction, topicality, entertainment, liveness", and finally "All we have to do then is: replace the single figure with a group, preferably; lose the microphone; lose the raised stage; lose the necessity of 'being funny'. But heighten and intensify the sense of entertainment... I can see why you would want a drink in your hand."
So, sort of like I said, simple. 

 

And now I'm putting the tangent down, and I'm walking away from the tangent. I just thought I'd bung a record of it up here on the blog, because it's all stuff I've been thinking about in relation to the now-upcoming Jonah show I'll be doing in January... a show which I've often considered trying to pass off as stand-up, but with longeurs, and hymns. I had a very odd dream about it last night in fact (or rather this morning), where my request to move the audience about and have the run of Shunt's lobby and lift were sniffily rejected on, of all things, ARTISTIC grounds. And then I thought, oh this'll make an interesting post. And then I woke up. They were rejected in my dream by a man called Mischa Twitchin, who I've never known be anything other than totally supportive of anything I've ever done... except maybe the Primo Levi sketch – Maybe that's what the dream was actually about, now I come to think of it. That wee fear. Mischa makes a lot of pieces about literature relating to the Holocaust, and I've just written a sketch where Primo Levi goes "Te-dee!" a lot, and has his sleeping-pill-powered, imploding gin bagpipes confiscated by the landlady. That's real. I'm back to talking about real life now.

 

But clearly I've left the writing of these posts long enough for them to start acting like dreams, in other words, too long, because: A) They do seem quite confused and boring in hindsight, for which I apologize, but also B) You think you've been concentrating on one thing and then you start writing and it turns out something completely different floats to the surface, like a dead polar bear in a film star's pool where you were expecting William Holden. "Oh Primo!" was finally recorded on Monday night, after I called Nigel to say yes. Apparently, the producer recorded himself in the bath for one of the sound effects. Isn't that lovely. It's one of three sketches I have so far got round to writing for Laurence and Gus, and I'm very very pleased with how they've been going. And that's all I'll say for now... I'm not going to complain again about how corridory Broadcasting House is. Although it IS awful. It's awful. Like a check-in desk. You can't take plastic cups in, you've got to pour the BEER BACK INTO THE BOTTLE! And there are only two urinals! That's not liminal! Unless a huge queue of men hanging round the door of the gents – the GENTS! – at half time can be considered liminal because it means "threshold"... So I'll leave it. A friend of mine got married at the weekend. It was lovely. That's what I'll write about next...

 

 P.S. Anyone whose interest was piqued by yesterday's garbled post about David Rosenberg might find a visit to his website http://www.iwake.co.uk/ both useful and illuminating (heh-heh-heh).

I suggest you turn your back now Hercules

 So hopefully Sunday night has seen off that recurring dream where I'm about to go onstage as Henry VI but haven't learnt my lines. It's a dream my Dad used to have as well. (Perhaps he still does.) It's not always Henry VI but it is always a play written in verse: I'm staring down at my second-hand copy in the wings when it hits and the lines are always ten syllables long. Now normally the dream ends with me having to go onstage and fake a few cues, then own up and apologize, clamber down into the auditorium and head out the fire exit... not defeated, just disappointed... but on Sunday night it was different.

 

On Sunday night I finally decided to take the play onstage with me and pretend I was reading the bible. (Henry VI is very into the bible. And I also started reading it a few nights ago... Never realized before how many men in Genesis wait 500 years before settling down to have kids... Also interesting to see God was good enough to run up a couple of tunics for Adam and Eve to wear in exile. Bless him... Very artistic temperament: "OH IT'S ALL RUBBISH IT'S ALL GONE WRONG... etc.") Of course the theatrical lighting meant it was very difficult to make out the words and I kept tilting my head and losing my place - In fact the whole thing was a joke. But when I walked offstage it was back into the wings, not the fire exit. And the show would carry on. (It was always going to be rubbish anyway.) 

And this may or may not have had something to do with the fact that Sunday evening had seen me heading out to Mount Pleasant to miss an Indigo Moss gig at the Apple Tree, which was fine, I mean it's fine that I missed it. Better than fine in fact because it meant I could get some walking done: This is the week I have set aside to write - as I mentioned in the last post - so a lot of that day had been spent attempting to... well face up to this fact basically. I didn't, for example, get round to meeting Benet outside the Burmese Embassy to take some photos (and the protest he was hoping to attend had turned into a march anyway so no-one else was there either). I just paced my room listening to Brian Aldiss on Radio 7 and poring over tray-sized compilations of pulp science fiction illustration, getting nowhere...

Because in the end I'm a peripatetic. If I'm going to write, I have to get out and walk. And in looking for the Apple Tree I walked a lot. So that was good. And by the time I found the non-Indigo-Moss, Franco-Irish skiffle group launching into "Ooh La La" within before a happy press of excellent old hippies (you know, "Ooh La La": The Faces, Rod Stewart, I-wish-that-I-knew-what-I-know-now, a sentiment as sacred as Christmas... anyway apparently it's called "Ooh La La") the sad knot of transcribed, amnesiac squabbling that had so far been all I could muster in the name of comedy had blossomed in my head into something a good deal more interesting - something stealthy even - something with mood swings and, at the very least, a middle and an end, if not a beginning. And the beginning's just the bit you end up putting first, I'm sure. 

 

Dumas pere said to Dumas fils: All the talent's in the table, if you put some paper down on it and rub long enough, something's bound to come off. And for me it's the streets... Yeah! The streets!

Word.

 

So, yes, how many interviews does it take to turn a writer into a wanker then. We have our answer. And I should be writing now. And not this rubbish. Here's some more salvaged Heracles instead: "The Twelf Labour - Cerbeus of the Underworld." It's very sad at the end. Brace yourselves.

- Your final task will be to bring back Cerbeus, the 3 headed dog from the underworld where you may not come back.

 

- (At last you can see his face)

- You're a bit heavy for a dead man and if you're not dead I can't take you.

- If you don't take me across you'll be the dead one!

- (Bully!!!)

- Why! I remember you when I with Jason to find the golden fleece.

- I'm hungry & blood's the only thing us ghosts eat.

- I'll kill one of those cattle.

- Hey you want a fight?

- Stop this arguing/ I'm Hades. I know why you've come here and you can have Cerbeus if you tame him
(I can't even make him sit!) 

 

 

- Righteo then

- GRRRRRRRRR

- GAWK

- I've done it.

- Then keep it.

- I suggest you turn your back now Hercules.

Back at Thebes:
- I've completed my tasks but where's Megera

- Didn't you see her in the Underworld. I'm afraid she died with a fever sent by Hera

Very Expressive Well Done!

Now We Are Loads (My mate's name is Legion.)

On hitting thirty I had a dream in which I met myself and was very polite, an entirely believable reaction but not at all what I would have expected, so I consider myself quite lucky to have found this out. I really wanted to make a good impression, as I might upon a friend of a friend, but was probably a bit too formal as a result and it was my other self who finally broke the ice by bringing our foreheads together and vigorously rubbing the back of my shaved head.

"Now you have a go," he said.
I did. It felt odd.
I didn't have this dream again and we haven't stayed in touch.

On Sunday morning, two years after this dream, I found my doppelganger (see "General Interests" on the homepage) still bald and lying on his front in the corner of that area of the Shunt Lounge known as "The Penthouse". Having spent two years gathering mould (and, oddly, dolls) in one of the presentation rooms now used for storage, he'd been cleaned up and borrowed for a show. The people in the show had dismembered him, hollowed him out a bit so he looked baggier like Brando and given him spongy joints. I no longer looked much like him, but he also looked a lot less like me. Fortunately the cameras were there to capture the moment.

And I dreamt of this double again that night, not the other self, just the husk. More than one. I was curled up at Michael Palin's feet but could still see out of the train window a line of them standing on the horizon, like Gormley's Angel of North if you look east at the right moment out of a train going to Edinburgh. They were standing shoulder to shoulder and the line never stopped. And some were hanging from pylons, and some in fields, all dressed differently, hundreds and thousands of them. And the train was going round in a circle. I think it must have been a ride. A very arty ride.