Hat Hat Bang Bang

 

In which I belatedly honour THE film of 2023...

 

 (A placeholder's good for more than one day, right?)

 The summer evening I saw "Oppenheimer" I remember I raced hime to get to work on a version of this, inspired perhaps by Nolan's ruthless deployment of the formula: Man plus Hat times Cinema equals Importance. But I couldn't find an untreated soundtrack to the trailer I wanted to mix into it, and it wasn't really synching, and so I moved on. For the rest of the year however I continued to ponder just what that script had meant when targets other than Hiroshima were being dismissed by those men sat round the table as "too small". It was just a throwaway line, but how can a civilan target be "too small"? Noone ever explained that. This was well before thousands more non-combatants would be bombed to death with America's blessing in the Autumn. Anyway, cut to the end of year and I had another look at the edit, and decided it didn't really matter that it was shit; no less effort had gone into it than the idea deserved.

 

 

 

Also for your consideration: "There are some things you can't film" Yoshishige Yoshida

 

 And working on the mash-up further wouldn't stop anyone actually thinking that one film was a cinematic milestone and the other a risible vanity project, but I was still bugged I couldn't get an untreated soundtrack. Then, tonight, someone on F*c*b**k – already having gone into some length about how much they loathed the charmless Great Man narrative of "Maestro" – started watching "Oppenheimer" for the first time, so I decided to dust this off and join in, and here it is. Tone is tone, isn't it? Where did Michael Flatley go so wrong? Nowhere.

 

And: "When the horizon is at the top, it's interesting" David Lynch (as John Ford)

F*c*b**K News And Guhhh

 Not happy news, stupid news really. Following a friend posting on instagram that they'd been reprimanded by f*c*book for "hate speech" over the following, I thought I'd try it myself, and yes:

 .. which is very petty. The site's been suffering a fall in sponsorship for not coming down harder on hate speech, and this is how the snots and their bots have decided to play it it seems. Chiron suggested I take the experiment further, but I'd had enough, fortunately Gemma was up for it:

 As I understand it she's still waiting for her reprimand. Apologies to anyone who has sighed so much at this point that they've deflated into biltong with eyeballs but I thought this was news.

BAD BUG

 I have started a tip jar! Simply as information rather than a call to action, this is what it looks like:

 

 

 Literally a rattling cup. That's now up permanently on the profile on the right. Some people have already brilliantly "bought me a coffee", several coffees in fact, and I don't know if it's a bug or a feature of the site's terminology that the most instinctive way for me to say thank you to those people is to "buy them a coffee" back. But thank you, them, or you! Speaking of Bugs: the best thing about claiming online that something is the worst music video ever made is, in all sincerity, being corrected. F*c*book was a joy to wake up to today - Joel Morris started it, as he starts so much that is fun - and I thought I'd share some of these goodies with you now. I was too keen yesterday to lay the entire blame for Steam's rottenness on CGI because its ideas were also irredeemaby seedy, but there's no such contamination in Joel's first contribution. Rush's Time Stands Still is pure live footage doctored to absolute bollocks for three and a half minutes, at which point the video doesn't stop, we just get our first effect that doesn't look like a mistake...

 Far calmer is Yes' Leave It - which is possibly short for "Yes I know it's upside down but it creates tension, leave it" - described by Joel as "a similar video where hard working technicians are packing ice round the rendering towers to stop them burning down into the earth’s core"...

 Good song though! So thanks be to Jon Dryden Taylor for submitting a terrible song, this one from "the artist I insist on referring to as Zeppo Jackson" (Jon's words, although I reckon Rebbie might be the new Zeppo. Gummo even? I know Gummo Marx never got in front of a camera, but still.) What's hotter than a centipede metaphor? A "hot centipede" metaphor obviously...

 What a terrible museum. By this point Joel had started a new thread of "all those transparent attempts to have The Same Hit Again" and it was there I found this contribution from Will Maclean: Just For Money by Paul Hardcastle, starring Bob Hoskins and Laurence Olivier. Having never believed in the existence of any such thing as "a soul", I am at a loss to explain what it was I felt torn from me upon watching this video. All I can say is something is now gone for ever. But enjoy!

 And finally, here is today's Defoe, in which our travellers also receive some charity and Richard the carpenter rustles everyone up their own two-storey house, internet café and monorail.

Cats. It's about Cats.

 Here's a figure from today's Defoe that took me surprise, relating to the number of domestic animals in London at the time of the Great Plague: "I think they talked of forty thousand dogs, and five times as many cats; few houses being without a cat, some having several, sometimes five or six in a house." That is a lot of cats. So many cats. I really didn't think of seventeenth century London as having that many cats. I'm finding it hard to stop thinking about cats. Ever since I saw the film of Cats in fact, which was like hearing Pennywise the Dancing Clown was back in Derry. Staring that beast in the face once more, however, I realised my uneasiness watching the movie was, if anything, the opposite of the uneasiness I'd felt watching the show as a child. There was no mystery to the movie, it was simply a mistake. But the stage show was not a mistake. It was intentional, unfathomable.

 (source)

 And as an adult I now admire that; particularly as an adult lucky enough to have participated in shunt, incredibly odd but popular theatre made entirely on its own terms, theatre - I guess like Cats - where there was nothing to "get". No questions. And yesterday I found myself actually defending Andrew Lloyd Webber on f*c*book, when Ed Morrish was having a pop at Jesus Christ Superstar - entirely fairly, he'd just seen it for the first time, and hated it - but I wrote: "A musical's really got to know what it is, and more and more I'm, quite reluctantly, realising how well Lloyd Webber's hits do this, given how mad the ideas are... Mad subject matter may actually help a musical, because its only quality can be its total 'itself'iness... Itselfiness is a very fragile thing though. There's so much not-getting-a-project that can happen down the line. That's what makes the hits so interesting to me." 

Interesting, I said. Not necessarily great.

 And I should probably go into this idea in more detail, but my eyes are tired and reasearching Cats does not help tired eyes. Lyndsay Ellis, who makes great videos about musicals, including the contribution at the top of today's post, does quite a deep dive into the differing fortunes of - and motivations behind - the Cats stage show and Tom Hooper's intughpretation here if you're interested. Here's today's Defoe, in which an adventure begins, an adventure in editing that I probably won't try again:

Invisiblish Cities

"I had sent away for a plan of Anaskol and had received this map in return. 

It was accompanied by a note saying Anaskol did not exist, but would this do."

 I wrote before, here, about my ambivalent relationship with maps of non-existent worlds at the beginning of books, but non-maps of non-existent worlds compliment fantasy's undependability far better, and so are fine... Once, last century, when I was allowed to be a film critic for the university paper, I watched Peter Greenaway give an interview in which he said film was the perfect medium for him because he was interested in text and images, and I remember thinking, maybe he should be working in comics instead, because film isn't just words and pictures, it's also time, and his films are quite boring. But I hadn't yet grown to appreciate drifiting in and out of a work, nor had I yet seen his early funny stuff.

"According to Tulse Luper, Antilipe in Syria was the home of a unique species of 

black maritime rook that mated with seagulls. That was obviously another Antilipe."

A Walk Through H (The Reincarnation of an Ornithologist) is a delight, and also forty minutes long. The film can be enjoyed in its entirety here, and if it weren't a film but simply a book of Greenaway's text and images, while I wouldn't feel so hassled by Michael Nyman's score (normally I love minimalism, but normally minimalism doesn't sound so impatient) I also wouldn't get to enjoy Colin Cantlie's brilliant - and swift - narration. A series of excellent sentences doing their thing rather than a saga, the script recalls Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, and Cantlie's delivery of it recalls Simon Jones' Arthur Dent, a perfect match, so I couldn't have been happier when this particular Ollie Evans posted the film on my f*c*book today saying my videos of Defoe had reminded him of it. Thank you, Ollie. Today's reading however is probably a bit too swift. Apologies for the gabble, but within it you will hear of the tribulations visited upon both those who were shut up because of the plague of 1665, and those who had to guard their doors (one of whom gets blown up SPOILERS!!!)

"I am the watchman! How do you do? What is the matter?"

Good News Update on the State of the Entire World

 It's fixed! It really seems to have been fixed! That's right, I can post links to the blog on facebook and instagram again! Cheese and crackers, what a relief, not just because it means I can now hobby along as before, but because - Well, how often does one get good news? Specifically, get told you can no longer do what you're doing, but then that it's actually alright? Without a fight? Within an evening? This is that. Touch wood. I'm still waiting for the second shoe to drop of course, but the daily making of something potentially pleasant is the only activism I trust myself with right now (F.T.O.D.)* and the immediate return of this freedom to share it, by a business ostensibly established to facilitate exactly that, colours everything. Unreserved thanks therefore to everyone who got in touch with the powers that might be to make this happen, and to the powers as well, and GO, OLD TIMEY INTERNET! (Is immediately banned again for pants.)

Image from "A Message From Mars" 1913
* Fascism Thrives On Division, don'cha know.

Err...

 F*c*book suddenly won't let me post links to this blog

 and all my previous links to it have been taken down too

 which I find oddly distressing, and I've deliberately tried to keep distressing things off the blog this year (apart from this). 

 Okay, maybe not "oddly" distressing. The whole point of returning to this blog was to create more agency in my dealings with the internet, and if anything posting a link to the contents of the blog, rather than posting that content directly onto facebook, was meant to be less spammy because it gave the reader more chance to ignore it. But that also meant facebook didn't own the content any more. Maybe that's the problem? It seems a bit paranoid - especially coming the day after a post about the internet's good old days - but so does the idea that "other people" might have reported this blog as "abusive". Can anyone else share this? You, the reader? I don't know. Do what you like. At least it's made writing today's post easier. Also, I'm glad I bookmarked this article on the extermination of links because it seems particularly relevant right now. (UPDATE: Instagram have also banned a link to this blog.) Anyway, Frankenstein Wednesday tomorrow as per (ie Thursday morning). Anti-distressant services to resume as soon as possible.

(Unless you're scared of heights.)

My Heart So Full and These Empty Hands

 I found this on my phone from 2018. I also note that I wrote next to nothing in 2019. And now in 2020 every second post on F*c*book is a link to the Australian fundraiser: "Please help any way you can. This is terrifying", but this isn't F*c*book, so here are some happinesses. Firstly:

 Watching Greta Gerwig's "Little Women" is like watching the Beatles. Anyone wanting to spend two hours in a room full of kindness should find a screening. Secondly:

 Robbie Hudson wrote the first show in which I appeared with John Finnemore "Frankenstein and the Sharks of Doom", a Mighty Fin Musical with songs by Susannah Pearse. The first time I performed John's writing was another Mighty Fin Musical with songs by Susannah Pearse "Diary of a Nobody", which was also the first time I worked with Carrie Quinlan. Mighty Fin Musicals are excellent amateur dramatics is what I'm trying to prove here, and "Farm" was the Mighty Fin's first, and it's being staged again this week with all proceeds going to charity as is the point of Mighty Fin. Tickets are on sale here and other Mighty Fin merch is here. Robbie also characteristically co-wrote with Johnny Flynn a folk musical about the Magnitsky act which aired last night, and can be heard here. Thirdly:

 I was hoping to be in "Farm" myself, but another happiness occured and I was asked to play an excellent role in an excellent TV show this Friday instead, and I've just received the call sheet and my mate Ned Mond's in the episode too, so this Friday should be amazing. But that's the end of the happiness, and Friday will not be amazing because on Friday my friend Morgan is finally being evicted from Seaview, his home of forty years, and mine for three.

 I can only say again what I said in February. He helped save my life and took me in when I needed a place, and there was no one he didn't take in. His work is as generous as he is and I hate this. If I'd ever learnt a second language I'd probably run screaming from the English-speaking world right now, but I never even did that, and I've just landed a telly, speaking of which the photograph of John Logie Baird came from here. Apart from that I have no idea what to say that is both true and happy about this thing I desperately want to say something about. Morgan made a book that's very happy though, and you can buy it here.

  

 Oh, one thing I can say: Morgan shared this video on F*c*book as well, and it reminded me that I don't look at nearly enough cartoons on youtube. I love monsters and it made me very happy - it's very him - and Morgan, if you're reading this I love youse too. Everyone else, have a happy and maybe helpful week. Here's a million monsters:

Kenny Everett interrogates John Lennon about Abstraction and Misery and I share it.

My mate Ollie Ford, who originally put this extraordinary 1971 artefact up on f*c*book, writes:

"This is a brilliant interview. Kenny Everett is so funny and John clearly likes him. He asks why his first solo album was so sad when he has so much and John starts to play the Laughing Policeman on his guitar and sarcastically asks if he’d prefer his next album to sound like that. There is also a heartbreaking bit when he tells Kenny how he’d like to die..."

 

I'm putting up a second post today, not because I'm ashamed of the previous one – it's clearly a beautiful tale, vividly told – but because I'm trying to make this the place where I share stuff now, and this is definitely worth sharing. The anarchic sweetheart, who would later go on to shout "Let's bomb Russia!" at Young Conservatives on the advice of Michael Winner, pulls surprisingly few punches questioning the choices of the troubled genius who would later go on to sing "Imagine no possessions" sat behind a white grand in Tittenhurst Park, and perhaps what's most extraordinary is just how cosy the interview remains, despite Cuddly Ken's unresolvable problems with not only John and Yoko's politics, but their art. It's all parsecs away from Lennon mucking around with Peter Cook a decade earlier, or Everett mucking around with Bowie and Freddie Mercury a decade on, but there's no bad faith here, and it's fun...

Liana Finck. Here's the linck.

... which hopefully leads me to why I'm sharing the interview here on this blog, rather than on, say, twitter. Because it's literally impossible these days to go more than thirty seconds on that site without encountering a fight. Neither that site nor f*c*book are really doing what we want them to any more – which is stay in touch – and they're both on our phones now, and our phones no longer fit our hands, and I'm increasingly concerned about what's in charge of who sees what. Joe Mande posted something beautiful about leaving twitter only today: "That's the problem with most things that are stupid as fuck: they're usually pretty fun" and Rick Webb's Internet Mea Culpa remains very sound, but of course there are many incentives to stay on, because one's work requires attention, so I'll keep linking to the blog on both sites. If you've any comments, however, I guess, please post below? Or just enjoy.

(If you're unfamiliar with the work and impact of Kenny Everett – whom I love – you're probably also unfamiliar with Joel Morris and Jason Hazely's "Rule Of Three" podcast – which I also love – so you might want to start with this one.)

And I'm still on instagram. Sure!

Everything is fire

  A recent timeline of insomniac thoughts, illustrated by "The Mitchell Beazley Joy of Knowledge Library's Book Of Man and Society":

2:05am – "No labels." What’s the difference between “labels” and words? Words themselves can stop communication, because their associations are so much stronger than the work they’re being put to do.

2:09am – Language is like fire.

2:11am – Not just language. Jokes as well. I'm thinking of the reaction to the Gorilla Channel tweet. Of course Trump doesn't spend seventeen hours a day watching a specially constructed compilation of gorillas fighting, broadcast from a secret transmitter on the White House lawn. Of course it's fine to share that joke. Of course this isn't "fake news". And yet, I know people – friends on facebook – genuinely scared of sharing that joke, not because it will give offense, but because it might now be believed.

2:20 am – Everything is fire. Everything that defines us as separate from animals can destroy us, if allowed to run unchecked: jokes, language, money, homes (and therefore property), love. All of it can become too important. Being human demands an attention to the equilibrium. Nothing can run unchecked. The past year has been a real lesson in that. I hope. A lot of people are newly terrified, but the threat's always been there.

2:28am – “Intelligent life” is too rosy a description of what we are. Intelligence is a part of what humans are, sure, but maybe it’s this capacity to create systems which endanger us that should define us, and define what we have in common with whatever we hope to make contact with outside of our own planet, so not “intelligent life” then, but... what? Dependent? Processing? Enhanced? Trapped? Artificious? Harvesting? Is there a word for this most fundamental human quality? What’s the label I’m now looking for?

2:29am – There are definitely people who will have written about this. I should read more.

3:08am – Leia gets nothing to do in "Empire Strikes Back". She’s the driving force of the films either side of it. It is not the best Star Wars Film.

3:10am to 5:25am –

Ear Plugs

But first, a belated...

Or not. We'll see. I'm going to try and use the blog a lot more this year at least. I wrote nothing last year, not just here but in general, unless you count the slew of comments about The Last Jedi I posted on Joel Morris' f*c*b**k page over the Holidays (WHY EVEN BRING BB-8?) so in 2018 I hope to be less reactive in my internet activity, and more... I don't know... hermetic?

Before I get to work on that insomniac mind-punch however, this week sees me clowning around NOT ONLY in London's glittering and highly monitered West End BUT ALSO in TWO consecutive pleasings on the Radio 4, so let's rinse out that bin and FISH OUT THOSE PLUGS!

THIS EVENING, at half past six, you can hear Angstrom... pronounced "ARNGstrom", and narrated by ME! Half of the retakes were because I pronounced it wrong. I also play Angstrom's boss "Bols Aashol" - a further third of the retakes were me buggering that name up too. Here is a picture of the Swedish Meatball Hot Wrap I bought in the lunch break to research my accent:

And TOMORROW EVENING at half past six you can hear the second episode of series SEVEN of John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme. Go on, kiss your ears! Here is a picture of the effect episode one had on the internet:

("Stinkkalk"?)

And if twenty-three and a half hours is too long a wait between those two doses of me, why not ALSO buy a ticket to tomorrow's as-yet-unsold-out matinee of our London run of The Hound of the Baskervilles?

Or, if you can't get a ticket, why not listen to all SIX episodes of the Wireless Theatre Company's Adventures of Drayton Trench, recorded at London's Museum of Comedy which is smaller than the Radio Theatre?

OR download my appearance on International Waters back in September recorded in a big egg on Dean Street?

OR listen to the thrilling latest episode of the now AWARD-WINNING Monster Hunters - "Queen of the Yeti Men" (which I'm not in)? Here is the award!

Yes! I won an award! AND why not vote for Time Spanner over on the British Comedy Guide and give me another one? EH?
WHY NOT? WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH YOU? AND WHAT THE HELL WERE THESE?

End of plugs. Heartfelt details to follow.

Wireless photo by Mike Tomlinson

Happy New Year image care of this.

Where I Was Way Wrongest (or: Wonderful, Wonderful Confirmation Bias)

I'm trying to make another film on my phone but the bits keep slipping about, I've been having the same problem putting subtitles on "Jonah" as well, it's quite disheartening, like that moment in childhood when you finally realized the adhesive limits of a Pritt Stick, but WHO CARES because we had a general election and everything's suddenly bearable again! PHEW, RIGHT?!!!*  

 

 6:09am, June 9th, Frankfurt

 

 Well, we saw. (Links to cautiously optimistic article about Corbyn from two years ago). And I'm very glad I got all of this out of my system before the results came in because it's worth remembering just how dark things looked. (Links to cautiously pessimistic article about Corbyn from two days ago). But didn't I say! "Do your job, focus on the facts, convince through competence, smile, be courteous, and let the Right go mental and out themselves." See! I said! And here's the thing: Maybe this is where the wave breaks, but I can't really see how. If the Tories aren't seen as strong then what are they? There can't be a more towering proof of their incompetence than the calling of this election. I'm not going to blame the results on the campaign however, Trump had a dumber campaign and won. "How good a campaign is" can only be judged on the result, it's a conclusion, not an explanation. Alex has a better explanation:

I think that that Ariana Grande concert helped too.
  

 * Disclaimer: Of course the prospect of the Right unmasked and mental is still terrifying and, facing the possibility of a deal with the DUP, we now have to man the walls against a wave of batshit thicker than anything we've yet seen, but I don't think this will be a tsunami, and the walls seem a lot stronger than they did three days ago. That's where I was wrongest: I don't think we're headed for a civil war now. Not on the mainland at least. We seem saner today, less frightened. A lot of commentators have been bemoaning the loss of a centre in British Politics but I think they're dead wrong, and I think the reason they're dead wrong is the same reason they've been dead wrong about this in-one-sense-unnecessary-but-in-another-absolutely-necessary election all along. Joel finally put his finger on it:

Consilium Pilot (with easter egg extras)

(originally posted on myspace here)

Someone other than myself drew this sweet catalogue of me and my worldly possessions (Le Petit Plastrier) and for all the gnashing on bile that follows I remain giddy and red-eyed with gratitude for that fact, and have no complaint with anything outside myself as subsequent posts will hopefully testify... Pblaaackk! It's September now, is it? Yeah. Right. What is it in this room making me cough every time I come in? This is it, the only space I have remotely moved into, how can I be allergic to it? Money's opening in a week now but I'm missing the hundred-and-forty-third day of the Big Push, laid up here in the Jock Block instead as though I've just come out of hospital and we're back in February, incapable of sleeping on my back once again, turning to the sputum pot I'd only kept as a momento and staggering to the bathroom for a toxic harumph. Is it sun-stroke? Is it nerves? Is it the karaoke at the Dungeon Summer Party where I went as Daryl Hannah out of Blade-Runner? I want a microscope. I want to peer at a sliver of this and give it a name. I want to look in the mirror and not see Zach Galifianakis' downy corpse squinting back. I want to write about Paris, and the seventh week of "Let's run it again from the Jewish Question", I want to get some ideas down for Sirs Harry and Paul, I want to run off every footling, glittering nugget I promised everyone so that I can get on with the stuff I promised myself, but CHIEFLY I want to use this blog for something other than lists of stuff I'm supposed to do. How am I ever get my own unfathomably-depressed-literary-giant-teatime-telly gig at this rate? And have you SEEN how overgrown the machine's been getting in our absence?

Well okay, what have I written... There's the closing sketch of this week's Mitchell and Webb Sound so have a listen to that maybe (three closers in a row. "Closer" is an industry term I've just used wrongly) although now I think of it, if you have it on and  DON'T listen my sketch does sound pleasingly like Peepshow... And I also filled in this questionnaire I filled in on F*c*b**k a bit back (a bit is a measurement of time. I have lost track of time. The Bit System is: A bit equals some bits and some bits make up a bit, so we're talking a bit back. So it works fine.) You had to answer every question using the titles of songs sung by just one band or artist. I chose the songs of Leonard Nimoy, and after essentially two month's blog silence the results are as good a reacquaintance as any, so you can have that... (oh and I've put links to the tracks where I can so don't click on them if you won't be able to face it, they're not the easter eggs I meant, I don't really know what easter eggs are)...

Are you a male or female?

Nature Boy.

Describe yourself:

Where It's At.

How do you feel:

Contact. 

(Particularly proud of that one)

Describe where you currently live:

If I had a Hammer...

If you could go anywhere, where would you go:

Where No Man Has Gone Before.

Your favorite form of transportation:

I Walk The Line.

Your best friend is:

Music To Watch Space Girls By.

Your favorite color is:

Ruby (Don't Take your love To Town)

What's the weather like:

Sunny.

Favorite time of day:

Lost in the Stars.

If your life was a TV show, what would it be called:

Consilium

What is life to you:

A Visit To A Sad Planet.

Your current relationship:

Gentle On My Mind.

Looking for:

Love of the Common People.

Wouldn't mind:

Both Sides Now.

Your fear:

Everybody's Talkin'.

What is the best advice you have to give:

You Are Not Alone.

If you could change your name, you would change it to:

Abraham, Martin and John

Thought for the Day:

Spock Thoughts

How I would like to die:

Amphibious Assault.

My motto:

Well what else would my motto be? The Ballad Of Bilbo Baggins? And who knew Lego did whites? And weren't Buffalo Springfield good sports? Right I'm going to try and catch some L-shaped Z's now, sweet dreams and prosper. Pblaaackk!

Hawkins' First Hadrosaur

DO NOT WATCH THIS:

 

 

*update: Oh. You can't.

 

 I wish Hesketh would get a shift on and forward me that strand of a hundred insults because "Jesusophile", as he terms himself here, lacks them all. Lack. Exactly. It's a lack. He should have them because it's a lack. (Sorry, you'll only get that if you've seen the video, which you mustn't). Videogum drew this Shitwizard to my attention after he posted an argument for the okayness of inflicting pain on women during sex. Someone else then posted a video where he demonstrated AIDS passing through a condom with some off milk and a strainer, at which point I smelt a rat and went and did my own research. It was the interview above that convinced me he was actually for real. Except he isn't. It says so on his youtube channel. Oh curse you, Internet. "You obviously have no idea how evolution works."
"People always tell me this. It's such a weak argument." Okay so he doesn't exist, and he's Dutch, but I didn't know that three hours ago when I had to walk him off, and a good thing too, it was a beautiful day and I ended up at the Natural History Museum. Passing the animatronic T Rex I was struck for the very first time by how bare not only he but most of the other reconstructions seemed to be, and became thrilled by the idea that dinosaurs had once been covered in feathers, not a new idea I know but one it became impossible to shift. Every animatronic now seemed very obviously plucked, and how would we know? I thought of those brilliant medieval bestiaries in which geese grew on trees and all that's known or cared about the crocodile is that it weeps after eating a man.

 ("Meh, that's a crocodile, yeah it'll do. Might have got the wings the wrong colour but sod it, it's a naturally occurring allegory, no need to sweat the details.") And I passed an illustration of a T Rex sinking its teeth into a hadrosaur and thought - Yes, if we've got that wrong, then that's exactly how we get it wrong: Take what we know about something and paint it killing something else. And for the first time since I was probably ten I yearned to visit the Cretaceous period and find out what it was actually like, which was GREAT because until that point all those post-Jurassic-Park, CGI "reconstructions" had pretty much seen off my childlike di-curiosity. But THIS, seeing the bones, remembering how wrong we might have got it, gazing at a scene of antlered hadrosaurs gathering at the water-hole, all this suddenly made me want once again to see not a clone, but THAT SCENE. I wanted a time machine. I wanted to step out of a time machine and see a T Rex at dusk trailing feathers like a peacock and scavenging some long-dead carcass while the hadrosaurs were left to butt heads in peace. Bliss. 

 

   original

 

 One of the best things about my stay in Crystal Palace was that the train pulled up right next to Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins' placid - downright pekinese - dinosaur enclosure. Googling "hadrosaur" I found an illustration of Hawkins in his studio in New York working on new wonders. Yes, New York: Apparently there was going to be a Paleozoic Museum bang in the center of Central Park until the evil Boss Tweed broke all the molds. You can read about it here, lots of nice pictures... Now when I used to work at Quinto's the second-hand bookshop - sorry if I've already told you this - there was this anti-semitic, ghastly-headed twenty-something, Joe, a bright and polite former monk with some very bad ideas. Among these was that "the Passion of the Christ" was "accurate", and that the world was six thousand years old. I took him up on this, and heard his thoughts on dinosaurs. They'd drowned in the forty days of rain caused by the bursting of Earth's original meniscus, an ozone layer of water that made all carbon dating useless. He believed in evolution and "Survival of the Fittest" but when pressed had no explanation for coal, or caves or tectonic plates. Shortly afterwards he was dismissed following a chat with our Spanish manager about Franco. But if ever you meet a creationist don't raise the subject of dinosaurs. Surprise them with coal, or stalactites. I mention Joe here merely to explain my gullibility in the face of Jesusophile, and I post Jesusophile's video up even though he doesn't exist, and isn't funny, because this is the internet and I'm an atheist and it appears that that's what we do, we like to make ourselves mad.

Finally here's something I wrote for "Money", which fits fine here:

'I want to show you something. I want to show you what we will look like in 200 thousand years time. And before I do, remember: survival of the fittest does not mean survival of the best at running. It means, or did mean “Who fits here? They can stay”. Okay. Behold. The man of 200 thousand years time... And they say variety is dead. And they’re right. Because look around, look – we didn’t adapt to this. We adapted it. Evolution can stop now.
Variety is dead.
It’s “Where fits us?” now, not  “Who fits here?” Where fits us can stay. And the rest, the deserts, the tundra, the bits with snakes, they go. And on their remains will be built a city without frontiers.
And it will be very expensive.
But we’ll be able to afford it.
That’s the other thing about the future. We’ll obviously all be able to afford it. Something to do with technology. Thank you, man of the future.'

(Man of the Future comes courtesy Paleo-Future, another cracking source of odd and ahh.)

Music Videos Were Invented By The French (+Horrible discovery for Futurama fans)

(originally posted on myspace here)

 

 

Day Three, and my purchase now stands rampant... I see, so it's a that. Well the image software's behaving itself at least. And I'm Jane Porter from Tarzan. Yes I am inquisitive and sweet-natured. I might not always know what I'm getting myself into, but I'll make my way nonetheless - and things will very likely turn out for the best! So that's great. And now I must write five sketches. Very quickly though: 
Does anyone else know about the Scopitone? It was a jukebox that played videos back in the fifties and sixties (decades before Queen was supposed to have invented the promo). How does that work? I don't know. But this website provides an astonishing library of the kind of the stuff you could stand and watch in a bar in San Remo before the trivia machines came along (Do they have trivia machines on the Riviera? They must do. Bullseye's appeal is universal.) It's like a secret history of the music video, this site, like nothing you've seen before. At least I hope it's like nothing you've ever seen before, because, well, LOOK at it! (Futurama fans should be particularly interested/baffled/nauseated by the turn things take a minute and a half in. Man, you think you know a reality, then something like this comes along. Thank you, Scoptione.

[That video has since been removed along with its dancers in rubber with bits missing. Here at least, is what they danced to...]

LATE POST: It turns out this routine is also a perfect match for Praise You. No really, try it (total desensitization is your only friend round these parts!)

MUST FLY

(originally posted on myspace here)

 

 

Day Two. Pah. This picture was much bigger than it should be because Adobe Imageready has got lost or some- I mean what even is it? - anyway I don't have the thing to make it smaller (Posthumously this may have been corrected). And It's just been intimated to me that "cockgoggles" is not a suitable word for radio 4 at 6:30 in the evening. Sorry, Miklus. Huh. Anyway... I'm a healer, says f*c*b**k, that's my "PURPOSE IN LIFE", and I should get my eyebrow pierced. Thanks. (Sarcasm. And I've remembered the asterisks this time, which is healthy.) I'm also Spider-Man, Footloose and Audrey Hepburn and should marry Cameron Diaz. Not my will, f*c*b**k but thine be done. However these are revelations I have too little time to ponder now, no I just wanted to stick up today's photo of the archaeopteryx... I wonder what interview with Lars Von Trier I am. Ah, "Which Marginalised Disney Gal are you?" Great, I'll take that one. Here meanwhile is a cartoon. X

Okay, why I might not be leaving facebook just yet

(originally posted on myspace here)

I think it's an archaeopteryx. Day One. 

Well I've added water now so we'll know in forty-eight hours. I bought it today in South Kensington for... ah, American laptop, it doesn't have pound signs... two pounds and sixty-five pee. I thought “something for the room”. It was an odd shop that, painted tin trunks "in the style of Jaipur lorries", scarves going for a grand and balls of twine for forty quid, so actually 2.65 for an archaeopteryx was very reasonable I thought. I took it upstairs to the till but there was no till, just a touch-screen beneath a tapestry besides which I ostentatiously hovered clutching the purchase and a fiver while the staff served free Turkish coffee to a troup of sonorous poshoes instead. But am I not also posh! Am I not sonorous! I may be between beards, these trainers may be fire-damaged and this belt quite obviously my sister’s but my fiver is as good as theirs. I very nearly just walked out with it. Did you, Charles Bukowski! Yes, I nearly did! That would have been great... It was an excellent day... I glimpsed Jennifer Tilly in the V and A. Better still I heard her. There is simply no verb for her voice. What both purrs and quacks? It’s like a sackbut if a sackbut could ask for directions. And I've just learnt she’s fifty! And the Marx Brothers didn’t start making films until they were in their forties! But that’s not why I may not be leaving facebook just yet.

Look I haven’t been able to find that strand of a hundred insults that I promised, but looking back over my "wall" here are some of the things I've learnt about myself since I logged back on:

“Which "Winnie the Poo" Character Are You?” I have completed the quiz, and I am Tigger. 

I am simply the life of the party. Life can get bumpy, but that's okay -- I won't notice it anyway! (And it’s “Pooh”)

“What kind of lover are you?” I have completed the quiz, and I am in the top 5 %.

"Are you truly eukaryotic?" I have completed the quiz, and I am probably an evil virus; re-enroll in college-level Biology.

"What Taylor Swift song are you?" I have comleted the quiz, and I am "Tim McGraw". Who is Taylor Swift? Who is Tim McGraw? None of this matters. I am Tim McGraw.

"Are you on a boat?" I have completed the quiz, with the result “You're on a boat."

“Femija juaj I pare…cun apo goc???” I have completed the quiz, with the result “Cun..”:

But there are so many more quizzes still to take,so much more i have to learn about myself. 

Join me tomorrow then, once I’ve run off these three sketches I hastily

promised Gareth Edwards for tomorrow HAHAHAHANOOoo... with the archaeopteryx

at half mast, and find out what I should get pierced. Or there’s one

called “WHAT IS YOUR PURPOSE IN LIFE?” Maybe I’ll take that.

Okay this formating's going mental. (I haven’t read Charles Bukowski. Is he good?)