Badphone's Last Stand

 

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 So here's Alan.)

 

Words we sometimes said in the basement of the Ned

 Notes designed by Susanne Dietz

 

 Yesterday was fun, and crammed, and with Serena and Tom on the chocolate coin exchange and Hannah checking bags (but not opening them –"Very nice, Italian?") a slight shunt reunion, happily. Thank you to Coney for organising The Golden Key, and to Gemma for having me, and to you if you came, and sorry if we were full. When we were trying to find a mood for the bar outside our snug and kennels, I don't think we anticipated how much time would be spent simply queueing, but that's the thing about unknowns. Choas inside the kennels was a lot more welcome, and I was very lucky to be teamed with clowns as kind as my fellow accountants Sachi Kimura and Julia Masli (the word "accountant" has a nicely ecclesiastical ring to it, once you don a robe). It couldn't all be unknowns though, so I wrote a little text for us to say and here it is.

Counting the grains of rice:

This is a new idea.

Each of these is a promise. Not a big promise. Not a particularly important promise. Still, probably more promises than it’s fair to expect any single person to be able to keep. Which is why they’re kept here.

 

Originally, a promise was much bigger, and most people would be unlikely to keep even one. They were about the size of this table, and made of something dangerous like limestone or cows. But one night, there was a storm. And a promise sank to the bottom of the sea – so it wasn’t lost, as the joke goes, it was at the bottom of the sea – and all the islanders had to decide whether or not to still count that as a promise kept. Which they did.

Maybe that’s why we’re underground.

 

Eating a grain:

This won’t be missed. Something will be missed. But no-one will know it was this.

Taking another grain:

And what’s the smallest thing you can promise? What’s worth this?

 

 

 Proving I'd licked a duck by sticking a grain of rice to it was a lot more fun though.

But Who's Counting

 

 Further facelessness. 

 In the temple-like vault of a former bank stand six-hundred-and-fifty defaced and numbered photographs of the artist Sarah Maple and her child, one defacing for every breastfeed given over a three month period. A lot more than I expected. It's called "Labour Of Love". I don't know if it will still be up on Saturday.

 

 I was down there today to scout the marble counting house I'll be in this weekend as part of Gemma Brockis' contribution to The Golden Key, a massive City of London commission from Coney and Friends, which will see the normally dead-at-weekends Square Mile come alive with activity and riff raff like me, and perhaps you! 

 

   

 

 Specifically, we'll be part of The Maze of Adventures: "Choose wisely, friend," insists the blurb  – a voice from a simpler time perhaps, before the pound found itself battling gravity like Indiana Jones – "as you will not able to see them all..." That isn't much help, sorry, but we'll be there somewhere. I'm not sure if I can give away the vault's exact location, but when I used to do the Ghost Bus Tours we'd get stuck in traffic outside of it for anything up to half an hour and have to vamp about plague pits – Oh, I hadn't thought about them! The City's full of subterranean material, but I think we'll be sticking to counting.

 

Logging The Local Iconoclasm

 Simple. Effective. And I notice this last picture suggests there were never any faces to deface in the first place. So everyone's happy, gold star.

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)

The Terrible Trivium Interviewed

 

"I would describe myself as nicely dressed, and pretty evil."

 

 I'm not sure I've ever written anything that wasn't a little like The Phantom Tollbooth (when I wasn't moving sand from one side to the other with tweezers). But, in the best way, The Phantom Tollbooth was a little like a lot of things worth copying, so maybe I copied its copying too. Milo was a child's Danté, lost in the forest of his life at the prodigious age of ten. Like Wonderland, the world he found on the other side of the Tollbooth was packed with unapologetically academic silliness, and momentous thought experiments. And like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz – and I suppose Everyman from Everyman ("Everymun"?) – his way through that world was a handy quest. This Christmas just gone, my sister gave me a beautiful annotated edition of it.

 

 So thanks, Norton Juster, for writing The Phantom Tollbooth, and for teaching me the names of some of the demons, and I'm sorry you're gone. 

Incontrovertible Evidence That Nobody Is Boring

 "I am very interested in lifts. I love original old relay logic lifts, especially the very advanced relay systems which can contain hundreds of relays"  – from the introduction to Beno's youtube channel.

 

 Little now remains of Robert Popper's blog post from 2010 which first introduced me to "Benobve" as he was then – "EXCLUSIVE: Sneak preview of Pixar's next movie" – but a process of elimination has led me to conclude that the video above is the one he was talking about: "The premise: a man (I think it’s a man) gets in a lift*. He/she goes up in the lift, then down in the lift, then, well I wouldn’t want to spoil the ending for you… Oh Benobve, I think I love you." It's something of a departure for Beno, whose other output at the time – about which Robert Popper was equally enthusiastic – looks a lot more verité, being, almost exclusively, live-action, often narrationless footage of real lift journeys such as this:

 

 Moved by Popper's enthusiasm for Beno's enthusiasm, I had subscribed to his channel back in 2010, but years would pass before I bothered to check in again, and when I did, I was surprised to see that his videos now came with a disclaimer not to copy what he was doing. This is how I learnt that Beno's undiminished love of lifts, in these intervening years, had grown now to incorporate an enthusiam for their exteriors, and for what lay at their top. Beno wasn't just riding in lifts now, he was hacking them. He was riding their rooves. He was recording something glorious and straight out of Judge Dredd, like the adventure below (referenced in my first zoom quiz). 

 I'd love to know if Robert Popper knows what Beno's up to these days. I hope he wouldn't be disappointed.

 

 

 "All of the activity in my videos is completely legal, I have checked this with my lawyers. I know the law and I do not break laws with my videos" – again, from the introduction to Beno's youtube channel.

 

 There's another fun old Beno blog recommendation here.

Barbican Outro: An Eighth of Mozart

 

 This is exactly what it looks like: a tiny, wooden audient. Placed in any architects' model of a concert hall, it predicts the acoustics by listening to sped-up recordings of Mozart's Jupiter Symphony (to ensure the soundwaves are to scale), while you work out what to hang from the ceiling. I'm not making any of this up.

 

 

 Dr. Raphael Orlovsky here might be, however. Perching like this was probably the director's idea; he looks great there, and it makes for a fun pan, but do architects normally clamber over their models, pretending to be giants? Is Orlovsky even the architect? I can't find anything about him online beyond the enchanting experiment performed sixteen minutes into this mixtape...

 

 The visiting musicians are very complimentary about the finished article, but I bristled a bit learning the only way onstage was up some stairs at the front – maybe because I was reminded of the beautiful concert halls we played on the Finnetour, where we had to change trousers in the corridor. That's the difference between real art and showbiz, I suppose: real art doesn't get a backstage. A lot of this footage bristles in fact. I remember very fondly how much Arts Reporting there used to be on television, but forget fifty per cent of it was posh people with microphones asking strangers how much they hated it.

 

  The Barbican's labyrinthine inaccessiblility is actually intentional – a power move – so the pissy reaction is understandable. This wasn't meant to be a place people stumbled upon, and I don't know how I feel about that. It's not a physical inaccessiblity, after all. You can find it if you look for it, and once there, share it with others who found it. So it's a faff, but it's also a pocket. And it's a pocket, but it's also a faff.

 Bringing the week full circle, this is what the Barbican replaced – another City in runes.

The Why? Axis

 Rene Magritte - La reproduction interdite

Hey it rhymes!

Here's the talk I gave at Science Showoff in September, in lieu of an interview, about a show that doesn't exist, recycling old blog posts. Pathetic. Since it looks like there may be as many as twenty acts performing on Thursday I'll probably go for something shorter than this now. I apologise that it starts with "so".

So as advertised I'm going to give a talk about how I managed to stave off a growing interest in science long enough to write a science fiction pilot.
The reason I wanted to write a sitcom about Space/Time Travel was...
Well, 1) I'd never tried to write a whole series before. I had written sketches, many of which took place in the past, and if I set a series in all of Time and Space then I might be able to recycle some.
But 2) I liked the idea that the best sitcoms take place in a form of prison, a trap from which the "hero" wishes to escape (trenches in Blackadder Goes Forth... in Father Ted it's Craggy Island... in Porridge it's a prison, it's a prison!) I'm not sure I actually agree with it but I thought, wouldn't it be great, just metaphysically, if the setting from which you longed to escape was All of Time and Space?
So I thought great, but now I'd chosen "The Universe" as my setting I had to work out what that actually looked like, the "sit" of my "com". So I started researching -

Actually, before I started researching I think I had already decided on two rules that this universe had to obey. First, in keeping with the idea of being trapped, it had to be finite. This is best explained by the image of someone looking through a powerful enough telescope long enough to see the back of their own head. Well that was how it was explained to me.

The second rule: There had to be just one universe, so no timelines - I was pretty strict about this, in spite of quantum theory. If you went back in time, you didn't get to change the past like in Back To The Future, you simply risked becoming more responsible for it. This cured any compulsion to go back and rescue Jesus or kill Hitler, or buy his paintings or - You could keep things light.

 

So, not this. Sorry, dude. 
(Update: this video has been removed. I can't now for the life of me remember what it was.)

In fact, according to this rule, if you did try to kill Hitler, then History and Dumb Luck dictated you would fail, so all you'd do is end up making him angry. Maybe it was all your fault. Aha.

Anyway, these rules decided (unscientifically), I began to research the Universe.
I watched Carl Sagan's Cosmos, which I'd bought on amazon, and I thought about nostalgia, because he's dead and I only found that out after, and because I'd originally seen the show when I was eight, with my Dad, and watching it again Space itself now seemed like quite an old idea, something I had grown up with but something, say, our hero's twenty-year-old sidekick might not have. And watching Cosmos I also started, really for the first time, learning Science... and the history of science, which is Science... and History. But when I was growing up I hadn't learnt either. "History" was battles and numbers, and "Science" was... also numbers I suppose - no one spoke about ideas the way I watched Carl Sagan doing now, not quite looking at the camera, poetically, and... simply the voice, which was wonderful and I found myself trying to do it. I'd find myself narrating my life, running a bath, say: "Thuh simpul ackt uv... turningonna tah pp... thuh wwwwater falling, theb ath fffffilling." It was lovely. I was hooked.

The real deal. Also available on vinyl

Speaking of Hooke, I spent three years of school studying Science in something called The Robert Hooke Building, yet in all those three years nobody told me who Robert Hooke actually was. That's what I mean.

So I was hooked on Science now, and History, and Reality. Which was a bit annoying, because I was getting further away from... well, Doctor Who and B-movies and umbrella-headed aliens and robots, and what I thought I'd wanted to write about: the flip-side to this research. The daffy conspiracy theories on youtube on which I'd hoped to base the mythology for this universe: Illuminati, aliens, the Philadelphia Project, Tesla conspiracies, Osiris, esoteric anti-science, Alchemy, John Dee, that kind of thing...

"Jim Carrey is an Osiris Resonator."
 Prometheus was basically made for this man.

Doctor Dee: very interesting historically, and pertinent. Queen Elizabeth the First's Court Mathematician. Prospero was based on him. An alchemist, he was called the Queen's Conjuror. What he actually was though was very good at reading maps. Map-reading was a technology in its infancy. When Dee brought one of the first globes back to England, it was like Project X, an invaluable technological advantage that ensured his country's position as a Global Super Power. Shakespeare named a theatre after it, of course. And yet. in spite of his learning, what Dee really wanted was to be able to scry, which means communicate with angels through use of a mirrored surface. Yes, they have a word for that, and it's "scry". And he couldn't scry - I think for pretty obvious reasons.

This never happened.

Angels don't exist. But... for the purposes of this sitcom I thought it might be useful to have an angel exist, if only to give my hero the ability to travel through Time and Space in the first place. After all Magic is simply Science that... can't be bothered. And Science is the study of reality. And Art is the study of everything else.

Except the "reality" component of this research was actually killing my interest in Time Travel now because I no longer believed in it... I was watching a home video of life in the year 2000, and there we were in our twenties pissing around in a garden that was still viewable from my window, but I live next door now, and a family have moved in with a staffy that barks, and a massive trampoline. The garden in the video is gone, and watching what was going on behind me ten years ago, it was suddenly clear to me that the past was gone. Just gone. It's there in our heads and in what we own, but there's no reaching it. And I know we talk about wormholes, and four dimensions, but Time's a dimension we can only move forward in and it takes no energy to do so and it requires no force, so it's really not the same. Which is fine. Everything's closed and cosy in this finite universe, fine... Except I didn't believe in the central concept of what I had to write any more. Not being able to visit the past seemed far more interesting than visiting it, because it was true. I didn't know what there was to explore in an idea I'd dismissed unless, unless I could find a way to stop dismissing  that idea by somehow working out a practicable method for our hero to travel anywhere in Time without cheating. I... Basically I had to work out how to travel through time. Backwards. Because we're obviously traveling through it forwards already. Or perhaps more accurately, downwards. It's called Waiting. And then... hanging out the washing in the stairwell I remembered  the telescope, and the back of the head, and it suddenly occurred to me how you might be able to visit the past without having to travel backwards. All it would require is for Time to be cyclical as Space is, patience, and a Big-Bounce-proof container. In other words, the longest journey anything could make was a second into the past, because you had to go the long way round.

So it's looped. Here's Space/Time:

 

Here's Now - Zero - here's the line of numbers meeting round the back, positive and negative, future and past. That's what the universe - reality - looks like, let's say. Every answer to "How?" lies on that axis. Now where do we put the angels?

Well I was reading too. It wasn't all box sets. And in Fermat's Last Theorem by Simon Singh, I learnt that while Dr. Dee was furiously trying to scry, another mathematician over in Italy - Rafael Bombelli - was inventing the number "i"... in italics... which is the square root of minus one... which is imaginary... which doesn't exist, but crucially is "necessary for completeness". Bombelli literally brought a whole new dimension to Maths. One that went up and down.

 

It met reality at Zero, which by definition doesn't exist. And everything from that point crept into some definition of being.

So here then was the Universe.
Along the x-axis: Time and Space and everything else that exists, carbon, eggs, the shops - I could go on.
And along the "imaginary" axis, and Maths calls it that so... everything else: Angels, God, and numbers of course, and Love. Which is necessary for completeness. And which of course is why scientists sound religious when they talk about Science.

Not because Science is an Act of Faith, but because Love is. And scientists love science.
And so do I. Thank you.

Carl Sagan's Cosmos is the best, by the way, and here.

What are we watching now? (Magritte's other Renoir period)

Crikey, but I do like Rene Magritte 1898-1967 - like him to an extent I took for granted until only recently, I suspect either because he was so prevalent or more likely because the small book of his collected works that we had in the downstairs toilet when I was a child meant he just seemed part of the furniture (an idea he might have liked). Haunting, slightly naively, never going over the lines, and to a nine-year-old very much of the Cosmic Encounters/second-hand, high-concept sci-fi paperback School of Painting - classier obviously -  more elegant - and funnier too - drier, but nothing you could definitively point to and say: That's a joke. Or an alien. Not even this:

Rene Magritte - La Voix des airs (Voice of Space) 1931

... although does "des airs" really translate as "Space"?

I thought it would be the opposite.

Those apparently are jingle bells. I'd always thought of them as concrete but no, Magritte is quoted identifying them as "the iron bells hanging from the necks of our admirable horses" proving again what a dog French is to translate.

Writing "Time Spanner" - my tv show or screenplay or something I hope gets made anyway - I thought a lot about what I'd make the future look like. And then gave up. As James Burke* said in that Royal Institute Lecture I managed to crash with Jason Hazely and Joel Morris (all of us agreeing that it was one the best live gigs we'd ever seen): "I don't predict the future because I like to be right." Also, presenting the future as simply another country - the backdrop to a travelers' tale - fun and ace though that is, seemed in the context of what I hoped to write now to dodge the real significance of the future, which was - well I don't know, but not that. I think it's that we're older in it, and that it's coming, and unfamiliar. So although I had set out to write a genre spoof, I realised now that I didn't want the future to look like "The Future", because the architects' model is too familiar, and literally too present. Still, these scenes would have to look and sound like something and puzzling over what that might be I remembered Magritte. I wasn't sure how it would work but I thought, wouldn't it be great if this future somehow felt like a Magritte.

"Le Grand siecle" (which nobody has translated as "the big century") 1954

I've ditched that idea now. I think. Nevertheless I got very excited when a commenter on David Cairn's ever-smashing Shadowplay blog inadvertently introduced me to the hint of a realisation of this idea in the following silent-era pop video: "Sur un Air de Charleston" - a post-apocalyptic, surrealist, sci-fi after-thought shot in 1927 by Jean Renoir - universally acknowledged as one of the greatest poets of the cinema - and featuring Renoir's wife Catherine Hessling as a dirty lady who dances for twenty minutes, and blackface vaudevillian Johnny Hudkins whom both imdb and BlackSci-Fi.com assure me is actually black. Les yikes! The overlap between surrealism and science fiction is inevitable when you're dealing with the end of the world of course. When supplies run low the identity of whatever's left will be forced to become more fluid (see also the early work of shunt, or indeed any theatre company before the funding arrives). Here:

  It's riddled with surprises, but I particularly recommend the opening two minutes for their Magritty shots of Hudgkins with his back to the audience in his proto-Sputnik bubble.

I don't know how I felt when I learnt this was four years before Magritte painted Voix des Airs. He must have seen it though.

* If you don't know who James Burke is you are in for a slab of brain treats. I can't help feeling Science and History - being taught separately - were taught wrong. Burke went some way to putting that right. Here.

Hello, Goodbyes (status update)

(originally posted on myspace here)

love is all i can bring and ting

Oops, wrong paste. That's something I pasted into Google trying to find out the name of that song (turns out it's "Uptown Top Ranking" by Althea and Donna). Hang on, this is what I meant to paste:

It hangs in Uncle David's House, or did a year ago.

But I can't pretend to any continuity with my last post really. It's been almost a month. Of course this always happens when I end a previous post on a cliffhanger - Jonah, Contains Violence, Hamlet, the funeral... Every time I go "So this important thing is happening next and I'll tell you about that - " like I'm writing some book or, worse, like I'm living some bloody book... Well of course I had no idea what to write about Uncle David's funeral: the Garden of Remembrance was nice, rose bushes and wind chimes and little terra cotta figures and space for many more bushes and chimes, I don't know, David's life was extraordinary, well no it wasn't, just exquisitely-lived, he lived through the Blitz as a child but so did everyone, do I rattle on about church some more, or numbers, or the eclipse of '9(9?) that he'd waited to see ever since he was seven - No I had no idea what to write about, or at least what to write about HERE. Sorry... here. Anyway there's the dear man, standing on the right.

And since, Geoffrey Perkins has died, and I'll never get to work with him, and Ken Cambpell has died, and I'll never get to work with him (and feel a little like the world's been expelled). Since, the switch has been flicked on the Hadron Collider at CERN (or the voice-command given or the knob turned or the button pushed and held down for two seconds or whatever it was. "THAT was a nice day!" to quote Bill Murray). Since, I've seen every episode of "Arrested Development". And "Xanadu". Since, I've visited my parents again in Languedoc (it was through Ken Campbell's stuff in fact that I first learnt of the existence of either CERN or Languedoc - SEE "Reality on the Rocks"! READ "Violin Time"! - you see, that would have been a good post - most of the more interesting ideas posited on this blog I'm pretty sure are trains of thought set into motion by that man). Since, Zoe's visited from LA where she writes movie scripts now for Stan Lee (it's fine that I felt so little at Uncle David's funeral, that doesn't make me a sociopath, she said, maybe just a narcissist, and suggested I look it up, which I did, and I am, look it up). Since, the Republicans have wisely plumped for a Despair ticket yet again (the WHOLE POINT being to find a candidate who stands for everything worst in America to terrify the Democrats into another coma). Since, I've learnt that the Mitchell and Webbs will be filming a whopping four sketches of mine for the new series (three of which I have written about here, which is pleasing to me). Since, I've played a magic baker on Southwark Bridge.

What else, since, in the public domain? I've given up smoking for a month. And I've given up drinking until I finish a screenplay (I wanted to write something about Joseph Conrad's "The Secret Agent" I said to Zoe. Oh, she said, Warners want to make a film of that. Write it.) And also, as of tonight, I've given up

facebook

No more "friend requests", "relationship status", cryptic misreadable messages snuck into "status updates", not for the time being. This isn't the fucking sci-fi channel. Actually it's me that's the problem, not it. I am a newly self-diagnosed narcissist and the last thing I need is another empty inbox. If I feel like issuing a status update I'll just have to post it here now, which is as it should be. Status update: Simon Kane has a new phone fit only for happy-slapping. That kind of thing. Let's see if my next post is any more pleasant. I found this great A Team colouring book today for 5p on a stall at the Thames Festival so maybe I'll just put up some NO! NO CLIFFHANGERS!!!

Hh. Still, hello. Oh it's just not been the same since they got rid of the Scrabble. Night.