I hope you agree this find was worth sharing. In its way, its almost as coruscating,
nourishing, and unstoppably funny, if only – as Americans say – on
accident. The central message of "Emptying Yourself for God" is a hell of a hook, and the total lack of rapport between unrehearsed host and puppet creates a tension I find it hard to grow tired of, however much the deranged animated inserts start to drag.
This Lucy and Friends is also the kind of reminder I always enjoyed getting, that before hitting its stride with wall to wall,
parasocial direct address and crafted video essays, YouTube was once a lot
more like the show Takeover TV, a kind of petting zoo for anonymous projects as its name suggests. Like Macbeth and the taste of fear, I had almost forgot.
* I'm trying to make formidable happen as a noun, a bit like spectacle even though that was never an adjective. Pronounce it as French as you like.
Having paid my respects to the category-defying works of Fred Spencer, I feel I should probably also share some weird, personal, self-produced music videos that are actually ept. Jazz Emu's visual album Ego Death (below) came to my attention last year when the video for Fun Kitai Furai Dei (above) appeared on a bill of comedy shorts at the Ritzy to a hot
crowd of universally dropped jaws. When real-name Archie Hendersen's full album showed up on youtube in March, its brilliance lifted me out of a particularly lightless attenion-deficit - I had just moved to a spacious flat near Arsenal and decided to keep the walls bare, a stowaway in my new captital P place, my brain two-thirds phone. That threat of playing statues hasn't entirely vanished, the feeling of wanting to tell myself to just go on ahead and I'll catch me later. But Ego Death still gets me moving.
It had heart, and sense, and fun, and painted sets and giant puppets, all perfectly coordinating with the preexisting ersatz marble pillars on the Globe's thrust, and it kept surprisingly close to its episodic source material, with a lucid sympathy for its antagonists (theatre is work, and money does matter) but also an understanding that, at some point, we were owed some real nightmares.
It also did a great job on that winter's afternoon,of drilling home just how great a sacrifice Gepetto makes exchanging his only coat for schoolbooks. I felt every hug.
It was no less cheering to discover afterwards that the extraordinary creative team behind all this was also responsible for the much-loved COWBOIS at the Royal Court, a show whose every choice I'd found baffling, sad, and timid. It was, in fact, healing to discover this. Lively and freeing.
Where I took the stills from.
And talking of the murder of indigenous Americans: among the many Pinocchio adaptations I saw in 2022 was THIS beautiful restoration of a silent film from 1911 directed by Giulio Antamoro that included amongst its narrative tweaks a sequence about half an hour in, in which Pinocchio is rescued from the whale by "Indiani" who make him their chief but also attempt to roast Gepetto on a spit, prompting the puppet to sneak out of his teepee and seek the help of a nearby troop of pith-helmeted machine-gunners. This creative addition stopped me sharing it originally, but I'd always meant to cut a genocide-free edit so that the rest could be more easily enjoyed, and now I finally have, and here it is...
Just as Autumn was beginning, sitting in a festoon-lit beer garden on the South Bank, I got to thinking about Pinocchio, and about how much of my adulthood seemed to have been devoted to exactly the life choices he'd been told to avoid. To showbiz and hokum. I didn't know the original book very well though, so I decided to text Gemma Brockis who'd once made a touring adaptation with Silvia Mercuriali in a car, and ask her what she thought Pinocchio was actually originally about?
Gemma answered that originally, actually, the story had ended with Pinocchio hanged. Carlo Collodi only added the blue fairy and whale-based redemption arc after the success of the initial serial prompted its expansion into a whole book. She also said it was all tied into the Risorgimento. What was that? The unification of Italy: Collodi was apparently deeply concerned with the path his new country would take, and was convinced education was the key to its prosperity. So, wait, was Pinocchio Italy, I asked? Totally, Gemma answered.
I dimly remembered a live action television adaptation from my childhood, and decided to see if it was online when I got home. It was. Here's a taste:
Nightmarish. As most live action adaptations of Pinocchio seem to be. That fox at the top of this post is in it too. Want the whole thing? Both episodes?
Here!
"What a horrible thing, Simon, why would you share this?"
Well I don't know, look, sorry. But last night I saw Netflix's new "Pinocchio" – a film Guillermo Del Toro apparently says he has wanted to make for "as long as he can remember"
– and I think it might be worse. At least the old BBC adaptation was nightmarishly bad. Despite its many nods to Frankenstein and the inclusion of Mussolini, the Del Toro version isn't even that. One of the problems might be that Del Toro said he "wanted to deviate from the original book’s themes of obeying
authority by making his Pinocchio virtuous for questioning the rules and
forging his own set of morals." But he doesn't, and when Pinocchio finds Gepetto in the stomach of a whale, it's not because he spent the last act of the story searching for him, but because he inexplicably and fortuitously was sent flying out of a fascist
military academy by a dropped bomb. This maybe makes the film sound more fun than it is. I promise it's not fun.
I'd also suggest that, if you don't like the story of Pinocchio – whatever that is – don't adapt it. I don't care Mark Kermode gave this film five stars. That's a lie, obviously I care. If anything, I care more about this film's reception than the film itself. It almost made me want to watch the Zemeckis version, to see how that could possibly be worse, although as summarised
by the excellent Ryan George below it seems to share quite a few of the Netflix version's narrative malfunctions. Don't watch
the Del Toro adaptation, is really all I've come on here to say, quite spitefully, or I don't know, you might love it.
But if you really want to watch a terrible Pinocchio adaptation this holiday, dim the lights, press "play" above, and let the screaming start.
And how successful was the act? Because, if it was successful, why have I never
seen any contemporary imitations? Why would we not see this level of
articulation in a puppet again until Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? If Vaudeville could come up with something this impressive in 1907, why would a Master of Cinema like Fritz Lang, the creator of Metropolis, have such difficulty building a convincing dragon nearly twenty years later? If I was Lang I'd have gone "Get me the dancing pig people, STAT!" Or
maybe he did. Maybe they built this dragon too, but it wasn't as good. Who
built this pig!
(Okay, now I've looked it out, it's better than I remember, but it's still no dancing pig.)
I have a question too about the technology used to clean this clip up – less about the wherewithal, and more about its effect. I assume it's some kind of rougher, off-the-peg version of whatever Ai Peter Jackson used to clean up the Beatles footage in Get Back. A few other youtube clips suggested by my algorithm use the same tech. Here's the first I saw...
My old workplace, the Trocadero, and the next time I was there I took a photograph, to compare the two...
Because, when I watch these clips I feel, as I felt watching Get Back, that I'm somehow being transported in time, and then I have to check why,
because documentaries aren't new and film has been around for long
enough for me not to be surprised by it. That's my question.
So I've decided it's not that the retouching makes footage look more realistic, but that it makes it less immediately familiar as "footage" and so the brain reads it more literally. One can – rightly – condemn the artificiality of this, if what's intended is the creation of a more accurate record. But what this technology reminds me is that, from its inception, film has never been just a record, it is also a genuine marvel.
Allow me to present these edited highlights of a tribute to the – apparently – thousands of sound effects artists required to bring a single episode of radio to life, according to this startlingly untrustworthy and increasingly Lynchian "Jam Handy Picture" from 1938 called, for some reason, Back of the Mike. Here are four men recreating the sound of a telephone:
And here, over a decade before The Archers was first broadcast, is someone testily soothing a cow:
I was inspired to do some research into this subject by Margaret Cabourn-Smith's shining turn as The Goon Show's solo foley artist "Janet" in Spike, which I saw at the Richmond Theatre on Thursday with her husband Dan Tetsell who had just finished his own run on EastEnders, completing the BleakEnders trifecta...
To save the kerfuffle of taking down bank details, I had given Dan two sleek tenners for the ticket – tenners aren't "crisp" any more, but is "sleek" the word? – which he then passed on to Mervyn Millar whom we met in the pub afterwards for tickets to My Neighbour Totoro at the Barbican. Mervyn in turn handed these on to Barry Cryer's son Bob who was the fourth at our table – I don't know for what, but it didn't matter, I'd really enjoyed the show and some pints and was now in the mood to find transactions like these immensely pleasing.* Here's the sound of a horse chase:
I talked to Mervyn about how much I'd been considering recently the increasing popularity of puppets in theatre, because I figured he must have played a part in that, and I asked how he got started: Apparently his first puppet had been a judge, built because there simply hadn't been enough time for the actor he was directing to do the full quick change. Here's a rain storm:
Bob Cryer was lovely too, and talked about the passing of his father, and the slight oddness of
grieving alongside a parasocial fan community (Ray Galton's son had
suggested they team up with Rory Kinnear and Lucy Briers to form the "Sons
Or Daughters Of Famous Fathers", or SODOFF.) I had a great time.
Naturally Margaret ended the show doing the splits. More surprisingly, she opened it accidently knocking her enormous gramophone off a trolley. I was very happy to be sitting next to Dan for that – that's the joy of live theatre – and I was also very happy the show ended with a performance of 1985. The tour ends soon, and the final Richmond show is going up within an hour of me posting this so sorry for that, but go if you can.
What else did I enjoy about that night? The pub was giving out free dog biscuits. Eating those took me back.
Here's more research:
* UPDATE: Margaret has just informed me it was for a ticket to Spike. Perfect.
Is there a word for the opposite of nostalgia? For the unhousingly alien disclosure of things past you'd forgotten you'd even tried to forget? Quentin Smirhes' innovations in this nameless, benighted field continue to go from strength to hideous strength. The botched Schools and Colleges module "Dont You Start" (beginning three and half minutes in) might be the QTV team's most ambitious bit of salvaging yet, but grisly as you might find it, it's angora wool compared to the botched experiments in A.I. Quentin now broadcasts over on instagram. Go and browse and dredge, for they are works of genius, and you will not come back unchanged.
Honestly, I was just curious what people's first instinct is when putting on a glove puppet – I'm talking about the Emu-like variety, whose muzzle requires a whole hand, not the Sooty-like, arm-waving variety – because mine has always been to have the puppet turn towards me first of all, then face the front and open its mouth like it's going "wow", and I wondered if this was a universal instinct, or if some people immediately went crazy and started chewing the air with it, and what might this say about people, so I was looking for an image, or short clip, to accompany this question, and I had vague memory of a puppet show called Pipkins, whose unorthodox look might fit the bill, and I looked it up and found this, but it is cursed, so do not watch it. The Ancient Greeks had a word with no English equivalent, meaning crime, or sin, or pollution or stain, but I can't remember what is, just please do not watch this. Please do – if you like – post in the comments what your first instinct is when donning a beaked glove puppet, because I'm genuinely interested. But please do not ask where this show is meant to take place, or in what, or who furnished whatever it is, or what lesson it's trying to teach, or why Hartley Hare has those Donald Trump reverse eye shadows, or what... or what... or what the puppets are even made of... because that would mean you had watched the video. And you must not watch the video.
What is this? Is this "Folk Horror"?
But it's in a city. Is it in a city?
Don't answer. Don't watch it.
(Post Script: Once my spirit had recovered, I researched the career of long-suffering presenter Wayne Laryea, and learnt he hosted another kid's show called Zig Zag which I also vaguely remember. I looked that up, but the first clip I found was from a... Canadian?... show with the same name, which is, remarkably, even more mind-scouringly whatever-that-Greek-word-means than Pipkins. So PLEASE just answer the nice question about puppets and DO NOT WATCH THIS EITHER!)
A few years before Disney's chastely fleshless skullbot, the LA-based Iranian artist Behnaz Farahi designed a less humanoid but also far sexier eye-contact-responsive item called "The Caress of the Gaze". It was admittedly designed to be worn by probably quite a sexy human. Most fashion is. According to this article, a camera beneath the top's mesh of quills registers not only whether or not the model is being looked at, but also the gender of the onlooker, and potentially even their age, possibly to stop the piece responding too sexily. Seduction doesn't seem to be the point of the piece however, so much as the creation of an article of clothing that can respond involuntarily to its wearer's environment, both physical and social, like hairs rising on a second skin. This is almost the exact opposite of the intention behind Farahi's most recent piece, and the piece that introduced me to her:
Taking its title from an article by Giyatri Spivak, "Can The Subaltern Speak?" is a work about not being looked at. The Barandi masks that inspired it were said to have been worn as a protest against Portuguese colonists. Its eyelashes flutter not in response to the male gaze, but to communicate in a secret language, like the American soldier who blinked TORTURE in morse code while filmed hostage in Viet Nam. As Farahi herself explains however, it is not in fact the wearers of these masks who will be communicating with each other in this language, but the masks...
The video on Behnaz Farahi below goes into a little more detail about "The Caress of the Gaze" mentioned in the previous post, and also touches on her work as an architect. This is what reminded me how easily I can be fooled into misdiagnosing intelligent life. The Mummenschanzy juddering of "Aurora"'s reactive ceiling panels may not remind me of anything alive specifically, but they do remind me of puppets, and my brain still expects puppets to have a puppeteer. In the introduction to the second term
of Gemma Brockis' online university's History of the Kiss (which now has its own site), snogging's origin is traced back 540
million years, to the deuterostome Saccorhytus Coronarius who let its spittle drift from tiny mouth to tiny mouth in the ocean. Even if there never had been such a thing as puppets, seeing any object react to you would probably still read as a sign of Life, regardless of how little Life actually reacts to you.
Isn't it great what you can do with a 3-D printer?
This video prompts at least two questions, both beginning with "Why": Why is Disney trying to perfect convincing eye contact in its animatronics? And why does the robot they've chosen not have skin?
Having finally got round to reading this tab I that had open for ages I might have an answer. Answering in reverse order: The robot above has no skin because Disney's worried this would make its experiments in interactive, human/autoanimatroic experience look too much like a sex robot. And Disney is building sex robots.
It has been harder to find good videos on slinky physics than I'd imagined. A few experiments with one in zero gravity proved so disappointingly unsurprising that the only person who thought it worth putting online was some grumpy flat-Earther calling for an end to science funding. But the video below from Veritasium is a cracker. Not only did I not manage to predict what happens when a slinky is dropped at full stretch (in a situation with very few variables) but, having seen it, my explanation for why it happened turned out to be completely wrong. All in all then, a very satisfactory watch (and also, like all videos of plummeting objects, clearly a metaphor for something or other). Details after the vid.
So: I didn't predict the bottom would remain hanging in the air like Wile E. Coyote. And when it did, I decided what I was seeing was the bottom springing back up, but that it only looked stationary because the whole slinky was also falling at exactly the same rate in the opposite direction, although this seemed a remarkable coincidence. And that's because, of course, this is not what was happening at all. Nobody's done anything to the bottom of the slinky, so it's not "springing back up", it's simply staying put, held as before by the elasticity of the slinky above, although the tension is shrinking. Presumably therefore, if you simply lowered the slinky rather than let go, the bottom would still remain in place. But no, hang on, that can't be right... I guess it must be... Until the slackness passes through the slinky to the other end? I suppose... I need to get a slinky.... Oh, do you know what else there are surprisingly few videos of online? Mummenschanz.
Presenting Percy Press' last stand, and some early hell from the Brothers Quay.
Now this is a find. Punch and Judy: Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy. It's only as the credits rolled I learnt it contains the last ever performance by "the uncrowned King of Punch & Judy Men" Percy Press Senior. He died when I was six, so there's a chance I saw him perform live as well in Covent Garden. The scene twenty-six minutes in where Joey has fun with the corpses of Punch's victims certainly rings a bell, and seems too virtuosic a piece of handiwork to be easily imitated. It also makes me giggle, which surprised me. Previously – like, I assume, most people – I had considered Punch and Judy entertaining only in the way bad taxidermy or collections of gas masks were entertaining, but Press' act here isn't just macabre. The timing with which he wields his puppets, punctuating their manic outbursts with sudden moments of tense stillness, recalls the cartoons of Tex Avery or Chuck Jones. And now I think of it, pretending you're too stupid to put your head into a noose so you can ask the hangman to demonstrate is exactly the kind of stunt Bugs Bunny would pull, except Bugs wouldn't batter his wife and child to death first.
I saw these in a Punch and Judy exhibition at the Aberdeen Maritime Musuem last year. In addition to the tradional policeman, beadle, ghost, doctor, "Joey", and devil, some modern shows add a health-and-safety officer. This is true.
As well as a record of Press' act, you can also see him performing excerpts from an interview with an early "Punchman" from 1850, in addition to some pretty queasy narration from Punch himself performed by Joe Melia – I didn't like that at all, and nor will you, be warned – a full account from 1827 of the first Punch and Judy show ever documented, complete with cracking, boss-eyed illustrations by George Cruickshank...
... and, perhaps most excitingly of all, early but readily identifiable animation from surrealism's foremost wranglers of haunted dolls, the Brothers Quay, including their accompaniment to the opera Punch and Judy by Harrison
Birtwhistle. It's altogether a beautifully packed little history.
I was researching Punch and Judy because, having finally put Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein to bed, I still had Clowns Versus Monsters on the brain. "Joey" Grimaldi himself was, of course, chased offstage by a giant mutant vegetable (see?), Bugs Bunny bested monsters and witches and martians, And Punch faced off against a giant crocodile, most famously, but also ghosts, the devil, and reviled seventeenth century celebrity executioner Jack Ketch. Like a cartoon, his woodenness made him indestrucable. But now I think about it, maybe the most pertinent parallel to draw is not with cartoons but with SPOILERS FOR ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD: Bradd Pitt's wife-murderer taking down the Manson familyEND OF SPOILERS.Quentin Tarantino has gone on record to say how influential he found Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, and actually it's his work we go to these days for our Punch and Judy shows*. The code there's the same: violent people are monsters, but violence itself is fun.
Florence hasn't quite got her thwack down yet, and the audience reacts accordingly. You can't go wrong with a crocodile though.
UPDATE, 15 December, 2025, RE: Tarantino's recent roasting of Paul Dano – don't ask a Punch and Judy man who their favourite Hamlet is.
Cleaning out my bag today of flyers, receipts, impulse-bought
journalism, and that white stuff at the bottom that could be bits of
mint, or rock, or – What is that stuff? – I found an advert for the film
"The Selfish Giant". Everyone gave it five stars (by the time you reach
five you really do have to count; five is so many stars)
and I thought "Oh yeah, everyone said that was beautiful. I wanted to
see that. Or I meant to see that. But I didn't, and now it's not on.
This unattended stuff builds up. Maybe I should just cut and run..."
which is what it feels like now I've reached this summer of exciting
bits and bobs, about which I suspect I have very little interesting to
say now, so late after, even though some were highlights of my year...
I mean, I had an excellent time working again with Hannah Ringham, on "Ghostphone", but you don't know what that is.
And it was brilliant working with Desmond O'Connor, Zoie Kennedy, and Jonny Woo on "Life By Misadventure". But what's that?
Well, it meant I got to go to Latitude. I've never been to a festival before. (There was that near miss with Anthony Neilson, whose lesson – "Let's never ever work ever with or for the bored" – played a huge part in then accepting Des' invitation... But then I also traveled up with Ian Leslie's "Before they Were Famous" and great as that was, Ian is to boredom what Keanu Reeves is to whatever it is Keanu Reeves is good at.) And it meant I got to sing, and play an angry child. Epic, neck-deep, freedom-fighting fury. A real labour of love amidst all Des and Zoie's other labours of love.
And so I found out that maybe I don't like festivals. I was waiting for some money to come in. I was running around looking for meal tickets. I liked the woods, and the tents we slept in, but not the bigger tents so much. There could be no mistaking them for a coming together at the end of the world. There was nothing like a community, even though we all wore 3D specs for Kraftwerk. And there were no jokes being told in the big tents as good as the jokes we told each other.
And no music as unifying as the clanging of the communal bogs.
The
Proscenium Arch: My little cameraphone can do no justice to the
cavernous, blackboardish, mouldering oddness of the three large brick
arches that make up the space in Shunt called the Arena. Having found
myself at the wrong attention-end of the table in the pub after work I
popped into the Shunt Vaults and the netaudio
festival being hosted there (whence these photos) just in time to catch
a gothic dance piece based on the works of Spike Jones and Doodles
Weaver.
I
couldn't remember when I'd last seen the Arena look like such an
attractive proposition for a performance. It may be because I'd never
seen it look so bare, or it may have been because I'd learnt on Thursday
that our days in this place were finally numbered. Or it may have been
that I'd recently been thinking about Jonah Non Grata thus (and thank you again, Andrew Haydon, for that review): If I were to perform it again in the Vaults much of the set I'd used for the promenade version back in January (the lobby, the lift)
had now been dismantled, so restaging that wasn't an option, and as
much fun as running around with the audience and pulling tricks with
doors and light had been, there was always an argument for taking the
show back to what it had started out as ie. a man gutting about onstage
for an hour in front of an audience allowed to keep their places and, as
a consequence, their anonymity... an argument now made all the stronger
by the rich, found seediness of this Arena. It really did look like a
great, godawful place to see one man stand.
But
how likely am I really to perform Jonah here agan? What have I already
got on my plate? For a start there's this film I'm going to make with Gemma Brockis,
although neither of us really have any idea what it's going to be.
We've mentioned "Fat Adolf" of course (I'm finding it very useful to
write Winnie Verloc with the casting of Gemma in mind) but should LA not
come knocking, or - Heaven Forfuckingfend - I never even get round to
writing the bloody thing and live out the rest of my days teetotal, we
also considered making a short. The one idea I had was to get Gemma to
play me, film it in black and white and call it "The Git." Gemma, a
little to my surprise, really seems to like this.
Okay,
so what should the Git do? Well as of last night I think he should
stand in the Arena and perform to the camera. Start with what you know.
Gemma, now I think of it, is also fascinated by the proscenium arch (for
her upcoming curatorship of the Vaults I think she's going to turn the
long corridor into a series of Pollock Toy Theatre style flats) while
I'm having enough problems working out how to make Iago work outside of
the traditional thearical seating arrangement and I'm only doing that
because it's going on the radio, so I see no need to fight this any
more: REGARDLESS of the medium, there is clearly something about a
person standing on a stage (preferably a big, bare stage) and facing
front that I find potentially hilarious and complicated. Let's start
there then, and just hope we get the whole thing wrapped before they
move us to the sewage farm.
I
couldn't face Ken's wedding reception this evening. Not at first. I
turned up at the venue round the back of Waterloo in my dark suit, but
couldn't see him there so walked out again. I haven't been good with
other people's weddings for a few years now. I hadn't been to the
service at the temple in Taplow either. I stood still outside EV for a
bit, putting things out of my head and then went to see if anything was
going on down by the river.
At
Waterloo Bridge there were things in the distance and people up
lamp-posts. But nothing was moving. What was about to happen would often
halt, it transpired, and I don't know if this was because things were
breaking down or blowing up, or because people were in the way, or
because they'd lost the music or simply because someone had decided that
it was better if, occasionally, everything halted. But after the first
three seconds of about twenty different tracks the false starts stopped
and things got moving. And most of these things had people inside.
The
Bolivians were the first to pass. Then Donna Summer's "I Feel Love"
sounded and teetering puppets of King, Queen and Caesar bore down on us,
frowning but friendly with big, flat hands flapping, patting, petting,
all that. I followed them down the hill to the viaduct at Butler's
Wharf. A lot of people were dancing now and at the brow of the hill you
could see smoke.
Ken
is a Buddhist. We'd won medals for acting in Kuwait and when we'd go
fishing in the Gulf he would always whisper to his catch before
releasing it. And whenever an insect appeared in our room he would
always trap it under a glass and then let it go, but only after he'd
kept it there for twenty-four hours, during which he might whisper to
it. And whenever he chanted it sounded like the washing machine
downstairs. We bumped into each other again in the street last month,
just outside the Dungeons. I hadn't seen him in four years. A fire alarm
had gone off and I was dressed as a corpse. "Simon!" he said, and we
hugged, "You're looking well."
Someone
blue was sweeping the road now with a maritime flare to prepare the way
for an elephant made of pink light. I've never been to a carnival
before. These are details. Chiefly of course the parade was made up of
dancers - or rather people dancing - every age and shape of person
adorned and bared and providing their own light. And lanterns. And the
music that we danced to we'd be dancing to every day if people hadn't
got so bloody excited about Britpop. And a very good and very loud
argument was being made for the Thames as a conduit for all countries
that had ever displayed a talent for making something out of paper and
mirrors.
A
cyclist passed dangling lampshades and behind him... Luke! Dressed as a
cherub, riding a bike, with two doves perched on his wrists: "Simon!
I'm freezing! Do you know where this ends?" Then the final phoenix
ducked to get under the viaduct, scraped its beak, and the fireworks
started. Along the South Bank and along the Embankment and along every
bridge we all watched. And I watched, thinking myself the only one there
on their own, as I always do at these things. And I thought "This is
great." And it was. I went back to EV and I found Ken this time. He was
sitting outside beside his bride, Yuki: "Simon! Y-..." He was smiling so
much that he could hardly speak. So we shook hands. For quite a while.
I
was part of the festivities yesterday. Sofas were laid along the apex
of Southwark Bridge and I sat in a hairnet and yakuza blue suit
clutching a bunch of daisies and a yellow copy of Alfred Jarry's "The
Supermale", glancing at my watch for eight hours. It was packed. I left
no trace. Just a tiny slick of spirit gum in the apple-bobbing barrel.
But what they did tonight was much better.
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