Themepunk Roundup: The Scratchblood Comeback

 Happy Hallow, as I guess today is! Above is not a picture of Hallowe'en. I have not been working here over Hallowe'en. God knows what's happened to the poor, brave souls who are. The work WhatsApp currently reads like the transcription of a black box. Lois has lost a finger, and I'm writing this on the train to York. I only hope they forgive my abandoning them.

“Why, to the North Po- to Whitechap- to London Bridge, of course! This is the Polar Exp- the Ten Bell- the Star Inn!”

 When my job as a conductor on the Mid-Norfolk Polar Express ended in December, I knew I wanted the New Year to be, above all else, one in which I continued to play people who carry a hurricane lamp. No, I wanted to continue doing improvisation-friendly, site-specific shift work with a regular band of friends as I wrote last post, and the London Bridge Experience was my first themepunk gig of 2024. (I am committed to trying to make "themepunk" a thing. Sorry, it's my blog.) 

 

 

London Bridge! History!

 

 It was a return to Tooley Street, and to reading on the floor between shows, and writing your own script if you wanted to just as the London Dungeon had let you do when it was the rival across the road. It was also a return to painting myself a better jawline and cheekbones.

 Look at this dashing rake! Who needs appetite supressants? Compare the portrait above taken when I started work at the LBE this February, to one below of me posing next to a stuffed tapir in Bedlam at the Dungeons in 2007, and you’ll see full rejuvenation was achieved. The dead don't age (although my phones seem to have got worse).

 

 The LBE used some of the pumped odours too – and you know what that does to a pysche –  and even some of the tunes: ducking out of Fleshmongers, past the giant spiders and through the labyrinth of killer clowns to check on my microwaved Shanghai rice in the green room, I’d hear the same plainsong which used to play on the steps to the boat ride a decade and a half ago…

 There were differences too, of course: old Horror posters on the wall as you enter, which made me feel more at home than ever, real swords and a fake Viking longboat, chainsaws, Romans, a wall of broken dolls, and the fact this place is genuinely underground (I turned my flash on one day, and you don’t get gastropodinous limestone arteries like this in County Hall...)

 Everyone there works their arse off as well, like they grew up through Covid or something. Physically, verbally, chemically, no two actors share a superpower. I think it’s the only job on which I’ve lost my voice – bloody Vikings – which is another reason I've been taking it a bit easier. so, okay, the dead do age. But, readers... work with people who work their arse off. I don't mean losing a finger. I mean, say: okay, between bouts of bursting through a blood-drenched shower curtain, for example, Sam's at his laptop in the green room, putting together something like this beautifully simple, one-shot unnerver below. Enjoy! There’s Jess and Preston in the bushes too. God, I hope they're okay.

 

The German Choir of London go "Oh God"

 Here's matter ghoul adjacent. Back in March I took an iPad out to where Spitalfields borders The City, to see if I could get anything useful for a little promo Big Ben said we needed to make now that the Americans were favouring Harry Potter Tours – which we don't do – over the more nuanced, site-specific contextualising of the tragic murder and mutilation of unaccommodated Victorian women provided by Fred Strangebone's Ripper Walks. "Well, this will look terrible" I thought as it started to rain because I knew nothing about what makes a street look good. 

 The iPad was a gift from the Musical Director of the Deutscher Chor London, Barbara Hoefling. When I came to cut the Strangebone footage together I found a whole file of recordings she had made on it in preparation for a lockdown Hallowe'en Concert. Barbara's developed her own method of directing amateur choirs: instead of training each singer up to the standard of a soloist, she concentrates on perfecting the coherence of their untrained voices into a single instrument, to produce a sound I've heard no other human choir make. I tried playing one of the recordings I'd found over the footage of our route, and was instantly thrilled by how devastating I found the result – far too upsetting to attract even the Canadians however. So I knocked together a new soundtrack from some library numbers, Ben provided text and sound effects – car horns, golf swings, that kind of thing – and you can see the final trailer here, if you like. But Barbara Hoefling's brilliant work is below.

 

Staying In My Lane

 Those old explanations of ghosts – echoes of a trauma baked into place – is it only human trauma that has that power? Might parks be crawling with the ghosts of worms? Is this river haunted by fish, fish ghosts targeted by heron, more than a millenia-worth? I'm trying to get into the Hallowe'en spirit now that the weather is proper October.

 

 Unfinished business – that was another explanation. Do only humans get to have that then? Wait, is that all a soul is? Business? Is it? I haven't been busy this year. Maybe. Have I felt like a ghost? A bit. And it hasn't all been unenjoyable, but I watched a youtube essay last week about the films of the Beatles which reminded me that being A CREATIVE FORCE is, you know, an option, and initially may require nothing more than just thinking to yourself "I'm going to be A CREATIVE FORCE" and then seeing what happens, and it's really picked me up. (Here's that video essay.) 

 

 In this case a bit of what happened appears to be me going for a walk and then posting shit phone pictures of it here. Well, good. You'll have to take my word for it that there were joggers. It's odd to me, by the way, that that that's what it's called: "jogging". That's definitely what it looks like, but it's not the aspect you'd think they'd want to advertise. Jogging's normally something you want to avoid, in case you scratch the record or spill your drink. How can I make running forward feel more like running into something? Jog!

 

 Are these pavement demarcations a hangover from the pandemic, or permanent now? And has anyone studied their effect on a pedestrian's mental health? I think I hate them. They just seem like another thing to get on the wrong side of. It's nice to have somewhere to record that though. It's nice to be A CREATIVE FORCE. The next paragraph contains swearing.

 

 I also hate seeing so many people right now take the side of a side, rather than siding with people – to see so many call for an end to Netanyahu's response to the largest mass murder of Jews since the Holoocaust while not also calling - seeing as we're calling for things - for the safe return of Israeli hostages, as though we've finally run out of internet and there was just was no room for the Landaus. Well fuck that and fuck the war and fuck taking sides unless that side is Peace. Fuck Bibi. And fuck Hamas; buoyed by their actions, the Iranian Government announced last week it would be targeting Persian journalists working in Britain like my friend Faren. And, parenthetically (do go on, Simon) coming up to a year after the murder of Mahsa Ahmini by Iranian police for having loose hair I decided to search Xitter for any more news of protests, and found myself enaged in the following fun coversation about... let me check... yes, apartheid. Stick with it.

 

 

 

 I know, "mroe"...

 By the way, you can now find me on blue sky at @slepkane.bsky.social. 

 I really hope you're all okay.

Tom and Jerry used to be Cops.

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

"At last"?!

 

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

Zan Zendegi Azadi continued...

 Yesterday I met Faren (not pictured) and her friends and colleagues in Trafalgar Square to join a human chain across Wesminster Bridge in support of the protests in Iran. October the 29th was also Cyrus the Great day, so I thought about researching him before writing this, then realised it probably wasn't that necessary, but I'll still research him after I've written this. I've got Larry Gonick's Cartoon History of the Universe open next to me right now.

 

 

  

 Whitehall had been busy. The March of the Mums had made front pages earlier that day, and there was also a Ukrainian protest outside Downing Street, with which we ocassionally intermingled. "Down with tyrants." A lot of the chants were in English, but we were also taught "Azadi! Azadi! A-zad-i!" the Farsi word for freedom. And I finally learnt how to say Zan, Zendegi, Azadi, meaning Women, Life, Freedom – as taught to the people of Hastings by Omid Djalili here, and written across the Jason hockey masks of some protestors. Others hid their face behind David Lloyd's Guy Fawkes mask, now associated with Anonymous, possibly unaware of the seasonal appropriateness. Others still were dressed as zombie nuns, but I'm pretty sure they were just cutting through.

 Our numbers grew as we walked down Whitehall, sometimes side by side and filling the road, sometimes holding hands in single file to form the human chain, (which I couldn't photograph without breaking of course). There hadn't seemed to be as many in Trafalgar Square as a month ago, but now we were on the move we were closing roads. This was my first march. Faren said she hadn't felt as safe as she'd have liked at the last one, because people had started shouting "Down with the BBC", believing the corporation hadn't been doing enough to support the protestors, or that reporting the deaths of students was bad for morale – meanwhile the very fact of Faren's employment by BBC Persian has seen her upgraded by the Iranian Government from spy to terrorist – but on this demonstration however, I only saw the one sign with the letters "BBC" dripping in blood, and Faren had her friends around her now. She seemed happy. She was loud. "I'm letting out a lot of anger." I realised I'd only been throwing my voice. Pretend shouting. Shy.

 

  Posting some photographs of the protest on Instagram that evening, I wondered for the first time what my phone is actually up to when it says it's "finishing up" after the loading bar's filled, and I had flashbacks to Arthur Pewtey at the Marriage Guidance Counsellor. I don't really know how well I've fulfilled protestors' requests to "Be the Voice of Iran". But I know what I can do if it's okay with you, and that is to sign, and ask you to sign, THIS PETITION to whoever's Home Secretary when you read this: to drop an already twice rejected Public Order Bill that would make criminal offences of everything that happened yesterday – "interfering with key national infrastructure" for example – in other words, closing roads – and "locking on" – in other words, holding hands. If not for me, do it for Cyrus the Great.

 

Guise? Guise!

 Using this blog simply to regurgitate videos from the BBC Archive does feel a little lazy, but it keeps putting out such treasure, and I wanted something properly unsettling to post for Hallowe'en weekend. Unfortunately this package delivers so fully that I now want the whole heathen atrocity of a "holiday" banished from the memory of the Earth. What are these poor innocents doing? What have they been taught? What is this programme?

 

 

 Full marks to whoever decided to overlay the subtle howling of wind over footage of children limping through a wood singing about their own ugliness. Until now I had entirely bought into the idea that trick or treating was something we picked up from the States – I blame Fry and Laurie – but I was ten in 1984 and yet I don't remember "guising". Or sticking my head under water to make contact with another world. Or eating apples to learn the future. I knew a little about carving faces into turnips, but only because we had to wear one at the London Dungeon as "Stingy Jack". That was a scary costume. It had nothing on this kid's Licorice Allsorts mascot Bertie Bassett though. Oh God. Oh Jesus Christ.

 

NEW, PARTIALLY BLOCKED SHOWREEL!

 

 Now with added EastEnders, which means that even though I used a clip from EastEnders' youtube channel the video is still "partially blocked", so that only certain countries can see it. I don't know which countries. Has it been blocked inside Britain? Outside Britain? Are you in one of those countries? That's a shame. Let me know.*

 For those of you who can't enjoy it, off the back of Orson Welles' Haitian Macbeth here's more scrupulously researched Vodou. As a kid I rarely experienced a fear of missing out, but I remember never being taken to a massive out-of-town Toys R Us, and never being given Atmosfear or Nightmare or whatever these board games were called. Whoever came up with SNL's David S. Pumpkins sketch clearly had though, so enjoy, and happy season of the skeleton!**

 

 

 

 *UPDATE: Okay. Blocked in the UK. If you still want to see it I think THIS is the link to the Spotlight upload. 

 ** And if you simply want more of Baron Samedi and a man rocking around in a stationary ghost train, THIS is the link to the full music video.

Sometimes this blog will just be HALLOOOOWEEN! And the Punishment Poll from "Mr. Sardonicus".

 Remember this? 

 

 Or this?

 

 Or who could ever forget this?

 Yes, disparage the pioneer of "Percepto" and "Emergo" all you like, every horror film William Castle made had at least a couple of images that were unforgettable, for one reason or another, whether or not your seat was wired to buzz, or a luminous skeleton trolleyed over your date's head. Even Castle would grow sick of gimmicks however, so when Columbia Pictures demanded one be included in his historical thriller Mr. Sardonicus, he came up with the "Punishment Poll". Just before the film's final reel Castle himself would appear onscreen and ask the audience to vote for whether the rictus-afflicted anti-hero should receive his come-uppance, or mercy.

 Only one ending was shot.

 

 

 Happy Hallowe'en then, my old Unattendees! If that didn't get you in the mood, why not watch the opening fifty seconds of Castle's House On Haunted Hill with the volume way up? Or there are still the remains of my Frankenstein Countdown to polish off, so here's what I wrote about 1945's House of Dracula: 

“Erle C. Kenton's House of Dracula does not bear close examination, if any. It is a bad film.” 

 And here is even more of what I wrote! Fortunately three years later Frankenstein would be met by Abbott and Costello and you can read my thoughts on that encounter HERE, along with whether or not it would become the most influential film ever made, because I can't remember. 

 Please don't be too frightened!

 

33rd

 An excellent party and I didn't even have to throw it.

 

Ruffians, toffs and catty slags hanging by the gibbet at the Prospect of Whitby, watching the fireworks going off in Blackheath, sporting sparklers and gins, cakes and tails, stage blood and corsets. And Ms. Meikle makes it over with a big bag of watercolours, colouring sheets, pudding mix and "FOUR INTERNATIONAL GAMES" taped to a board for 99p. All for me! And let me here record that she whppped my ass at Chinese Checkers, and immortalize the butterflies coloured in by the stragglers at 4am washing their brushes in pink champagne, irrespective of insignia.

 

shit and shithead (and the GURUN observation deck)

Halloween. A three-day leave from the Dungeon starts today and I can tell it's gotten colder while I was inside because my shirts still aren't dry and it was British Summer Time when I hung them out five days ago. I've not that many work-related scars to show for the half-term push: a slight wonkiness from where I cracked my nose on Bedlam, a black toe from where I dropped the cleaver, some blood in my hair that turned out to be real from where I failed to clear the chain hang on no, okay maybe I have been showing signs of tiredness... A corporate event on Monday evening saw us warming up in Torture with an exercise that required us to evoke through collaborative improvisation a given landscape which the poor schnook who'd just been sent out would then have to guess ("Chess Championship", "The Final Frontier" etc. It's not that easy to evoke Uhura actually if you don't have a chair, very easy to topple). When the final landscape we were given turned out to be "Inside Simon's Head" everyone just started screaming. So yes I must have been showing signs of tiredness. Oh and he guessed it. Meanwhile next door in Shunt, Luke was stuffing my rubber double into a minicab to take to a party. 

 With my looted corpse the toast of Stoke Newington and the contents of my head a warm-up exercise I went to relax in Gordon's Wine Bar with some churlishly unloaded cheese, a deck of cards, a bottle of red and Ms. Meikle who was down from Potters' Bar, herself fast becoming the toast of the cat-neutering circuit. She taught me Shithead. It was very relaxing...
SHIN!
GURUN!

 I'll explain those in a minute, but no I've been fine fine. Just busy. Simultaneously occupied and vacant. None of your business. Been looking forward to a few days off and a chance to kick back and enjoy some perspective.

 

... So it was very profitable to find myself at 11 o'clock this morning summoned to the twenty-ninth floor of Centre Point and staring out of a sound-proof window at Hyde Park, Wembley Stadium and this evening's weather rolling in over Chiswick. Here was perspective alright.
"Our clients have decided to write their own copy I'm afraid, and it's, um... incredibly repetitive. But what we want is, you know, warm and friendly... " In my booth there was a pint mug of about thirty pencils to the right of the microphone. The engineer, seeing that this was clearly too many as we came in, left me with three for some reason. On the other side of the glass before me was a plate of perfectly arranged biscuits no-one dared touch, an equally untouched dish of fuck-me fruit and two warm and friendly men unwittingly slinging my financial ass out of the fire. And beyond the sound-proof glass to my left: the bigger picture... SHIN! GURUN!

 

An hour later and twenty-nine storeys down I happily bumped into David from Shunt outside a coffee shop in Portland Place taking a quick break from his day-job in anaesthetics, writing in a notebook. It's the first time I've seen him in a suit. I told him about the medical modelling. The last time I bumped into him making notes outside a CoffeeSomethingNationBucks he'd told me about the theatrical commission he'd just got from the Lyric Hammersmith which would let him try out the forty-odd remote headphones he'd already bought in bulk: The audience would stand outside on the balcony, watch an actor or actors in the building opposite, and through the cans be able to hear the inside of their heads (not screaming, I'm assuming, other stuff). Today he asked me if I wanted to be in it, and was I free to help him try something out at the Lounge next week. It wasn't even midday yet...

 But man it's got late now. I'm meant to be resting. Instead the area beyond my peripheral vision has just switched from black to white.
I'll leave you then with some Manga sound effects from Eiji Otsuka and Housi Yamazaki's excellent "The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service" which I bought because of the cover. All the speech balloons have been translated into English of course, so you have to keep switching between following the action from right to left and following the dialogue from left to right, while the sound effects - the Kapowees, the Screeches etc. - have been left as pictograms and then translated in a big glossary at the back (ie the front). And here, in no particular order, are some examples, verbatim:

ONGYAA ONGYAA
baby crying

KPFU
sound of a refrigerator door popping open

SHUGOGOGO
sound of propane stove

ZUZUZU
body slowly climbing in

PAKU PAKU
sound of flapping mouths

CHAPOON
splash of pebble hitting water

GYU KYUN
spirit being pulled into the bullet

KYUN
last bit of the spirit being pulled in

GORORON GORORO
sky rumbling

KAR KARI KARI KYUDWOOOON
air crackling then loud lightning

TSUU TSUKU TSUU CHA ZUNCHAKA ZUTCHA TSUU TSUKU ZUN
sound of music being overheard on someone's headphones

SHIN
sound of silence

GURUN
sound of world spinning

PAKIII
sound of a bolt falling through glasses at terminal velocity into eye socket
 

 Happy Halloweeeen!

"The only animals filthier than people..."

said Ian, our rat wrangler, as the flies on the filled bins and bagel papers presumably did everything in their power to lead good lives and 'pfutt' their sorry souls up the Karmic ziggurat... "The only animals filthier than people," said Ian, "are actors."

Here's some dust:

 

 

What possible values - you may ask - must a fly live by to ensure that it doesn't come back as, say, another fly? Likewise a rat? Let us take as our model the Core Values birthed by Top Brass over a weekend cocooned in workshops and playpens as illustrated by this printout accidentally circulated around the staff-room for feedback:

That's just the one page, but it gives you a taste. So... Chrome jigsaw bridges... "Fairness to our each other"... "Green". Dislikes? Likes? A number of us put on our feedback forms "The Aids Joke" (under either). There wasn't one of course, but the thought of some nit having to pore over this poop again in a cold sweat seemed a lot more entertaining to us than another round of Mutoid Hypothetifucks on the mortuary steps ("What if she had ears instead of breasts? And she had an ear on her elbow? What if she had a newsagent's growing out of her back?" Ideas are clearly running thin...) For we are working Halloween hours now. Getting too busy to see the Bigger Picture. Entertaining the kids - Hello kids -

 

Apparently if you try to cull the rats that make their home here, as opposed to those Ian brings in, their Queen simply waives her spawning monopoly and the numbers swell instead of going down. The only solution is sonic cannon, says Ian... 

 How is the bigger picture though, guys? I hear it's getting mighty cold. Me? After work I just pop next-door to the Shunt Lounge with a copy of Manga or Jarry and fall asleep on the couch. Last week Nigel was asked to lope around naked, mute and covered in shopping - again - but this time he would be driven off by a fleet of diesel-powered leaf-blowers. 

 Nigel is an actor. 

 I missed this scheduled intervention unfortunately, but before my nap I managed to catch the old school up-stream torsoes projected across the long corridor, and had a go on the vibrating arse belt (I'm not sure what that machine's actually called. You see them in Bugs Bunny cartoons, clattering in gyms by the steam boxes, lazy people use them to lose weight, you know. And "upstream" is a word I've just been introduced to as a palatable alternative to "experimental". Or, indeed, "alternative". Use it in a sentence today.) I tried to photograph some of this, but the flash just picked up dust. See? Filthy:

 

 But pretty.