Christmas Quiz!

 Thanks for playing! Just the one question: I have always been a song and dance machine. But who am I dressed as in this picture?

You have the entirety of Kate Bush's Christmas Special from 1979 to leave your answer in the comments. Go!

 

 

 (Tangentially: after hearing Paul Putner and Joel Morris discuss the "Divine Madness" VHS on Joel's brilliant podcast Comfort Blanket, I realise I've always been drawn to piano-playing singer-songwriters more than guitar-playing ones, not a distinction I'd previously noticed. Okay, NOW go!)

 

Reporting Back from the WandelProbe

 High Camp! We made it! This working week ended with a run-through of The Love Goddess that seemed to leave everyone happy, including our composer Logan Medland who now has to return to New York, and certainly me. I also learnt a new word: WandelProbe, pronounced "Vondelprobe", which means... well, what we just did. As I said when we started: everyone is lovely, and I'm trying not to be too weird. I don't think I'm always succeeding. However, I've decided to blame two decades of making work at the last minute with whatever was to hand for any sudden attacks of lip-chewing anxiety I've experienced when, say, asked suddenly to enter holding a phone that we don't have yet (because I mean how much of this phone will end up existing? Just the receiver? Or maybe it should be just the receiver? Or will there be a wire coming out of it? Why? Or why not? And how long will that wire be? Where does this world end?) or to dance in time with the music.

 

credit Sonia Sanchez Lopez

 

 (But wait no, because this bit isn't a dance, it's just a scene in which the characters happen to be dancing. And maybe my character isn't a good dancer. Or maybe he is. Maybe I haven't decided. Where does this world end?) "Trust the process," says our choreographer Jacqui Jameson who, let me remind you, has a dancing shoe named after her. I don't always understand the process though, I think. But then she says, "You're impatient." And she's right. And I knew this.

 

 credit Sonia Sanchez Lopez

 

 Also though, it has always for as long as I can remember made me uncomfortable in warm-ups when I have to bend over and stick my head through my legs, because now I can't see what everyone else is doing, and what if they suddenly do something else? How am I supposed to learn then? All bent over with my head through my legs? I don't know if that's necessarily impatience. Anyway, as I say: we made it this far. I feel very lucky to be working with these people, and look forward to playing with them. We open on Friday.

credit again Sonia Sanchez Lopez

 

 Here is fictional actor Nicholas Craig's take on the rehearsal process, care of Nigel Planer pictured at the top, and illustrated with some mercilessly harvested contributions from the non-fictional. The Naked Actor first went out in 1990 when I was still doing school plays, and was an instant hit in whatever crypt we happened to set our satchel down in. "Rehearsal! Aye! Ha-ha! Rehearsal!" we'd all quote. Or: "Janet my love?" Or: "A bit Freddy Frautington." Does that sound like the kind of gang you want to be in? Then enjoy. The opening credits are honestly the funniest I've seen, and distil perfectly a very specific moment in British culture when a happily subsidised mainstream could regularly present to the masses something a bit like something a bit like something thrilling and experimental which the director had popped in on.

(Redevelopment) Where To Find Us

 The Golden Key is on today! Here are some clues as to where we'll be, and by clues I mean very late research I decided to do on our location while leaving the bath running. That's the Parliament building of New Delhi. I was in New Delhi in 1991 when for some reason our house master pulled strings for us to perform there Václav Havel's absurdist critique of Communism Redevelopment, in which I played a middle-aged architect having a nervous beakdown with talcum powder in his hair because I was sixteen. I think I have a photo...

 

 ... That's me far right. I secretly based my performance on Bette Davis in All About Eve. Ronnie Potel's the idealistic young buck in the middle, secetly in love with my wife. I remember the audience muttering when she gave me a shoulder rub, and I bought my first ever Talking Heads album over there, and my first beer, and saw distant women doing laundry in the Ganges as the sun set behind the Taj Mahal in Agra. None of that's a clue, sorry, just memory's cute stampede. We'll be at the end of Share Mile in the "Maze of Adventures". Come and find us, and once it's all done I'll post where we were in the comments (I might also post the school magazine's review of my Zdenek Bergman!) Here's the clue. Take it away, Nibbling Nuts...

Poem About Nuclear Weapons Written Possibly Before I Knew What Nuclear Weapons Were

NO-ONE RECALLS THAT FATEFUL DAY

WHEN, NOT FROM WATER, WOOD, OR CLAY

THE NUCLEAR MISSILES FROM THEIR BIRTH

HAVE TERRERIZED THE EARTH

OUR PRECIOUS LIVES SWING LEFT AND RIGHT

NOBODY CARES WHO'S WRONG OR RIGHT

THE DESPERATE STRUGGLE OF THE LIVES

OF HUSBANDS, CHILDEN, WIVES

ALL WE DO IS SCREAM AND PROTEST

THE DAY WILL COME WHEN THESE MISSILES ARE PUT TO THE TEST

 

 Happy National Poetry Day! 

 Despite growing up during the Cold War I've no memory of actually ever being particularly scared of a nuclear winter (although I was definitely enjoying the work of artists who were). I can't think of anything else I wrote for school in block capitals either, so this is certainly an outlier. Is it a spoof? I normally only used block caps for comedy. So now I think about it, it might have been a spoof. But then why was it marked? And what kind of corrections are those anyway? No idea what year. I just found it loose in the box. Yes, now I've been living in Notting Hill for a whole year it's time once again to start sorting through the boxes and make sure I just keep the good stuff. 

 Like this:

A small sad sausage sat beside a spider.

Sometimes this blog will just be Tinsel and Custard

 

 

 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.

Lighting Candles in the Cloud

 Monday was shrouded in mist, or cloud (I don't know how high up we are, here in Languedoc). Sat around Mum's computer on three chairs, we attended her brother Francis' funeral online, then drove carefully to the abbey in the next village, to light a candle for him. 

 

  The abbey's been here less time than Mum and Dad, only completed in 2018. I don't know who designs sanctuaries these days, but they understood the assignment. The small chapel we were taken to by the monk, where the candles were lit, was bright with stained glass, even in this weather, but the palette of the surrounding cloisters is far calmer, almost prehistoric, the colour of water and bone. And the windows of the main church aren't stained, but grooved like the sand in a karesansui garden, which my camera doesn't pick up.

 

 The earliest Christmas I remember, I was six or seven: I received a robot that broadcast a panorama of Saturn across its chest and fired missiles from its forehead (this one, in fact), and a beautifully illiminated boxed set of The Chronicles of Narnia, which I still own. I remember Mum conveying the excitement with which she and her brothers and sister would look forward to the next story coming out, but I'm only now realising the more personal connection: that its author had actually taught one of them. Apparently, C.S. Lewis considered Francis "the best mannered man of his generation I have ever met." I loved that box, but it would be decades before I got beyond The Horse and His Boy, although I still remember, vividly, its description of how surpisingly damp and grey it is to be inside a cloud. 

 Francis' service, if you wish, can be viewed here.

 

Uncle Francis Postscript: Fatespotting

"Shelter Drawing: Three Fates" by Henry Moore (source)

 

 Following on from what I hope was a tribute to my late uncle Francis yesterday: looking for pictures of him to accompany the post, I was surprised to find the video below, from 2014. I never expected to see Francis in a video. Possibly because the first extraordinary fact I ever learnt about him was that Uncle Francis didn't own a television! He composed epic dramas in blank verse, and themes for organ. He didn't pop up on youtube. But here he suddenly is, less spry than I remember, I hope it's okay to say, which is why I suspect the last time I saw him was before this. But maybe we're just witnessing the toll upon Francis of talking about the Blitz. These aren't happy memories, which is one of the reasons I think they're so worth sharing. I remember, in the class he gave in 1999, Francis talking about growing up in "Bomb Alley",watching "men murder each other in the sky above us." I forgot – if I ever knew – that he was also friends with Henry Moore and Francis Bacon.

"It's not spooky. It's just a city waiting to be crucified."

 

 You can see Francis talk at far greater length about this moonlit childhood beneath the bombing in his other youtube appearance here: "Armageddon and faith - a survivor's meditation on the Blitz".

 And his funeral service will be held on the 20th. Here.

Turning Round, Coming Through a Door, Shrugging or Tripping or Something with a Top Hat

 

I thought I'd see what happened if I took a break from the blog, 

and what happened is I re-binged Mad Men.

 

 I moved schools in the mid-eighties, at around the age of ten, and the cast of characters changed around me. When I'd get home, to watch The A-Team, or It's Your Move, or Family Ties for Michael J. Fox and Justine Bateman even though I hated it, I would wonder who from this new cast would make it into the opening credits, and what two or three things they'd be shown doing, and what two or three things I'd be shown doing, if I made it in. I don't ever remember thinking of myself as the star of whatever this was. I only stopped thinking about this when shows stopped doing it – although it was probably still echoing around my head when I shot Mirrorboy – and being suddenly reminded of how formative the idea of a three-shot portrait had been to my childhood social aspirations is one of the reasons I love this Mad Men fan video so much; but there are many others. 

 How would you have popped up?

EXCITING SPACE ADVENTURE 27: MARVEL CLASSICS EDITION!

 Not every power would be relevant to every challenge. Reed understood this even if Sue didn't. Still, he was glad he'd brought the ropes along. It was nice to have something to do...

 A classic Jack Kirby cover – which my friend Alex Fitch got Stan Lee to sign for my birthday! – and which, decades earlier, I ripped off, from memory – (I hadn't noticed the other eye) – for the front of a Conan spoof I then never got round to drawing.

 

"Pooper Man" by Simon, aged 6 or 7

 As with yesterday's untitled Jaws parody, I start out with a straight steal, this time from Mad's "Superduperman!" (viewable here, although our paperback version at home was in black and white, making Lois Pain – far right - far more prominent in the opening splash)...

 

 ... and then I wander off. It's possible nevertheless I was at the height of my creative powers here. I would have had to come up with my own solutions to depicting stuff before I was proficient enough to start copying styles, and both the grizzly robot/monster hybrid and the balding, pot-bellied editor are surprisingly elegant, I think, considering – like the ripples yesterday. I'm also reminded of these fish I drew...

 

 I'm not sure I could design anything so simple and effective now.

 The Tarzan's just background, I think. I still don't really understand muscles. Sorry there was so little poop.

Untitled "Jaws" parody by Simon, aged 6

 Or maybe seven. That's my excuse for the "you're"/"your" confusion. The first page is missing, as you can see, so I don't know now what pun on Jaws I used as a title. The layout's based on paperback reprints of EC's "Mad" which we had around the house, as are some of the panels:

 

  Characters in Mad parodies would occasionally break character to ask "How's your mom, Ed?" I didn't know why*, but it hopefully explains some of what follows. I hadn't seen Jaws, obviously, but I assumed the film followed the plot of King Kong, which Mad had also parodied, (source):

 

 I didn't follow the plot of King Kong either though, because I was six. Clearly I stuff every frame with as much extraneous detail as my felt tips would let me, in the Mad style, but the way I depict things emerging from the water is actually quite minimalist and, I'd even go so far as to say, elegant. I'm pleased. Minimalism and elegance were big in 1980, as were were sharks. I remember, I had a big book that taught me how to draw "sea monsters" in four steps. A shark was a cone with two eyes and gills. It's all coming back now.

 This is too long an introduction for what follows though. Sorry.

 

 

 Did you guess the twist?!

* I've only just now looked up what the line refers to, and it's perfect.

HAIKU composed remembering the greatest disappointment encountered making comics as a child

 

Biro ink brightens.

But felt tip ink turns paler.

Why's that then, Tipp-Ex?

The Annotated "The Empire Strikes Bac" by Simon, aged 9

  Continuing this blog's Star Wars long weekend: One of the things I used to make as a child were unfinished pastiches of Mad Magazine. I'd write and illustrate parodies, articles and little Sergio-Aragonés-type doodles in the margin, just like Mad, but laid out in landscape, because I was using the gum of the notebook to hold the pages together, and that's how they opened. I had definitely read Mad's parody of The Empire Strikes Back (above) by the time I came to make my own. I'd also read the photobook, the behind-the-scenes book, and bought the action figures. I knew the names of the bounty hunters, and what "AT-AT" stood for. I'm just not sure I'd actually seen the film but anyway, knowing all good parodies subtly and hilariously change the name of the title, I began work on "The Empire Stikes Bac" without a "k" below. Exelanto!

 Pithy punchline from C.G.P.O. there. I wouldn't be aware of "Quee-er" as a gay slur until I saw Five Go Mad In Dorset a few years later. And I remember being shamefully aware of how little Pham Shmoelo looked like Harrison Ford, but also quite excited to have accidentally captured the likeness of Jack Lord from Hawaii 5-O. I am pretty merciless in my depiction of Mark Hamill's new nose...

 

 "Fab on" indeed! Frame seven of this page contains the first evidence of me knowing that rude body parts and functions are, in theory a staple of comedy, without actually knowing what any of them are called. I would later learn that an appendix is not rude. Barbara Woodhouse was of course a celebrity dog trainer at the time – television's always been turning out reality stars – but I might have spelt her name wrong. However there seems very little guesswork in the design of either the snow steed, the snow beast or the AT-AT, so I was probably using my own toys as models. I also notice. Nice foreground/background stuff in the frame with the spy droid by the way. Nice gag too. I'm also particularly proud of this next visual gag...

 Another cracking panel seven, politics of course also being a staple of comedy. Dusty Bin's there too, great. Giant nostrils, yep. Puke is in his vest and pants when he gets kicked off the ship because he was definitely wearing a vest on Dagobah in the photobook so I assumed he was doing PE. Which he sort of was. And I've clearly abandoned any hope of making Pham Shmoelo look like Harrison Ford now and am just doubling down on the Jack Lord thing.  Panel two of the next page features another botched bodily function joke: Is Puke farting, sneezing, burping, shitting? No idea...

 "You nerdy jerk!" "Baboons' pants"! What filth was I reading? And why is "a matron" asking for money for seats. Do I mean "usher"? I know jobs have names, again I'm just not quite sure what any of them are. "Your Tallness" is a valid honorific though, and knowing how unpublishable my drawings of Short Round from the The Temple of Doom were, I'm hugely relieved to see how handsome I've made Landoff...

The light sabres here were drawn with a rubber. Now Vader carbon-freezing Solo just to test the kit, was that an actual plot point from the film? Seems weird. There's a little misunderstanding here about who is being fined for not having a driving license, but nothing remotely comic. But I'm really filling these frames with research: Boba Fett, Slave One, Ughnauts. I don't know where I got "I must only use the Force for defense and thought" from, but I applaud the simplicity of itssentiment. It's a good mythos, isn't it, Star Wars, though I still maintain Leia doesn't get nearly enough to do in this one.  Oh, there's a little marginal Aragonés-type doodle coming up top left...

 

 "Michael Foot". Heh.

I Always Confused Jan Pieńkowski With Jan Pieńkowski

 

 "I don't like shrill noises I think. Because I've blotted out the screams. You know. I can remember terrible things happening. And people being killed and so on. But I don't remember the noise. The noise has been obliterated somehow. But it's there inside me. And so I feel terribly unhappy with screaming and all that sort of thing. And people panicking, trampling, screaming. That is what scares me."

 

 

 

 "The surviving population were marched to a depot where trains are mended. There are sort of pits between the tracks, so the mechanics can get underneath the trains. And so we slept in those pits. It was all this atmosphere of panic, fear. It was very unpleasant. And then we were put on open top cattle trucks, and taken down to the Reich... Fortunately, my father had relations in Krakow who helped us. And then my father got a job on a farm in Vienna. You see, there were so few men left in Germany by then."

 

 "We grew the flax. We put the flax in the pond. Come the Autumn, fished it out, dried it out. And there was a special medieval device for getting the husks off. Then that was combed. Then that was given to the spinsters to spin. Then it was given to the weaver to weave. By this time it was Spring. Then it was pinned out on the meadow in the sunshine, to bleach by the sun. And then it was made into sheets, shirts, whatever it was."

 "What about food?"

 "We were allowed to kill one pig a year. If you did more than that, that was punishable by death."

 "We met in a pub in the King's Road. We just hit it off. And I went off on the back of his scooter and that was the beginnning of that."

 I had just finished re-reading The Kingdom Under The Sea, and thought: well hang on, if Jan Pieńkowski is the name of the artist who did these beautiful silhouettes against spilled ink, what's the name of the artist who did the pop-up books that look nothing like this? So I looked it up, and discovered I'd not only indeed seen the name on both as I was growing up, but also on all the Meg books as well. I suppose, as an infant, you learn what a word means by the picture it appears beneath, and the words "Jan Pieńkowski" – instantly recognisable, and unlike any other I'd seen – appeared beneath simply too many completely disparate images for me to register the precise extent of his work until this year. I didn't even know he was a "he" until this year. So I'm glad I finally did a little research. The extraordinary quotes above, about Pieńkowski's life as a Polish immigrant, come from his appearance on Desert Island Discs. As does this nice picture of him and his dog. You will not regret listening to it and it's here.

A Quick Question about Puppets and DO NOT WATCH THIS!

NO! DON'T!

 

 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!)

 

Gods, Men and Monsters. And Snakes... Oh, and Women!

   For centuries, it seems, the defining characteristic of a gorgon was actually her tusks. This two-and-a-half-thousand year old antefix from the island of Thasos for example doesn't even bother with snakes in the hair. I hadn't realised not having snakes in the hair was an option. I wish I'd known that when I was nine.

 I just assumed you really had to commit to the snakes. I also thought you had to give a gorgon breasts, which as a nine-year-old I would definitely have found harder to draw than snakes; but the Medusa in Clash of the Titans had breasts, and the Medusa on the front cover of my school's copy of Gods, Men and Monsters clearly had breasts, so in the best traditions of Classical Sculpture, room was made. And speaking of grotesque misrepresentations of women from Greek Mythology: my friend and teacher Natalie Haynes has a new book out to set the record straight called Pandora's Jar, which she talks about on a very fun Book Shambles HERE! 

 Here's another misrepresentation: the Pythia at Delphi, showing a lot less skin than Medusa, and surrounded by big, scary Dangermouse eyes in tunnels. I've clearly misunderstood "Pythia" to mean "half-lady-half-python" which it didn't at all. It just meant "priestess". Still it gave me a chance to draw more snakes. And here are more: the giant cobra that apparently guards the Golden Fleece, facing Jason in his Speedos over on the right...

 And one of the heads of the magic deity Hecate up in the centre, whom I have also given hairy legs, knee windows and a nighty. On the bottom left is Medea, single-handedly taking on the bronze giant Talos. Not Jason at all. I'd forgotten this, but Natalie mentions it in the Shambles so I'm happy to see this was also the version I was taught. And fuck it, here's a slime monster.

 Now a plug: On Friday I'll be one of seventy-two actors reading The Odyssey aloud in its entirety on the Jermyn Street Theatre's live stream here. I'll be on around 4pm, I think (after Mark Corrigan's mum!) telling of Odysseus' conversations with ghosts in Hades, including the ghost of Agamemnon who sacrificed his own daughter Iphigenia and was in turn murdered by his wife Clytemnestra. "She has poured down shame on her own head," Agamemnon moans, "and on all other women, even good ones." The italics are mine, but I'll be the one reading it so they're staying. Natalie also talks about Agamemnon. She says her next book will be a novel about Medusa. I can't wait.