David Warner's Juliet, and other dirt

 

 

A trip to Marx's grave

 

 I used to watch "Morgan: A Suitable Case For Treatment" all the time when I was at school. Of all the fictional, whimsical pests the sixties had thrown up, David Warner's Morgan was the only one I wanted to share a cup of tea with. He didn't seem to have that rockstar ego. He seemed like a listener. It made sense that my parents said he was the Hamlet of his generation. A lot of people said that. It was only when Warner died in July that I found out my old neighbout turned housemate Morgan had been named after him, also that I was now living on exactly the same slopes of Notting Hill where the film had been set – have I said I've moved to Notting Hill? 

 I can't find any way of seeing his Hamlet now, but here are some photos taken by Lord Snowdon which, according to the captions, show the actor in character. Researching the original production I can't find any confirmation, but I hope the captions are right. Look at him enjoying himself...

 

 Once I'd left school I actually got to share a cup of tea with David Warner. I was in Hollywood for my gap year, and he knew my Dad because they'd been in the Royal Shakespeare Company together back in the sixties. He was a gentle giant. Later, when he would come to London, he and Dad would reminisce about the night he tried to jump out of a window because he thought he'd be caught by a cloud. It was the first time I'd ever heard the word "bi-polar", encunciated by David with arms oustretched in a shrug as wide as I was tall. Over tea in Los Angeles, I asked him why he'd stopped working with the RSC and he explained that they'd wanted to cast him as Romeo, and he said he'd only do it if he could choose his Juliet, so they fired him. 

 He'd asked for Frances de la Tour. 

 David and Dad worked together again years later, on a television production of "Love's Labours Lost" that I rewatched the night he died. I posted a few clips on instagram, because I think they're just gorgeous together. Here's one...

 

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A post shared by Simon Kane (@slepkane)

 

 So, yes, now the death of Her Majesty has brought me back to the blog, I thought I'd catch up on my old In Memoriams. And having moved, I'm also sorting through my boxes once again. I found this: the fax David Warner sent me when I came to play Hamlet myself at University. Director Simon Godwin's face was a picture. David said he had no advice, but I took it anyway.

 

Hospitality (featuring Woodlouse or Moth)

 "The PSC (pre show coffee) Award: Simon" – smudged in transit

 

 Oh my God, I never win anything!

 The "Best Actor Oscar" from Morgan was an honorary thing really, but that paper plate to the left of it came with ceremony, cheers, and tables in the corner of an upstairs room of the Lyric Pub Soho – the full Dundies, in other words – a coherence. The PSC is an award that speaks to me. It says, "You make coffee before a show, Simon. You are seen. You did not just crash the Crystal Maze hosts' social last Monday. You were expected, it's fine." 

 After the ceremony we lugged our plastic medals over to the Pheonix – when was I last there?... I bounded home smoothed by compliments received for a person I barely recognised, and fortified by the hope of a world reoreinting itself to accommodate the plans of those just starting out. 

 Christmas had started early. 

 In fact, as soon as Halloween was over – bang on All Hallows' – we'd transitioned into playing reindeer, and the Crystal Maze wasn't the only business decking its halls earlier than seemed seemly, in the unspoken shadow of another possible lockdown sometime in actual December. So it was good we got the  celebrating in when we did, before Omicron Week. 

 However it does mean I ended up posting nothing on Monday evening. Or since. So to make up for that, here's a working week's worth of unposted quiz rounds from the Dungeon Zoom, beginning with - from May the 14th – "Woodlouse or Moth?"... There are ten of each, but which is which? I'll post the answers in the comments below, but you can also find them for yourself here and here.

1. Dandy Postman

2. Apple Leaf Skeletonizer

3. Charlie Pig

4. Oak Lutestring

5. Scarce Vapourer

6. Billy Baker

7. Humidity Bug

8. Manchester Treble-Bar

9. Blair's Shoulder-Knot

10. Cheesy Papa

11. Roly-Poly

12. Old Lady

13. Triangle

14. Chuggy Peg

15. Least Minor

16. Damp Beetle

17. Clifden Nonpareil

18. Leather-Jacket

19. Snout

20. Granny Grunter 

The Artists' Mews

 My tree was missing an angel. 

 Then Morgan got in touch today, and I made this, inspired by a significantly better picture he painted for me back in 2010 to welcome me into his home after the fire. Both of those links will take you to more pictures of Kato, the old Wanless Road cat. Morgan posted more images of her on instagram last weekend. He's taken care of and made work about her until the very end, which end was the subject of his message today. Morgan, I'm so sorry. And Kato, thank you for being an angel. For all I know, you took care of and made work about Morgan too. Rest In Power, Meeower.

"MORE MEN ARE USING MUMBLING AS A STEPPING-STONE TO HONEST COMMUNICATION"

"orthographical banter" 

 Last year - I can't remember when but it was clearly hot - the writer Chris Power and I were invited onto the excellent podcast of Postcards from the Past curator Tom Jackson. You can hear it here, and can see which postcards we brought along here. According to Tom "this is a lively one", and I do appear to have a lot on my mind, but I had a lot of fun unloading it (and got a great introduction) so thank you, Tom and Chris. (I wonder if Chris has worked out by now who either Wayne or Wendy were.)

Friday riddle. Wait... "00:00" Saturday riddle then (for @mORGANICo_cOM)

 Hope is enormous. Hope is dead...

 Hope is hanging by a thread...

 Still, it finally gets people to go upstairs...

 And why they named it that's nobody's business but theirs.

 Do the photos give it away? I think the photos might give the answer away. And thanks entire to the taker of this last picture for the typically generous and strengthening, but still astonishing, help she organised at the last minute for Seaview, and thank you to everyone else who tried to help Morgan. And thank you, Morgan, for allowing me to be part of its history and for making things nicer with monsters. Here's a short educational film about thriving which you might enjoy. See you in the land of steam, buddy.

My Heart So Full and These Empty Hands

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

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

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

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

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

  

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

help (noun)

I thought this was ten years ago. Actually the fire happened on the 8th. Huh. It was painted by Morgan, the next door neighbour who heard Dan's cries for help while I was unconscious from smoke inhalation on the ground floor. That's Dan in the window. Residents of South London, from Brixton to Waterloo to London Bridge to One Tree Hill, might recognise from this some of Morgan's other great works, on shop fronts, shutters, electricity boxes, bins, murals, the Imperial War Museum, and the totem pole on Peckham Rye. And friends and blog readers with excellent memory will know that I moved into his house and found a lot to be very happy about. I started writing "Time Spanner" there, and imagined Martin and Graham living somewhere similar. It's the only home Morgan's ever known, and then last November, on my birthday in fact - the anniversary of Laika's first and only flight into space - I learnt that Lambeth Council were evicting him from it after forty years. It was his mother's council house, and his mother didn't live there any more. That's why I mention it. There was a fund to help him, a legal fund, and the legal fight may now be lost, but Morgan might be homeless this Winter is my point, and he helped save my life what I thought but now realise having checked wasn't ten years ago, and he took in everyone, and I love him, and money might still be useful. If you'd like to donate, go here.

In other words, this call to donate to an "artist's resistance fund" was posted too late. But there's a lot of bad news going round and I couldn't bring myself to add to anyone's fat upload of online grief at the time. So, sorry if that's all this news has done. But Morgan makes me happy, and an introduction to his work is always, I hope, a little like a chink of light. Heavens know we all deserve better, but Morgan most. Here.

And, you know, everywhere. That's a bin.

Fuck Me My House is in Vogue

Where the hell was I when this happened?
(That's our bin. I live a little to the right of this image. Not behind the boards. There's a swamp behind the boards. They've quite a history.)

Always On

 

Ah, Summer... And then August and September happened and now we're here. And Money's still running which is good because, as I said, not enough people have seen it. But I should be writing. Hey, I nearly wrote a blog at the beginning of this month but that definitely didn't count as writing. And hey, it went thus:

"Well yes, quite.
Apologies for my absence. I haven't been in Edinburgh or anything like that - although there has been a Fringe in Camden, so a bit like that... And now I think of it I have been quite consciously favouring Irn Bru when popping into newsagents for a change of scene, thereby the August rituals are kept alive. But what might I have posted about? Well, following the here-hinted-at cancellation of Money a month ago I had about a week on Murun Buchstansagerish, squalid auto-pilot, cooped up in my stuffy, smelly crack -

- when suddenly the money from Garnier arrived (so that IS my voice) and the Camden Fringe fortuitously coincided with my freed-up evenings, finally letting me see what everyone else had been making. And that was joyous. Partly it was joyous just to catch up with friends from the London Dungeon (where I'm back, obviously) but the chief joy came from simply being able to sit in an audience again, and from being impressed and addressed and surprised by these friends. And being proud, and to be feeling part of something other than Shunt. 'That Mitchell and Webb Look' was happening as well, I know, but - maybe because I haven't written a single minute of comedy this year - I didn't really feel a part of that any more (God knows I tried, watching and re-watching every 'Prayer and a Pint' posted on youtube and relishing David's phrasing and Stuart Scudamore as the Iranian extra proving there are no small roles, only small actors - He is for me this season's giant robot scorpion -

all this while still having no real idea what I thought I was doing... HamerD's comment probably sums it up best: 'It's not supposed to be a classy sketch.')

"What else do I feel a part of? Well, the recession obviously. I have three jobs now, and there are four people living here in Morgan's now, not two. (Yesterday's Evening Standard proudly proclaimed George Osborne 'leads the way and sacks 350' so it's good to know we're all doing our bit.) Job one's the Dungeons. Job two's the Ghost Bus Tours, started up by an old Dungeon friend Ben Whitehead and doing very nicely it seems. I jump on and off in the evenings. I sweat and get possessed. The city is our stage I suppose, and that's a bit like Edinburgh.

"And job Three's 'Money' by Shunt. Which is running again. Four shows a week now. This must be good news because it's an outstanding show, and it shows just how huge an amount of work is going into its survival. But on our first night back I did realise that I hadn't missed it at all. I suppose there's a lot of anger tied up in that place (and anger's a hard barb to shift, as obviously poisonous as it is, because it's righteous). But let's turn up and do the show, let's see if we can get the bar going. But also let's find another focus. It's September. I need to write. Actually that's not the problem, I need to write loads: half-hours, hours, three-dimensional people who interact with each other over a period of time and make sense and don't make sense, that's the block. Apologies. Here meanwhile, as promised, and as no kind of spur, is the state of Douglas Adams' grave."

And that was the end of what I nearly posted. And still I haven't been writing.
The only thing to add is that ever since we've thrown open the fire doors and chalked up "Bar Open", Shunt's been feeling a good deal more Shunty. And it's nice to sit on the door at a free entrance. On Thursday night I chalked up "Bag Search in Operation" and sat on a deckchair rifling through my satchel, loving my joke. "Always on", exactly.

Money here
Ghost Bus Tours here
And what is now excellently going on across the landing from our bathroom here

Sylvia's Super-Awesome Maker Show

is, when all is said and done, super-awesome. But why would on Earth would I wish to make a - ugh - "drawdio"? you might ask. Well watch.

Quick Tip: Don't breath the fumes. Thanks as ever to videogum.com
In other news, I've started reading the second volume of Michel Palin's diaries and the phrase "valuable writing time" keeps coming up. What is that?
Bong.
Morgan's just bought another chainsaw. Bong.
Went for a stroll in Whitehall. Nowhere does ice lollies and Liam Fox comes up to my tit. Bong.

 Oh and finally, I never did follow up that place-holder about scripts, did I? Well the moment's passed now I guess, but my cross-purposed response to Chris Goode's original enquiry can be found in the comments here, and my monosyllabic contribution to his unscripted piece "World of Work" here. Happily, complying with this request turned out to require less time and imagination than turning it down. Bong. 

 

Neat detail from Chris' "Blurt Studies".

Settled by Bleeps (a brief introduction to oMMM)

(originally posted on myspace here)

Well they aired it. Did you hear? Did you like it? Did you like the way it went straight into the News? Did you think, oh all those electronic boops and bleeps are a bit unsettling? Well this man was not responsible.

He is Edmund Davie, a wonderful, wobbly electronic musician who founded the bedcore movement and lived in our kitchen. Possibly taking with him my copy of "Moominland Midwinter" which Will Self recommended as the most depressive book ever written he moved out on Tuesday, and deserves a post of his own and here it is. Look at this video he made back in 2005! It's ever so catchy and includes a MacDonalds commercial he was in. Here's to him getting another one soon. Cheers. Bye, Ed. Bed. It's okay, we found where you put the cups. I el-oh-uv this:

Links:
Ed's site
Ed's sounds
Ed in the kitchen

Signs of Life

Of course that should be "recommend" in the last post. I kept the misspelling in to communicate a sense of urgency. How do you think I did?

And where was I?

Well a year ago now the house caught fire, but nobody died, not even Kato the cat. It was kind of fine. The place has double-glazing now, although you can still make out the scorched paintwork above what used to be my windows - see? I took the above photo when I went round to Morgan's to pick up post. He lives next door. He always has. That was in... August? I had a swimming pool in August, I may have mentioned. I was living here:

Real twenty-first century stuff. It was called "Osprey Heights". That's my room at the end of the corridor. Then there was Cesar's, but he moved out, and then this room, as seen:

No permanent occupant, but every two weeks a different Israeli in his early twenties would move in. The first one asked to have a television installed. I was always welcome to watch it. None of them ever unpacked. They never shut the door. They all slept with the light on. I didn't mention the show to them- Hey we also had a gym! And it was eighteen storeys tall. Imagine the view! Don't, it's here!

Down a bit...

Down a bit...

That's your lot. Sorry but the windows are a bit narrow- And we had a sauna! And gates! Big gates! All it lacked was a garden.

So in October the lease ended and I moved out. And into Morgan's. That's really the point of this. I'm in Brixton again. With Morgan and his paints and the sign that says "Sea View" and the little Easter Island statues he sticks into alcoves of the Ritzy. And a nice guy called Ed who makes synthesizers from kits. Oh, and Kato!

Morgan painted that for me when I moved in. He's out at the moment, working on a totem pole. There's a chain-saw on the spare fridge in the kitchen, what the place lacks in bannisters it makes up for in carnivorous plants, there's never a shortage of crayons and this is my new view if I look down:

... which I prefer. If I look a little to the right there's a garden with a telly in it and a family and the faces we chalked on the bathroom wall for Fin's birthday, back in - wow... 2000. Yeah. It was time I moved.

(originally posted on myspace here)

DEATH RAY WEEK day doodah: Laser Tag

(originally posted on myspace here)

Is this - ? Why - What was the point of this blog again? Anyway Hamlet (abridged) happened on Sunday again in front of four charming witnesses. "Let's film a trailer next," thought our producer aloud, "With better costumes and lighting - Just set two days aside and -" Back to the lab... That night I was up with a cold watching "Have I Got News For You?" on iplayer, answering everything and realizing that I get most of my news now from youtube. I'm THAT bored. Clips isn't really news though, is it. Clips is just clips, they'll never tell you what's really going on. Unlike THIS!

Here's an exciting interview with author, Doctor Judy Wood: Could the collapse of the Twin Towers be the work of a Giant Death Ray? What exactly IS the "dustification" point of steel?... I'm sorry but Sarah Palin's clearly given me a real taste for watching dumb lies squirm under scrutiny, how about you? Dr. Judy's haggard appearance admittedly skews one's schadefreude a tad, but still:

Oh listen no actually that's not important. What I really want to draw to your attention is this. This is what actually happens when you point a Laser at a building in Manhattan. This is what a Graffiti Research Lab actually gets up to. I'm going to build one for Morgan:

James helps to design robots on Mars. James wears a hood. James rules.

"The Worwd Demands an Expwanation!" (bubble-wrap, coffee, tears, neon and death.)

(originally posted on myspace here)

We were tired at the Dungeons on Saturday, tired but happy, but tired. But happy. We would clean the mystery shit out of each others' eyes or retreat to the storage cupboard, where the tiny gusts provided by the popping of bubble wrap are our only source of fresh air.

The walls of our staff room were now papered with colour photocopies of actual injury, cuts, swellings, bruised ribs, evidence to any visiting nob that we really do take care over our make-up even if the whole lot's drained down our necks within the hour. And what else was new? We have a coffee machine.

The coffee only really kicked in about midnight though. I had wandered around Piccadilly after work, thought of catching "Elegy", but then staggered into HMV and saw a DVD of Xanadu. That might be worth a look, I thought, but resolved to head home and check it out on youtube first, and fell asleep on the tube. It was dark when I got home. A man stood beneath the lamp on the corner outside my house, staring at the pink hoardings. Then he walked off. I walked up, took his place, and saw that Morgan had painted a small mountain landscape on the broken shelf beneath (beneath the heads I posted here two entries back, or the space where those heads had been). And then I went upstairs, remembered I had to find some black articles for my Uncle's funeral on Monday, did nothing about it and logged on to youtube. The coffee kicked in round about the time Gene Kelly steps out of the pink cab in tassles and roller skates:

 

 

The excellent, now-defunct film magazine "Neon" once printed an article called "100 Things That You Don't Get In Movies Anymore", and one of those Things was a still from "Breakdance 2: Electric Boogaloo" with the caption "Everything in this picture". The same goes for this clip, which is ironic since the period it was trying to generate nostalgia for is itself so poorly served (this has to have been one of the films Paul Thomas Anderson showed his crew before they started work on "Boogie Nights"). It made me deliriously happy. And it made me go and look up every single musical number from "Animalympics" I could find, for some reason. Which then made me weep uncontrollably, for some reason. Which made me think, a 33 year-old man sat at a laptop at three in the morning, wearing headphones and crying over Dogra-La, Rene Fromage and Kit Mambo, is that hilarious? I thought so. Ollie had told me to go home and get some sleep and at the time that had seemed like a good idea, but I headed downstairs instead, turned on the real Olympics, and caught the end of what it turns out is a single-sex marathon. And then I got some sleep.

Loads of sleep. I woke up at five in the afternoon, sewed up the trouser-leg on my Italian double-breasted in front of Hellboy, and that's it. The funeral's tomorrow. I've been thinking a lot about what a bad idea they might be, funerals. I don't think I want one. I think if people want to meet up then they'll meet up, and I wouldn't want my corpse there when they do. Uncle David was a Warner though, and the Warners are very different. I'll be reading C. S. Lewis on the train on the way up. I think my Mum would like that. David would write extraordinary responses to anything I did, plays or stories. He's definitely not dead in my head. We'll see.

One last conspiracy (NONBOND NIGHT 6,708: A MAN CALLED DAGGER)

(originally posted on myspace here)

Who's been painting all of Brixton's hoardings pink? It appears to be part of a beautification project, and on a sunny day the pit that was once a pub next door does glow now with a kind of Mexican ebullience. If I had a camera I'd show you. But I don't, so here instead is a picture of what got painted over:

And now, roll down your sleeves for "just another Pussy Galore", whatever that means, ie nothing. The most charming aspect of this typically charmless trailer, I think, is that it's always the same two henchmen who seem to get defeated. That, and Dagger's David Geffenish comb-over. Girls get blah Guys get blah, you all know the drill by now...

Brittle Sticky Liquid Issues

No photos for a while I'm afraid, as I dropped my phone into some coffee this morning heading out onto the floor of the Dungeons and all I can get it to do now is either vibrate or electrocute me, I'm not quite sure which it is. I was at a party the night before in Hammersmith. It was very good indeed but left me lolloping quite a bit. Laurence and Gus were there and it turned out that the Abraham and Isaac sketch I'd written for them had been recorded after all, nothing was censored, so hooray. That'll teach me. Apparently it's fine with Radio 4 listeners to pick holes in the OLD Testament as long as you're not making fun of Jesus. "And," as Laurence points out "the appearance of God automatically makes everything cartoony".

Morgan meanwhile, Morgan from next door, he has been censored. His hoardings-based portrait of Da Vinci with the lobster claws, and the slogan "THE WORLD NEEDS A PAINTBRUSH AND A HUG" have now been - a little ironically - painted over by the builders. In their place can now be seen a number of large colourless slabs that make the Tate's Rothko room look like the Wide Awake Club. Or they did until Morgan joined them up to form a large, grey smiley face.

And speaking of large, grey smiley faces I've started searching for "latex masks" on ebay. I do recommend it. There's a cornucopia of cheap, weird heads out there. I was sourcing materials for Jonah Non Grata because the "Constipation" mask I used to wear to play a cherub is now pretty much unusable. I used to fill it with Greek Yoghurt so my head would be good and gooey for the scene inside the whale, but now it's gone brittle and cracks. And electrocutes you. Okay it doesn't but I don't really understand latex and they don't make that mask any more, so I'll probably have to find a new face for the cherub. And here's a very small sample of the current ebay front-runners. See?

Where to Put the Present (with thanks)

 I had my birthday lie-in today, one day early. I was woken up by fireworks in the street so I knew that it must have already turned dark. On one side of the warm bed was my phone telling me it was half-past six in the evening, on the other lay three unread copies of 2000AD and at the foot, blocking my view of the shirts hung drying for a week now - currently from the venetian blinds - stood a large, white gift from my sister and her boyfriend.

 

Susy and David had warned me that it would be very big, and that it came in two parts currently standing in their corridor, wrapped, and that I might have nowhere to put it, so I went over to their place in Hampstead a couple of nights ago to take it home with me in a people carrier. It was a lovely evening. David was making his television debut in "History of the World Backwards" so we all sat and watched that and I showed them some of my scars from work and spilt the Chinese on the carpet. He was playing a George Harrison tribute act who crash-lands in the Amazon inadvertently inspiring the indigenous peoples' pudding bowl haircuts. (He's in the Bootleg Beatles in real life. Only he's Paul. I didn't know he could do George as well. I'm told he also does an excellent Syd.) On the way home the driver asked me if I'd ever been in prison, and then told me about a fight he'd witnessed the night before where someone had had his ear chewed off in the street. The driver told me, because I asked him, that he worked twelve hours a day six days a week and actually lived in Luton with his family. I think he was Indian. Seeing a man get his ear bitten off had clearly got him thinking about prison. He made about four hundred pounds a week.

 Outside my house we unloaded the present, and I saw that on the former-pub-now-boarded-up-hole-in-the-ground on the corner Morgan from next-door had drawn a big picture of Leonardo da Vinci. He had lobster-claws instead of hands and the words "THE WORLD NEEDS A PAINT BRUSH AND A HUG!" coming out of him. It took two trips to get the present upstairs. I set it up in my room as an interim measure and then went online. I'd warned Susy and David that I would probably have to keep it in the attic until I had more space but it was too late now. What they'd given me was a large, white drawing table. A cast-iron cartoonist's drawing table and four pilot pens and a pad of A2. I had set it up as a sort of easel because of space. It looked really good. And hunched over my laptop I began to think about Heather, who when given a pair of boxing gloves for her birthday had decided she might as well learn how to box... I got up and stretched my legs... Outside of painting my face I hadn't held a brush in ages...

 

 

Of course it was a drawing table, not actually an easel, so there was nothing to stop the paper occasionally slipping off, or the paint, but I had a lot of fun that night. I was up until six. As I have been every night since. 

Hence the lie-in.

This is what we do. Part 1

 

"This is what we do."

Those words spiral in white from a gobo across the floor of the new cafe in Broadcasting House. Free-standing plastic pillars are covered in catch-phrases. It's like the Millennium Dome, except it's a corridor. It employs whatever the opposite of Feng Shui is, a bit like that triangular cell I hypothesized about a month back, and is an even worse place to stay behind and have a drink in than the Drill Hall, which may be the point. Oh you BBC!... whose buildings have inspired literary and filmic dystopiae for nearly a century now. Always at the forefront of baffling and inhuman architecture. "This is what we do." Isn't that what they hung around Morgan Freeman's neck in "Unforgiven"?

What I was there to see was excellent however, and not the work of idiots, so I'll stop being mean: Two recordings of "Safety Catch", a new sitcom about a hapless arms dealer by Laurence Howarth (an alchemist of comic assonance - eg. "infertile wind-surfer") and an excellent idea all round as it gives him the opportunity to a) write a treatise on the nature of evil without anyone minding, and b) have carte blanche to a motherlode of new and amusing-sounding words like "Uzi", "Howitzer", the "Gambia", and "Chad".

These two nights of recording ran either side of Chris Goode's last London preview of "Hippo World Guestbook", which was also an excellent idea perfectly executed (and an uncharacteristically simple idea for Chris): the reading aloud of a selection of six years' worth of comments from a hippo fan site guestbook... first about how much they like hippos, and then about how much hippos suck, and then about how much people who think hippos suck suck, and then how about much they like to fuck hippos if anyone is interested in visiting their site to watch, and then just endless adverts for internet gambling and viagra, and then nothing... in short, a neat portrait of the death of, well, hope Hahahaha. In the bar afterwards ("Bar"? Pub. Downstairs) Chris said something about being "surprised by the people coming out of my mouth" and I thought to myself: "He's talking about acting. *Gasp*. Not theatre-making, not even "performance" - which he's said is like Texas and I can't work out why - but Acting. Capital A. Pretending to be someone else. Awwwww, he's got it!" Which was pretty petty of me actually. It's on in Edinburgh. It's very good.

When Chris originally told me about it I was immediately reminded of my own first glimpse into the dark heart of an internet community, when I finally got broadband and discovered youtube and found a lovely little film someone had posted spoofing someone else's lovely little film, and then read the comments beneath... There were over a thousand. Some people loved it. Some people didn't "get it" and made the usual complaints about "twenty-five seconds of my life I'll never get back". Some people retaliated with the usual "you wasted even more time writing in to complain" which in turn inspired charges of retardation and general volleys of hatred increasingly based on what country a post had come from leading in turn to heated debates about the state of Israel and the existence of God, the War, and on and on and on and it went EVERYWHERe, and it was all AnGRY and in a way... actually... that was the one thing I missed from Chris' show: None of the dissenting "Kill All Hippos" posts that he read out had to be taken that seriously. They were evidence of vandalism, nothing more. Sad, but not scary. Not as scary, anyway, as an open forum's flip into the dark side can be.
Nor as scary as, say, my own flip...

When I last visited Chris' blog I did a very bad thing, and I'm not sure I can go back. Why does this happen? I'd just come home from Dungeon team-building exercise. I had made someone cry without noticing. Go team. I was a bit rattled so I sat down to the powerbook and saw that Viv had just joined F*c*book and posted photos of Sofia, so I cheerily insulted her ("hunchback") and then her baby ("Dylan Moran") and then moved on to Chris' glowing review of my friend Mel's astonishing Edinburgh show "Simple Girl" and insulted that ("I..." actually what the hell am I doing quoting this stuff again) and then went Ahhhhhhnm-nm-nm-nm-nm-nm-nm and got into bed and went to sleep.
And then woke up.
At seven.
Pale.
And waited until twelve.
And made some phonecalls.
And received some texts.

In our kitchen now are five large bin-liners full of uneaten cake from Morgan. And there's a sixth in the hall. And I'm off to Edinburgh today. I still don't feel that well. I'm just waiting for the water to stop dripping from the lightbulb above me and the ceiling to stop fizzing from where I let the bath overflow and my room to stop smelling of Copydex. I may be gone some time.

And I am so very sorry.

(To come in Part 2: Nice stuff about the BBC... and everyone... redemption... padlocks folded into swans.)

Spurious Temporal Generalisation (dark note sandwich)

Now I was promised a future that was down and dirty full of, yes, weird new crime but also gaudy animal excess and a lowered everything age.

So what's happened?
Why are they talking about raising the drinking age, say?
Who do they think that's going to calm down?
What happened to our pre-packed longpig sandwiches and mescaline patches?
Someone recently posted on their profile the simple question "What in the name of God is going on?" and I posted back "The fifties" because that has been my consolation. It's what I said to Ms. Meikle back in the caravan when she expressed a global hopelessness: that for all the paranoia and the bangs and the juvenile delinquency and the dead-eyed certainty of a culture telling us how badly our lives were being led, that this was just a bad decade and a smarter sixties future was just around the corner full of excellent music and second-hand clothes and popular art that made no sense and kids expressing their discontent with society through slapstick and dirty comics. "This is just the fifties," that's what I kept telling myself. "History's a cycle. I can't wait for the sixties."
But, Ms. Meikle, if you're reading this: Dudo, I doubt. There is another possibility that seems increasingly likely to me every time I step out of work and see the news-stands and a surrendered public... that history in fact is like a pellet in a game of pong, not a cycle... that we're going the other way, and that what in fact lies just over the horizon is not another 1960s, but another 1940s. And not a cool Lauren Bacall 1940s either, with lots of great roles for women and smoking in the library but, you know... 1948... Strength through Joy... Lights out.

But on a lighter note: I came home from work to find that Morgan had left us a big black bin-liner full of pain au chocolat.

And on a darker note:

FACEBITS (newsnightreviewze me)

Morgan lives next door. He used to leave odd messages through our letter box burnt into banana skins. Now he leaves us recycling bags full of organic bread and vegetables. It's his new business. He has a van. And even though he's got a website (morganico.com) and I've lived here now for almost eight years I've never really known that much about him except that he practices the didgeridoo and is nice. A few weeks back however we got a flyer saying that some of his art (!) was going to be exhibited up the road at the Carnegie Library until September (which is open four days a week, looks like it was drawn by Ronald Searle and stocks mainly leaflets). More of these flyers then appeared all over Brixton with FREE DRINKS circled heavily in red. So we went, and it was great. It turns out he's been responsible for all the stenciling around Herne Hill over the past three years, including the life-size portrait of Gandhi looking cheeky in a doorway... And this evening returning from the big fridge across the road with a box of chicken I saw him out and about doing some work on his van. He's giving it ears:

So I thought I'd note that down. Which brings me neatly to my absence from this blog. It is not a subject I am trying to dodge... I've seen a lot of other people's stuff since I last posted, too much to recount in one post... I've seen some stuff of my own as well, which has been exciting and empowering and which I shall also recount... I have seen one boy film another knock a girl to the pavement outside my window at seven in the morning and have no idea how to take it as all three parties were clearly friends before, during and after (Is that why it's called "happy" slapping? Are we all missing something?)... And I have - this very afternoon as it happens, coiled and beaming in front of a matinee of Interstella 5555 at the Ritzy, formulated an incredibly good idea for a radio show which I might actually keep to myself now I think of it... but I have mainly... I have mainly... to the extent where I will now find myself in a crowded room sorting mentally through Groening noses and eybrows for a match... I have mainly like every other itchy sucker been creating "avatars" on the Simpsons Movie website and sticking them up on F*c*book.
They're not really "avatars" though, are they, in any sense? They are simply lifeless portraits made from bits of Simpsons' faces and if you're lucky you might be able to get one of them to walk. But here, as an apology for being away so long, is mine:

Hang on no. That of course is my Newsnight Review avatar. I remember I used Ian Hislop's hair for the moustache.