Manage to watch this to the end and I'll buy you a pint...

 Ahahaha indeed. Here, try playing this simultaneously underneath. It might help:

And welcome to the new look Unattended. Yes, the old myspace blog has finally become unnavigable - de-evolving from codex to ROM-sapping scroll - so I heaved the whole lot over here to blogspot like a grownup and have been up late sewing tags, all to ensure the Blog Mark Two is hopefully user-friendly now to the point of harassment. What do you think? Too noisy? Try the "Obama", it's delicious...What a haul it's been. "Fat Adolf" remember that? That Secret Agent screenplay I kept going on about which I still haven't written or started to write? - Ah, it's 7:16 in the morning - that would call for a "Sleeping/Not sleeping". It's good to have a system. Happy rummaging!

HIlarious Bush Clip! Oh wait no not hilarious tragic.

 I've just seen Oliver Stone's "W." and it's a bit sketchy, which is the last thing I expect of an Oliver Stone film, I expect bold, impasto swathes of goo, bits you open up and glitter and pasta. (And why does every Bush impersonator always go for the frown and pursed lips when his signature state should surely be Garth Algar's nervous smirk?) I then came home to idly surf and found the following exchange, which I have not seen before. It's deep. Sticking it in "W." would instantly have made that film twice as good. I mean, it's the pith. Now while this beautiful piece in The Onion has seen me finally feeling as cock-a-hoop about Obama's victory as I was hoping to, in our relief let's never let this poor little guy off the hook...

 "Help!... I wasn't kidding... This is how I work..." etc.

This beautiful Arizona evening

 The night of my thirtieth birthday was spent sitting in the kitchen with a bottle of cheap white wine watching the first uncontestable election victory of George W. Bush. He didn't steal it this time, they chose him. I couldn't face that again. So last night I stayed up long enough to see Obama gain - what was it, 150 seats? against McCain's 90-odd - then McCain suddenly gained another 20 and I remembered Kerry and knew exactly where this was going.

  

 This morning was very grey, wasn't it. I turned on the telly and... well McCain's victory was still a kick in the guts even though I'd called it. Obama's wry but wounded speech in Chicago, the tears in the crowd, the quiet, broken rage, everything as I'd imagined, the predictability of the whole scene was almost a comfort. And the tension had been unbearable so at least we'd been put out of our misery, that too was sort of a comfort... And then McCain took the mike in Pheonix to give his victory speech, and I thought it odd that he wasn't smiling.

 I mean it was very odd. Especially given the ecstatic noise the crowd was making. There was no pointing at the crowd either, I can understand that he wanted to come across as, well sobre, but why wasn't he smiling? He just stood there flanked by single-star-spangled banners, his lips pressed, palms out, and it looked like the crowd would never shut up. But when they let him speak I have to admit he was more gracious than I'd ever seen him: "Thank you. Thank you, my friends. Thank you for coming here on this beautiful Arizona evening. A little while ago, I had the honor of a call from Senator Barack Obama - " at which point the crowd struck up again, like a wind, almost like they'd lost. There were real jeers. The cameras picked out face after face and none would have looked out of place in a meeting at the warehouse in a straight-to-video Steven Seagal film. McCain put his hands out once again and signaled weakly for silence. Finally he got it, and he held it. For what seemed like a minute. And then, it was extraordinary. It was sort of beautiful... "Guys. You scare me."

  

 Silence from the crowd. And then: "My fellow prisoners... Goodbye." And he opened a door in the air behind him, turned to raise a small old hand above his head for the first time in twenty years, waved farewell, and walked through it smiling.

  

 Ah man, the look on their faces! And then when Sarah Palin stood up to the mike and they all started cheering again but just as she's about to speak the ground suddenly LURCHES TILTS ALARMS SOUND ALL THEIR FACES PRESS UP AGAINST THE GLASS AND THEY REALIZE THEY WEREN'T ON THE PLANET EARTH AT ALL BUT ACTUALLY STUCK IN A TWO-DIMENSIONAL PRISON SPINNING THROUGH SPACE!!!
 

 Dude. No I have to say I didn't see that bit coming. That was cool.

America Next Wednesday (check this out etc.)

 

 

 Just trying out a couple of images to flash up on the big screen in the event of a technical hitch the day following John McCain's inevitable election victory. I'll be sitting above the bar in Shunt covering the panic, skyping the States and fielding any questions you may care to scrunch into a ball and throw up at my feet as part of Gemma's fortnight curating the Lounge. I might also keep a gun on the news-desk to repel stage crashers, it'll be a reckless, red, misty hoot! Then on Thursday, once everyone's woken up to the irremediable fuckedness of the American spirit once again, I'll be hosting another Nijinsky Karaoke. A nice couple of gigs. Pop in.

 Tonight's Halloween celebrations also look very promising. I'm off to Broadcasting House to watch some sketches so won't make it, but when I was over there this morning they were putting the finishing touches to a whicker man in the penthouse and the itinerary I glimpsed in the kitchen mentioned a "pig filled with blood". I also overheard Andrew Rutland refer to a "blonde wig that makes me look like a Mexican prostitute, fortunately they'll only be seeing me from behind" which can only mean he's finally given up trying to hire a lookalike to cover the non-appearance of Jarvis Cocker and opted instead for distracting the crowd with his impression of Britt Eckland, which would have been fun to watch.

Hello, Goodbyes (status update)

(originally posted on myspace here)

love is all i can bring and ting

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

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

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

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

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

facebook

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

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

 

A little bit of politics: walls

(originally posted on myspace here)

In a break from rapping at Bishop's tonight we got onto the subject of Lego.

Peter reminded me that in the old days if you wanted to make a spaceship, it would normally involve inordinate amounts of trellis and possibly a tree. All of which has nothing to do with what follows, although maybe the image does, but probably not.

After an early night to bed I woke at five this morning. I filled a large cup with some water and ice, logged on to iplayer, and rustled up a documentary about the Nigerian schism in the Anglican Church. Bring that schism on, thick bigots, say I. It's the only thing that makes me wish I believed in God: I'd love to be an Archbishop. I'd bandy around words like "charity" and "evil" like it was my birthright. Surely that's the whole POINT of being a religious leader though. Don't pussyfoot around Leviticus, just say "Jesus had a much better idea: instead of looking to the Scriptures for our morality let's trust to our own informed and inherent empathy, not the most original of premises I know, but I AM AN ARCHBISHOP so I think that this was GOD'S idea, new idea, even though a lot of people had thought of it first, still we should clearly listen to THAT and not the old mad, survivalist, cutting-it-in-the-desert stuff, admittedly it doesn't seem THAT MUCH like a religion, but OUR churches are mainly lovely and old and yours, while admittedly incredibly popular, aren't - look, YOU ARE EVIL and you imprison homosexuals, albeit your services do look a lot more fun." But no, that apparently would be foolhardy and that's not how the Church works.

And it clearly didn't send me to sleep, although it was quite draining. So then I loaded up a whopping two-hour-plus slice of Boris Johnson taking questions from the London Assembly, which was every bit as enervating (a word that still stubbornly refuses to mean "elevating" crossed with "energizing"). Tossy guff about "Ken's pet projects urgh AH OOH newts (laughter) MUH that number by the pound sign is very big, I'm sure smaller numbers exist therefore that could be cheaper MUH UM New Routemaster ie not a Routemaster AH consultants, what do they do? MUH BUM knife crime" and then that silver gitfox from the BNP started getting excited about some definitely non-racial study he'd just commissioned as to what percentage of the - now, it was some section of the community, I can't for the life of me remember exactly which one he'd decided to single out for study, but there... no, it's gone - anyway the "something" community was affected by knife crime, at which point I shut up my laptop, popped on a fleece, and threw myself to the alsatians.

And then... and then... and then at Bishop's this evening I caught Barack Obama on Channel 4, quite shrewdly talking to the assembled Berlin throng as though he'd already been elected (a charade I'm sure the rest of the world will be quite happy to go along with even if it turns out he loses. I would.) The telly played the speech's book-ending soundbites, "The road is long", and the hokey moonshine of "I speak not as a candidate for President but as a citizen" and I was none too impressed but thought I'd look up the rest, tonight, just now. And good:

Dude, did he say "a world without nuclear weapons"?

Twice?

Of course, the last time I felt this good about a speech it was Tim Collins' address to his troops before the invasion of Iraq (as jotted down here by the lady standing behind Kenneth Branagh) so, you know, fuck it. And indeed, looking over this central third again, I can't really put my hand on my heart and swear that David Cameron could never have made this exact same speech albeit lying through his shiny head. So why post it?

Well, I think it's when he talks about walls. Living in London I've seen a number of barriers go up in the last five years, mainly black and yellow, sometimes orange and slotty, and sometimes tortured metaphorical barriers I try and cram into this sentence like the barriers to anyone under 21 buying alcohol in a shop. Every politician seems to think barriers are the answer. So, yes, it's nice to hear someone talk of walls coming down for a change. And that's the nub. It's not just that he talks like he's already been elected, it's that - although he does mention the war - he talks, uniquely, like a leader in a time of peace. And that he gets his countries and his history right. And that, although I don't know the size of his claque, there's 100 thousand Germans there waving Stars and Stripes, and someone in the audience is clearly ululating... "Hope" is such a potentially duff word. But no I think, here, he's nailed it. I just wish Hicks or Hunter were still around so I could check.