Unposted on Election Night: Spoilers for Vengeance

 Okay, a little more about what's happening in US... 

 B.J. Novak's superb comedy "Vengeance" – released in 2022, but only caught by me on the plane back from Vancouver last August – charts an aspiring true-crime podcaster's attempts to document "the new American reality". And I mean charts. The film is a text. So this post isn't an in-depth review, just a recommendation. I'd originally meant to put it out as an immediate response to Trump's election victory back in November, because I thought: what rational reader wouldn't be thinking "Wait, what the hell's going on?" and I'd enjoyed the film as a search for some answers. Then I didn't post it, and now I've learnt the film's leaving Netflix on February 8th, so quick, HERE IT IS*

 I'll return to "Vengeance" in a bit, and maybe it's too late now for post mortems, maybe no-one's in the mood for "What happened was...", but it's only going to get later, so here's another search for answers I meant to share – answers other than just "Everyone's Abandoned Democracy", which seems hopeless if true – and by the way, I'm so glad Jon Stewart's back...

 

 "What happened was, the country felt like Government wasn't working for them, and – the Democrats, in particular – were taking their hard-earned money, and giving it to people who didn't deserve it as much as them. And so the Democrats got shellacked."

 Or, as Jennifer Pahlka puts it even more succinctly in this article:

"the reality is that Republicans let their voters choose the candidate, and Democrats didn't - twice." 

 Maybe what resounded most, then, rewatching "Vengeance" after Trump's terrifying majority, were its final words, so here are SPOILERS... Our hero's initial understanding of events, before he even arrives in Texas, has proved completely correct: the girl he hooked up with in New York was just a hookup, and despite the conspiracy narratives spun by her family, she did die of an opiate overdose. But his understanding of everything else now – how to act, how to choose, how to love, how to remember... the big stuff – is scorched earth, and when he concludes to her mother, as we're all taught to conclude, "No regrets", the Texan muses back:

"I never understood that... No regrets... In my life, everything starts with a regret... Ends with a regret... In between, regrets... It's all regrets... You run as fast as you can from the last regret... And of course you're just running straight into the next one... That's life... It's all regrets... That's what you should say... No other way to be alive... It's all regrets... Make 'em count."

 

"So Six Flags, the theme park..."

 

"Exactly."

 

* UPDATE: For those who can, it's now up on All4 HERE.

Not A Good Look

 Another big scary face. Gemma Brockis sent me this: it's Mussolini's Italian Fascist Party headquarters in 1934. There's a lot going on, isn't there – the face may be saying "No", but the walls... It's got my name written all over it! Anyway, it's a lot more ghost-trainy an aesthetic than I normally associate with fascism. When I think of fascist architecture, I think of Albert Speer's slave-built "cathedrals of light" at the Nuremberg Ralleys, and those huge, bare rectangles and domes reminiscent of and maybe even inspired by John Martin's extraordinary designs for the Hellish city of Pandaemonium in his illustrations for "Paradise Lost" made a hundred years earlier...

 

All of which I guess means there never really was a "fascist aesthetic", beyond Big and Dumb. It's just a numbers game. Changing the subject completely, walking home last night I noticed – it was hard not to – more police on the route from Victoria to Hyde Park Corner than there were non-police. I asked one of them what was going on, and she explained that the Qeeen had died – thanks – and that they were here for the funeral. "Isn't that a week away?" I asked. "It's just, this is quite intimidating." "Don't worry," her partner replied, "We're here to keep people safe." I didn't ask from what. 

 Hey, remember when that Russian guy got arrested for holding up a blank piece of paper? Can you imagine if that happened here LOLZ!

The Ride and Room

 

 One old friend I was uncharacteristically proactive enough to actually arrange a reunion with before the wedding on Saturday was shunt's David Rosenberg, who instantly invited me to his latest shipping container work in King's Place which I had known nothing about – a mesmerising conveyor-belt-set dance piece called "Future Cargo" (see above) – and just as instantly offered me a job over drinks on the roof on the Standard Hotel. Yesterday saw me therefore, still bouyant as a blue plastic bag from the previous evening's hoo-ha, crawling across gravel and making sucking noises in a black curtained room on Darkfield's Greenwich premises before two more old friends – the writer Glen Neath, who was also at the wedding, and the head on a stick from "Coma" who was not. 

 I won't say any more about the job until it's all up and running, but I think it's something of a departure for Darkfield, maybe even more so than for me. It was a bit of a blur.

 

I remember noticing, on the journey in, how excited I still was to be riding the Docklands Light Railway, and wondering suddenly when I'm more content than when I'm on a ride.

 

(Source)

To all who come to this happy Round: welcome!

 They are the best of places. They are the worst of places. They are the realistion of dreams. They are the stuff of nightmares. They are really good. They are really not. They are theme parks, and I love them, so here's the theme-park-themed round I prepared for last night's zoom quiz. Oh, we shared some beautiful stories last night, we London Dungeon veterans... looking for cats, identifying pirates, trying to remember how many films from the nineties Gary Oldman had exploded in... Kevin had just got an article into "Film Stories", about seeing Bad Boys in the cinema when he was fourteen. Peter had got one in print!... We got drunk. It got late. It was great. Answers as ever will be posted in the comments.

 

 1. Here's Vice President Richard Nixon at the opening of the very first Disneyland in 1955. But which of the following attractions was the only one there from the beginning?

 a) The Jungle Cruise?

 b) The Pirates of the Caribbean?

 c) The Haunted Mansion?

 

 

 

2. Arrange these skins in chronological order, earliest to latest:

 

 a)

 

 b)

 

 

 c)

                                                                                                                               

 

 

 3. Which of the following phrases was NOT used to describe a rollercoaster before the invention of the word "rollercoaster"?

 a) Pretzel Ride?

 b) Hooligan Slide?

 c) Flip Flap Railway?

 

 

4. Nicknamed the "Electric Eden", Luna Park opened on Coney Island in 1903. Which of the following attractions did it NOT boast?

 a) "A Trip to the Moon", in which patrons boarded an airship suspended from cables, and were taken to a cave where costumed "Selenites" would try to sell them green cheese.

 b) "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea", in which patrons would board a submarine and experience a simulated trip to the North Pole, using refridgeration eqipment, and three miles of spooling canvas.

 c) "The Time Horse", in which couples enjoyed naughtily gripping onto each other, astride a fake horse on a steeplechase through recreations of Ancient Egypt, Jungle Temples, and Dinosaurs.

 

 

 

5. Still in Luna Park – I could have done a whole round on Luna Park, really – in this photo from 1906, you can just make out a sign boasting "INFANT INCUBATORS WITH LIVING INFANTS", but what did the building actually contain?

 a) Exactly what it says – a series of prematurely born babies in incubators?

 b) A funhouse of distorting mirrors?

 c) A variety show, very much of its time, with a cast of little people?

 

6.  Last question from Coney Island – these were all inspired by this jaw-dropping "Defunctland" video, by the way, which I highly recommend – What was most remarkable about the seven-storey brothel that burnt down in 1896 (not pictured)?

 a) It was New York's first fully electrified hotel?

 b) It was the shape of a giant elephant?

 c) It had a boat ride?

 

 

 

7. Where is this? 

 a) Black Gang Chine on the Isle of Wight?

 b) Answers-in-Genesis' "Ark Encounter" in Kentucky?

 c) Ho Thuy Then in Viet Nam? 

 

 

8. Action Park, New Jersey, another great "Defunctland" video about which you can find here: Throughout the 1980's and 90's, its founder Gene Mulivihill would test the safety of his attractions by offering employees a hundred dollars to get in and just see what happened. But which of the following did NOT happen at Action Park? 

 a) A ride involving an enclosed ball covered in casters, and large enough to hold one passenger, was pushed down a PVC track which had melted, missed its mark, left the park, rolled across the freeway and landed in a swamp?

 b) The Action Park wave pool, later nicknamed the "Grave Pool", saw fifteen employees have to be rescued from drowning because of the strength of its wave machine, only to then be hospitalised for consuming human waste?

 c) Employees trying out a "loop-the-loop" waterslide emerged with torn skin as a result of the the broken teeth of previous riders which had become embedded in it?

 

 

 

9. One of the attractions planned by Michael Eisner for the opening of Disney's California Adventure in 2001 was "Superstar Limo". Originally envisioned as a high-speed chase through Hollywood, pursued by the paparazzi, the final, deeply unpopular dark ride turned out to be a much more leisurely affair. Given that there were no safety issues, however, why had Disney decided to slow down the ride? (There are not a multiple choice answers for this one, but there is another excellent "Defunctland" video.)

 

 

10. And finally: The O and T of Disney's Florida attraction, EPCOT, stand for "Of Tomorrow"? But what do the E, P and C stand for? Points will also be awarded for silliness.

 

 (And here are the image sources for the banner, and for questions 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10.)

Benchless in Baatu (Jenny Nicholson does some digging)

 "What Walt would later describe as the best weekend of his life..."

 Here's animator Ward Kimball and his boss larking around at the Chicago Railroad Fair in 1948 (and here's the source). This delightful photograph pops up in the video below, another great piece to camera from Jenny Nicholson and the subject of today's post (I blogged about her visit to Pandora here). If you've absolutely no interest in Disneyland, then move on, dear reader, but if, like me, you think it might be the most impressive work of art of the twentieth century, BOY does Nicholson deliver! "Star Wars Land: An Excruciatingly in-Depth Prequel" is an almost literal dissection of the place. Here's a map:

It is a map I grew up with – hung by the front door where we kept our wellies – of Disneyland from 1976. Dad was a huge fan. When I finally visited the park in the nineties – although I didn't take it in at the time – the area depicted just to the left of Fantasyland was unrecognisable. I'll enlarge it a bit:

 Those tracks are a ride called "Nature's Wonderland". Nicholson's video is full of footage showing it was more than just a mine train ride (although "Walt Loved Trains", and Nicholson makes a great argument for the whole of Disneyland being one huge train set). The place was actually crammed with many modes of transport...

  Importantly they served not only as "conveyances" but a "futuristic mode of ornamentation." To quote Nicholson: "they are not just rides for the people who are on them, they are also symbiotically enhancing the experience for everyone in their sightline."

I love talk about sightlines. The reason you can't see any evidence of the rest of Disneyland is that the whole area was dug out to be eight feet deeper than the rest of the park. By the time I visited, twenty years later, it had all been concreted up – animatronic elk, the lot – to be replaced by the Big Thunder Ranch, including a petting farm with real animals, where Jenny would later work (the park's least popular attraction, but "a quiet place to chill for a minute"). All this was then re-excavated a couple of years ago to create the planet of Baatu for Star Wars Land, which is why I said this video is an almost literal dissection.

  I also love talk about seating arrangements, so it's worth noting the end, where things get darkest, as Nicholson interrogates "Project Stardust" – the plans made by the park to help the "flow" of visitors to Baatu by removing "benches and planters", that is, literally anywhere to sit down or find shade, or as Jenny puts it "a place to linger". There's no petting zoo on Baatu. I don't think that's a decision Walt would have made.

Toto, I've a feeling we're not in... Oh we are?

Thanks to this pinterest account.

 Continuing my celebration of youtube essayists completely obsessed with theme parks, here's Kevin Perjurer's "Defunctland". The first two series pesented beautifully researched info-dumps about extinct attractions from Kevin's (and my) own childhood, but series 3 goes back even further, to the childhood of Walt Disney and a golden age of fevered Can-Do-ism that gave the world the Ferris Wheel, the Eiffel Tower*, and "Elecric Park": In 1900 the Brothers Heim had spent the then equivalent of three million dollars on a tram to bring citizens of Kansas to their brewery out of town, but when it turned out nobody wanted to take a tram to a brewery they shelled out even more on the introduction of lightbulbs, roller coasters, actors dressed as mermaids, alligator wrestling and the world's strongest magician, resulting in both a roaring success and a decisive inspiration on the tiny Walt (as well as, I assume, on The Simpsons' Duff Gardens). Enjoy the full history of this wacky Xanadu below, including tales of airship crashes, escaped carnivorous animals and "hooligan loop" accidents, all with zero causalties.

 DefunctTV's six-part documentary on Jim Henson is also hard to beat.

* And apparently, before settling upon the Eiffel Tower as its centrepiece, the 1889 Exposition Universale had considered a one-thousand foot tall guillotine, while proposals put to the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, charged with topping this, included a five-thousand foot tall tower from the top of which visitors could toboggan to Manhattan.

"At just a little under a dollar a word, becoming fluent in Na'vi is a very expensive investment."

Re: the implausibility of humankind ever actually visiting another inhabited plane... Avatar!

Commenting on the previous post, @tealin wonders if our hopes of encountering higher intelligences might be as much about a kind of "looking-glass colonialism" as they are about angelic conversations, and of course she's right. But the success of "Avatar" suggests a third and opposite fantasy – the desire to re-encounter the "Noble Savage". Were that ever to happen, the video below may be as accurate a prediction of that meeting as we'll get. Some of my happiest recent viewing has come from discovering, and then bingeing upon, the work of youtubers who share my fascination with theme parks. And if that sounds niche, let me inform you that Lindsay Ellis's piece on Hobbiton was just nominated for a Hugo, so keep up, old-timers! I'll share more of Ellis's stuff in another post, but what we're here to enjoy today is the work of Jenny Nicholson – specifically, her hilarious, fifty-nine-minute-long account of a visit to the newly opened Avatar theme park in Disney's Animal Kingdom.

Why not search for images of "Avatar theme park", and see if you can immediately distinguish the concept illustrations from photographs of the finished park?

Now, I appreciate this might not sound like everyone's cup of tea – an hour-long monologue about a theme park based on a nine-year-old movie – but the sustained simplicity of the presentation is part of Nicholson's genius. My favourite detail is the Jordan Peele-y ambience of dread she notices pervading the park, as a result of its invented backstory: the world's indigenous Na'vi have welcomed this second human invasion, we're told. There's statues and framed photographs everywhere, celebrating human and Na'vi cooperation. But no Na'vi. Nicholson can also just describe rides, and I like just descriptions of rides, but they too add to a portrait of an idea that has over-reached itself just enough to be ceaselessly entertaining. Enjoy...

"Santa, we found someone even creepier than you."

BOO! It's the annual running of the Krampuses.

 If the Christmas Doctor Who doesn't have a Krampus, it's missed a trick. Krampus is of course Saint Nicks' shaggy, old-religion, child-beating-after-it's-put-them-in-a-sack assistant. As Christoph Waltz explained to Jimmy Fallon "there's an old medieval tradition that is still kept alive in the mountains, where the young men... put on sheepskin and huge carved wooden masks and cow bells, and they get drunk... and storm like the riders of the apocalypse, through the village." The Austrian kids seem to love it. 

 

Really though, I'm just looking for some context in which to post one of my all-time favourite Christmas clips, see below. It too features children beaming inexplicably at a horrific, What-Am-I-Please-Kill-Me costume and is if anything even more terrifying than Krampuslauf, because in this clip the kids are now sharing a car with it. Where are its eye-holes? Has it seen that dog? Will the howling of the siren ever stop? Ably heckled by Mystery Science Theatre 3000's Kevin Murphy, Mike Nelson and Bill Corbett under the "Rifftrax" banner, here is the finale from probably their greatest find - Pirateworld's dismal promotional feature: "Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny". Enjoy.

This Is Why Gerald Should Be Supervised

Here's something else I never got round to plugging: A one-take wonder from Johnny Burns and Pier van Tijn, and my first experience with an armourer.

SPOILER ALERT: This was actually meant to have been a much longer film in which I was just an extra, but when they told me to "have fun with the character" I went and murdered a large number of the leading players in the establishing shot, forcing Pier and Johnny to think on their feet and ultimately to settle upon the solution you see above, which I think turned out beautifully. Watching it again, I wish I'd kept a bit more still administering the coup de grace but, oh well, it's done now.

"Putting Gaston in his Place": Attitudes towards Animism, Predeterminism and Liminality in that youtube video

 Here's a very charming video of a theme park actor enjoying four minutes of actual acting. I know, from working in the London Dungeon, that in a job like this – normally all character and no drama – a heckling child who totally buys into it can be water in the desert.

  #NOTALLMEN

  But the real reason I'm posting this video is because of  the comment Neil "Ned Mond" Edmond made below, which I think is brilliant and useful:

"What I mainly like about this is that the girl's relationship with the characters and narrative matches what I hope eg. a pre-Christian norseman's relationship with a god might have been: The story is both finished and ongoing, and intervention is meaningful even when the result is predetermined."

See also: playing with Star Wars figures.