Workaround with Pat & Mat

 

"... and that's it!"

 

 Thanks to Faren Taghizadeh for introducing me to this!

 Apparently, growing up up in Tehran, you got your clownish antics and bywords for ineptitude, not from the Chuckle Brothers, but from any Laurel and Hardy short that didn't have wives in it, or – thanks to the fact that neither were identifiably female – from Czechoslovak Television's Pat & Mat. But do you know what? I'll take it. Because every episode I've seen so far of Lubomir Beneš' and Vladimir Jiránek's "... a je to!" ("... and that's it!") is beautifully animated and unimprovably funny, powered by a genuine love and undersanding for the detail of how things actually break. Silent partners Pat and Mat are a charming realisation of the differently ept; endlessly creative, endlessy unfazed; the architects of both their own undoing and their making do. This is the stuff, and there's hours of it.

 

 "I have called it 'Slapstick' because it is grotesque, situational poetry."

Kurt Vonnegut

"Who Gave A Mermaid Her Voice"

 Above is this week's Ships, Sea and the Stars which I think will be the last for a spell. It's about mermaids, presumably organised to coincide with the beginning of Pride month, but given a little extra pang of relevance yesterday by J.K. Rowling. I don't sing on this one but I get to do a little reading of Oscar Wilde, and the guests are as superb as ever. Watching it, I kept being reminded of the brilliant video essay below about Howard Ashman's work on The Little Mermaid. I'd no idea how big a part his vision played in it, nor that Ashman and Menken's first ever musical was an adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut, which I obviously found exciting. (I also never knew until today that when the cartoon was first dubbed into German, Ariel was voiced by Ute Lemper.)

American English Class Projects based on Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse 5"...

(originally posted on myspace here)

... are the second best - I suppose because the book's so much better known than Cat's Cradle, and it's been foisted upon so many more students who just couldn't give a monkey's or just plain haven't read it. (Anti-war movies! You might as well make an anti-glacier movie, amirite?) Casting my net wider for school-produced Vonnegut gems has therefore proved a bit of a trawl. I don't know, are these gems?

Well, aging make-up always looks fake. So, excellent work. "And why would he laugh?" - It's interesting seeing which lines each project picks up on. I really love the pan upwards to the abducting craft, a nice simple cheat. Likewise I love the abduction effects on this next film, and the typewriter/Meerschaum combo (it would be easier to "Forget Donnie Darko" though if they hadn't played "Mad World" over most of it. But this is a niggle. You put a pan on a kid in a cart on some rails. You get an A...)

 It had to be a failure since it was written by a pillar of salt". And in what follows I'm pretty sure we see what it actually feels like to get shot at more accurately than anything heretofore managed on the screen. I know. I've been paint-balling.  

The dog joining in! Was that on purpose? The sudden change in aspect ratio before the shot! was that on purpose? Because it WORKS! Yet it's the following film that has to take the prize. (There is no prize). It may boast neither the commitment nor the ingenuity we've seen elsewhere, but it was this film that set me upon the whole kids-do-Vonnegut quest-ette, so enjoy...

"You're going to Dresden! Come on! Now! Get going!" Is it scripted? Isn't it scripted? Too many questions.

In other news, Diary of a Nobody tickets are selling fast. (Looks like I'm keeping the beard.)

And Money closes on November 25th...

American English Projects based on Kurt Vonnegut's "Cat Cradle"...

(originally posted on myspace here)

... are the best! Consider the evidence:

Which brings us neatly to the end of the world, or would have neatly if this post had anything to do with that, which it does not but was meant to. I saw "Collapse" last night and had just watched Milligan interviewed back in '67 before that, but! Then somebody in the pub this evening, maybe me, said "Love is not a duty but it is a discipline..." which I thought worth recording and got side-tracked looking for something to prove this, or at least pad it out, and I typed "love" and "discipline" into youtube, and was presented with Robert Palmer in Japan, and fled, and ended up here among these brilliant little school projects instead. There is no lasting happiness of any kind without discipline, probably. But let these treats serve for this evening. (Keeps has just texted me. It's been a year. Here's to plastifungus and a happy and habitable planet then. Here's to us! And OweMGee, youtube is also a hundred years old I've just realised! Here's to it!

See how easy it is to get distracted? Oh but have I mentioned the read-through for John Finnemore's new panto that took place yesterday? No. So see how focused I am. Okay, here's your homework.)

Dance Bear Don't (a life in 3 acts)

(originally posted on myspace here)

Let's see if we can't squeeze another one of these posts in before Newsnight Review shows up tonight (pray God they respect to the Code of the Preview, that is all I ask...) Now - ah - I'm writing this on the office's IBM ThinkPad and there's odd little buttony growths all over it, what do they all do?!... Um, so anyway last night saw more cuts to the show: no more giant table cloth, and no more opportunity to sing along to this unparalleled two-minute ode to joy WHAT?! NO!

I do hop s ee its rurn. Oh how did the cursor get over there! I'm using my thumb to move and my forefinger to click, thi sis nonsense¬! LISTEN - no, bad caps lock! - listen, let's all just take a moment to be the water shall we? Let's fill the cup. Fill the bottle... That's better. Alan?

I mean, it's fine. I recognise the preview period will be intense and that changes need to be made. I recognize that the Simon Smith Karaoke segment wasn't working in context inasmuch as it was unbearable and stopped time itself Howard Campbell-like in its tracks, and I recognise that perfect as the song is we must pay attention to the doughnut, not the hole, and speed our plough over the bones of the dead. Of the dead bear. Of the dead child and his amazing dead dancing dead bear. That is fine. Huhhh... huhhhhh, huh huhhhhh.... I had a good conversation with Lizzie last night. She's the designer. It's good to talk to her because I think her priorities are spot on - how do you work on an audience's imagination without asking them to suspend their disbelief? That seems to me the - OH IT'S NO GOOD! ALAN PRICE! ALAN PRICE WHER ARE YOU?

Consilium Pilot (with easter egg extras)

(originally posted on myspace here)

Someone other than myself drew this sweet catalogue of me and my worldly possessions (Le Petit Plastrier) and for all the gnashing on bile that follows I remain giddy and red-eyed with gratitude for that fact, and have no complaint with anything outside myself as subsequent posts will hopefully testify... Pblaaackk! It's September now, is it? Yeah. Right. What is it in this room making me cough every time I come in? This is it, the only space I have remotely moved into, how can I be allergic to it? Money's opening in a week now but I'm missing the hundred-and-forty-third day of the Big Push, laid up here in the Jock Block instead as though I've just come out of hospital and we're back in February, incapable of sleeping on my back once again, turning to the sputum pot I'd only kept as a momento and staggering to the bathroom for a toxic harumph. Is it sun-stroke? Is it nerves? Is it the karaoke at the Dungeon Summer Party where I went as Daryl Hannah out of Blade-Runner? I want a microscope. I want to peer at a sliver of this and give it a name. I want to look in the mirror and not see Zach Galifianakis' downy corpse squinting back. I want to write about Paris, and the seventh week of "Let's run it again from the Jewish Question", I want to get some ideas down for Sirs Harry and Paul, I want to run off every footling, glittering nugget I promised everyone so that I can get on with the stuff I promised myself, but CHIEFLY I want to use this blog for something other than lists of stuff I'm supposed to do. How am I ever get my own unfathomably-depressed-literary-giant-teatime-telly gig at this rate? And have you SEEN how overgrown the machine's been getting in our absence?

Well okay, what have I written... There's the closing sketch of this week's Mitchell and Webb Sound so have a listen to that maybe (three closers in a row. "Closer" is an industry term I've just used wrongly) although now I think of it, if you have it on and  DON'T listen my sketch does sound pleasingly like Peepshow... And I also filled in this questionnaire I filled in on F*c*b**k a bit back (a bit is a measurement of time. I have lost track of time. The Bit System is: A bit equals some bits and some bits make up a bit, so we're talking a bit back. So it works fine.) You had to answer every question using the titles of songs sung by just one band or artist. I chose the songs of Leonard Nimoy, and after essentially two month's blog silence the results are as good a reacquaintance as any, so you can have that... (oh and I've put links to the tracks where I can so don't click on them if you won't be able to face it, they're not the easter eggs I meant, I don't really know what easter eggs are)...

Are you a male or female?

Nature Boy.

Describe yourself:

Where It's At.

How do you feel:

Contact. 

(Particularly proud of that one)

Describe where you currently live:

If I had a Hammer...

If you could go anywhere, where would you go:

Where No Man Has Gone Before.

Your favorite form of transportation:

I Walk The Line.

Your best friend is:

Music To Watch Space Girls By.

Your favorite color is:

Ruby (Don't Take your love To Town)

What's the weather like:

Sunny.

Favorite time of day:

Lost in the Stars.

If your life was a TV show, what would it be called:

Consilium

What is life to you:

A Visit To A Sad Planet.

Your current relationship:

Gentle On My Mind.

Looking for:

Love of the Common People.

Wouldn't mind:

Both Sides Now.

Your fear:

Everybody's Talkin'.

What is the best advice you have to give:

You Are Not Alone.

If you could change your name, you would change it to:

Abraham, Martin and John

Thought for the Day:

Spock Thoughts

How I would like to die:

Amphibious Assault.

My motto:

Well what else would my motto be? The Ballad Of Bilbo Baggins? And who knew Lego did whites? And weren't Buffalo Springfield good sports? Right I'm going to try and catch some L-shaped Z's now, sweet dreams and prosper. Pblaaackk!

Excuses, excuses and Heather Couper

Ack, daylight.

The sun says hello. Good afternoon then. My system of parallel alarms clearly hasn't done the trick. My sleeping body's learnt how to operate two snooze buttons simultaneously and instead of waking up I make it only as far as REM sleep where Sean Penn's crouched behind me in the back seat of a left-hand-drive Buick tearing through an orchard, saying how shit an actor he thinks Michael Caine is: "He always plays the same damn thing! He always does the same fucking thing with his hands! He should - Like one character should maybe have two fingers blown off so he's only allowed to use three fingers - Find something different to do with his hands. At least that would get him to fucking act for fucking once!" And I go "Well, hmm..." and watch the trees streak past and think "Shall I tell him how over-rated I think he is?" but don't. And then the alarm goes, my lizard brain kicks in, slams it off, goes back to sleep and now I'm channel-hopping with my Dad in a hotel in Spain... I tried to find a graphic to illustrate "lizard brain". I think its proper name is the cerebellum. There's supposed to be a lizard bit and then a mouse bit and then a monkey bit and then dolphin bit, but I can't work out where the lizard bit initially is. It's not the kernel. I think it's more like a little old-man-of-the-sea brain that clings onto the back, curled up like - now I come to think of it -

Anyway by half past one in the afternoon some part of me even tires of being tired, and I reach a hand over to the off-white, Glen-Larson-schemed replacement phone I've been issued with since the theft of the one on which I used to play Sonic, and start playing Snake.

And Heather Couper's on the radio, discussing the anthropic principle. This as I understand it points out that if you throw a tin of paint against a wall it's got to leave SOME kind of mark, even though the chances of it leaving EXACTLY that mark are infinitesimally small. Ergo the presence in this universe of life intelligent enough to ask "Why are we present in this universe, ie here?" proves nothing but, well, itself... It's a very simple principle, confounded perhaps by my decision to explain it in terms of paint. Of course I remember Heather Couper back from when I was a kid watching her on Saturday morning television explaining Space or Halley's Comet or warning us not to look at an eclipse. She had a white jacket and a red shirt and a perm back then. Lovely, warm Heather Couper.

Was she always on because we were sending so much stuff into space? Were we? Or had we just got something back? It's odd to see in hindsight the conditions of your childhood environment revealed as blips, not constants. Are kids still even into Space? I know for a fact they still receive the same basic grounding I did in Ancient Egyptian burial technique, because whenever I ask them what this double-pronged eye-ball gouger's for their first response will always be "Oo, pulling the brains out through the nose!"

And I was reading Michael Palin's Diaries (1969-79) recently, in which he unwittingly charts the day-to-day gestation of the world into which I got born. Everything's so recent. I was amazed. Such-and-such a day saw the rise of the IRA, the discrediting of the Left, the gentrification of Notting Hill etc... I'd hoped, you see, that reading these diaries would help get me back into the act of writing (I hadn't forgetten about you) and bought quite a number of other books by writers about writing in this same vain hope. Read 'em all. Played Sonic. Then Snake. So I've read Brian Aldiss' "Bury My Heart in W.H. Smiths". And I've read Kurt Vonnegut's "A Man Without A Country", where he jots down "the funniest joke in the world" (Last night I dreamed I was eating flannel cakes. When I woke up the blanket was gone) although I found a funnier one I think on page 131:

"When I got Home from the Second World War, my Uncle Dan clapped me on the back, and he said, 'You're a man now.' So I killed him."

Another interesting thing about Palin's diaries: He writes nothing at all about the business of crafting sketches for Monty Python, but will meticulously chart the progress of a possible voice-over gig. (And it only takes him half an hour to write an entry. I can't be a writer. That explains it.)

And here's Anthony Neilson's advice to young writers, if you're interested. I've done some homework. And I don't disagree with what he says about the liberating discipline of "story", but all this stuff is just so self-evident and, as advice, useless. It's unilluminating. "Thou Shalt Not Bore". Oh, you think? It gets us nowhere. Silly, old, fantastic, paperbacky Brian Aldiss would be the first to point out the wrong-headedness of this simply as advice to a writer, let alone someone wishing to write for the theatre - SPECIFICALLY for the theatre. If all you want to do is tell a story then set up stall somewhere unheckleable and accessible to millions. Make no mess. Never fail. And, ahhh BLAH BLAH (I wonder if that Sean Penn dream had anything to do with this) anyway I'm awake now, my fingers hurt, it's dark, that was five hours well spent, and if there's one OTHER thing I learnt from the Palin diaries it's that sketches don't write themselves. So I'm off to play Snake. Stopping only when the measure of my own success makes me bite myself in the ass:

 

(Hm. That's two posts now that I've ended with the word "ass". Maybe I'm a writer after all.)

(originally posted on myspace)

Light and Portable

 

So the Lounge has reopened. Excellent.

Now: At two in the morning I finally considered the possibility that the accumulation of books and coats and scraps and dice and educational stickers from Kuwait and stocking-fillers (thirty-two years' worth) left to me by my emigrating parents nine months back may never in fact see the outside of a stacked box again... that having holed myself up in a rattling room with enough wallspace or, failing that, floorspace to postpone indefinitely the fate of every single object I have ever owned or made I may now, in fact, in short, be stuck... in a big and cheap room in a loved house, but still stuck. Then again, this is how inventions happen, isn't it? But it's also how "The Italian Job" ends... And I'm not sure I should spend the rest of my thirties on my knees in a teetering coach.

Ned Mond's traveling around Europe right now, calling himself Ian Jones and clutching his dearest possessions to his chest in a tin of Bisto, enviably. It's a fiction, of course (an internet campaign for Ford as it happens) but a fiction that Ned will both script and act out in his own clothes and facial hair for the next three months, which by my calculations makes for a pretty hefty fact-fiction intersection:

"We are what we pretend to be," says Mother Night, "so we must be careful about what we pretend to be." Well Ned has gone for a more socially backward and protectable persona than his non-internet self. And who doesn't?

Goths.

One of the most interesting aspect of all this is the option of joining him out there, fictionally. You go to wherearethejoneses.com, write up your own character, send in the audition tape and wait for the call. It's a bit like the site Second Life, I assume, but real. Oh, speaking of which... Here I was going to post a youtube link to a fat avatar walking naked and soulfully around Second Life holding a big sign up saying "Free Hugs" and sporting a very unruly, six-foot phallus, but they've taken it off.

And "Big Nick" is hitting the road too, leaving the Dungeons after nine years service to be by the sea with the woman he loves in his sixty-second year. And we all met up in the Shipwright's, colleagues past and present, reunited to say goodbye. And there I bumped into the woman who three years back said "If I kiss you I think I'll see another side to you. A sweeter side, a more tender. And that's not a side to you I want to see." And I bumped into M. Berry, who's just put up a poster on F*c*book for a film he's starring in. It's called "The Devil's Chair." There's no tagline, but I suggested: "Oh sorry, yes sometimes it does that."