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:

10,000 Bad Drawings #00013-#00024

Ahh, drawing monsters and making no-budget sci-fi films, this is the life! I've got some catching up to do clearly, but here's twelve more. (Really though, I am going to make more films. I think Mintu's going to turn up in one. Watch this cyberspace.)

 

 

 

 

10,000 Bad Drawings #00001-#00012

Yurgh! Isn't this brilliant? It just goes to show what you can do if... well, if you actually do it. Staring the present in the face I've likewise decided to renew last year's resolution to draw A MONSTER A DAY! I want to fill that book and drawing's a discipline I want to get back. Now that I don't doodle I've stopped paying the same kind of attention to other peoples' doodles, which means I don't enjoy comics so much for example, and I want that enjoyment back. I know it's also because I'm forty, and I know my body's running out of Ooo's and Ahh's if I don't exercise them. I also appear to have developed a fear of putting pen to paper. Thank-you letters haven't helped: What if they can't read my handwriting? What if it's all tiny like a serial killer's? What if I accidentally write Cunt? 

Anyway, what's the saying? "We all have ten thousand bad drawings in us, the sooner we get them out the better. " Here then are twelve. 

Minimalism's all I'm capable of, which keeps costs down.

"Take what you've got and fly with it." Jim Henson said that.

My mate Paul Thompson also said something along those lines, and equally pithy. I was talking to him about how I wanted to make an album before the year was out, even though I couldn't play a musical instrument. We were crammed into the Players' Bar. Paul's a musician, but we've known each other from the London Dungeon for seven years or so. Here's something of his:

He'd asked me to appear as a post-apocalyptic clown (plus sundry other supporting characters) in a play he'd written for the London Horror Festival back in October. (I based my performance on the video at the bottom of this post, of Max Wall dying in Germany). It was Paul's first play as a writer, and it read like a dream in at least two senses. I reckon musicians are good at dialogue. Rehearsals involved a trip to his flat, a few ideas on how we'd perform these lines - who'd take what, and when - then just running this through, script in hand. Then having something to eat. The next rehearsal we'd try it differently... It was a very nice way to work, and when we finally came to perform "It's Only A Matter Of Time" in a pleasingly packed Etc Theatre a number of the things we attempted on stage had never been rehearsed.

 Photo by Lanna Meggy

But not so you'd know.
Anyway, as the pianist at the Players' launched inevitably into Rocket Man and those people finally left that table, Paul and I talked about making things and - I guess - mininalism - or at least the Mirroboy video, and how I only played two notes on the guitar and how that was one of the jokes, and he put something very important very succintly:
"It's about making it matter."
Well said, Paul. That's exactly it. Whether it's Galton and Simpson and a Sunday afternoon, Shakespeare and the verb "to be", a bowl of fruit, a wicker chair, the colour blue, or four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence and waiting for Godot, it's just about making it matter.
That's why I wanted to make an album in the first place, I think. I like writing lyrics. There are fewer words, and they matter more.
So I'd better get on with it.

Speaking of not much, shall we look at the rest of that aborted draw-a-monster-a-day project? Yes, they're dreadful. Let's get that out of the way.

 

 

 

 

Oh well.
Here's that video of Max Wall then.
Who knows how these things happen?

Monsters Placeholder and Angels Place

 Well folks, it's coming to the end of the year, so let's look back at how those resolutions went, for example, the draw-a-monster-a-day project. That didn't even make it to the end of February, and who can blame it? I mean, these aren't that great. Sometimes I try to make something out of that, mainly I don't. Anyway, here's February's remaining monsters.

Now that one was at least supposed to look slightly off.

And the one above was copied from a toilet wall in Liverpool, which is why it's interesting.

 Then we went to Los Angeles for a couple of weeks...

 What? Well, whatever I've written here when I arrived, I know I didn't feel it when we left.

This silhouette approached us downtown. The streets there are pretty empty of people without blankets.

But we loved Los Angeles. To anyone wondering where their jet pack is now it's 2014, it's probably in Los Angeles. It's just there's no record of that love in these drawings.
And after these, the intervals between them only got larger...

"I was driving down Sunset, and I turned down one of those roads that leads up into the hills. And we stopped at this place that overlooks the whole city, it was fantastic. I suddenly felt exhilerated. I was really moved by the geometry of the place - its conception - its brittle harmony. It's a fabulous city. To think some people claim it's an ugly city when it's really pure poetry, it just kills me. I wanted to build something right then, create something. You know what I mean?"