Future Shock

Meaning "the physical and psychological distress suffered by one who is unable to cope with the rapidity of social and technological changes," the term was coined by Alvin Toffler in 1970. I've just found that out. I thought it was coined by Judge Dredd in 2000AD: the sufferers were called "futsies" and scooted around malls at knee-height in mink stoles with saucepans on their heads, swinging machetes. But how - I wondered back then in 1988 - did they know they were living in the Future? Why did they call it Future Shock? When I'm in the future, will I know? Will it feel like the Future? I liked the idea that I might - that I wouldn't take the Future for granted. And I've always had a taste since then for depictions of the present that focus on the jolt, which is what's posted below... Buster Keaton and The Twilight Zone - two of my favourite things! I found this last night. Apparently Richard Matheson's script originally consisted of nothing but a big chase, which would have been terrific. That's not how it ended up, and not all the episode is as good as this bit. But then, what is?

The full episode: "Once Upon A Time" is here.

This deleted scene from The Avengers is also beautiful on the jolt.

And parenthetically - this being the year 2013 - has anyone else noticed how many posters recently have completely done away with imagery? Just big phrases. It's grim. The year is 2013. And what the hell is a "Festival of Neighbourhood"?

David Shayler has other ideas.

What I really want to write about is Jon Ronson's "The Pychopath Test" - which first alerted me to the current state of former MI5 whistleblower Shayler's internal narrative let's call it - and Phillip K. Dick, and Brian Aldiss' thoughts on ECG testing, and all sorts of research for "Time Spanner" and modern epiphanies. But that's going to take ages so here, I'll just drop you right in this... God it's funny if you can forget it's actually happening to someone:

"When I first woke up I was told by Jesus that we would be hit by massive solar activity in 2012, and part of my mission was to gather together 2,000,000 children to sing "Greensleeves" to calm down the effects of this solar activity." And so on, and so on... Willy Mason said it so much better.

Jimmy Fallon has all the best ideas.

Or his writers do, I don't know, however it works. Obviously looking up old US talk-show clips on youtube isn't all I've been doing with my evenings (and afternoons*) but - you know how it is - the mind gets into a groove, you work evenings, mostly, and you've moved again so there's loads of conveniently out-of-the-way stuff in boxes to once again find less convenient places for and you feel at home finally but you've become so used to feeling displaced and so YES... I have been watching quite a bit of Jimmy Fallon AS IT HAPPENS.

The scope for unchecked, sloppy fun paradoxically afforded by the industrial-scale demands of a nightly American talk-show (as opposed to its weekly UK counterpart) is a contradiction I first fell for back watching The Larry Sanders Show nearly twenty years ago, long before youtube gave me access to the less fictional snippets of Conan, Jay, Letterman, Kimmell and Craig Ferguson (Craig Ferguson?!) which I now sort-of-I-guess-enjoy, but my enthusiasm for the theatrical and even pastoral responsibilities of the nightly hour-long telly treadmill has remained  undimmed and chipper. John Oliver has of course just taken over hosting duties on The Daily Show, I know, and yay! - but the political focus and consequence of that particular gig make it a bad example of what I'm trying to talk about here. This is what I'm talking about:

This is Jimmy Fallon. Until recently I knew him only as the corpsing drummer in that Will Ferrell sketch where Christopher Walken says "More Cow Bell" (good luck finding that online) but the more familiar I become with Fallon's talent the more convinced I am it's really Fallon's frivolity which turned More Cow Bell into something loved enough to gets its own T-shirt. His attention to the whole is seemingly instinctive, his care over detail is on a par with CERN's, and he has an ear and an eye unmatched by anyone else I can think of working in studio-based television. Take the sketch above: two boards are wheeled on, a filter's applied and suddenly we're in a movie - that's your joke, that's Love, that's Art. Seriously. Or when he plays Neil Young singing the them tune to "Fresh Prince" and is absolutely in it, it's the shadow cast by the hat over his eyes that means someone somewhere involved in this is a meticulous genius...

Or Steve Martin punching Death in the face, here...

Or the decision not to prerecord these twenties inserts, here...

Or everything about this even though I've no idea who Michael McDonald is...

I'm reminded of The Muppet Show, but with better jokes, or what Adam Buxton might make if he was given his own talk show, or indeed anything. Have you half an hour still spare? Join me.

Excellent idea.

 "Who's on first?" extended edition. Excellent idea.

 PeeWee Herman's "Dark Knight Rises". Excellent idea.

Spoofing this. Foolhardy, but an excellent idea.

Naming guys. Excellent idea.

Not raising interest rates on student loans. Excellent idea. And if Jeffrey Tambor, formerly of "Larry Sanders", happens to be a guest on your show, well this idea is...

Also excellent. To say nothing of "Let Us Play With Your Look", "At the bar with Roger Federer", Real Stars of "Guess Who?", "Mom Dancing with Michelle Obama", "Rap Histories", "True Facts of Truth", "Real People, Fake Arms" basically I've watched the whole damn channel.
I love him.

* and days.

G. reat B. ritish H. oliday

With the US release of "Sightseers" today or something, what better time to publish this glowing assessment from resident cineaste Mary Ann Sputnik? (Apart from when they released the DVD, or maybe when the film actually came out over here last year anyway it's here):

You'll have to see the film to understand how great a still this is.

Dark and noisy and lying in wait, movies side naturally with monsters. Road Movies aren't about driving, they're about Sex and Death, Bonnie and Clyde, Badlands and Five Easy Pieces (or, back in my day, Thelma and Louise, True Romance and Wild at Heart) - they're fantasies about turning your back on everything you've ever been given or had to take, following a plus-one into the wilderness, and then trying to hump and kill your way out of feeling like a trespasser. Also of course, they're movies about America. You couldn't set these stories in Britain - good old, naff, uncomplaining Britain with its not-massive cars, gun control, pencil museums and shaming dearth of deserts and peyote. The very idea of a British Road Movie is inherently comic, surely, which may be one reason Sightseers is billed as a comedy (although there are some outstanding jokes). But blow me if Sightseers isn't also the very first Actual British Road Movie.

The only stuff of Ben Wheatley's I'd seen previously was The Wrong Door, so nothing had really prepared me for the intoxicating wilderness he helped to serve up here. Holy cow, can he film! Places and faces. And those faces! Alice Lowe's tiny beams and frowns, Steve Oram's mug like thunder. And those places! When the killing come, as promised, it doesn't sneer as the trailer suggests. These aren't the killings of If... They don't denote a conquest. And they're not a judgment, they're arbitrary as Nature, a psychedelic framing of the question "What are people actually for?" As Chris and Tina conclude, "murder is green". I was reminded oddly of Dredd - another lean, mean exercise in fantasy violence unbound by the yucky dictates of orange and teal. I was also reminded of Four Lions, less oddly. In the end, the rage so happily submitted to comes as a relief. I left on a high.

Forbidden Corner, Tupgill Park Estate, Coverham as recommended in

"More Bollocks to Alton Towers - Far From the Sodding Crowd"

So there you go. You can always post nice words on twitter of course, but really that just looks a bit too much like you're saying "Hey, wow, I know these people". And I do know Alice Lowe, and Richard David Glover who's in it too, and is also brilliant, and I'm surprised I didn't mention him actually. I know them, and I was excited when Alice first spoke about this film, excited because a friend was making a film and that's exciting. But that excitement was nothing to what I feel now that I've seen it.

1925-2013

 Two days ago we arrived in France, took in the two-thousand-year-old Pont du Gard in perfect light along with its boob-heavy, garcon-silencing supplementary educational film, then headed back to Puisallicon to find out she was dead. My first reaction was "Ah. Oh." Now I'm at a computer here are the other thoughts. Feel free to join in.
So, secondly, I always thought it curious as a nipper how none of the caricatures looked like her. She didn't have a nose like a scythe. She had a high, wonky forehead. But when I came to caricature her in my visual notebook - along with the rest of the cabinet, many of whom I'd never seen outside of Spitting Image or Steve Bell - I went along with it.

 

The exception. Note: normal sized nose.

 Thirdly, I found it odd to have a government whose message so flatly contradicted the basic demarcations of right and wrong being instilled in me as a future adult, to have a PM so boldly mean and incurious. I don't know what I thought a government was for, but when they started privatising the utilities it reminded me of Tom Sawyer charging kids to paint his fence.
 Fourthly, it also bugged me when I was being driven into school to hear politicians on the radio say "We can't just wave a magic wand." Nobody was proposing that. They're doing it again and it's still annoying, which leads me to -
 Fifthly, I was educated in a Church of England school in Tory Wandsworth, then Westmister Prep and Public Schools - I know, lucky me - and in every one of those conservative establishments nobody liked her... Nobody... Actually by the time I was fifteen that's probably not true. There were of course a few vocal Tory children whose arguments remain unchanged over twenty years later, "fully-formed" as some describe Michael Gove, or just ungrown-up, and it's possibly a fault of my upbringing but I couldn't begin to understand where they were coming from. I still don't. I do try. It's something to do with ninety-five per cent of capital being invested in property or something, yes? Anyway my point is when she was finally ousted - just round the corner from us - the glee resounded up and down our toast-scented corridors pretty much unopposed.
 Sixthly... and yet, somehow nowadays "being taken serious politically" seems to mean operating on her terms. So she can't have started the fire (self-interest isn't transmitted from above). But don't tell me in your obituaries she didn't know the meaning of the word "can't". For many she embodied "can't". Her talent was for recognising strength and siding with it, and I'd say sticking to those kind of principles is pretty easy. She served her idea of justice by doing everything within her power to sell this country to her heroes, and that idea hasn't really gone away, this is still the eighties and Thatcher's passing seems like just another of those endlessly replicating shadows cast by street lamps as you walk home, hence perhaps the feeling of "Ah. Oh." And her heroes were dicks.
 Seventhly, her funeral procession from Westminster to Saint Paul's via St. Clement Danes - the procession we can definitely afford because in spite of my sixth point we can afford anything we like if there is the political will, of course we can - will follow exactly the route of the Ghost Bus Tours. Tickets here.
 Finally, I keep thinking of something Clive James wrote in 1975: "In real life, Mrs Thatcher either believes that everybody can help himself without anybody getting hurt, which means she is unhinged; or else believes that everybody who can help himself ought to do so no manner who gets hurt, which means she is a villain; a sinister prospect either way." I don't know if he still stands by this remark, but I can't see why he wouldn't.
 This is also good.

Blacking up

This is the Council Chamber of the Battersea Art Centre, where "Ring" takes place. The picture was taken Monday afternoon. Those aren't lights being rigged I now realise, they're whatever the opposite of lights are: black velvet gaffered to the holes in the ceiling. As part of a less specific refit the chamber walls have also undergone a rushed, artificial school-play ageing. Even in this light you can make out the phoney splurts of grey around the detail in the roof. 

It's a lost space dolled up as a found one. Tea candles burn everywhere, sheet metal mirrors have been screwed into the ceiling and lightbulbs hang like bunting, unfitted. I've no idea how much of this is temporary: there's a lot of building work going on (and the dressing room I'm sharing with Daniel Kitson has a few sheets of plastic where a wall might later go). I hope they keep the carpeted dining booths they've erected on the central staircase, those are dreamlike. And I hope they lose the "Arbeit Macht Frei" buzzguff beneath:

Apart from one "scratch" night, eight years ago, of the never continued Self Portrait As Frida Kahlo, this is perhaps surprisingly my first time performing at the BAC. I used to come here as a child and print badges, but I don't think I ever saw a show here, not back in those days - That's not true I've just remembered! When I was ten I saw my Dad's friend Ted tell a story about two crows nattering to each other while feasting on a dead soldier's eyes! Eeee, that must have been in the Council Chamber, and thirty odd years later here I am, in the dark.

We finally had someone leave tonight. Total darkness is strangely claustrophobic. That's not the right word. Claustrophrightening. Everything seems taken care of though, The staff are incredible, most of them I'm assuming are volunteers. It's all a bit out of my hands anyway. I'm keeping the headphones on now. 

It's like, how much more black could this be? And the answer is, none.

The buzz has been good. It's selling out around me. I think it's all going according to plan. You should come, we should see. In the meantime there's an excellent, spoiler-free interview with David Rosenberg here. And you can hear him have more binaural fun in his podcast "The Ear" here. And you can get tickets here. And here are some reviews - spoiler-free summary: Like, and even the people who don't like are coming again:

One Stop Arts
Whats On Stage
A Younger Theatre
The Upcoming
Spoonfed
Evening Standard
The Guardian
Time Out
Everything Theatre
Exeunt
London Magazine 
What's Peen Seen

The Man Who Would Be King Of Popes

Topical

It was the press night of Ring tonight, so, and yikes - there's people moving in that dark - take your headphones off (don't take your headphones off!) and you'll be astounded at the amount of slithering people produce... in that dark. Anyway, regardless, today was also New Old Pope Day, so thanks to Alan Cox for drawing my attention to this beautiful thing from Second City Television *. Also thank you Canada, for realising Victor Spinetti is a thing. The winner of this sketch has to be Dave Thomas whose "Richard Hariss" is good enough to raise the question of why Richard Harris impressions are not now more prevalent. All it should take is for someone to get it right - see Christopher Walken impressions post Kevin Spacey doing it at the Oscars, or Blair post Bremner... (We're still waiting for a decent impression of any of the current cabinet by the way. What happened?)

* SCTV's alumnibunch include Rick Moranis, Catherine O'Hara, Harold Ramis, John Candy and Martin Short. I first encountered them on network awesome where their eight-minute-long sketch pitting Vikings against Beekeepers alerted me to their esoteric fabness.

P.S. It's only after posting this I realised the new Pope's called Francis. Which if you come and see Ring... you'll... well, you'll see. Rosenberg just keeps nailing that zeitgeist.