"Show us the hand of God That hath dismissed us from our stewardship!" Okay then...

"Oi!"

 Thanks to Gemma for this portrait of "Charles the Martyr" in which the condemned monarch's consecration looks a lot more like simple astonishment at having his crown snatched by a baby in a cloud. As for Richard II, I have now recorded the first act of its sequel, but with such excitement that my body clock's running amok again so please forgive this place holder.

And now I can't stop thinking about Ian Nairn

 I found the little wall he had a sit down on after interviewing that doctor. It's even littler now:

 I was inspired by No Two The Same to stroll to Pimlico this evening, retrace the faltering steps of Ian Nairn, and check out the housing estates:

 The Churchill Estate still seemed to be working nicely. The Mighty Fin used to rehearse musicals here, in the hall on the corner, but I'd never before ventured beyond these bollards:

 There was a lot more green than estates are given credit for. Brutalism doesn't have to look shit when it rains. There are cobbles once you leave the road, and bricks, and bark, and all were gleaming tonight:

 By the time I got to the Lillington Estate, it was darker:

 It's on Vauxhall Bridge Road, where I used to go to school, so, again, an area I should have been familiar with, but I'd never ventured into:

 It's more labyrinthine than the Churchill Estate, which is a hard quality to capture on camera, especially if the light's poor. I found a "sensory garden" but, again, my photo didn't really do it justice, so this isn't it:

  And today I discovered that the term Brutalism comes from the French term for concrete: Bréton brut, so has absolutely nothing to do with brutality, which makes sense to me, but is unfortunate. This sign says "Caution, Bees":

 These estates' biggest mistake is probably just believing the earth beneath them would stay still, which is why the cracks appear and the paving stones go wobbly. But it's naivety rather than neglect and, I think, the opposite of brutal.

 And it was a nice day for it. But now I need a sit down.

The Village

 "I say people will insist on things being different."

 After Sunday's post, I can't stop thinking about Thatcher, so here's some Socialism. My parents recommended "They Came To A City" to me, or at least told me they'd enjoyed it – it's an unapologetically utopian thought experiment from pipe-smoker J. B. Priestley, just before Orwell put him on a list, and according to my parents, a lot of it has come true. There's another slice of the film on youtube, but these are all I could find. What my algorithms throw up next is not a third clip, but perhaps the most concentrated dose of Seventies British Programming I've encountered outside of pastiche...

 It's called "No Two The Same". I don't know why. It's from 1970, and features a nervous writer called Ian Nairn, saying nice things about a couple of housing estates in Pimlico. Here's Ian with his back to us, interviewing a doctor:

  Initially I wasn't sure why they were both leaning on a car, but then I noticed Ian having a bit of a sit for pieces to camera other presenters might have remained standing for. There didn't need to be a chair nearby. A wall or a bollard would do.

 I looked Nairn up. He died thirteen years after this was shot. I realise that's morbid, but it's a hard question to ignore while you watch him in action. He's really not comfortable standing.

 But he's talking about hope. Not towering hope like Priestley's, just something on the "oh that'll be nice" scale, and it's a tone I'm unfamiliar with. It's not an unemotional watch. Here's more. 

 Here are lives having attention paid to them, not just by Ian and his film crew, but by the makers of the places they inhabit. 

 It's common to dismiss architects like Le Corbusier for asserting "a house is a machine for living in", but I'd rather that than the uninhabited gated off from the uninhabitable.

Ian talks of it as a village, but also seems to enjoy the anonymity these new places afford. It's odd to think hope also looked like this.

 "Nice day for it," he says as he's greeted at the door. I think it's the first time I've heard this said for real, outside of a sketch.

 But all this is real.

  Which isn't to say it's not funny.

  But it's not just funny.

 Here's the full piece:

  P.S. Bonus notice: It opens EXACTLY like an old episode of Dangermouse, to the point where I wonder if it was an influence.

Have You Heard The Good News About J. Theophrastus Bartholomew?

 It is only sitting down to post about how disappointingly intimidated I feel not just by the tone but by the content of J. Theophrastus Bartholomew's introduction to his Games You Can Play In Your Head - a book promoted by my new youtube heroes the Corridor Crew, and edited down by two of their number from an initial, sixteen-volume set found in a yard sale in Bayport, Minnesota - a book I was incredibly excited to receive, but whose opening pages contained such red flags as "You might think to yourself: but what about all my friends? To which I retort, of course, and without hesitation: who needs them?" or "if you are an adult who attempts to function as a cog in the blood-soaked machine we call the American Dream..." or "Say it aloud: I am playing a game, Father. A game that requires you to leave me in peace and allow me to be a more fully formed human" - it is literally only now, sitting down to write about how worried I am to continue reading this book, that it occurs to me what may already have been blindingly obvious to you: that there is of course no J. Theophrastus Bartholomew. That there never was an original sixteen-volume set, that this is an original work which would explain why J. Bartholomew's name is not on the cover, and that Sam Gorski and D. F. Lovett are entirely aware of how intimidating he sounds because they made him up to sound like an embittered, nihilistic kook because that's the joke. So all I want to share with you now, having sat down, is my absolutely genuine relief at that realisation. He never existed. Oh my god. It's okay. It was a joke. Oh. That feels so good.

"I'm Enjoying This! I'm Enjoying This!" A Final Banging On About the Formal Run of Richard II

 Firstly, I admit that, contrary to the date given above, this post is actually going out on Monday evening. So I'm glad to be getting back into Full Shakespeare, but I'm also going to blame it for how late I'm now getting everything else done, and indeed it.

 

 

At least the weather's broken. (Does pinterest count as a source?)

 Secondly, I recently received some typically clarifying thoughts from Gemma Brockis about the "Formal Run" of Richard the Second (viewable HERE) which I hope she won't mind me sharing: "He's normally played as a bit of an odd ball or outsider," she writes, "But if he's powerful then his descent feels weirder. Which it should... In making it glamorous, and epic, you kind of don't care so much about liking people." Which is a relief. She also uses the word "majestic" which eluded me, and is spot on; really I should rename these the "Oddball" and "Majestic" runs. 

 But what exactly is Majesty? How does one picture it?

  It's not really seen as a heterosexual, cis, male quality these days, and I wonder if that's a Post-Revolutionary thing. Not just because capital-R, poets-on-crags-with-pamphlets Romanticism promoted a more egalitarian, no-frills idea of masculinity, but because – and this is something I only realised yesterday – for the majority of its history since the French Revolution, Britain hasn't actually had a king: 1800-1837, a couple of Georges. 1837-1901, sixty-three years of Queen Victoria. 1901-1952, an Edward and a George and an Edward and a George. 1952-2020, sixty-eight years of Queen Elizabeth. Another friend wondered whether, if Britain had actually had more kings, we'd still have a royal family at all, or whether the men would have blown it. Playing the "Majesty" of Richard feels apt then, but also, at least initially, inescapably female, which reads as camp, which is presumably why no-one does it that way now.* Even Fiona Shaw played Richard as an "odd ball".

 Another problem – and perhaps the source of a lot of my initial impatience with this play – came from unfavourably comparing it to Marlowe's Edward the Second, in which a King's misplaced love for his favourite, and his subjects' hatred of that love, drives the whole story. There, it doesn't matter what you think of the Crown; a man is imprisoned for an unrequited love, his tragedy is clear, and in the shadow of that tragedy, Richard's own fall feels squeamishly underwritten. But Richard's sexuality, or lack of it, isn't actually a contributing factor to his tragedy, it just provides Bolingbroke with slurs whose utterance make him as despicable as everyone else. Rather, this is a tragedy about a God-appointed show off. When Richard's understanding of himself as a king is contradicted, he reinvents himself as a saint, and in prison we see him discover this is even more naive an ambition, and that he might as well pretend to be a clock. He's entirely ready for death, until it comes, and good for him. This is a play about a failing artist. Audiences like those, and so do actors.

 And there's something genuinely fun about the old-school use of an actor's voice to do everything but imitate natural human speech, a fun that transmits, even though its power is ungenerous, and of no use to anyone else on stage. Nowadays, it's something we see women use more than men. Men just shout. It's an isolated voice, and Gemma's right, it doesn't matter if we actually like the owner. Here's another way of looking at the Formal Run then: Richard nailed the performative aspect of Majesty to the bitter end, but botched the policy. He may or may not have been Elizabeth the First but – and again, this is something that only occurred to me yesterday – bloody hell, does he remind me of Margaret Thatcher.

 

 

*UPDATE 28 Feb 2025: It's interesting or me to read this after rewatching Ruper Goold's "Hollow Crown" film of the play, with Ben Whishaw, which does a brilliant job of staging how universe-dismantling the handing over of the crown feels, a proper act of magic. So much of what I thought I'd discovered in this play is right there.

Sometimes This Blog Will Just Dip Into An Octopus's Umwelt

 Continuing on the subject of natural wonders: "Maybe I can never really know what it means to be an octopus..."

 Imagine if your hands were your legs and your tongue and also had brains, so actually imagine that you're a leg that can hold and taste things, but also that you're the owner of that leg. Okay, stop doing that with your hands now. That's a  hard ask. Let me put it another way...

 Imagine being not a top-down monolith of neurons, but a guerilla collective so attuned to your environment you could actually change colour. So imagine your brain wan't just in your head. Maybe you don't imagine that anyway. Maybe you're quite active. Maybe you just do that with your hands naturally. I'm not really making myself clear. What am I trying to say? Let me put it another way...

 Imagine owning an octopus!

Live Event, Regent's Park, 3am

Source

 London's possibly at its politest at 3am. Last night, Regent's Park's Outer Circle was almost entirely silent apart from a soothing chewing, ten feet up in the air. The night was humid enough to blur the top of the Telecom Tower, and the heat had brought out the giraffes. I kept very still by the railings. I'm not sure I was seen. Zebra butts were also visible, in the sodium light from the NHS hearts recently installed on the giraffe house, but the giraffes themselves were lit like dancers now, completely silhouetted now, renewing their strangeness wonderfully. I could have been looking at the Loch Ness Monster. 

 I was glad I hadn't brought my camera, you know, my phone, and then I wondered why. I was definitely feeling that the fact I couldn't record this sight made the moment of my experiencing it more important, and by "important" I maybe just mean "something to which there is no satisfactory alternative". This was a wonder – rather than an opportunity to record a wonder – and would remain a wonder only for as long as I decided to stay and find it wonderful. This is how I used to live of course, before carrying a camera. I started thinking then about the idea of wonders, and monsters again, and how we're not scared of fire, and for how much of humanity's existence Science simply meant not being scared of fire. I'd resumed walking by that point. Giraffes suited the hour. They always seem very polite. Look at their antlers.