Kiss Revision

 I caught up with Gemma Brockis this evening on Islington Green, both of us wrapped up against the sudden cold but with an ice cube in each of our picpouls blancs - she'd asked for one and I copied her. Gemma was enthusing about the university as a tested theatrical model for lockdown, because students can still be part of something without having to leave their rooms. 

 

 Her own online university has embarked upon its Autumn Term, still teaching just the one (excellent) module, "The History Of The Kiss", but like Sarah Winchester before her, Gemma has now restlessly added extensions and secret passages. So, even if you aren't new to the course, I would still recommend revision. You will get lost. Here.

 

Or Maybe They Just Wanted To Frame The Dawn

 Browsing is something I've subconsciously abstained from in the Plague Year, but yesterday I found myself scanning the racks and shelves of the British Heart Foundation with an enthusiasm I hadn't felt since getting Netflix. Maybe the shortening days were making me feel festive or maybe I was just hoarding for the winter, but I found Anvil (full title: Anvil! The Story of Anvil) on DVD for 33.3recurring pence, and Joel Morris had recommended the documentary to me earlier in the week so I took it home and watched it with much crying which I hadn't expected but really this is a post about Stone Henge: 

  Lips and Robb, who've gone their whole life without a Plan B, visit the site after a particularly high stakes argument on the sixth day of recording their make or break comeback album, and it's only now that I realise this sequence was probably a nod to Spinal Tap, because all I was thinking as I watched was how unmysterious Stone Henge suddenly appeared in the context of their story, and how almost everyone alive has probably had experience of erecting something similar as an infant. 

  I don't know if it's a discovery each of us makes or if, unlikely as it sounds, we're all just copying an original, but when given building blocks, at some point we take one and stand it on its end, and then we stand a second block next to it, but that's still not a building, and then... and then we realise we can put a third on its side along the top! 

  And now we see that it is finished. And what we've made serves no purpose, it is just - although our infant minds don't recognise the baggage of this evaluation yet - cool. 

  I'm one of those who grew up distrusting the idea of cool, but the instinct to raise two freestanding objects and then place a third on its side along the top is an instinct I understand, and it's because it would be cool. And to do it on the scale of Stone Henge, with the collective energy such a project would require, would be incredibly cool. Which is maybe all the motive people needed to break their backs doing it. 

 It seems to be all the motive Anvil needed.

Sometimes this blog will just be Bruno Bozzetto's Dinosaur Bolero.

 

 My family aren't normally the kind to email links, but Dad sent a beauty this week: A hundred sequences that shaped animation. They tell me "cartoon" was the first word I ever spoke, but there's still a lot here that was new to me, and I recommend a wallow. Nestled, squirming, two thirds of the way down the list, between Caroline Leaf's brilliant The Street, and the introduction of Black Vulcan to The All-New Super Friends Hour, is the "Bolero" sequence from Bruno Bozzetto's Allegro Non Troppo ("Not Too Fast"). It wasn't new to me, just hitherto uncategorised, having turned up uncredited between Peter Pan and Bambi on a pirated VHS Dad bought in the eighties, and I was very glad to see it again. More than just a great spoof of Fantasia's Rites of Spring, it mixes bleak and cute without mercy, it tickles and kicks, the climactic tower blocks bursting from the ground precede Brazil by almost a decade, and I think it may also have taught me a few dance moves. Enjoy.

 

Further Immersivity For Kids In Visors And Disguises

 

 Here's a fancy shot taken eleven hours before the support bubbles go up all over London, of excellent friends Story Spinner making work in the roof of the Imperial War Museum, for a family event next week called Spies And Disguise. I'm as surprised it's still going ahead as your are, but Story Spinner know their stuff, and working with them is always a joy and a relief. The details are here, so come if you are able, but not too close! Activities will include learning secret signals (without touching your face), disguising yourself (without touching your face), and looking for other spies to pass on your secret messages to (from a distance of two metres) all against the backdrop – or belowdrop? – of Ai Weiwei's History of Bombs, and with a finalé in socially distanced grids opposite the Holocaust Exhibition. Look out for me in a lab coat on Level 2, next to the large red Polaris suit that was left in a pub in Barrow-In-Furness.

 

Can Do

   Hell of an image, that Rosie the Riveter, if you're ever thinking of recruiting people.

 

 Still tasting the bitter-sweetness of Poussey's Advenures in the Arts World, the following night I wonderfully found myself beneath railway arches again, watching actors dance and musicians jam. One Night Records was the name of the night. Glimpsing an abandoned juice box on an oil drum at the entrance, I intinctively reached for it to pump alcohol onto my hands. We arrived for nine, and moved from stage to stage in groups. We could carry drinks with us and lower our facemasks for a sip of Old Fashioned. I think ours was the last group, and small. There were no more than twelve of us to fill these rooms, so no way to make any of them feel like clubs, with or without social distancing.

 

 

 

 But they didn't need to. We were where we were, stragglers at a dip in history, sitting still and bursting with gratitude. Every act must have already been playing for two hours before we arrived: The One Night Records Rhythm Revue Band. Amy & the Calamites. Sumudu. Laurence Corns and the Candid Jug Orange Band. Jaz Delorean. All of them in front of us. All seeming so happy to be in front of us too, togethering. I think that's the literal translation of "entertainment": Togethering. Here's a clip of the last act we saw, maybe the last live act I'll see this year. I'm still bursting with gratitude.

"Toast Can't Never Be Bread Again"

  I'm very glad I've continued bingeing Netflix's Orange Is The New Black, which having lost its way a little in season 3, has not only found it again in season 4, but absolutely Gone There. I don't want to spoil it for those who haven't watched, so there's only so much I can write, but for something made under Obama, the series is proving a blistering accompaniment to MAGA – and 2020 in particular. I also wasn't prepared for how much the season 4 finale would make me pine for 2009. This isn't a spoiler, because it's a flashback. All of Litchfields' inmates' flashbacks suggest a seemingly limitless budget – every backstory builds a new world – and Poussey Washington's last night in New York is such a specific and unembarrassed celebration of the goodness of people without proper jobs, and of the places they make, and of the accompanying greatness of the city they play in (those aren't even real monks) that it seems to yawp "Fuck viability!" as if they'd made it this week.

 

   I'd felt that city slipping away here ever since the closure of the Shunt Lounge. As I may have mentioned. We lost so many places to play around in in 2010. And I had been thinking about changing the blog's wallpaper too – those hangers have been up for decade – but now I've decided they'll stay because, as this episode's reminded me, it's good to be reminded.

 

Canvas Tanks (A Round-Up of What's Not)

Thanks to Tony Way for this... "It’s Omar, Dan, Sophia, Jahmal, Naomi, Justin, and Will I feel sorry for. Nobody gives a fuck about them."

 Erratum: Yesterday's post was obviously inspired by the image above, top row, second from the left, which had been doing the rounds over the weekend, and which I only found out today is not, as rumoured, a government initiative to specifically discourage people from becoming live artists in response to theatre closures, but actually one of a series of adverts from 2019. Oliver Dowden, the Minister for whatever it's currently called, issued a tweet slightly correcting the story, but neglecting to say that the campaign was from last year. Almost as if - well - maybe the misapprehension wasn't entirely inconvenient. I know. That sounds crazy.

 

 Similarly, a few weeks ago ITV News had to retract a story that the Chancellor of the Exchequer had singled out careers in the live arts as now "unviable", when in fact he was talking about, well anything. And yet the word "unviable" is still cropping up in the feed of creatives feeling wretched, and the same thing will probably happen to "Fatima". It's hard, probably impossible, to find the origin of these false alarms, but miserable to see them spread, especially if they do turn out to be the work of some sockless, civil-service-dodging, gaslighting, grudge-drunk, anarcho-fascist game theorist who probably can't so much as spell "Psy Ops". Easier to source is the fake story that might have initiated this pattern, published in the Daily Telegraph a month ago and immediately debunked by Stweart Lee, that the new Director General of the BBC would be setting his sights on "left-wing comedy". It was a lie, but that didn't stop the anger, or the enervating processing of a manufactured attack when that lie spread, and the jokes are still being posted today satirising the non-existent, harshing - in a word - the vibe, simply because it's more fun to riff on a story than to check if it's true. Well actually, no. As Tony Way has proved above, both can be fun. We can do both.

Not real.