January in Albertopolis

 I thought about going through my unposted photos from earlier in the year, when I wasn't blogging, and putting some up throughout December like I'd do at the end of every month, but looking through January's, it struck me that a more honest recap of the year might be, just to honour that lack of intention. Why catch up? 

 I had also forgotten how widescreen old photos from my good phone were, but here are four.

 I'd never noticed this collonade before. These are from January, and the earlier setting sun had now made it unignorable. I'd been living in Kensington for three months, and had finally decided to revisit the enormous museums along Exhibition Road as a resident, wanting to feel I was exploring my new environment, with an emphasis on the "my" rather than on the "new." I'd known this area all my life.

 

 During Boris Johnson's Mayorship – although he may have had no more to do with this than he had with the Boris Bikes – this road had become a "shared space" to "honour the area's cultural importance," meaning it stopped being a road for cars to drive down, and became instead a pavement for cars to drive down. This apparently resolved "the long stand-off between pedestrians and cars," until ten people got hit by a taxi in 2017. 

 This whole campus is called "Albertopolis" I found out today. It suits it. I keep discovering new ways in which, over a hundred and fifty years after the death of Queen Victoria's husband, the landscape of London still orbits his absence. 

 The railings here weren't always black.

 

Sometimes this blog will just be Japan's Bob McGrath.

 

 The beautiful Bob McGrath died today, which is also the day I learnt from an old American panel show that a couple of years before becoming Sesame Street's whitest human he'd had a successful career as a singer of Irish ballads in Japan. Telling me facts like this seems exactly what the internet was meant for. I've done my thing of dropping you into this clip at the good bit...

 

 

 

 There's a lot of Bob's Japanese crooning on youtube – is it still "crooning" if you don't have the raw, genital energy of Rudy Vallée? It's very hard to be unhappy listening to him, whatever it is – And it's not all Irish standards. There are Japanese songs sung in Japanese as well...

 

 Here Bob sings something a little more festive, in both English and Japanese. Merry December, everyone! But can we agree "Jingle Bells" maybe has more verses than it needs? It's a simple enough situation; you're in a sleigh; you're not Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts...

 

 Here is the song I know Bob best for. I love how much trouble Jim Henson's giving him here in the preamble, and how unphased Bob is by it. Water off a duck's back to Bob. He was ninety when he died. That's good. As Oscar the Grouch might say, fare forward, Bright Eyes.

One of the Things They Called Rudy Vallée...

  "I was really the very first, I think, to sing naturally, to sing as you speak. And of course, it wasn't accepted by everybody. Certain clergy thought the songs I sang were evil, because of the love content and the way I sang them. And they really, really said, Rudy Vallée should not be allowed to sing on the air. Because – not of the content of the lyric particularly – but the hypnotic effect, the sexual quality, let us say. I was born, my friends sigh, with a tremendous amount, a great amount of sexual... emotion. Now, the song pluggers in 1940 in New York City called me 'The Guy With the Cock in His Voice'. That was their expression: 'The Guy With the Cock in His Voice'. That was evidently why, over a period of my eighty-four years of life, I have known over a-hundred-and-forty-five women and girls." 

 

 I have been doing a little research into the studio that made Citizen Kane. Also featured in Episode One of The RKO Story: Katharine Hepburn... King Kong... Murray Spivak's giant wind machines... a hundred dancing women strapped to aeroplanes... Ginger Rogers... and Fred Astaire, who also appears in Love Goddess - the Rudy Vallee Rita Hayworth Musical, tickets HERE!

 

Nightwalk in Xanadu

 Having skirted its making in my "research" for Love Goddess, I decided today to actually rewatch Citizen Kane which happily appears to be available on iplayer forever. The film seems timely now, in a way it probably hadn't since it first came out – initially I wrote "frighteningly timely", but if I'm honest, also quite pleasingly timely...

 

a reference to this

 

 Timely not just in its depiction of one of the richest men in the world maniacally throwing money away in an attempt to buy the love of "The People" and call it Democracy, but also in its depiction of the attempt to use money and the media that money buys to remake reality itself, and the suicide-attempt-inducing nightmare of having to live inside that lie – the fate of Kane's second wife.

 

 Susan Alexander's story probably stands up best as a metaphor. In reality, billionaires' wives seem to be managing okay, but as the opening of the film makes clear, Citizen Kane doesn't take place in reality. And I was wildly wrong before when I said it began with a news reel. Of course, it begins with this:

 

 In the ruins of the fairy tale that Kane retreated into... to the sound of the same sleepily growling horns composer Bernard Herrmann would later use to accompany Jason and his Argonauts disturbing Talos' gigantic jewellery box... lost monkeys, abandoned gondolas, an absurdly convex golf course, and the suggestion – confirmed in the film's closing shots – that this is just a taste of Xanadu, that you'll never be able to see the whole thing. Immediately, I was reminded of scrolling through my photos after a night walk, deciding what images to use, and how many, and what order to put them in on this blog. So actually, I suppose this opening does remind me of the real world. Or whatever you want to call what we're living in until the lights go out. That's what makes it the greatest.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How To Read Minds By Not

Orson Welles by Derren Brown

 

 Another two-show day, so here's your Sunday shot of Orson Welles. 

 I first saw "cold reading" demonstrated in Derren Brown's Séance, which is also well worth a watch. (Of course, Derren Brown being Derren Brown, I may only think I saw it demonstrated.) As described by Welles to David Frost below, it is "a fraudulent technique used by mediums in the Victorian times" whereby you "warm up the sucker" with facts about themselves that could apply to anyone – I have a scar on my knee! – until they're so convinced by your psychic powers, they start unwittingly volunteering infomation about themselves.

Props can help. (Source)

 

 That's the theory. And Welles practised. According to various accounts – and a scene in Love Goddess (tickets available here) – he even practised on his future wife Rita Hayworth at their first meeting. It's never made explicit in our show that's what he's doing, but very little in our show is made explicit, which is one of the reasons I love it so much. And to Welles' credit – and unlike those who began it, or most famously practice it now – he only ever claimed to have "mind-reading capabilities", rather than the ability to speak to the dead. It was a more innocent time. There was a war on.

 

A Bad Idea I Had, and How It's Going

  I'm not going to soul search here. I'm just going to report the facts. I bought Mondo and Sky Blue when I lived at Clapham Junction, to serve as a surrogate couple we could take with us on holiday and photograph in case we didn't work out as a couple ourselves. Mondo had one eye, and a goofy grin across his belly. Sky Blue's face was clear apart from the sun. These two vinyl figures came with us everywhere for six and a half years, and they stayed with me in the flat in Forest Hill when the time came for me to live there on my own. That's them, above. The night before my first night alone, I wrote the following in the notes app on my phone at 3am:

Those go there.

Mondo and Sky Blue.

Except they don't go there any more

Because there are more gaps now.

But you can't just move stuff, because then it's just things in a room and it's cold outside and that's all you have when this was going to be a home.

And you've made nothing that can be hung on a wall in fifteen years.

 I wrote more than that too. 

 They came with me when I moved to Mornington Crescent a year later, and they came with me to Notting Hill. I didn't know what to do with them, all my ideas seemed stupid, but here's the one I finally went with: near where we used to live in Loughborough Junction, there's a small, unexplained indentation in the wall where a brick has been slightly knocked in.

 

 On the 29th of August I took Mondo, Sky Blue, and a small bottle of Loctite, and I set them there. Sky Blue was glued a little more firmly as I couldn't find as flat a base for Mondo, but both stuck, and I took a photo and then left them, feeling I'd done something actually quite self-indulgent and pointless:

 

 A week later, on the 5th of September, I returned to Brixton and decided to check up on them. They were still there, but I noticed that Mondo had come unstuck. Someone must have moved them to see if they were glued down, snapped Mondo off, but then left him there unacquired. I was touched by this. I wondered if anything like this would happen in Notting Hill, if anyone would just leave something standing. I took a photograph, and decided to check up on them whenever I was south. As I may have said before, I have no memory of ever experiencing closure on anything:

 

 I revisited them again, a week later, on the 12th of September. They were still there. Sky Blue glued in place. Mondo left loose: 

 I revisited again on the16th of September:

 

 And the 2nd of October:

 

 And the 20th of October:

 

 And the 29th of November:

"We can't all, and some of us don't. That's all there is to it."

 

Illustrations by E. H. Shepard. That dragonfly is just perfect.

 Ernest Hemingway, who liked big, short statements, famously said, “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. American writing comes from that." 

 I'm unlikely to change my mind that A. A. Milne's "Winnie-The-Pooh" holds a similar place in British Comedy, and since yesterday's post accidentally went out in the early hours of today, I'll linger a little longer on the story "In which Eeyore has a birthday and gets two presents". Here's an extact. I had forgotten Owl was in this story. I had also forgotten just how sketchy a character he is. (Does one lick pencils?)

     "It's a nice pot," said Owl, looking at it all round. "Couldn't I give it too? From both of us?"

     "No," said Pooh. "That would not be a good plan. Now I'll just wash it first, and then you can write on it."

     Well, he washed the pot out, and dried it, while Owl licked the end of his pencil, and wondered how to spell "birthday."

    "Can you read, Pooh?" he asked a little anxiously. "There's a notice about knocking and ringing outside my door, which Christopher Robin wrote. Could you read it?"

     "Christopher Robin told me what it said, and then I could." 

     "Well, I'll tell you what this says, and then you'll be able to."

     So Owl wrote... and this is what he wrote:

HIPY PAPY BTHUTHTH THUTHDA BTHUTHDAY.

Pooh looked on admiringly.

 If the Hundred Acre Wood is Dunder Mifflin, Owl is its Creed. And like Dunder Mifflin, or Michael & Eagle Lettings, or the Muppets, the company of Pooh have little in common; they're a team, not a gang – and like Charlie Brown, every character is an absolute mood. 

 I had also forgotten that this story gave us one of Jim Henson's favourite songs, "Cottleston Pie". Here it is, performed by another bear.