EXCITING SPACE ADVENTURE 17

Zwareth turned to behold the most hideous creature he had ever laid eyes on...

 

His mind raced: How had it got here?... What did it want with him?... What were those hideous glistening things at the end of its legs? Some form of cover?.. And where... Dear God!... Where were its wings and tail?!!!

"Zwareth?"

"Huh?"

"Your mandibles were moving. Are you talking to yourself?"  

"Oh - No. No. Nothing, my nectar. Just thinking."

Zwareth would have to watch himself. It would do no good for Zwarina to suspect... What? What had he done wrong? Nothing. So he'd seen the vide-saga before. No reason she had to know!

"Zwareth, you're doing it again."

"What?"

"Muttering. What's on your mind, pupa?"

"Nothing."

Boots the glistening things were called. Hideous. So hideous. And the creature's chest. Too broad. Far too broad. It didn't even have wings, why did it need such a large chest?! No matter how often Zwareth had watched this clip, it still all seemed so unnatural. Why was it so smooth? And those trousers!

"Zwareth. What?"

"Am I doing it again? "

Zwarina's tentacles loosened.

"We don't have to watch this."

"No. No no. I'm enjoying it. But I mean... Whatever you want, my nectar."

"Okay. Well... I might open another bottle."

"Not for me, thanks. But sure."

Zwarina paused the vide-saga and hovered over to the drinks cleft. Zwareth considered humming, but then decided remaining silent and stock still until his wife's return might better convey the impression of contentment.

Hideous...

Illustration by Rowena Morrill

S!

On the topic of under-appreciated books about supermen...

 Some people find Superman boring because he's invulnerable, but he's not, of course. He cares, which makes him extremely vulnerable. Elliot S. (later S!) Maggin's "Superman, Last Son of Krypton" – originally published in 1977 to accompany the release of the Motion Picture – was happily brought to my attention by Colin Smith here (with surprise input from S! himself in the comments below: "Of course Alan Moore read my book"). Reading nothing like a novelization – more like a very early Kurt Vonnegut – the book is careful and witty and full of aliens. One of my favourite paragraphs is the opening of Chapter 6 "The Penthouse", a beautiful and unfamiliar introduction to an archetypal megalomaniac:

"Yesterday Luthor was dressed in skin-tight pyjamas and crossed ammunition belts. The outfit was the only affectation he had for a purpose, and therefore the only one he recognized as an affectation. The penthouse hideaway four hundred feet over the city, the medieval tapestries hanging over the faces of the computers and wall consoles, the Egyptian sarcophagus whose mummy was replaced by a mattress covered with Snoopy sheets and pillowcases, paintings on the walls by Leyendecker, Peake, Frazetta and Adams, those weren't affectations. Those were matters of taste. Luthor was flying in the terrace window with his jet boots for the seventeenth time and he was running out of videotape."

The Kid's Show

 

"You must remember that Homo Sapiens has little more to contribute to the music of this planet, nothing in fact but vain repetition. It is time for finer instrument to take up the theme."

Before I leave Bowie behind entirely...

I assume he read Olaf Stabledon's 1935 novel "Odd John" - about a pan-sexual, permanently adolescent, hyper-intelligent super-being.  It seems a more probable source of the phrase homo superior than "The Tomorrow People" anyway. 

Olaf Stapledon's a rather unsung figure in British Sci-Fi. He's best known either for 1930's "Last and First Men" - in which he wrote more broadly about the future evolution of humanity, really broadly in fact, I forget how broad, millions of years - or for 1937's "Star Maker" - in which the narrator pops out for cigarette and ends up voyaging to the end of the Universe, again I forget the details, I think he meets God. Its final pages, I do remember, set out very clearly the case for war against the Nazis. Christ, imagine living then!

"A nation, after all, is just a society for hating foreigners."

With subjects these humungous (and unfilmable) perhaps it's clear why Stapledon's not more widely known, yet he relates these immensities about as sanely as any writer can I guess. There's always a sense of fun. The wit is more apparent in a work like "Odd John" though, where the human scale allows for actual dialogue. Here for example, is an eight-year-old John in conversation with a business magnate:

"It must be so snug to feel both safe and important."

I love that. 

Homo Superior's childish curiosity takes a much darker turn later on in the novel, but Stabledon's a canny enough writer to suggest that this journey - like much in nature outside the experience of homo sapiens - has nothing to safely teach us. All the quotes come from the younger John's Gulliver-like observations of life in the thirties. We've had capitalism, here's communism:

"Funny, too, what a religious fellow that Communist really is... Of course he tells you the Class War is needed to emancipate the Workers. But what really gets him about it isn't that. The fire inside him, though he doesn't know it, is a passion for what he calls dialectic materialism, for the dialectic of history. The one selfishness in him is the longing to be an instrument of the Dialectic, and oddly enough what he really means by that, in his heart of hearts, is what Christians so quaintly describe as the law of God." 

Okay, that quote wasn't so much fun... 

Maybe it was "The Tomorrow People".

Beyond Good and Evil with Pete and San

Station to Station with Buster Keaton

He's standing in the wrong place!
Speaking of obvious Mirrorboy influences, seeing this image from The General recently, made me realise how much of Buster Keaton's comedy (and influence) can be derived from that one statement: he's in the wrong place. It's character comedy of a sort, but a classical figure in a non-classical landscape that's modern and breaking down and falling apart and moving differently to what you've braced yourself for is also pleasing just visually. You could say it predicted surrealism if Keaton didn't normally like people so much.
"The Frozen North" is an exception...

A complete break in character: here the Great Stone Face snarls, robs, murders the innocent, and incorporates a giant comedy beard into a rape scene in a way that had me genuinely gasping with laughter. It's alright though because it all turns out to be a dream or a film, or a dream in front of a film. I first watched it with the sound down, bewitched. It was only watching it the second time with the piano accompaniment up that I recoiled: this isn't a story that benefits from being buoyed up by ragtime, it needs music from the abyss, something that could sell a burning rose. Looking for a better accompaniment I went to Ralfe Bande's (the Ralfe Bande's?) fab absurdist-friendly score for Paul King's film "Bunny and the Bull", but reviewing the resultant mash-up I think it turned out a little joyless. Then I saw the photograph below, and went to Bowie. "Station to Station" is nice and long (if not long enough), but it's also fierce and I think it fits. See what you think. I'm going to pretend that this is Keaton's Bowie tribute.

On the subject of thin white dukes, David Cairns' blog introduced me to the film and explains here how the whole thing was actually a satire on a peculiarly gaunt contemporary - the unfortunately named William S. Hart - a star of the silent western who'd kicked Buster's friend and mentor Fatty Arbuckle when he was down. So much surrealism, it turns out, is just spoofs of things I haven't seen. (By the way the other name above the title - Eddie Cline - went on to direct most of W.C, Fields' features. His last, "Never Give a Sucker an Even Break", features Fields chasing a bottle of whiskey off the observation deck of an airplane only to land in a screwball interpretation of The Tempest, a mountain nest occupied by Margaret Dumont, her virgin daughter, and a gorilla. Recommended obvs.)

It'll Hurt More

 Of course, Alan Rickman's death hasn't really sunk in yet.

 I rewatched "Truly Madly Deeply" only a few months ago, on an old VHS, appropriately enough. And, once again, skiving off work to hang with Rickman's prickly ghost seemed a far more beautiful fate than having to move on to Michael Maloney and his hopping sack of quirks. "Wait," I thought on this latest rewatching "Is this subconsciously why I found grief so attractive? Because of Maloney with his sleeves stuffed with doves, trying too hard? Because of this film, and Bach, and Barrington Pheloung? Because of Juliet Stevenson? Because Alan Rickman made self-indulgence look so dashing?" Might this also have been why I spent so much of my twenties keeping my coat on indoors?

 

Spoilers?

 Probably.  

 It's still there, under my skin, if I think about it. Look up. His influence can be seen even in the banner of this blog. Let's not mince words: for anyone of my generation acting as they entered adulthood, Alan Rickman's performances really – really – broadened our options. The key supporting player in a lot of late adolescences, I can't think what it would have been like without him.

 The Goblin King gone. Now Gruber. It hasn't really sunk in yet. After the count of three.

 One -

Sweet Thing

Okay. "Blackstar". But David Bowie was always saying goodbye, wasn't he? That's what's so devastating. Space Oddity. Changes. Time. Let's Dance. Love Is Lost. Was there ever a work where he wasn't, if not raging against, at least charting the dying of the light? Even when he sang about the future it was to sing about a world without him in it. It's ageing to think that now might have stopped.
Not might have. Has.
Maybe they've uploaded him into Roy Batty. Facebook and Twitter are full of Bowie right now, but weren't they always? That's the other thing. Wasn't someone daily finding something Bowie-based which delighted them and inspired them and which they wanted to share? This is so much less fun than when Lemmy passed.
I tweeted, as far as I could within 144 characters, "Here's how it will have to work: We're all Bowie now. Someone dies you take all you loved in them and and become it... Too much isn't there?" Someone else tweeted that they understand now how our parents must have felt when Elvis died. Maybe. But I think it's bigger than that, because THOSE TUNES... Just as Shakespeare would be a genius if he'd only written "Measure For Measure", we'd be honouring Bowie today if he'd only written "Sweet Thing" (the first song of his I went to when I read the news today)...

But that's not how writing works. I guess you keep making things. Last year I lay in and learnt to enjoy not making things and to just take things in, and the year passed as slowly as it would have if I were ten, because it turns that out taking things in - even on youtube - counts as change, and the more change you experience the slower time passes. It was beautiful. This year might have to be different however. I'm sure time will pass slowly if I make things too.
His first wife's in the Big Brother House. Major Tim's in space. I wonder if they know yet. He was beautiful, but it was never about being beautiful. He was sweet too, let's not forget that either. Let's dance.

As Many Stars as there are Ears!

 As you can see, it's been a fun winter apart from the gas leak and the prospect of having all of our floorboards ripped up and – Forget that. Why not enjoy some of the fruits of that winter down the side of your head? And forget about not having any heat, or floor – boiled eggs or floor, that's the deal – But don't worry about that! Here:

 The Monster Hunters Christmas Special! "The Rapping on The Mirror" – NOW with added SCRYING. And a whole Series 3 is on its way! I'm listening again to Series 2 as I write this. Much happy.

 North by Northamptonshire: Full Stop! A "bottle episode", which means I get to do a massive, long scene with Katherine Jakeways and Felicity Montagu and Penelope Wilton AND Geoffrey Palmer, AND Sheila Hancock, AND John Biggins, and TWO Kevin Eldons! All in a bottle! The kind of morning one files under "Christmas has come early", hence the jumper in the photo.

 And finally, this very evening on the BBC's own Radio Four, a BRAND NEW SERIES of John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme will be broadcast at half-past six! And then HERE!

 Okay, enough fruit... I wonder if there's any pizza left for breakfast.