Exit Bob Hoskins, Pursued by a Salad.

Not one for the coulrophobes.

 Ideally I'd have posted this Christmassy treat on Twelfth Night, sorry, but it's still panto season somewhere, so here's Bob Hoskins as Dickens' favourite clown Joseph Grimaldi displaying a talent for slapstick not employed again until "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" There are also cameos from David Rappaport and Chris Langham, and a giant vegetable mutant whose inclusion can presumably be explained by this cartoon from the Victoria and Albert Museum, depicting Joey "Setting to with a Grotesque Figure which he makes up of a series of Vegetables, Fruit &c. and which becoming Animated beats him off the Stage"...



 ... although there's no such set-up here. The giant All-Seeing Eye on Bob's midriff meanwhile, for which I can't find any precedent in cartoons of Grimaldi, must be explained by the fact that this was directed by Ken Campbell, who'd just finished staging the Illuminati Trilogy and possibly meant the whole Omnibus documentary from which this clip was nicked to serve as a secret Discordian Salute to the Embodiment of Chaos. You can watch "Ken Campbell's History of Panto" in full, complete with further reenactments here. (And you can attend Grimaldi's annual Memorial Service here, but from the look of things you really have to like clowns.) Hail Eris &c!

 "GRIMALDI & the NONDESCRIPT in the Red Dwarf - the Clown kills the Pantaloon and afterwards Dresses him in the Skin of a Lion the Head of an Ass Eagles wings Cats feet & a Fishes tale." Image courtesy of the Lewis Walpole library in Yale.

I do not remember this episode of Red Dwarf.

Marie Osmond takes us into the Roaring Twenties.

Re: yesterday's post...

 She's not wrong! Personally I'd no idea any of the Osmonds had had a brush with the author of the Dada Manifesto, but here it is and it's wonderful. Thanks for the heads up, Mary!

 According to the youtube comments, Osmond hadn't entirely got her facts straight though regarding Ball's outfit: "The '13' costume discussed in the video was worn by Theo Van Doesburg, not Hugo Ball, in 1922 when he performed 'Does At Mid-Lent' at the Bauhaus." When Ball performed "Karawane" at the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916, what he was actually wearing was this:

 Image courtesy of whatever this is.

 I wonder if the people at Ripley's suggested Marie try it on. The clip is from 1985 by the way, two years after the release of "Stop Making Sense", although Ball's "I Zimbra" never made it into the theatrical cut of that so it's probably not relevant. Shame. David Byrne's little salt-shaker moves are one of the defining memories of that film for me. Like David says, "If you dance you might understand the words better." Hell of a lyricist, that Hugo Ball.

Salvador Dali's WEEEEIIIIRrrdest Painting

From the Dali Theatre-Museum my parents took me to in Figueres:

Annoyingly, I've forgotten what it's called. "Happy Cherub" or something. I can't find any other record of it online either. It's definitely by Dali though. He really did say yes to everything:

"He's a mis-leading man!" 

UPDATE: Apparently, the painting is simply called "Nude In A Landscape". Thanks, RedScharlach! Everybody go and buy her stuff.

Toto, I've a feeling we're not in... Oh we are?

Thanks to this pinterest account.

 Continuing my celebration of youtube essayists completely obsessed with theme parks, here's Kevin Perjurer's "Defunctland". The first two series pesented beautifully researched info-dumps about extinct attractions from Kevin's (and my) own childhood, but series 3 goes back even further, to the childhood of Walt Disney and a golden age of fevered Can-Do-ism that gave the world the Ferris Wheel, the Eiffel Tower*, and "Elecric Park": In 1900 the Brothers Heim had spent the then equivalent of three million dollars on a tram to bring citizens of Kansas to their brewery out of town, but when it turned out nobody wanted to take a tram to a brewery they shelled out even more on the introduction of lightbulbs, roller coasters, actors dressed as mermaids, alligator wrestling and the world's strongest magician, resulting in both a roaring success and a decisive inspiration on the tiny Walt (as well as, I assume, on The Simpsons' Duff Gardens). Enjoy the full history of this wacky Xanadu below, including tales of airship crashes, escaped carnivorous animals and "hooligan loop" accidents, all with zero causalties.

 DefunctTV's six-part documentary on Jim Henson is also hard to beat.

* And apparently, before settling upon the Eiffel Tower as its centrepiece, the 1889 Exposition Universale had considered a one-thousand foot tall guillotine, while proposals put to the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, charged with topping this, included a five-thousand foot tall tower from the top of which visitors could toboggan to Manhattan.

Hard but fast

Buster flung, still courtesy of whatever this is.

 I love Buster Keaton, you've probably heard. And comedy relies on timing, you've probably heard as well. So I feel a bit of an idiot having admired Keaton's comic timing all this while without taking into account one of the most obvious features of Silent Comedy - a feature even people who know nothing else about Silent Comedy could probably tell you about Silent Comedy - which is that it's sped up! I only realised this last week because of an excellent video by Ben Model, posted in the comments section of David Cairns' Shadowplay - always one of my favourite places on the internet - in which gags from "Cops" are run in real time as recorded, rather than as projected. They're still extraordinary stunts but it's a very different performance from Buster, more like his later television work, which I'd always assumed just seemed slower because he was getting older, like an idiot... It's not a "performance" here though, is it, it's an ingredient. He knew exactly what he was doing as the video shows, even running different gags at different speeds. So the cranked up version is the actual "performance" and, as with the animated performances of Bugs or Daffy, the technology was a vital part of it.

I still don't like all that sped up stuff in Green Wing though.

A New Year's walk in the Countryside...

... and then we saw "Cats".

It's 2020. Here's Lembit Opik.

 I'm concerned that not enough of you know what former Cheeky-Girl-dating, light entertainment Lib-Dem Lembit Opik is up to these days. Don't worry, he's doing fine:

 He's now a "Chairman of Parliament", specifically the parliament of "Asgardia", a micronation the size of a hard drive orbiting Earth which is what it is. It has a king:

Thanks, Dr. Igor! Further specifics about the actual make-up of this parliament can be found on Asgardia's website, which is of course asgardia.space, where you should also find a link to click on if you want to be mayor. Don't worry, it has scientists as well obviously:

 So yes, I will be keeping a very close eye on these guys. The full story of this putative zero-gravity sex farm or whatever it is can be enjoyed in Amy Hoggart's brilliant piece for "Samantha Bee's Full Frontal" below, which is how I first heard of it, and in which I was really not expecting to see Lembit Opik pop up. Anyway, happy twenpy-twenpy everyone! Here's to the future...

"He founded the nation. Give him a break."