Just so we're agreed what's good...

My readership, apologies. 

Instead of knuckling down to a post mortem on Jonah, as promised, or gloating in print (or whatever medium this is) over Jonathan Ross directing a little of his boundless enthusiasm my way last Saturday (in an interview with Mitchell and Webb about the new TV series – listen to the last fifteen minutes if you must - he lightheatedly bemoaned the non-transfer of a radio sketch I wrote called "Asbo Zapruder". By me. And then he went on about "Padlockigami". Which I wrote. Which was nice. Bracket brackets: for the record, I don't see the logistical problem being Rob dressing up like a baby seal, so much as James Bachman having to pass himself off as a French heron. Also, once you've got over the initial visual gag, the sketch is basically just five minutes of watching a man text)... yeah so instead of gloating over that, which you'll see I haven't, I have, it appears, posted the following comment on David Cairns' fine movie blog "Shadowplay" still sat here in my coat (I meant to get some eggs). When not bigging up Fritz Lang's tedious, horribly acted Die Nibelungen, Mr. Cairns has been asking for people's personal moments of cinematic "euphoria", and then charmingly and intelligently broadcasting them. Mine's not a particularly remarkable choice, but I've made it now, and it's all I have to show. So here. Enjoy. (If you have broadband obviously. If you don't, here's an old flyer:)

 

"1. the opening credits of Do The Right Thing:

2. The escape by boat in Night of the Hunter.

To my mind another pretty-much-perfect movie. Suddenly, finally, here with the image of Mitchum stuck in the water, and the kids heading off into the top right hand corner, we're out of the spiky German shadows and into a children's story. Everything is made to look as simultaneously fake and as life-like as possible. I can't explain. I first saw this late at night when I was about seventeen, and it was as the boat set off that I went from loving this picture to being in love. I can think of many examples on film of a violent mood-jolt from peace to horror, but no other example of this, its opposite, a scream that lingers as a lullaby. It's unspoofable, which is pretty much the same thing as sacred.

Both these clips are completely unconcerned with any tradition that I'm aware of. They just go: Hey we can do whatever we like! And then they do it... To which should be added, now I think of it: 3. The pan over to Christina Ricci's tap-dance in Buffalo 66."

Of which I could find no clip. So here instead is Danny Kaye declaiming "Giacomo hides not behind drapes!" Happy Valentine's, you all.

Bissous x

MITTENS IN MEMORIAM

No time as yet just now to post the Post Mortem on the run of Jonah. No time either to document my very confused emotional reaction to the airing of the Primo Levi sketch in "Laurence and Gus: Hearts and Minds". I don't know if I still find it funny. The performances are brilliant. The sound effects are brilliant. But they've cut bits. Quite a few. And does the absence of a frictionless vibrating stepladder, gravity-defying nylon scarf and gas-powered aromatherapy helmet make the sketch more merciful, or simply more glib? I don't know. Always forget a sketch is going to be edited. Am I evil?) No time either just now to comment on the sad passing of Jeremy Beadle (owner of the largest private library in Europe according to Ken Campbell - according to Ned - "Next time you meet 'im, get 'im to take you into his cellar and show you his shelves on hen-faced women!"... now bedad and alas I never shall) nor the death of mitten-spurning Maila Nurmi, aka "Vampira"... "Plan 9" cameo, obviously, James Dean's S & M stub-buddy, and seemingly sole keeper of the flame of geek-lust lighting the end of the fifties' tunnel. Howammamma!

No, the death of strangers is an easy topic. My own life more fiddly. Suffice it to say that a huge, uncomplicated, marvelous fact is currently taking precedence, and I'm going to let it - I asked for it - and return to you with the more traditional arty humhahs once everything's settled down. So, Jonah thoughts next for everyone reading this. And thanks to all who came to the show. Particularly those who hated it. You know who you are. And I love you...

and I shall do better...  

Why so serious?

Nearly there. Jonah opens tomorrow at Shunt (or tonight, depending on your sleeping patterns). I haven't performed it in three years, and a number of props were in this pile behind a curtain just outside my room. Be happy you just have to scroll...

A pleasingly large proportion turned up (and much more: most interesting find, twelve embracing artist's mannequins in a plastic bag. No idea whose.) But the surly, blue bum-face I wear as a cherub turns out to be even more squashed and brittle than I remember. I tried to work it open with some vaseline but it simply unravelled. And now my clothes look like the kind of evidence that might send Bill Clinton to the chair.

Tonight's subject line, meanwhile, refers of course to the tag-line Warner Brothers have been using to advertise the HOLY SHIT BATMAN suicide of Heath THE JOKER Ledger out OF NOWHERE months before his WHAT!... which I learnt about from Miss Meikle over the phone by the Thames at eleven... So eat THAT death, you "Britney six months to live" byline writers (I don't actually know what a byline is. I don't actually know what I'm talking about. But all the stars are bursting. God damn.)

And not since Diana died have I so stingingly, instantly felt: "Now this is going to be interesting..."

But poor Heath. 

3 solid nights of mixing sounds with sister Susy later I am

but 'appy

and I hope she's happy too.

Thank you, mighty sibling. You did it all.

What NONO What

 

Blimey is that the time?

Three in the morning. Um - Ah. Look. I found these:

 

I can't stay. Sorry. I shouldn't even be here. 

Look! I did those when I was four! How cool!

If I had more time I might argue that the unloading of all this stuff actually relates to a conversation I had in Cambridge today about ideas, the instant of an idea, the storing of that idea, the writing down of it, the changing of it, the losing of it, and cleaning. I've been asked to participate in something called "I shall never be clean". I'll explain. Just not now. "You can't clean anything without making something else dirty," Jeremy pointed out, and I think this project of his is going to be a bit of a clearout after ten years of not making. And those are often very good.

 

Actually as I'm here I might as well clear some things up:

My phone is now working again after a couple of sessions on the radiator, but its session in the coffee has made the joystick stick a little. Joylessly.

The documentary I was voice-overing yesterday for the SciFi channel turned out to be about "Heroes", and not Mary Shelley or string theory, which I'd sort of guessed really. And it turned out I'd been hired by Steve Hore who made that show-reel where I get born. Surprise. Lovely.

It's pronounced "George Ta-KAY" apparently. Not Takeye.

Laurence and Gus had their final table-read today, which I couldn't make (Cambridge, see above) and having totally failed to make good on a promise (at least to myself) of an epic sketch concerning Elizabethan conjuror (read "map-reader") Dr. John Dee and his earless, klepto stooge Ned Kelly, I submitted instead some last-minute stuff that was old and weak and listlessly tinkered with at five in the morning WHICH IT IS NOW AS WELL!!!...

NO!!!

HOW CAN IT BE FIVE?!?!? Hhhhh...

Anyway - thereby ends with a snivel and a whimper an assignment that up until that dawning has been all grins and zeal.

Anyway.

And Shunt are giving me everything I ask for and more regarding "Jonah". Which is incredibly exciting but does mean I have to get some work done now. Or maybe fume with hubris and balls this up as well. I see Chris Goode (see past strands and tangents) has kindly posted the following plug on his blog, which has made me laugh and will have to make do in lieu of a press release. Now GOOD NIGHT. NIGHT. GOOD NIGHT.

"This revival might be garbage, who knows, but the several times I saw it at CPT, it frightened and baffled and upset me and made me laugh, all in ways that I normally associate only with getting out of the bath in a heavily mirrored room. It is ruthlessly inventive, acutely painful and, oh, stuff. It is also very titillatingly close to this new invention of mine called theatre."

 

Notes towards a definition of Mastodon

On Tuesday I'm going to record a voiceover for a "documentary for the Sci Fi Channel". That's all I know so far and I'm simultaneously very excited and sure I shouldn't be since I've no idea what the Sci Fi Channel actually documents. Nevertheless yesterday found me pacing the floor of Plague fruitlessly speculating which words I might be called upon to intone ("Cosmos" was one I hoped for. "Shelley" another.) And then in the evening, changing the subject somewhat, I went over to John Finnemore's where the conversation among those assembled inevitably turned to the root of the word "Mastodon"... "something teeth" was as far as we got before Robbie looked it up: And a mastodon, it turns out, is an extinct straight-backed elephant, slightly smaller than the Mammoth, whose teeth "exhibit a pattern of cone-shaped cusps ideal for browsing". Which must be why the committee of paleontologists called together to name this lesser mammoth settled on the name "Nipple Teeth". That's what "Mastodon" means. That is the lesser mammoth's defining characteristic according to those namers. It's teeth look like tits.

And does anyone remember those Italian Scientists who published research into the number of glasses of wine you should drink a day? Four, they'd discovered. They sound fun too.

A book. A cover. You judge.

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