GO, GONG GANG!!!

 WOOOO!!! Give me an O! Give me a U! Give me a T! Give me an S! Give me... another T! Give me a... Give me A! Give me... hang on...  GO, FINNEMORE!!! How's that for not getting sixty per-cent on anything, you lovely fella – Sorry! – lovely Fellow! And please note, readers, that the Writers' Guild didn't just give John this award last night in recognition for his Outstanding Contribution to radio comedy writing, or to comedy writing, but to Writing – which is world-straighteningly just. Because John strives, and for as long as I've known him has always striven (striven?... strove? strived?) to be an outstanding writer, not just by not his own self-punishing standards, but by those of every single audient in front of whom he goes out and performs this stuff. Performing it alongside him is one of the least worrying things a person can do, and being asked to do it has always felt like a prize in itself – perhaps the only prize John will never be able to win. 

I mean, just look at the list of works above! No. Look at it. Closer... Nothing missing, is there, Writers' Guild? Just look at the breadth of that. That episode of "Safety Catch" he wrote? Yep, that's there. "Dead Ringers"? Yep. Mm-hm. All there. Yhm. Nooooothing missing, nope... 

 OH! AND my friend, and former creative fixture of the Shunt Lounge, Season Butler, has won Best First Novel for "Cygnet", which I raved about last year on Instagram thus: "a bit like what I guess it feels like having a biro stuck in your throat so you can breathe easier feels like – shouldn't make you safer but does", which was meant to be a recommendation, because it is also brilliant.

 It's a shame there's nothing of John's you can currently enjoy as well. Wait... let me check that list of works again... Anything? Mm? Maybe also to do with swans? Nothing? Nope. Oh well. Hallelujas all round.

P.S. Don't forget! Frankenstein Wednesday tomorrow! Let's see if that happens!

My Heart So Full and These Empty Hands

 I found this on my phone from 2018. I also note that I wrote next to nothing in 2019. And now in 2020 every second post on F*c*book is a link to the Australian fundraiser: "Please help any way you can. This is terrifying", but this isn't F*c*book, so here are some happinesses. Firstly:

 Watching Greta Gerwig's "Little Women" is like watching the Beatles. Anyone wanting to spend two hours in a room full of kindness should find a screening. Secondly:

 Robbie Hudson wrote the first show in which I appeared with John Finnemore "Frankenstein and the Sharks of Doom", a Mighty Fin Musical with songs by Susannah Pearse. The first time I performed John's writing was another Mighty Fin Musical with songs by Susannah Pearse "Diary of a Nobody", which was also the first time I worked with Carrie Quinlan. Mighty Fin Musicals are excellent amateur dramatics is what I'm trying to prove here, and "Farm" was the Mighty Fin's first, and it's being staged again this week with all proceeds going to charity as is the point of Mighty Fin. Tickets are on sale here and other Mighty Fin merch is here. Robbie also characteristically co-wrote with Johnny Flynn a folk musical about the Magnitsky act which aired last night, and can be heard here. Thirdly:

 I was hoping to be in "Farm" myself, but another happiness occured and I was asked to play an excellent role in an excellent TV show this Friday instead, and I've just received the call sheet and my mate Ned Mond's in the episode too, so this Friday should be amazing. But that's the end of the happiness, and Friday will not be amazing because on Friday my friend Morgan is finally being evicted from Seaview, his home of forty years, and mine for three.

 I can only say again what I said in February. He helped save my life and took me in when I needed a place, and there was no one he didn't take in. His work is as generous as he is and I hate this. If I'd ever learnt a second language I'd probably run screaming from the English-speaking world right now, but I never even did that, and I've just landed a telly, speaking of which the photograph of John Logie Baird came from here. Apart from that I have no idea what to say that is both true and happy about this thing I desperately want to say something about. Morgan made a book that's very happy though, and you can buy it here.

  

 Oh, one thing I can say: Morgan shared this video on F*c*book as well, and it reminded me that I don't look at nearly enough cartoons on youtube. I love monsters and it made me very happy - it's very him - and Morgan, if you're reading this I love youse too. Everyone else, have a happy and maybe helpful week. Here's a million monsters:

Benchless in Baatu (Jenny Nicholson does some digging)

 "What Walt would later describe as the best weekend of his life..."

 Here's animator Ward Kimball and his boss larking around at the Chicago Railroad Fair in 1948 (and here's the source). This delightful photograph pops up in the video below, another great piece to camera from Jenny Nicholson and the subject of today's post (I blogged about her visit to Pandora here). If you've absolutely no interest in Disneyland, then move on, dear reader, but if, like me, you think it might be the most impressive work of art of the twentieth century, BOY does Nicholson deliver! "Star Wars Land: An Excruciatingly in-Depth Prequel" is an almost literal dissection of the place. Here's a map:

It is a map I grew up with – hung by the front door where we kept our wellies – of Disneyland from 1976. Dad was a huge fan. When I finally visited the park in the nineties – although I didn't take it in at the time – the area depicted just to the left of Fantasyland was unrecognisable. I'll enlarge it a bit:

 Those tracks are a ride called "Nature's Wonderland". Nicholson's video is full of footage showing it was more than just a mine train ride (although "Walt Loved Trains", and Nicholson makes a great argument for the whole of Disneyland being one huge train set). The place was actually crammed with many modes of transport...

  Importantly they served not only as "conveyances" but a "futuristic mode of ornamentation." To quote Nicholson: "they are not just rides for the people who are on them, they are also symbiotically enhancing the experience for everyone in their sightline."

I love talk about sightlines. The reason you can't see any evidence of the rest of Disneyland is that the whole area was dug out to be eight feet deeper than the rest of the park. By the time I visited, twenty years later, it had all been concreted up – animatronic elk, the lot – to be replaced by the Big Thunder Ranch, including a petting farm with real animals, where Jenny would later work (the park's least popular attraction, but "a quiet place to chill for a minute"). All this was then re-excavated a couple of years ago to create the planet of Baatu for Star Wars Land, which is why I said this video is an almost literal dissection.

  I also love talk about seating arrangements, so it's worth noting the end, where things get darkest, as Nicholson interrogates "Project Stardust" – the plans made by the park to help the "flow" of visitors to Baatu by removing "benches and planters", that is, literally anywhere to sit down or find shade, or as Jenny puts it "a place to linger". There's no petting zoo on Baatu. I don't think that's a decision Walt would have made.

The Berenstain Guide To Alchemy

Michael Berenstain is the son of Stan and Jan. They did bears. He, apparently, studied alchemy...

 The Sorceror's Scrapbook isn't mentioned on Michael's Wikipedia page, but it is beautifully illustrated and, as far as I can tell, much pretty spot on.

Shadow-Unboxing (or: Why I'm totally fine with the map of Earthsea)

"To let understanding stop at what cannot be understood is a high attainment. 

Those who cannot do it will be destroyed on the lathe of heaven." 

                                                                                                                 Chang Tzu

 Try telling that to Dangermouse.

 And still on the subject of maps...

 This is the ball-ache that greets any reader opening Ursula K. Le Guin's "A Wizard of Earthsea". For much of the book, it appears to be an example of exactly the kind of map-at-the-beginning-of-a-book I talked about dreading in yesterday's post – the kind you're meant to constantly refer back to while following the hero's journey, an impediment to reading, crammed with unnecessary detail, imprisoning upon the page a world which the act of reading is supposed to liberate. But Le Guin's brilliant, and clearly knew what she was doing, because SPOILERS! the book's climax takes place off the map. It's only beyond the edge of the world that Ged can name his shadow, and – like Dangermouse in "Custard" – let reality catch up with him. The map isn't here to show us where the hero went, but to show us, physically in fact, what he had to escape. It's an excellent way of depicting magic. I'm guessing. I'm very glad I re-read it.

  

When does this happen in the book though? 

I still do not remember this happening in the book.

 "Every story must make its own rules. And obey them." I was inspired to read more Le Guin because of an excellent documentary no longer available on iplayer but still viewable here. And I haven't read any of the other Earthsea books yet. Nor worked out what the point of the map at the beginning of "The Dispossessed" was either so, you know, maybe I'm wrong and she just liked maps.

 One other takeaway – Character after character offers to tell Ged the name of his shadow and save him his journey, but it's clear he's meant to turn them down, get lost, and work it out for himself, which – taken with what I remember of "The Lathe of Heaven" – leads me to ask: Does anyone know if Ursula K. Le Guin had a beef with therapy?

Why Not Build A World? (Enjoying the Unvisitable)

  I'm very sympathetic to the idea that all the best fiction has a map at the front, but I'm not a complete convert. Different maps serve different puposes: the map in The Hobbit is a call to adventure, while the maps of the Hundred Acre Wood or Moominvalley are more like welcoming gifts. Both types are pretty scant on detail, and both are types I like: maps you don't have to constantly refer to. It's not just laziness that makes me favour these maps, it's that they make no serious attempt to pretend – as some fantasies do – that imagined lands can be depicted objectively.

 It was Nerdwriter's video below that got me thinking about this (that, and the fact I just finished "A Wizard of Earthsea" but I'll write about that map tomorrow). According to Nerdwriter the "bill of goods" of a fantasy is not World-Building, but "the ideas and insights that spring forth from the explosive act of reading":

Or to quote M. John Harrison on his own imagined world:

"Like all books, Viriconuim is just some words. There is no place, no society, no dependable furniture to 'make real'. You can't read it for that stuff, so you have to read it for everything else."

  I was delighted to see Harrison's name pop up. I've always loved "In Viriconium" – there's a detectable Viriconian influence here for example. Like Bastian's Fantasia in "The Neverending Story" the city is unmappable. In my spare periods at school, I used to walk along the then undeveloped South Bank in the shadow of Bankside Power Station (now Tate Britain) looking for places Viriconium might be, scouting liminal locations. And any reader in any other city could do the same.

 That's one of the reasons I love Orson Welles' film of "The Trial", whence all these images (more here). Unable to shoot in Prague, he had to invent his own dream city from bits of Paris, Milan, Rome, Dubrovnik and Zagreb – effectively shooting the film in Viriconium. Terry Gilliam's own stab at Kafka a couple of decades later, "Brazil", would conjure a similar city out of real locations; its setting, according to the opening title – "somewhere in the twentieth century"  – similarly vague.

 So that's why I'm not a-hundred-per-cent a fan of maps at the beginning of books. Fantasy locations are unvisitable. Definitive visualisations are impossible. That said...

  I can't have been the only child to think Tolkein was taking the piss with his illustations to "The Hobbit". Show us the bloody monsters.

Frankenstein Wednesdays! Prologue... Deadzoning Dracula!

 Sorry, but I'm really pleased with this discovery.

 Silence is creepy, and talking pictures were still pretty new when Todd Browning's film of "Dracula" came out in 1931, so a film without music was probably an innovation, and what I'm suggesting is obviously heresy... 

 Nevertheless, I've always wanted to see "Dracula" be given a proper musical score. Even the film's most ardent fans would admit, once we leave Transylvania, things becomes a bit slow and stagey, but what makes a film "stagey"? It's based on a stage adaptation, but the problem isn't so much a failure to open the play up, perhaps, as a failure to allow the audience in. Here's a clip...

 

 Before.

  And here it is again, but this time I've done a Super Kool Kane Mix, and plastered Michael Kamen's score for "The Dead Zone" all over it, and come on!

   After.

 

 Music helps broadcast an inner life, and that's pretty useful in a story about mind control. There's nothing "stagey" about these performances now, at least not to me. They're big, yes, but it's "Dracula"! I'm in the room now. I get it. I care. There's dread, yearning, regret, bloodshed, romance... I'm really trying to avoid using the word "stakes"... Kamen's score has it all, and it turns out so did Browning's film.  

 Again, here's a clip without the score. And now with:

   Again! Again!
 

 It's worth forking out for the Blu-Rays if you can next time you're in CEX, and maybe having your own fun with the soundtrack. Dwight Frye as Renfield particularly benefits from Universal's gorgeous restorations. His teeth really glisten, his eyes really gleam. Anyway, now that I've touched upon "The Creature From The Black Lagoon" and completely fixed "Dracula", next Wednesday we'll (hopefully) begin this trawl through Universal's original "Dark Universe" in earnest, with a film that absolutely allows the audience in. This is what I'll be working with. And your homework is James Whale's "Frankenstein".

 (If you actually want to hear something informed and enlightening about this film by the way, I can really recommend "Why is there cardboard in Dracula?")