Sorry these are going up late, it's just I've... I've been getting jobs! Great little jobs. One after another. Here's a photograph from one of them.
The six prosthetic nipples pinned to polystyrene are part of something I did over the weekend, care of alarmingly young job creators Uncle Shortbread. As is this gorgeous display:
Okay. Now I think you're ready for Christopher Walken dancing his clothes off.
Or his writers do, I don't know, however it works. Obviously looking up old US talk-show clips on youtube isn't all I've
been doing with my evenings (and afternoons*) but - you know how it is -
the mind gets into a groove, you work evenings, mostly, and you've
moved again so there's loads of conveniently out-of-the-way stuff in
boxes to once again find less convenient places for and you feel at home
finally but you've become so used to feeling displaced and so YES... I
have been watching quite a bit of Jimmy Fallon AS IT HAPPENS.
The scope for unchecked, sloppy fun paradoxically afforded by the industrial-scale demands of a nightly American talk-show (as opposed to its weekly UK counterpart) is a contradiction I first fell for back watching The Larry Sanders Show nearly twenty years ago, long before youtube gave me access to the less fictional snippets of Conan, Jay, Letterman, Kimmell and Craig Ferguson (Craig Ferguson?!) which I now sort-of-I-guess-enjoy, but my enthusiasm for the theatrical and even pastoral responsibilities of the nightly hour-long telly treadmill has remained undimmed and chipper. John Oliver has of course just taken over hosting duties on The Daily Show, I know, and yay! - but the political focus and consequence of that particular gig make it a bad example of what I'm trying to talk about here. This is what I'm talking about:
This is Jimmy Fallon. Until recently I knew him only as the corpsing drummer in that Will Ferrell sketch where Christopher Walken says "More Cow Bell" (good luck finding that online) but the more familiar I become with Fallon's talent the more convinced I am it's really Fallon's frivolity which turned More Cow Bell into something loved enough to gets its own T-shirt. His attention to the whole is seemingly instinctive, his care over detail is on a par with CERN's, and he has an ear and an eye unmatched by anyone else I can think of working in studio-based television. Take the sketch above: two boards are wheeled on, a filter's applied and suddenly we're in a movie - that's your joke, that's Love, that's Art. Seriously. Or when he plays Neil Young singing the them tune to "Fresh Prince" and is absolutely in it, it's the shadow cast by the hat over his eyes that means someone somewhere involved in this is a meticulous genius...
Or Steve Martin punching Death in the face, here...
Or the decision not to prerecord these twenties inserts, here...
Or everything about this even though I've no idea who Michael McDonald is...
I'm reminded of The Muppet Show, but with better jokes, or what Adam Buxton might make if he was given his own talk show, or indeed anything. Have you half an hour still spare? Join me.
Excellent idea.
"Who's on first?" extended edition. Excellent idea.
Not raising interest rates on student loans. Excellent idea. And if Jeffrey Tambor, formerly of "Larry Sanders", happens to be a guest on your show, well this idea is...
It was the press night of Ring tonight, so, and yikes - there's people moving in that dark - take your headphones off (don't take your headphones off!) and you'll be astounded at the amount of slithering people produce... in that dark. Anyway, regardless, today was also New Old Pope Day, so thanks to Alan Cox for drawing my attention to this beautiful thing from Second City Television *. Also thank you Canada, for realising Victor Spinetti is a thing. The winner of this sketch has to be Dave Thomas whose "Richard Hariss" is good enough to raise the question of why Richard Harris impressions are not now more prevalent. All it should take is for someone to get it right - see Christopher Walken impressions post Kevin Spacey doing it at the Oscars, or Blair post Bremner... (We're still waiting for a decent impression of any of the current cabinet by the way. What happened?)
* SCTV's alumnibunch include Rick Moranis, Catherine O'Hara, Harold Ramis, John Candy and Martin Short. I first encountered them on network awesome where their eight-minute-long sketch pitting Vikings against Beekeepers alerted me to their esoteric fabness.
P.S. It's only after posting this I realised the new Pope's called Francis. Which if you come and see Ring... you'll... well, you'll see. Rosenberg just keeps nailing that zeitgeist.
Basically, what these depictions of the blinding of Polyphemus prove is that it's hard to paint a cyclops from the side. Representing the physical world in two dimensions, like impersonating Christopher Walken, is something we can only to do it once we've seen how someone else does it, and at the time these vases were painted, 27 hundred odd years ago, clearly nobody had yet drawn someone from the front. I'd love to know what anxiety, if any, was felt by the artists who had to depict a famously one-eyed creature under these restrictions. Once the first Cyclops had been attempted, was the heat off, the precedent set? I can't find out which of these vases was the first though, nor whether the artists had seen each other's work, or simply decided independently to stop bothering.
Gorgons were painted face on! And they date from as far back as the vases! So artists did know how to paint a face from the front. But only if it belonged to a gorgon? How did that work? And is this actually a face seen from the front? Or is it...? Let me just cover up one half with my hand... Is it just two profiles stuck together?
I wonder if the ancient Greeks had fun making these with a mirror.
The six prosthetic nipples pinned to polystyrene are part of something I did over the weekend, care of alarmingly young job creators Uncle Shortbread. As is this gorgeous display:
