My Alien Friends

I was recently delighted to rediscover, at my folks' house, my old UFO reports book. I'm a sceptic, I know it's all rubbish, but I find UFO's a fascinating psycho social reflection of their times.

Plus the fact that it gives illustrators a chance to let their imaginations run, run into deep space.

This book contains some nicely atmospheric pastels of UFOs, such as these;

UFO from the Valentich disappearance

UFOs buzz cars

But, it is with the aliens that they really get a chance to shine. Or not, as the case may be.

Armless aliens and their blue blob spaceship

Happy smiling spaceship holding hands

Lobster handed floating monsters

"I come in peace and fetishwear!"

"It could be you!"

Tony Benn pipesmoking dude

Rejected cyberman design

Vilas Boas space babe

"Don't fuck with my garden!"

Errrrr

"And I saw, mushroom head"

The Martian Cabaret

"We cater to all, regardless of gender, race, species, or number of limbs."

So ran the marquee for the Cabaret of Ares, backlit with electric light, glowing green above the medium sized backstreet off the West End. People had become used to Martians working in intricate labour - they were working in jewellery and clock making in the city these days - but never before in an arts environment.

After the invasion of 1897 failed it had been thought that all of these inhuman, unearthly creatures had been killed by Earth bound micro organisms they had no immunity from, but as it transpired, this was not the case. Younger specimens, it appeared, had an inbuilt immunity that gradually faded away as the creature got older. Taken into scientific care, and fed a diet of blood with iron supplements, the young Martians had unexpectedly thrived, and had even gathered an adaptation to the more strenuous gravity and heavier atmosphere of Earth.

So, twenty years down the line found these Martians, and their budded offspring, trying to make a way in a human society where the freak show novelty had long since worn off. They were able to communicate using a complex tentacled sign language, and their engineering skill had long since been noted. But as former world owners and world conquerors, they were bored, dissatisfied, and longing to stretch their experience away from Martian hive regimentation to some of the more human frolics they had witnessed over the years.

Hence the cabaret. Recruited by expert in Martian sign and theatrical agent Doctor Hornbeam, four Martians - three dancers and a pianist, were billed to perform at the Strandling Theatre, an off West End establishment with an experimentalist bent.

Advertised in the times, the evening was a sell out. Doctor Hornbeam stood satisfied at the door counting white bills of money, while the theatre owner, one Mr Arnold, beamed from ear to ear.

Insides the electric footlights went up as the main lights dimmed. On stage, were the four Martians. The former drinkers of human blood, destroyers of towns and villages with their deadly rays and toxic smoke, were ready to entertain their public.

One of them was 'seated' at a piano, its rounded green-brown body essentially just dropped on a purple cushion - now rather stained - at an angle enabling it to play the keyboard with its 16 mouth tentacles. In credibly dextrous, it played complex harmonies on a perfectly tempered clavier, the crystalline sharpness of the tuning causing wine glasses in the crowd to call in sympathy, the wine forming standing waves like rings in a pond after a stone has been thrown in.

The other three Martians sang, one clad in a bowler hat, the other a fascinator of sorts and the third a leather waistcoat engineered to fit the spherical body.

"Alllloooo aloohooo" they cried in augmented 5ths and sharp 9ths. "Alllllooooo oooo-oooo" and the spotlights were filtered red, and another light was trained across the crowd in slow swoops, reminding some older patrons of the heatray of the days of the invasion.

"Alllooo hoo-oooh ooo" and whatever they were singing about - a longing for home, a failed tentacle love affair, the beauty of the girl from Syrtis Major they'd never get to meet, they meant it. All the while they moved their sixteen limbs in the most extraordinary ways, creating a shadowplay of intricacy unrivalled on the backdrop behind them, hypnotising the crowd in all its finery.

Another piece was instrumental, and featured the dancer-singers linking their tentacles like Moebius strips and forming rings and spirals in shadowplay. Another piece was comedic in nature, and featured the three Martians exchanging their headgear with each other, and also with delighted members of the front row, who replaced shock with laughter, as the celestial cat burglars whipped their headgear off so fast you could barely see it done.

The final piece however, replaced bawdery and shadows with poignancy. A solitary Martian sang wordlessly in minor thirds as a picture of Mars taken with the Greenwich reflector was projected onto the backdrop behind it. The piano adopted terrestrial harmonics at last, and the whole effect was so moving that many of the audience found themselves complaining that smoke was getting in their eyes, as teardrops dripped down the canyons of their faces.

Stage right, pound signs were glittering in Doctor Hornbeam's eyes. At last! A hit!

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 08.12.14

The Space Music of Doctor Phibes

The music of space. Been on my mind a lot recently, with the thoughts of the poor Philae lander all on its own, batteries dying on a cold and hostile comet before it fell into what seems likely to be a permanent sleep.

What sounds does Philae hear in its sleep out beyond the orbit of Mars. Has The Sandman's sister Death called on it to take it across to the "other realm".

A band that always transports me into other space dimensions is Doctor Phibes and the House of Wax Equations. You almost certainly haven't heard of them, they were a very short lived concern in the early 90s, one that if I remember right very sadly came to an end when their charismatic vocalist Howie suffered mental health problems that ended in tragedy. I saw them live only once, at the 1993 Phoenix Festival, and can vouch for out there their music was. So hypnotic.

They were much better experienced live than on record, although their one album "Whirlpool" is a psychedelic classic. Enjoy their single "Hazy Lazy Hologram" and let those echoing guitars wash over you.

My "Ashes to Ashes" Hair Struggle

Much as looking like Keeley Hawes might be very very jolly for some chaps, it is not of her that I speak, rather David Bowie in his all-time classic "Ashes to Ashes" video, complete with black skies, exploding kitchens and Steve Strange.

I remembered it, vaguely, as a child in 1980, but not clearly, and it took the "History of Rock Video" all nighter on the BBC in 1986 to put it back in my consciousness. There was a half hour Bowie segment, and I was absolutely enthralled when "Ashes to Ashes" appeared and seemed a thousand times better than I remembered.

And then, there was his hair.

 

 

Not the best shot there has ever been, but the best one I could find. It was long at the front, parted, but sort of quiffed over so it was hanging over his (strange) right eye. It was immense to me, the birth of a new Mister Mulberry, the gonk with the terrible curls and waves into the semi-hip teen.

 

 

The hair would be the vanguard of this transformation. That was the plan anyway. But even after the hair was cropped short and the back and left longer at the front, the crucial change away from early 80s mullets, it was still far too wavy to make it look like the suavily weird Mr Bowie.

 

This didn't stop me from standing in front of a mirror for hours with this bizarre round hard toothed brush with a sort of boingy end. I'd dig it in at the front like a gardening fork, pull the hair out straight as I could, then sort of curl it round the brush to straighten it out against the wave.

 

The strands could then be draped across my eye in the appropriate fashion, and so I would look the Bowie part.

 

For all of about five minutes. Ten, if I used industrial amounts of mousse and hairspray (the brand with the sort of Mondrian painting on the cans) and gave my hair the texture of a mummified jellyfish. After that, the curls would spring it back to where it sodding well was, only with the addition of a weighty coating of utter gunk.

 

 

This ritual would persist for months, with the same result. I never learned from this, when David Byrne appeared  in my life, I would go for it again, with more "product" and even worse results.

 

People just don't remember what a trial it was to be a teen with wavy hair in the 80s, they really don't. "Ooooh, perm!" I would have yelled at me, by pocket Bryan Ferries with a girl on each finger.

 

Worse was folk saying "Girls would kill to have hair like yours!"

 

Thanks Granny, for saying my hair looked like a woman's. Thank you very much.

 

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 17.11.14

The Pub Travels Through Time, but Regresses

My former favourite pub is a time machine...

I swear to god it is something to do with the cellar. I caught a glimpse down there once, I didn't see any barrels of beer or spare bottles of spirits or crates of over priced coke bottles the size of thimbles.

Instead I saw a blue glow like Cerenkow rediation, and the sound of some massive demonic device that seemed to be sucking all the power out of the pub and setting off fire alarms, and bringing forth smoke.

This device seems to be some kind of time regression device. It's the only thing I can think of it being, For it is caused evolution, of the human race in particular, to run backwards.

Sometimes, I wonder if that also includes myself.

When I first started going, in the dim mists of (pub) time, the pub was a quiet stronghold of the intelligentsia, and dammit we were proud. The only pub open till 2am, it was our own speakeasy. It got more popular. Students were there playing music. There were lock ins for the chosen few, until 830am in one case.

Then the bad people heard about it, and initimidation arrived, along with horribly cheap coke snorted in the medievally unhygienic lavatories. The lock in bar staff left, and bar staff who encouraged the presence of thugs arrived.

The hairlines got lower, the knuckles began to drag. Faces began to bear the mark of inbreeding, rough voices, IQs lower than the pool balls used on the (sign of doom) pool tables. Fruit machines for the hopeless gambler. DNA decaying, you could see strands of it disappearing out the window, synapses dying just by being in there.

Bouncers on the door. Sub humans now present, girls with cottage loaf bun hairstyles, lacquered so they are hard and shiny, like the crappest bargain hunt antiques. Voice boxes have now de-evolved to the point where they can only make harsh, guttural sounds. As for the men...

Ballards Drowned World...people have lost the need for brains, they are operating with their spinal columns alone. Floodwaters rise, the pub is filled with giant ferns for the rabble to fight in. They spend so much time punching on the floor, the local pub-goer now walks on all fours. They copulate in the pub by masturbating onto the floor, the females then rub themselves in it like a lamprey or hag fish. 4 weeks later flat headed children are born, and she is ready for the next litter.

I'm watching all this. Recording it. Scientific observations from my corner. Taking genetic samples from drool and spittle and breeding fluids.

My once favourite pub is now in the Pre-Cambrian.

BOOKS - 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson

Having seemingly, and unconsciously, avoided sci fi novels since the death of Iain M. Banks, I found myself reading a work on which he seems to bear a significant influence on.

Another one, in fact.

In fact, I find myself thinking that the work is almost a prequel to Banks' "Culture" universe, with early forms of terraformed planets, terrarium spaceships with evocative names, and a form of AI that has developed well beyond Turing Test levels.

I'm probably a mile out with this assessment, but then again I'm hardly Clive James when it comes to criticism.

The story involves terraforming artist Swan being involved in an apparent accident on her adoptive home of Mercury when her city - which rolls around permanetly out of the scorching sun - suffers an apparent projectile strike that nearly claimed her life; and left her cancerous and wandering tunnels to survive in the company of a new acquaintance, the lanky Wahram, native of Saturn's moon Titan.

As she investigates the incident from one end of the solar system to the other, it becomes clear that the incident on Mercury was no accident, and only intelligences of the very highest order could have arranged the attack, but who? We also see her on Earth, attempting to re-introduce extinct animals to the North American landmass from "space ark" terraria to a flooded, struggling planet where most folk capable of doing so have long since left.

It is a far easier read than Banks' work, and although not possessing the incredible span of his imagination, it is easier to grasp the spaceborne society of the novel. It also acts as a fascinatingly deep study of sexuality and body modification; males and females as we know them are not the dominant genders with many people choosing to have the genitals of both, or neither. DNA from other species, both alien and not so, are also combined with human with varying degrees of taboo.

The world of 2312 is one where people can sing like birds, and have experience sex as a male and a female simultaneously.

The Swarm and Crap Cinema's Greatest Quote

"Are you endowing these bees with human motives? Like saving their fellow bees from captivity, or seeking revenge on Mankind?"

"I always credit my enemy, no matter what he may be, with equal intelligence."

So responds Richard Widmark as General Thalius Slater (wasn't he in the Burton "planet of the Apes"?) to Michael Caine, as they and a host of other big star names from the 70s - Ricahrd Chamberlain! Katherine Ross! Slim Pickens! - fight to keep their heads above a mighty, buzzing, nuclear power station destroying tide of AFRICAN KILLER BEES.

"Burn you motherbuzzers!!!!"

It isn't easy, because these bees can kill you with just 6 stings, and if you don't die, agonising hallucinating madness awaits.

Butch Cassidy seems a long time ago, eh Katharine

 Of course, Widmark being the usual military idiot wants to take the shock and awe option, bombing, spraying, and immolating the bees out of existence, but Caine dissuades him with a memorable, ballbusting ecological lecture, delivered in the loudest yell Caine ever used in his career. Blowing bloody doors off has nothing on it.

That is the point, general! The honey bee is vital to the environment! Every year in america, they pollinate six billion dollars worth of crops! If you kill the bee, you're gonna kill the crop! If you kill the plants, you'll kill the people! No! No, general! There will be no air drop, until we know exactly, what we are dropping, and where, and how! Excuse me!

Of course, they are both right. Caine lures the bees offshore using some sort of sonic gizmo, where Widmark is finally able to deploy his napalm on the pollinating apid psychopaths. But not before most of the stars die, all the extras die - best scene; an old teacher screaming as her kids are agonisingly exstingulated - and Henry Fonda overdoses himself with bee venom in a fruitless attempt to find an antidote.

AAARRGGGHHHHH

Doctor Kildare's bedside manner comes in for criticism

This mega camp Irwin Allen disaster (in all senses) classic was shown last night on BBC4. Iplayer while you can and give yourself a treat.

I Love the Silurians!

The Horror Channel's Doctor Who repeats have been an absolute godsend for me; wallpaper TV I can write to without ever. having to concentrate too hard. All of the Pertwee and Baker era storylines knock the modern era into one of those "cocked hat" things - whatever is a cocked hat FFS - and the fact that most episodes appear to have been dug out of a bog make it easier to ignore, or indeed enjoy, the daft costumes, sets, and rubber suited monsters.

So. Doctor Who and the Silurians. I knew what the Siluruans were, roughly (things to get confused with the Sea Devils) and I knew they were among the best loved monsters. But I had never seen their 1970 story until now.

It is, or rather they are, fantastic.

The thing is with these Silurians is that they are not really monsters at all. They may be up to no good, but it is only initially in reasonable self preservation...their leader even has a sense of burbling charm...no mere evil green blobs on wheels, these fellows. Their high intelligence shines through.

Achh, who am I trying to fool? The charm is in the daft turd brown rubber suits; the fluttering eyelashes; the aforementioned burbly voices that make them sound like "The Fifth Element" Mondushawan on acid; they have a funny stumbling walk as if their arms have been strapped by their sides while their amphiboid heads bob back and forth; they have a light in their foreheads which have a duel purpose of killing people and moving coffin like hibernacula around; their faces are silly, and as ever when they do have a plan to hatch for the usual earthling killing purposes, it is far too long winded and complicated for it ever to work, especially when they set it out to the Doctor beforeheand in the tradition of every movie bad guy.

I love them, for every single on of those reasons, and more.

FX and FX2 - The Deadly Y-Fronts of Illusion

I managed to pick up both of these very 80s thrillers - with a loose element of sci-fi - at Oxfam over the weekend for not much money, and was looking forward to watching both of them. Neither of them seem to crop up on UK television much these days.

I was initially stunned to see Lalo Schiffrin's name turnv up in the credits, but the super heavy 1986 analogue synthesizer tunes won't appeal to "Bullit" fans.

The plot of "FX: Murder by Illusion" is actually pretty clever - special effects genius Bryan Brown (THE Australian actor in the 80s, apart from Mel Gibson who wasn't actually Australian) is hired to fake the assasination of mob boss Jerry Orback (Law and Order ahoy!) so he can join the witness protection programme. But the good guys turn out to be not so good, and Bryan finds himself fighting for his life as innocent passers by, and his girlfriend, are iced in the crossfire.

None of this is as alarming as the two standout scenes in the movie; the first when we are treated to a glimpse of Brown in his white Y fronts of a morning, and a second where he descends upon a bad guy like one of those flying squirrels.

Luckily, he overcomes these nightmarish visions to win the day, with the aid of some classic analogue FX tricks and chubby Brian Dennehy, playing the same sort of lumbering cop he played in the Skorpions favourite film, "Gorky Park". Both end up waltzing off into the sunset with 15 million dollars of mob money amid some jarring tourist film of Switzerland.

Onto FX2 "The Deadly Art of Illusion", and we find Brown still battling corrupt cops AND District Attorneys in league with the Mafia as an FX stunt to trap a sex killer goes wrong and the father of his girlfriend's child - hello Rachel Ticotin from Total Recall! The money, and moustache having all ran out for Dennehy, he teams up with Brown again to see off the bad guys with the aid of a terrifying movement micking robot clown, and an early sighting of virtual reality in the cinema.

Dan Brown must have written the bit of the script dealing with stolen Vatican gold medallions

 

 

The films are horrifically dated now, although there are less rolled up jacket sleeves and big hair on view than you'd expect. I found them an entertaining afternoon, but I shant be reaching to the back of the DVD shelf to watch them again any time soon.

 

I have no wish to see the robot clown again, let alone those Y-fronts...

 



The Unknown Villain - Boy Number 6 Kazuo Kiriyama

Battle Royale is a movie probably little known outside of fans of Manga and those "Tartan Asia Extreme" DVDs, and hence its chief antagonist does not have the reputation he deserves.

He is Boy Number 6, Kazuo Kiriyama.

Nothing behind the eyes

The Manga apparently gives him a complex backstory, that he is an intellectually superior child that had been rendered essentially sociopathic by an accident in the womb that caused to all intents and purposes a partial lobotomy.

The film just presents him as a blank "transfer student" who's first act one the game the commences - the game being the teens fight to the death until only one remains scenario pinched by The Hunger Games - is to be able to kill a gang of 6 heavily armed opponents with a paper fan.

Throughout the film he kills without mercy, using his movie standard M10 with everlasting magazines to kill boy and girl alike without making a sound. The only utterance he ever makes is when he makes an  inhuman cough into the megaphone used by two girls in a failed attempt to unite the students, before using it to broadcast a dying girl's death rattle to the whole of Battle Royale island.

The face of death

He is a killer far above any campy Bond villain or lumbering Michael Myers, and it is time he was recognised as such.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 08.10.14

Riddick's Adventures on Crematoria

"The Chronicles of Riddick" is a spectacular looking, but hugely flawed film cursed with some awful scriptwriting and dire acting.

Designed to expand the Riddick universe created in "Pitch Black" and expanded upon in video games, it tanked horribly. Vin Diesel, who has invested so much in the character that made him a star, put Riddick in cryo-sleep while he went a-fast-and-furiousing to get the readies together to make Riddick 3.

Which supposedly is even more disappointing.

The beginning of the film has risible dialogue and acting - hello Thandie Newton - scraped from the bottom of the darkest barrel in hell. But the design is amazing, and the "Big Bads", the Necromongers, are wonderfully designed right from their armour, to their flying mausoleum spacecraft detailed with tortured statues made by an astronaut Hieronomymous Bosch.

The ending is perfunctory, and ruined by a final fight scene that doesn't quite work.

It is the middle section, the section where Riddick allows a squad of Mercenaries, wonderfully led by Nick Chinlund as merc leader Toombs, to take him to the prison world of Crematoria, a "no daylight slam", that really works the best.

Crematoria is beyond hell. It is a super-Mercury ravaged by a merciless star sending out searing radiation onto a landscape of tortured lava towers and rolling fireballs. It's temperature ranges from 900 above, to a rather impossible 700 below, and only deep underground can anyone survive.

It is into this subterranean prison that Riddick is deposited while the mercs argue the price on his head with the guards, a grimy bunch of mixed ethnicity with a French boss much given to spitting and a Russian thug with an acute nose.

Below this, of course, Riddick first's job is to fight for his life against the usual slam tough nuts who want to give him a good beating - or worse. Of course he does so, surrounded by the stem rising from the volcanic interior, and scaring my favourite sub character, a goggle wearing mole apparently sexually turned on by male violence back into the hole in the lava he apparently and unwisely seems to live in. The self appointed "Guvnor"welcomes him to the jail, a rusted iron clattering of cells arranged into a cliff face and populated with a mix of rastas and ginger women, apparently. As well as Riddick's former child mentor Jack, calling herself Kira and now mutated into Alexa Davalos instead of Rhianna Griffith.

Some more great scenes follow; Riddick kills a guard with a tea cup to the heart before shitting the other guards that he can do the same with the key from a tin of pilchards, and then the remaining guards decide to rattle the prisoners with their spiny hell hounds - mutant armadillo cats with spines and a habit of turning scarlet when angry.

They eat most of the prisoners they catch, but no the Furyan Riddick, oh no. They love him!

Upstairs the warden gets wise to the fact that the Mercs have stolen their prisoner from under the noses of the Necromongers, and all hell breaks loose in the weird flying saucer on screws that is their HQ. Riddick leads the Guvnor, Kira and some other prisoners up top, to find most of Mercs dead, the Guards fled, and Toombs dangling on a rope. Riddick takes care of him by locking him in with the hell hounds, and then they deliberate how to beat the guards to the hanger and the one serviceable spacecraft before the Necromongers surely arrive.

And so follows a great set piece; while the guards run the 29.1 km in tunnels, the convicts have to run the terminator between freezing night and boiling day, initially freezing, but then sweat starting to drip as the sun approaches the horizon. They go through a snowstorm of thick black ash, through termite looking towers, across semi melted lava fields, and then finally a harsh climb up a cliff face as the suns rays cremate most of the escapees.

The Guards have beaten the prisoners to the hanger, but not the Necromongers, who make short work of the French and the Russians, while Riddick watches on. Alas he and his convicts get no further either, and he is left for dead as Kira is kidnapped for Necro conversion...

...and then it all goes to pot again, as a bizarre looking Linus Roache appears and expedites massively before burning himself to death rather needlessly, summing up all the problems is a literal flash as he incinerates in a wondrous looking way.

End. But its a great section of a not great film - that I still love because like Dune I can sometimes survive awful writing if the design is good. And in Chronicles, it really is.

The Haughty and Shaved Beauty of Natalie Dormer

I'm not given much to pulpy, pappy, celebrity admiration, but I have to give it up for Natalie Dormer with her head shaved for Hunger Games purposes.

Lori Petty must see this, look back at Tank Girl and wonder where it all went wrong. Probably when she agreed to be in it after Emily Lloyd was fired.

It's interesting how a shaved head affects the perception of a woman. Sigourney Weaver having her hair cut for Aliens was one thing, but having it shaved for the difficult but massively underrated Alien 3 was another. It gave Natalie Portman a previously unseen toughness in V for Vendetta, and GI Jane showed a very different Demi Moore than the one we thought of from Vanity Fair covers.

The transformation is not always viewed positively, of course. Sinead O'Connor was often regarded as at best scary, at worst insane, from the moment she first registered on the collective conscioousness with Mandinka, and Brittany Spears went from being pop princess to Trailer Park Trash with one pass of the barber's clippers.

Perception of beauty will be argued about until the sun turns red giant and scorches the earth before swallowing it. But, to my jaded eyes at least, Ms Dormer's haughty good looks have been rather enhanced by the procedure.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 20.09.14

Up All Night with American Mary

Normally if I get home late, I sleep the moment I hit the sofa - or bed if I'm lucky - after my late night rum and coke under the stars. I am by inclination both a night owl and a morning lark, a lifestyle that it is always going to very tricksy to maintain, and a normally gruelling work schedule tends to put me into the lark category.

Because only larks have to get up at 530 am to cycle to work in a blue collar dump where hopes and dreams are slowly composted to nothing.

However, I'm on leave at the moment, and found myself last night as insomniac as I used to be when I was 20. I also had two new, well second hand actually, DVDs to watch from the market and decided to do some double ended candle burning to watch them.

"The Wicker Tree" came first, Robin Hardy's sort of follow up to the all time classic "The Wicker Man". I'm sure I've raved about that film often enough on here so I shan't go on about it, suffice to say that it must be rolling in its reputed M3 motorway foundation grave at how bad "The Wicker Tree" is.

Britannia Nicol tried to avoid "doing a Woodward"

Trashy chastity ringed country singer and boyfriend head to Scotland to convert some Pagans, and get caught up in Mayday rituals, with added unfunny comedy tone and breasts from someone who was in Foyle's war and in no way has Willow Magregor's allure. That's it. The film is dreadful, and if it does anything, it shows that the genius of "The Wicker Man" was down to Antony Shaffer's screenplay.

Summer is most definitely not "I-cumin-in"

That over and done with, I was still as awake as a moth on speed, so it was time to deploy "American Mary" on my eyes. As unwatchable at times as "The Wicker Tree", but for entirely different reasons, this film stars Katherine Isabelle, the wonderfully sneery-faced beauty of "Ginger Snaps" fame as a drug rape by her teachers leads her to abandon her medical studies for the world of aesthetic surgical body modification.

The Soska Sister's second film, after "Dead Hooker in a Trunk", the film establishes their brilliance as visualists and conceptualists of a new Cronenbergian Candadian horror, while showing that directing actors, and acting themselves, is not their strong point.

The Soska Sisters need some mods done

With its cast of Burlesque performers and tongue split Vancouver scenesters, the film has a rough and "out-there" tone balanced by the stylish corsets and medical fetish wear of Isabelle as the movie's protagonist. Indeed the movie's most alluring scene, that of Isabelle operating on the twins in black and red scrubs, is incredibly reminiscent of Cronenberg's Dead Ringers with the surgical near-performance art of Jeremy irons as the identical twin surgeons who lose their minds over a woman.

Surgery with style

The film, being what it is, suffers from bouts of awful acting and falls away badly towards its incredibly rushed ending. But the imagination and style behind it is so striking, it inspires you to search the depths of your own mind to see if you can think of anything conceptually better.

And so far, I haven't.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 16.09.14

Who Wants to Die in their Bed?

I am by nature a coward, but I have daydreams of having a heart of cold, unfeeling steel.

Some famous writer or other, can't remember who, said “Marriage is the only adventure open to the wary”. Well I disagree. For some even that might be an unattainable goal, some might not find it terribly interesting or adventurous at all, and ultimately there is an adventure we all must take.

Hero, coward, one and all, everyone has to die. And without wishing to spill into horrible mawkish Gandalf “it's a journey we all must take” territory, it is a journey we all must take.

The trick is to make it as exciting as possible. After you've delayed it for as long as possible of course.

So no dying in my bed for me, not like most people.

I rather fancy the idea of being killed in an apocalypse...atomic war, tidal wave, asteroid strike. As a research project, it would be amazing, a literal, actual, once in a lifetime experience to end all experiences...the earth churning up under you, the thundering of a deadly wave, a scorching hot extinction event from the skies.

I w'd want to be there. I'd have to see. I'd have to know.  If it's a fate we'd all share, I wouldn't be worried about dying alone. I'd like to think tat especially in the case of a nuclear explosion, it would be like the climax of “Sunshine” where quantum and relativistic effects made it possible for Cillian Murphy to touch the surface of a re-ignited sun. How could you not want to go like that?

Reality check. The odds are against most of those things happening, in a huge way. I suppose I'll have to settle for being eaten by a pride of lions, ripped apart while I record my sensations into a dictaphone. Or smearing raw meat on my legs and running through a pack of komodo dragons.

How tedious.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 10.09.2014

"My Headaches are Caused by Alien Implants!!!"

Or so I would be saying, if I was a "certain" kind of person.

Yes, I'm struggling with headaches at the moment. Not through hangovers, cheeky reader, but rather the sort of seasonal, heavy wet air, amorphous sinus headaches that come in little waves throughout the year.

But whatever my wishy-washy shilly-shally self diagnosed for reasons for my headaches, I'm not a long standing alien contactee - or abductee as we should probably say these days - who thinks their aches and pains are caused by the dreaded Greys implanting them with devices to monitor their position and medical status, thus making it easier for them to be located for further abduction, and breeding experiments.

This is a long standing trope in science fiction, and was portrayed in reds-under-the-bed movie "Invaders from Mars" back in 1953. In 1957 the first implantation case reached UFO researchers, but the Hill Abduction of 1961 was probably the first major publicity such cases got.

Implantation in "Invaders from Mars"

Later on, Whitley Streiber's "Communion" brought anal probing and Christopher Walken dancing to intergalactic disco to the fore, and of course the X files was just one long story of implantational probular interference by the evil Greys.

As these tales reached popular culture, then the number of people reporting alien implants, and even finding strange bits of metal of supposedly unknown composition falling out of their noses or fished out of their teeth by dentists grew too.

This explains my fascination with UFOlogy not as any real science whatsoever, but rather as a reflection of society's current cultural fascinations, and subconscious worries. Some folk get headaches and think "Sinuses!" - others may think "Brain Tumour!" and a few may think "OH MY GOD I'VE BEEN EXAMINED BY ALIENS!!!!"

So many factors at work.

Having Tourettes and OCD as I do, I am well used to getting panicky about contamination fixation. I wash my hands constantly to avoid flu and the dreaded bete du jour Norovirus, and if ever I get spots on my skin, or any itching, I get really anxious about having picked up scabies or lice. How much time I have spent in my pre medicated days, hunting for evidence of parasites.

Doctors would call this "Neuro-Dermatitis" or "Delusional Parasitosis". But not those who claim to suffer from Morgellons a condition where people believe they have an itch caused by strange fibres embedded in their skin - this always reminds me of "The Fly" or "Ginger Snaps" - and may collect specimens thereof, which usually get identified down the line as the sort of natural or aritificial fibres you'd expect in a domestic environment.

I put it down to OCD. I know what that genuine condition can cause.

This piece, well, it hasn't gone where I expected. A day of bad headaches, and I'm talking about aliens and new but unknown skin diseases. I offer an explanation based on OCD and anxiety, and cultural contamination.

I have no idea if I'm right, but I'm putting it out there.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 01.09.2014

"The Prestige" and the Cinematic Pub I'd Most Like to Drink In

Whenever I watch "The Prestige", Christopher "Inception" Nolan's superlative and apparently under-rated (not by me) movie about rival magicians in the late 19th century, one of the many thoughts I have rattling around my head is this;

"God I'd so love to drink in that pub! It looks amazing."

David Bowie as Nikola Tesla, and Hugh Jackman as The Great Danton

"The Prestige" features many pubs; stews of East London, champagne dens of the West End, but one reigns supreme in my eyes. It is featured in two scenes where Hugh Jackman's Danton character meets up with his fixer played by Michael Caine, and it beyond irritates me that I can't find any stills featuring it.

A lot of people, I surmise with no actual evidence whatsoever, probably like the idea of drinking in wild, decadent cat house bars, like those ones featured in Westerns, or going further back in history the pig shitted riot of Tortuga's brothel in "Pirates of the Caribbean." But really, would you really want to drink in that place in reality. All the brawling, gunfights when you are trying to read a good book, and lice ridden clientele?

No, you really want to visit a bar like that featured in the two scenes I mentioned, a beautifully elegant establishment with a high glass ceiling  -giving an orangery feel - lots of refreshing plants, and glass racks tended to by smart gentlemen in bowler hats before high quality ale is served forth to richly whiskered patrons. Sadly, it's a set constructed in the entrance atrium of a modern building, I believe, and doesn't exist in reality.

Because I would so want to drink there. It so looks like my kind of pub.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 20.08.14

The Untold Tales of "The War of the Worlds"

I've been watching Jeff Wayne's "War of the Worlds - The New Generation" DVD - originally bought as a Christmas present for my folks but still unopened 8 months down the line. The Victorian costumes the musicians are wearing are to die for and the updated music is still amazing, but some of the vocal performances are not as strong as the original DVD production.

Like the fact that the terrible Richard Burton head was ditched, and the noticeable steampunking of the stage show. Some of the extra dialogue is pretty risible, however.

Idle Jeff Wayne chit-chat is not why I'm here however. It struck me while I was watching that all the way down the line, "The War of the Worlds" is a story told through the eyes of a single person, the first-person journalist narrator. Later christened "George Herbert" by Wayne - as in Herbert George Wells - we only see what he sees, only interact with what he interacts with. Obviously there is his brother too (as I've stupidly only just remembered) but that is so essentially the same story that in all later versions it is easily converged with the narrator's.

One of Alvim Correa's beautifully atmospheric illustrations for a French War of the Worlds

I was thinking of all the potentially really interesting tales of the Martian invasion that have been left untold. The extended serialisation Wells wrote, if I remember correctly, features some corking extras, like the scientists who was vivisected by the Martians in a rather twisted piece of satire. But there must be others.

There are obvious ones of course, like that of the narrator's wife in Leatherhead - what traumas did she suffer while waiting to be reunited with her husband? Or that of the Artilleryman, what sense of purpose did he lose after the Martians died when he realised his dream of being a working class Lord of the Underworld was over?

But think too of all the people never mentioned in the book...the nameless dead, the anonymous survivors. Who were the people who discovered the dying Martians before the journalist? Who survived being kept as a living blood donor in the invaders' food baskets, and don't say Tom Cruise with his bloody Hang Grenades.

Who met a Martian close up, and attempted face to face communication, or perhaps hand to tentacle fighting. What happened to those who stayed in an East End of London that still remembered the Whitechapel murders? Who got closest to  a Martian cylinder without being razed out of existence by the Heat Ray?

So many stories.

I wonder how many people have tried to create "spin offs"(ugh I hate that word)  from the original novel; I would imagine it's a tricky thing to do because the rights to the Wells estate are complicated. I shall research this.

Research, then perhaps see if I could produce something of my own.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 16.08.14

On Talking to the Cat that’s no Longer There

Sad to say, our much loved moggy finally found herself on the wrong side of the Schroedinger’s Cat paradox, and died a few days ago..

She now sleeps under cloud trees in the back garden, marked by a little cairn with a “cat stone” on top of it - a tabby painted round, smooth rock - the family having decided that this was a nice peaceful spot for her.

All the words we use to deal with the death of both pets, and humans, are all euphemisms of course. “Rest”, “sleep”, “put to sleep” and the like, and our behaviour is a kind of euphemism too. People talk at gravesides, I’ve been talking to the cat under her little monument outside.

I justified it by worrying she was lonely outside, the cat never having spent a night out in all her time with us, and so I say a few words to make sure she isn’t, and ask her what the plump looking blackbirds are up to. I imagine her leaping from tree to tree, peering in bird’s nest and being naughty, or sitting on a branch looking at me as if I’m stupid as I talk to thin air or give the cat stone a little stroke, furry Maine Coon tail swaying laconically

This is all for my comfort of course. I miss her, as do we all, ergo I need to talk to her, to reconstruct her. I know the cat isn’t really there, and not being religious in any way, don’t believe there is a spirit of a cat there.

And yet…

...perhaps in the world of science not yet discovered, the science to come, there is a reason she could still be there. Some “out there” types believe the Universe is essentially the same as a hologram and even a tiny section of it contains all the information that there is in the whole. Perhaps the soul is a physically identifiable quantity that really exists, and thus her mind has slipped into my beloved eleventh dimension - if it has, I envy what she’s seeing. Maybe she is a true quantum cat and can exist in multiple states a la Schroedinger.

I don’t know. But in any event, I shall carry on talking to her about the birds, and giving the cat stone a little pat.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 11.08.14

James Herbert and his Horrid, Nasty Rats

To revisit my childhood, I've just re-read "Domain", the second of James Herbert's trilogy based on a mutant strain of black rat terrorising Epping Forest. Not merely by making a mess everywhere and causing a spot of Weil's disease, but by killing lots of people and taking their heads back to their hideously deformed two headed leader so it can eat their brains.

Together with "The Rats" and "Domain", "Lair" represents the first horror I ever read, and the horror was so vivid it stuck with me always.

The mass attacks by rats are terrifyingly described; Herbert clearly loves getting into our Winston Smith like 1984 heads, and invoking the primal fear the long incisors and scaly tails can cause in people. These giant, three foot long rats with the strength of a pitbull terrier don't just kill, they eat in bloody, visceral detail.

They bite the fingers off vicars attempting to escape from a fresh dug grave the rats are violating. They eat the toes of an adulterous (of course) woman as she indoors in outdoor sex with her lover, before tearing deeper into her flesh. They devour a tent full of Barnardo boys. They blind a man by eating his eyes, and cause a man to wonder why he can still feel the rat eating his heart.

A moving tube train? No problem for the rats, who slaughter the evening commuters before slowly eating through the cupboard the stationmaster was hiding in. School children are devoured en-masse. Cinema-goers are devoured en-masse. And in "Domain", a post nuclear holocaust London throws rats into the mix of radiation sickness and rabies atomic war throws up, a high Rad count being no protection against being eaten.

Worse, was the fact that in the "The Rats" if you survived the attack, you would die within 24 hours that would cause you to lose your senses and your skin to turn yellow, stretch and tear over your skeleton.

For the youngster, the fact that Herbert would throw in a wide array of terribly written sex scenes would provide a little light relief from the rodent atrocities that would infiltrate your dreams at night and make you want to sleep with the light on. No form of strictly heterosexual forms of intercourse is left undescribed, and just like in any American horror movie of the 70s, the participants are always first in the queue for a violent death.

And finally, few folk who ever read "The Rats" will be able to forget the phrase "You couldn't fuck a Polo mint with that!" in any kind of hurry.

Copyright BLoody Mulberry 09.08.14

The Peugeot 205 as Space Vehicle

My stepfather still has his 25 plus year old Peugeot 205, its his pride and joy, his love, his baby, his metallic blue tangerine flake baby.

And to me, like all our other cars, but this one especially, it was a spaceship. Yes, another thing in my life that was a spaceship, an escape from being a weird kid at school, an escape from being ignored by all the damn girls, a way out of tedious maths and sciences I could no longer do.

It was an all age thing, from childhood to adulthood. How many times have I written or thought about making spaceships out of things.

The 205 was, and is, the best because of its metallic spaciness, soft top - yeah, cabriolet spaceships are not much use in space I know - and fabulous internal retro stylings out of the 50s - all manner of knobs and levers that could be used for various thruster and life support services.

It was small, you could imagine the confinement of a Gemini or Apollo crew, I think actually there was more room in the 205 than in a Gemini spacecraft. Going to Mars in a 205, no room to stand or more realistically float about.

It's still there, and this common theme, this storyline running through my head forever, escape! But now, more likely on a bicycle or running, than in a space equipped Peugeot 205.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 08.08.14

"Pele's Soccer" and Other Retro Footie Games

Recently at work, a group of 32 lucky punters took part in some kind of FIFA14 World Tournament. The game itself is very life like, it almost pours off the screen into the real world, and the moonlighting managers (three hour lunch break today eh chaps?) sit and cheer like real fans.

Am I taking part? Am I watching? Like hell.

For me, the shiny modernity of a modern football game just doesn’t cut it. It has no quaintness, no charm, and frankly if you like football that realistic, why not just go and play in the garden for pity’s sake?

I liked my football games a little more old school. Not that I was any kind of gamer now, then, or ever, but as any kid does, I enjoyed playing on my friends computer’s, and soccer type games actually offered some of the few decent opportunities for live head to head contests.

It goes all the way back, in fact, to the 70s, where visiting my father’s house I came across a classic Atari cartridge console. It was the second video game I’d ever seen, after an early “Pong” console on holiday in Arran, and it belonged to the son of a very famous footballer of days gone by. My stepbrothers used to borrow it, and I loved it, especially the “Combat” cartridge with the biplanes.

The game that got played the most was the first football game, the inimitable “Pele’s Soccer.” No flash manager mode here, you were limited to selecting a formation of, er, 1-2 as your men, shown in plan view as hexagonal blocks with sticky-out little feet, were clearly skewered together in a fixed equilateral triangle, kidneys impaled. It didn’t seem to stop them running, as they flew up and down the pitch accompanied by a marching little sound like a centipede tap-dancing. The round ball was a square and only travelled in straight or 45 degree lines (much like England) and a shrill whistle blasted out of the screen if it went out of play.

It's all action on the wing

The scoring of goals, a relatively easy business as the console controlled goalkeeper had the speed of a shrivelled slug, was signalled by a computerised fanfare, and firework display graphics nicked from the advert breaks on the Benny Hill show.

I say scoring was an easy business, I should have added “if you were playing me” because I hardly ever caused Benny Hill expressions of goalular delight, while my stepbrother and his cousins would regularly stuff twenty past me in an eight minute game. I always tried to claim it wa because I had the crap joystick where the handle grip would come off.

They would say it was because I was crap. They were right.

I played other olde school football games on various platforms. “Football Manager” on the Sinclair ZX81 offered, um, a blurry grey screen interrupted by score reports and the chance to manage Newport County, but it was the progenitor to one of the most successful game series. The Spectrum version had highlights; black or red stick men either scoring or not scoring, in very jerky basic.

“Match Day” on the Spectrum was a real cut above any previous game, however. It was probably the first to have anything even approximating playable, realistic action, and you could use Panini 82 World Cup annuals to name and commentate upon all your players - “And what a goal for Boniek!!!”. You could even play on a black pitch, but too bad about the unstoppable goals from throw ins.

That were scored against me by my friend. In great numbers. I never won a game of this either.

Scoring in "Match Day". Just like I never did

“Pele’s Soccer" was still the best though. The great man even endorsed it. That’s how good he thought the three impaled hexagons in a triangle were.

Copyright Simon Hodgson / Bloody Mulberry 30.07.14

Painting the New Worlds of Space

Space is just out there waiting, an undiscovered, unspoilt quantum wilderness. I’ve written before about a planet of poets, trying to poet their way to a new society and watching the crops they sowed wilt in a blight of pretentsion.

Where do artists fit in in this creative universe? Well, I figure perhaps the best place would be the asteroid belt, great grey rocks that may soon turn out to be the future prosperity of Earth as the corporations mine them out for iridium, titanium and all manner of valuable metals.

But in the meantime, they are lifeless boulders with the complexion of ashes. From the size of footballs to hundreds of kilometres across.

Ready, and waiting, for interplanetary gentrification. Enter the artists.

“Art for an Intergalactic Race” proclaimed the flyers in every city. “One Small Step for a Man, a Giant Leap for Human Culture” was emblazoned on giant banners over the motorways/freeways/interstrada. “Leave Your Mark on God’s Creation” was painted down the side of a skyscraper in Salt Lake City. Applicants were required to do nothing more than proclaim their fitness, after all, there were plenty of asteroids to go round…

Every artist is given a small spaceship and a very large supply of paint, special paint that can coat with thick colour in layers only a molecule thick. The spaceships are on preprogrammed autopilot so all the artists have to do is eat their freeze-dried space food and urinate into a rubber hose. It is a very boring voyage, and all the artists have to do is talk to twelve other artists of their choice. All these thirteen way conversations are beamed back to Earth to be broadcast on very very earnest radio stations in the dead of night, listened to by no-one but a few insomniacs and deranged cultural commentators.

Eventually each spacecraft arrives at its randomly allocated asteroid, and every artist disembarks to begin their project under a glittering hail of stars. All wear spacesuits part from the Japense conceptualist Umagi who walks out of his spaceship naked and allows his decompressing intestines to form a ribbon around a minor planet the size of a house.

“Is he encompassing the asteroid, or is the asteroid encompassing him?” was the debate back on earth.

Other artists went for entire coatings of one colour, including one who claimed to have used transparent paint. One had taken along some of Rothko’s ashes, and used two colours before he realised he had hung the asteroid upside down. Abstract space squiggles - very tedious and predictable - decorated others, while another carved out the huge asteroid Vesta into the likeness of female genitals and coloured them in crimson reflective paint. He thought he was celebrating womanhood on an unprecedented scale. Most said he was a sad exploitative old man.

Asteroids ended up as moon sized pastoral scenes, fluffy clouds above fluffy sheep, green fields on a bedrock of scheiss and silicate. Thee are impressionist asteroids, expressionist asteroids, and a descendant of Duchamp urinated on the surface of one and said that asteroid was now both a urinal AND a work of art.

The urine froze into yellow space crystals before it hit the ground.

Asteroids were red, asteroids were blue, asteroids were Mondrians, others were Koons.

The asteroid that eventually caused a mass extinction on Earth was a Vettriano...retro dancers on the beach wiped out all life, as others had previously thought Vettriano had wiped out at.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 26.07.14