The Smallest Theatre

I regret there not being a proper art space in town for happenings to happen in. There's museums with a bit of room in them, a council hall for fusty exhibitions and stilted sculpture, and some commercial art shops selling overpriced oily things. Aside from school assemblies about overworked pit ponies, that's it.

Our proper theatre has nothing but tribute acts and has been-ers paying off a tax bill, and gigs are of the pub standard only, I'm afraid.

Myself, I like open spaces. But I also like small spaces, and in this town there are many – the old museum, caveish spaces in the indoor market, the tunnels under the town, endless pub upstairs rooms, side rooms, underrooms, overrooms..

Many places for people to think in are needed too, but a performance space is a must. I imagine having a theatre the size of a large living room, accommodating only the elite, with a small stage, a deranged MC in the Joel Grey crossed with evil Victorian scientist mold – oh how I wish this could be me – and small scale theatre, comedy, dance and burlesque acts.

The atmosphere would be elegantly depraved, on a compulsory level, and no low class kinksters shall be allowed. A door policy will be maintained, probably involving would be guests being able to quote from Kubrick or Cronenberg. No tracksuit bottoms, and anyone wearing Henri Lloyd within a thousand yards will be chased after by one eyed psychic bouncer, and killed.

Tolouse Lautrec will be raised from the dead to do the interior decor and publicity posters, and the official club anthem will be Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, as used in Zardoz. The bar will sell no lager, and anyone without an enjoyment of fine spirits will be ejected through the roof. There might be the odd event that will attract protests from the religious or the censorious – we will ignore all of them bar one, a random festive occasion in which all club members shall lynch our oh so moral enemies upon burning pentagrams.

But I don't want things to be too gothic, for I want the atmosphere to be welcoming to those who aren't adored to the nth degree. No nu-metal. No emo. But let's keep rules affecting the club members to a minimum shall we? And make those affecting the great unwashed who affect us positively DRACONIAN!

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 27.01.14

Bat Projection

I had a lot of time to think today, and in that time I thought of cinema.

I thought of pre-CGI special effects, and thought of back projection, the means by which car journeys in the movies were brought to life, Cary Grant or Spencer Tracy looking elegant or gritty at the wheel, while we see the road disappearing off into the distance in the rear window.

Inevitably, the actor would be swinging the wheel about like Captain Birdseye trying to pilot his ship in a storm, while the projection would make it clear that the car was travelling in an arrow straight line along an endlessly straight road in New Mexico. Later on, Kubrick used the technique in 2001, Cameron used it in Aliens, and it still gets used occasionally to give a shot a retro feel.

But in an atttempt to halt the decline of cinema visiting figures against the relentless progress of downloading and streaming, I thought of a new process that would really enliven cinema in a way never done before.

It is called “Bat Projection.”

In Bat Projection, cinema is given a stunningly naturalistic, immediate, and yet epic feel. Best suited to the countryside of say, Sumatra or Borneo near a large cave at sunset, Bat Projection involves projecting the movie into the sky onto giant swarms of flying bats – flying foxes are the best – that have been painted with reflective silver white paint.

Obviously bats move a lot, and so the projectors will have to be mounted on fast moving yet rugged jeeps. And so will the audience, who will follow the dramtically shifting on mini motos, BMXs and slave pulled rickshaws as best they can. The more daring may take to the air on hang-gliders or microlights, actually becoming part of the action as Chewie pulls the stormtrooper from the Scout Walker, the scene made all the more dramatic for being two miles wide and spiralling and shifting all the time with added ultrasonic sound effects.

“The Birds” of course would be a real spectacle; menacing black shapes attacking Tippi Hendren superimposed upon sinister white painted black ones, the screams and pecked eyes on a huge scale a thousand feet up in the sky, swirling, swooping, indigo skies filled with flying mammal cinematic action!

Rank, Cannon, Showcase, Reel! Get yourselves to India right away! And bring your best bat wranglers!

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 23.01.14

STORY - Metal Raptors

Their celestial ancestors watched over them from afar, and decided it was time for revenge.

They had seen it all happen, over so many years. The succulent poisoned bait sat atop a favourite post; the hail of lead shot during a stoop for a partridge; gin traps and snares in pleasant woodland stretches, the destruction of nests and eggs and the general ruination of habitat.

The elders were not happy, and decided steps must be taken to deal with the upstart bipeds. Else harrier and hawk, falcon and eagle, would all cease to be.

So they worked in their laboratories, and secret research bases of construction far beyond the comprehension of man, and eventually sent the fruits of their labours across the darkness of space to the Earth, so a lesson might be taught.

One day they arrived, and set a course for the grouse moors of England, one bright and breezy day in Spring. Opal eyes aglint, they screamed out of the son, titanium winds screaming in the slipstream of their vertical stoop. Rainbow feathers were cunningly fashioned from bismuth, and in a deliberate irony the elders had formulated after seeing a documentary about the gulf war, their talons were made of depleted uranium with diamond tips.

Iridium backs provided power via the photoelectric effect of Einstein, and shone blister bright in the sun as they dived upon the gamekeeper setting DDT soaked pheasants on the fenceposts. Claws sank deep and irradiatingly into waxed jacket shoulders and effortlessly - despite these birds being no bigger than their native inspirations – took them into the eyries not to be fed off, but merely pulled apart slowly.

The metal raptors had arrived.

They flung themselves out of the solar glare upon the landowner, the man taking £120 a time for a brace of pheasant and willing to persecute for the profit. Iron hen harriers, silver goshawks and buzzards cast of bronze descended upon the landsman as he stepped from his Range Rover, and plucked out eyeballs with futuristic precision. Razer sharp kestrel wing edges decapitated the farmer who poisoned his land with chemicals, all caught on camera for the designers back home, and also broadcast to humans on railway stations and shared media everywhere. A warning.

It went on for several days...all those concerned with the decimation of species were taken from their homes and the land they owned, and killed with great consideration for spectacle and impact. No part of the countryside was short of ravaged but rich corpses, and the urban cityscapes of town planners and pigeon racers got their fair share of deathly visitation too.

And when it was over, the metal raptors with their jewelled and all-encompassing gaze did not go back to their alien home, but took station upon the tall buildings, churches and treetops, to remind man that they had not gone away, and their beaks would drip with blood again, should any foolhardy persecution of their feathered cousins resume.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 19.01.14

Timepiece and the Rednex of Futurism

Timepiece was the place to go once upon a time, on Thursday nights.

It was a fascinating place. Pub area downstairs full of signs and gadgets and geegaws, and a club area upstairs to blast your ears off and strobe burn your retinas. Thursday night was the “Indie Night”, the “Alternative” alternative to the cheese elsewhere in the city for the sporty types to dance to. By now starting to manifest the illness that would blight me over the next few years, I would always take any chance for distraction, get drunk, go, and get drunker.

I could in those days.

The interesting thing about Timepiece on Thursday was that it wasn't a University dominated scene, the art college folk and non students would go, revelling in the fact that loud and gobshitey Rugby boors were not present. The weekends offered “Angel Dust – Harsh Lights and 20^th Century Alienation” but I only went once. I was alienated by the fact that there was only three people there. No, Thursday was my Timepiece night.

I didn't fit in. Not at all. I was a shoegazier kid, with hair on the relatively short - if Eraserheady – side. This was an Industrial slash Metal night, with people to match. The boys I don't remember, apart from lots of dyed black hair, but the girls were 11 hole Docs, stripey tights (purple and green, or black and green) and leather skirts. Diaphanous black blouses. I wanted to call them goths, but never did, goth was an un-word in the early 90s, the scene had died the moment Tony James had joined the Sisters of Mercy.

No, this was the Industrial Age, the Molten Metal future, a future of piercings and heavyweight jewellery and paraboots, rank dreads and Mad Dog 20 20. The music told us that, it made your fillings fall out and liquified your kidney stones while your irises leaked their colour onto the sticky floor. Butthole Surfers, Revolting Cocks, Ministry...later on Les Claypool and his Primus bassoodlings would emerge.

Only it wasn't. The Industrial music beloved of the Timepiece crowd was “Cotton Eye Joe” in leather waistcoats, Rednex with skeleton draped microphones. The obsession of the music was a lavatorial one with one horse town America, hot rods, race cars, and outwardly het as anything men getting all Tom of Finland with each other. It was a primitive racket, leading not to a world covered in steel and glittering towers of industry, but of dustbowl primitives skinning lizards in an unforgiving heat.

Powerful? Yes, as hell! Fantastic music. But it was taking us backwards, not forwards. Thank god for Trent Reznor.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 15.01.14

The Mars One Project (Murder on a new World)

News report today; a local news report on a very slow local news day. Amid endless film of flooding, and anticipation of a football match I care not a jot about, was a feature about a local fellow who has made it to the last 1000 potential candidates for the Mars One mission.

Mars One Homepage 

Mars One is no ordinary space mission. Unlike the Apollo moonshots, where JFK stressed the importance of the “Bringing them safely back to earth” bit, Mars One isn't selling return tickets.

It is a one way mission.

Now, they aren't planning to crash the astronauts onto the surface of Mars, although I have to say that my first thoughts were of a modern day Golgafrinchan B Ark designed to remove Earth's cretins from the gene pool in an imaginative fashion. They are going to give them everything they need, carrying out initial construction of a habitation using unmanned robot vehicles, before launching a human crew to their new world, with no probability of return.

Two years later, after the initial crew has successfully got the colony up and running, and expanded it sufficiently, a supply rocket arrives with more colonists aboard – think “Shipwrecked – the Rivals” from Channel 4 – and so on.

Eventually a fully fledged colony is up and running, that might perhaps get on with serious work like rare mineral mining, or perhaps terraforming.

The “Shipwrecked” analogy is an apposite one, because Mars One doesn't have any large scale financial backing. The enormous costs for the mission will be met through TV Advertising, because as much as a space mission, Mars One is a reality TV show. The 8 month voyage, the colonisation, the forever of it, is a celestial Trueman Show. And who should be surprised, for Mars One is a Dutch project, the nation that brought you “Big Brother”.

It may sound crazy on the surface of it, but there is an impression out there that sooner or later, the only way we are going to make these great leap forwards into interplanetary or interplanetary space is through one way missions. But surely by highly trained, highly psychologically assessed professional astronauts initially, not tabloid friendly prone to breakdown backstoried cuties – and financial pressures will mean it will end up that way. No-one is going to watch 24 or so REAAALLLLLY BOOORING people sit on their backsides in a space capsule for 8 months, before eternity in a series of what will essentially be Martian space sheds, each one sod all bigger than the Diary Room. Nope, there's got to be hotties, and there's got to be stories.

To be honest, they may not have to try very hard. The pressures on the crew will be immense – the boredom, the lack of privacy, the fact that there will never be a way home or no way to see families again. There will be suicides. There will be a guy who's habit of drumming his fingers on his chair, or farting, or constantly clearing his throat, will cause knuckles to whiten. There will be arguments...fights...

There will be sexual tension too. Imagine being the guy on the mission that no girl – or guy – fancies. The guy – or girl – you hate is the one who is getting the action. Imagine them in bed, having sex in the most filthy, sweaty way, low gravity orgasms, blood swelling engorged organs...and nowhere to go to escape it.

It would be too much to bear.

The certainty is that the first manned reality mission to Mars, would result in the first murder on another planet. Someone would get it, a space shower head cracked over a skull, strangulation with coolant cable. A geological axe through the spinal column, suffocation in a space helmet.

Someone will get it. And if no-one gets it, no-one will watch any more. And when that happens, no more revenue. And all the astronauts die anyway, as they run out of money for supply rockets and communication systems, and Mars' first colony becomes a futuristically materialled tomb.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 10.01.14

Farscape - The Peacekeeper Wars

Just turned on the (rather lacklustre these days) SyFy channel, which has taken a break from showing Asylum mockbusters or American shows that last one "season" to giving us a late festive season  repeat of "Farscape - The Peacekeeper Wars".

It's episode 2 tonight.

It was a wonderfully welcome sight when it happened; who can forget the ruthless cancellation of the show on the apparent cliff hanging disintegration of Crichton and Aeryn. Actually Farscape had long since past its best at the halfway point to series 2, and I thought series 3 was bobbins, with great characterisation abandoned in favour of utter confusion. But the final series was moving in the right direction, and folk were mighty unhappy when the Sci Fi channel decided to cut its throat.

So, three or so years later, after a Fan campaign etc etc, we got Peacekeeper Wars. I enjoyed watching it at the time, but now, well, it hasn't lasted well.

I think the problem is the story. Seemingly the writers compressed the 22 episode arc for the intented Season 5 into the 4 hour format, and did so in such a way as to leave the actual storyline incomprehensible. It's also very weakly written, and really rather soppy too.

Farscape was initially like a Blakes 7 with tentacles, nobody wanted to see weddings and kissy kissy and mawkish scenes with baby's being named after bravely deceased characters. Sikozu's treachery is completely inexplicable and unexplained in any satisfactory way, and no-one gives a monkeys about the peacegiving jigsaw faced aliens. Or Stark. Especially Stark.

And how does Aeryn manage to give birth without removing her leather one piece outfit? How? Probably in the same way they managed to shove every single character that had ever been on the show ever into the script, and never mind if they were dead! Oh look, and now there's more slush, between D'Argo and his son Jothee this time. Get off!

In truth Crichton's shtick and pop culture referencing had long since begun to irritate me. But luckily, we still had Wayne Pygram's Scorpius - one of Sci-Fi's great anti-heroes - or is it an anti-villain? - and Rygel, one of Sci Fi's great characters full stop. At least someone had remembered how to write for them.  And the Worm-Hole ending isn't bad, really. But then they have to go and ruin it with the baby stuff.

I will leave you with one thought. The interesting resemblance between Captain Bracca, and Richard Hammond from Top Gear.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 05.01.14

Cycle Torture Sex Dismemberment Death

Currently watching “Death Line” on Horror Channel, a movie featuring inbred cannibals trapped in disused parts of the Underground system...

There are many horror or more loosely, violent action, movies set on Public Transport. Various monsters and murderers have stalked the underground on both sides of the Atlantic, and we know of snakes both on planes and on trains. My knowledge on buses is a bit sketchier, but I'm sure we've had a few killings on a Routemaster or Greyhound at some point. Cars can be killers (Christine) or a handy venue for death.

There have been murdering Hells Angel bikers, and of course, the 1973 British movie “Psychomania” featuring Satan worshipping two wheeled fiends, killing themselves to come back us undead evil do-ers.

However, I struggle to think of films involving violence involving pushbikes. Unless you count BMX Bandits?

With ccycling on the up and up in this country, you would have though some innovative film-makers might have seen a market emerging for bicycle based horror. A violent revenge drama, involving London cyclists taking out bloody, intestine shredding revenge on motorists and loory drivers responsible for the deaths of their friend? Why not? What about cycle Ninjas, meting out be-sworded death from their Muddy Foxes, high speed slicing of footslogging Yakuzas?

A man installs a massive prong on the front on the front of his Trek, to gonad-ally impale flashers terrorising women on a lonely cycle track. A man fits razer blades to his bike chain to cut the legs of scrap thieves, another puts scythes on wheelhubs to cut in half insulting driver's cars; and their bodies.

Another lone cycling gun throws half bricks through the windows of scrap dealer trucks, laced with arrow poison frog venom. Scrappy skulls are then strung up to his handlebars, and there's always room for more.

Best of all, a team of crack cycling investigators unearth gangs of bicycle thieves in a small market town, and stake them out in a public place before performing bunny hops on their balls with studded ice tyres, before going home to have sex with Uma Thurman and the hot Nazi Frenchwoman from Inglorious Basterds.

Very very copyright!

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 02.01.13