A Journey to Andromeda...

I've been imagining a fascinating experiment in human psychology.

Endurace type events have always been an obesession of mine. Long distance running. Cycling. Nordic Skiing. The idea of walking the entire coastline of Britain, waterproof clad, relishing the rain.

So, watching a cosmological Horizon on BBC4, a programme going boldly to the outer edges of my knowledge - about a five second jouney - I was inspired to imagine another such voyage.

A journey from here to the Andromeda galaxy, 2.25 million light years away. I'm making assumptions like no one has assumed before here; that perhaps the people at the British Interplanetary Society can come up with a working design that would get us there within, say, ten million years or so, that ayone would want to make such a journey, and that they could survive it.

Allocate those a variable, x,y and z. Matrix them, forget about them. It can be done. I want to put someone in a spaceship, alive and conscious the whole time, for ten million years. Face fixed forwards perhaps, contemplating the doppler shifted stars at insane velocities, Plato's cave in space.

Could you stand it, fed and watered, somehow entertained, for ten million years. If the sanest person on Earth started the journey, how far beyond the bounds of madness would they have reached after a mere ten years? Suicide could not be allowed to be an option, so restraint and feeding tubes may have to be employed. Would the brain evolve into a new lifeform in its own right? Would it discard the body, would the body discard the brain?

Would the endless dark of intergalactic space be enough to drive you mad without everything else.

If anyone could do it, I envy them. Life isn't long enough to take in these feats, and that makes me sad. I doubt I'll be around to confirm extraterrestrial intelligent life exists, and that makes me sad too.

Doctor Manhattan says it best. When we die, the Universe doesn't even notice.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 26/09/2013

T'was a Doubly Dark Afternoon

I am in passing, flying through my blog en route to my film script, but my DVD watching activities on Monday must be commented upon, etched digitally into memory for interested parties to see.

There is a very good, very low rent, collectors stall at the market on monday, and as well as plastic buckets stuffed with Star Wars figures with varyingly correct numbers of limbs, it has a lot of decent DVDs on sale for one English pound each.

It's a bit of a crap shoot, folk buy and sell DVDs there in batches of twenty or thirty at a time. But, if you have the patience to flick through the films in their slightly broken and jagged containers, there are gems to be had. And on Moday, I found two.

First up was "The Dark Crystal" - Jim Henson's wonderfully rich muppet fantasy full of vivid characters and design; the camply "Hmmmmmm-ing" Lord Chamberlain Skeksis is a character that has stuck in my memory since I first saw the film in 1983. And having enjoyed that, it was time for another Dark, and darker film - Dark City.

Dark City is a little seen dystopian fantasy from 1998, where a group of energy beings have reanimated corpses to act as a corporeal vessel from which to conduct experiments on un-knowing human abductees manipulated around a 50s film noir metroploitan environment full of Gilliam-esque mutating cityscapes. Shot in Australia by Alex Proyas, it boasts an odd sort of cast, with Hollywood stars Jennifer Connolly and William Hurt mixing it with a young Rufus Sewell, and Richard "Riff Raff" O'Brien appearing as well.

It is superb.

Watch it, and pay attention as the themes of Blade Runner get warped through space time into Dark City, and hence onto The Matrix.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 25/09/13

The Civil War Drummer

Sitting in my local library, doubly caffeined with a large tea followed by a large coffee, I was looking for a source of inspiration.

And superimposed on a background of grey skies and lush green trees, I saw it. A bronzed statue of civil war soldiers. One is a blank faced drummer, the other a royalist officer wielding a broken sword, and wearing a fancy hat that from the rear looks like a giant fist is coming out his head. Almost as if he met the shapeshifting squelchy alien anal invaders in the classic Brian Yuzna film “Society”.

They must get very bored, used for little else other than a pissing post for the local drunks and a perch for birds. And then I wonder if they have a secret life…a secret mobile life, like Rosie and Jim, having adventures by moonlight after the library has home and the last street drinker has brought the last of their clear vomit up over the flagstones.

Not children’s adventures though. Adventures of, shall we say, a more adult nature.

I remember reading of the Italian titular porno-comic character Sukia, and how her and her gay friend once had “an experience” at the hands of the Riace Bronzes, the two Classical 5^th century Greek statues found in the 70s off the boot of Italy. Perhaps our civil war drummers do the same thing; in fact I wished they would. The local thugs could meet a bloody end on the end of his rapier, their blood spilt on the slime stained cobbles of our market square.

They could use the old bear baiting post to silently, metallically, torment the dross of the town. Death of a thousand drumstick-dipped-in-excrement punctures for bicycle thieves. Mouthy high heel violent women eaten by android bears after being forced to eat five kilos of chips. All conducted under a sympathetic moon and the un-natural orange streetlight glow.

But they also provide reward. They climb into the bedrooms of lonely kind people, and service their every desire on their birthdays, Cavalier genitals meeting those of the modern age, a Battle of Naseby storm of pleasure, the Civil Warriors silently putting smiles on the faces of the worthy, the purpose of the fist on his hat revealed only to the select few…

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 21/09/2013

Computers! Our Abusers!

Currently watching the ever glorious Horror Channel, and a peculiar film called “Holocaust 2000” - starring Kirk Douglas, Simon Ward, and some variably dubbed Euro types.

I've missed most of it, and what I'm seeing I don't understand. But it appears that Kirk is beset with the problem of a son who isn't really his, but some kind of anti-Christ with an unborn demon son, and an all powerful computer tended by an eventually bisected Anthony Quayle.

A film full of rip offs from the Omen, Demon Seed, and Rosemary's Baby with a gentle dusting of The Medusa Touch, it is evidently entirely awful, and along with Saturn 3 shows where Kirk Douglas' career had ended up by the late 1970s. But more pertinently, it's a film that seems to show one of our obsessions of the time; the evil computer.

Now computers were commonplace in media, if not the home, by 1977, and most of the time were portrayed as inanimate clusters of metal filing cabinets the size of Belize, with huge reels of 3M magnetic tape whirring endlessly around. They generally failed to solve crimes, and ran nuclear power stations not terribly well, but their failings were without malice.

But other films portrayed other kinds of computers, computers hell bent on making our lives a misery. HAL9000 in 2001 (made in 1968) was merely mentally ill, a machine who's murderous condition was brought about by its human programmers seeking to conceal the information the computer felt its raison d'etre was to explore and reveal. But the Colossus of the Forbin Project from 1970 was a tyrant – a machine that felt it was far more capable of running the world than its pitiful human creators – capable of rape, and worse still in the context of the times, collaborating with its Soviet counterpart in oppression.

1977's Demon Seed brought us Proteus, another insemination obsessed intelligence with an ability to charm Julie Christie out of her nightdress with only minimal force before beheading folk with its Rubik snake physical form. Rollerball featured a semantic computer controlled by a bumbling Ralph Richardson, and even Superman 3 got in on the act, with an Atari influenced supercomputer destroying the world to save us from any more Richard Pryor movies.

The true mark of the evil computer is that it must not look like a computer. It is a visual cue to the viewer than any humble 16K tape trundler the weight of a Black Hole isn't going to do any harm. The demon computers, the demon seeds, must not look like a computer. They must be huge rotating crystals, or pillars of light like a Jean Michel Jarre concert, a giant metal skyscraper, or if you think about it, an enormous machine city powered by shaved headed beefcake actors covered in the slimy stuff you find in pork pies.

They must not be familiar, because no familiar machine can be worshipped like a god by humans who don't actually realise they are doing that. The computer is a tool, and an altar.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 18/09/2013

Bioshpere 2 and Mars One - the Daydream Lives On

I remember very many years ago, when I was still just about at school, I remember one of the science programmes of the time – Horizon or Tomorrow's World probably – featuring the commencement of the Biosphere 2 first mission. It seemed so attractive, 6 or 7 people sealed into an enormous laboratory with fields for growing crops, various other biomes like rainforest and desert. and most attractively, a big pseudo-ocean filled with fish that you could swim in. The whole thing reminded me of Douglas Trumbull's “Silent Running” movie, one of my favourites.

The whole point was that it was supposed to be a closed circuit environment – nothing in or out, the “bionauts” having to survive with nothing other than what they could grow themselves.

And so initially they starved. And I remember there being stories about the supposedly sealed environment letting in bacteria and air from the outside, and the whole thing wasn't really self sustaining anyway as a lot of the food was planted before the Biosphere was sealed. In the days when to most people the World Wide Web didn't really exist, and for those that did - like me in my first year at university – it was used mainly for playing MUDs based in California. Therefore you couldn't really follow the project like you could do now.

There was a second mission, but apparently this dissolved in acrimony after management takeovers and an attempt by members of the first mission to break in.

Sad. It all seemed so idyllic on Horizon, the image of a guy swimming in “the ocean” has always remained with me. It seemed like such a cool thing to do, the dismal reality of ant takeover and falling oxygen levels never registering on my radar. It seemed like practice for a really long space mission, and indeed since then various other experiments, with greater success, have run along these lines to see if a Martian mission is possible without everyone going mad and stabbing each other.

Of course, if you want, you can try and take part in the Mars One reality show mission, where various lucky folk will be sent to spend the rest of their lives on Mars in capsules about the size of a caravan stood on end, by the looks of things. And all this while having your decaying psychological state being observed by Big Brother type fans 24 hours a day!

On the other hand, this is how our colonisation of the solar system will eventually have to start, it's just not cost or resource effective to send people that far with a plan to bring them back. But imagine having the fact that you are the only person on the mission who is so ugly they can't get a partner.

I think the first space murder investigation will be on the cards.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 15/09/2013

Foraging for the Gods

I can’t tolerate recreational drug use. Not out of any great moral outrage, but rather because my Tourette’s and generally overstimulated frontal lobes make narcotics inadvisable to dabble with.

I hear from friends that magic mushroom season, Psilocybe Semilanceanta, is upon us, and that foraging parties will soon be underway in various secret woodland glades around about my home town. I always remember the classic album “Boss Drum” by The Shamen, featured Learian psychedelic enthusiast Terrence Mckenna on one track, where he said things like “If the truth could be told in a form that could be understood, then it will be believed” in a funny nasal voice.

He went on to say, on top of bleepy house burblings, that psychedelic plants were the key to opening up the mind of humanity to enable it to progress. I was the perhaps jealous outsider looking in on all this, as although I was the right age, the reliance of drug use for the rave experience – whether acid or ecstasy – I found very excluding.

I lost several friends because they were into drug culture back in 1989, and I wasn’t. Nowadays I feel that I’ve been lucky to be blessed with a powerful imagination, and that drug dabbling would have enhanced nothing. So this afternoon, instead of looking for psychedelic mushrooms, I will be looking for blackberries and perhaps elderberries, hopefully to put a few in a sandwich container to gift to my presents.

And who knows, perhaps blackberries are the true food of the gods, and that this “reality” I see before me, is a fruit enhanced view of the world, and actually I live in some sort of endless concentration camp, smothered in mud and excrement and raddled with typhus, and that a precious dose of smuggled blackberries has led me to hallucinate I’m typing in a library.

You never can tell.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 14/09/13

Smoking in the Fringes of the Strange

I always go out for a cigarette at one am, moon, cloud, frost, snow or the clinging humidity of warmer months that means I can never sleep. But whatever the weather I always prefer to be outside.

For my home lies on the fringes of the strange.

The strange is defined by a complex mathematical function that makes no sense in our world. Things can flit across the fringe in both directions unimpeded, but take on a radically different form when they do so, a spinor function that resolves all life into true pure forms rather than crude three dimensional representations.

This is not as glorious as you would think.

It just reveals the endless baseness of humanity. I will be there smoking a Camel Light, and I see at the end of the driveway an attractive woman in Victorian dress carrying a parasol – I know, a parasol at night. She asks for a cigarette, and as I say yes, she crosses the border of the strange, and becomes a spitting monster in Paul's Boutique, who demands “a fag” and threatens to have me beaten to death by her steroid abusing boyfriend as soon as get gets out of nick. She is multidemnsional and so has tattooes both on her skin and off it.

A passing couple of deities, Mars and Aphrodite, began to kiss backlit by the moon. And then they crossed the fringe and became a low grade couple fucking in my bushes amongst discarded fag packets, their poison filled condom joining stacks of others, tampons hanging off the elderberry bushes dislodged by their sweaty intercourse. They see me standing there and yell threats even as the male's hips began to spasm into climax, skin the colour of a corpse.

Foxes cross the garden, dying immediately at the fangs of a hound the moment they cross the fringe. Badgers shot to pieces by the government. The stars turned to greasy fast food wrapping the moment their ancient light crosses the threshold.

And yet I'm always drawn to watch it, a student of sluttishness, observer of decay, I remember it all as I stand there with a cigarette and a drink, garnished by the endless drizzle.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 13/09/13