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.