I was
reading yesterday that a new mobile phone app has been released for
the purpose of warning against shark attacks.
My
first thought was that it would only be much use on a waterproof
phone – Sony Xperia Z users, may your legs ever remain unsevered! -
and would presumably flash up huge letter warnings saying “SHIT!!!
BEHIND YOU!!!”
By
which time it would probably be too late.
Of
course, we know now that you don't just need a shark attack app in
the sea, oh no. Sharknado shows that if you are caught in a tornado,
you'd best turn on the shark attack app instead of the weather
warning one. Caught in the desert? Don't bother with google mapping
for an oasis; whip out your i phone and check for a shoal of sand
dwelling white pointers. And now it seems that a shark attack app is
needed as much for skiers as swimmers; avalanches are a habitat for
deadly ocean predators.
Heading
for Venice? Don't forget the shark attack app, and for the love of
god don't take a temporary job poleing gondolas about. Don't forget
the app if you are visiting a facility where octopus DNA is being
experimented on, and steer clear of swamps, prehistoric times, and
John Barrowman. And if you are Samuel L. Jackson, I'm not sure any
app could save you.
In
fact, just keep the shark attack app on the go at all times. Even
sitting on your sofa. For you never know, even the safest looking DFS
sale bought corner unit could house a deadly mako or hammerhead, just
waiting to leap out from the chintz and devour you, anus first.
Back in
the day, the very late 70s or perhaps the early 80s, there was a time
when children were actually catered to in the daytime schedules on
BBC1.
At
Christmas, Easter, and most excitingly in the long summer holiday,
children's TV was shown in the early morning AS WELL AS in the
afternoon by the Beeb. It was superior stuff too, because instead of
the childish Play School, and to me the earnest, boring and tedious
Jackanory and Blue Peter, you got action!
By
action, I mean staples like Champion the Wonder Horse (“like a
something something arrow from a bow”) - in which use of the dog
Rebel was the most interesting thing to me – and Eastern European
seeming stories like “Down on the Danube Delta”, “Silas”,
ummm, the one with the cities at war; where all the children were
dubbed into posh prep school, and all adults were as gruff as Tommy
Vance after a Fisherman's Friend. Heidi was also doing the rounds at
this time, but I dismissed that as far too girly and cissy.
The
big treat however, for a young boy who thanks to an eccentric sea
captain from Scotland was already a massive space fan, was a showing
of Flash Gordon's Trip to Mars. I think I was possibly staying with
my grandparents near Sellafield (true!) when the 15 or so 20 minute
episodes from the 30s were shown in morning matinee fashion, with the
voiceovered cliffhanger at the end.
I
don't really remember the storyline of this at all, but the penile
rocket ships with the drone of a World War 1 aircraft and a sparkler
for an engine were present and correct. So was Ming, Dale, Aura,
Barin, and I think the Hawkmen too. There might have been sort of
“clay men” living in underground caves too. The presiding Flash
was Olympic swimming gold medalist Buster Crabbe with his
immaculately stylish hair.
For
a children's show, there was something quite horrendous thrown in.
1930s torture porn in a sci fi sense. This was seen in the shape of
the terrifying “Evaporation Chamber” where Flash, Barin and Co
found themselves thrown in more than once for Ming's pleasure.
What
was evaporating about it, I'm still not clear about. It resembled a
sort of electrical playroom which General Pinochet's secret police
would have had massive wet dreams over. Huge Tesla coils crackled and
spat bolts of electricity between their arcs, and these conical
devices shot showers of sparks over our writhing heroes.
Whatever
the evaporation was, it was clearly very painful and I certainly
didn't want it happening to me. I had nightmares about it a few
times, and I was always afraid that I'd go into a big shop and find
those big Tesla Coils waiting for me.
These
big shops were already scary enough to a child. They had those slowly
moving cameras that looked like Death Star Imperial pain droids.
Brrrrrrrrr....
Courtesy
of Roy Wood of Wizzard, this is another little lyrical poser that
Christmas songs throw at us.
How
exactly does a snowman “bring the snow”?
A
snowman cannot bring snow. He is snow surely, and can only bring snow
if snow has already been brought with which to construct him, so he
can then bring snow. Another snowman might have already have brought
snow, but then, who brought the snow that constructed him?
To
consider this, I suppose in all honesty, would have taken Mr Wood a
long way from an all time seasonal favourite (and pension plan).
A
snowman already constructed in another location where snow was
already in place, could theoretically bring snow with him when he
visits Mr Wood's vicinity. But this is assuming that the temperature
in Birmingham was cold enough that the snowman and the snow he was
bringing wouldn't melt, and if it was cold enough there might already
have been snow there, so the snowman bringing some would have been
pointless.
However,
it has just been pointed out to me that I might be making an
assumption vis-a-vis the nature of the snowman. A milkman is not made
out of milk, yet he brings milk. So it could well be that a snowman
is actually some sort of tradesman, who's job is to deliver snow –
possibly by means of a float – to people in the Black Country.
The
snowman thus delivers snow to adults, and also to children, so that
they might “Take it!!!!”
This is of course no bad thing. Chris de Burgh is a rolled up jacket sleeved, mono browed buffoon who's best known song is a paean to strange love with Cardinal Wolsey in drag. I have never paid the ferryman, I never even fixed the price, he drowned Mr de Burgh for me for free.
It's Christmas you see, and you'd think Chris' Von Daniken inspired talk of the birth of Messiahs being a 2000 yearly thing heralded by the appearance of the Angel Gabriel in a spaceship would be dominating our local gold station's seasonal output. But they have better taste.
Driving Home for Christmas by that other craggy Chris is their favourite. Possibly because it doesn't contain such lyrical gems as; "He followed a light and came down to a shed, Where a mother and child were lying there on a bed,"
Of course, it gets better than that.
We've always wondered what form our first communications with a sentient extra-terrestrial lifeform would be. We've sent them plaques with naked pictures on, a record with birdsong on, or a beamed message to the globular cluster Messier 13 with a digitised image of DNA within. So far, we've heard nothing back, and we're not even sure that if we did, we'd recognise it.
Chris de Burgh himself is in no doubt.
"And it went la la la la la la la la la la, la la la la la la la la la."
Having travelled "for light years of time" - oh and by the way, light years are a measure of distance, not time, you fool - you'd have thought Homo Superior might have something more interesting than that to say on a First Contact. If the Vulcans had said that to us that wondrous day after Zephraim Cochrane had got to Warp 1, we'd have thought they were taking the piss.
"Gort! La la la la la la la la la, la la la la la la la la" - well, that wouldn't have helped.
"Ulla-la la la la la la la la, la la la la la la la la la" is just about acceptable I suppose, but visitors, travelling spacemen, stick to "Take me to your leader."
Outside the library window, two statues stand, figures of the civil war, a bronzed embodiment of 400 years of history, where they fought for the right of Parliament, or the right of The King.
The sun has gone in and is no longer glinting off their patinated forms. One looks West, the other East, both poised for action. Like they could come to life and fight.
...which I always think of when I look at these two chaps, are amongst the most culturally significant pieces of statuary ever found. The notorious Italian porno-comic Sukia featured them coming to life and, ahem, "seeing to" the eponymous heroine and her male friend on a trans-Atlantic liner voyage. I don't want these fellows to do that (too much), but it's easy to imagine them coming to life, in a time and culture alien to them, and reacting with fear and violence.
Watch a 400 year old sword plunge into the jugular of the abusive drinkers who congregate at their feet, scraping grimily off their calcifying cervical vertebrae, while the drummer boys beats them unmercifully with his lead stick.
They could pause to take in the forever green landscape, before espying bike thieves making their way about town with bolt-cutters they are too brazen to hide. Their Civil War justice is swift, and merited as they arrange for them to be hung drawn and quartered, dragged screaming into four wriggling bloody pieces by teams of cyclists, the modern day cavalry of our confused world.
"Draw them men! Quarter them so they might feel it, but not too fast!" they cry, facial hair stirred by the winter breeze. The smackheads who deal as children learn to read next to them, are forced to do cold turkey on the bear baiting post, tattoed necks enclosed in a spiked iron collar.
The sun sets, and now the moon lights their metallic forms with a cold glow. Now, they head for the ale-houses, taverns and hostelries, and lo! Shall the unworthy face their mighty come-uppance! The brain dead drinkers offer them out for a fight, and shot by musket are some, while others are piked through their orifices and hoisted 16 feet into the air to fly like flags, a warning for all!
Pike them well, my Civil War friends, pike them hard! And never stop acting as you do, a 17th Century cure for modern day social ills!
This afternoon, after running outside in a howling wind, I decided to settle down under my duvet and have the pleasure of watching the original BBC TV production of "The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy".
I first remember seeing this when I was a very small boy, thinking it was going to be some sort of boring programme about travelling, like the sort of thing you'd see with Cliff Michelmore or Frank Bough in Holiday 81. But as soon as I heard the music, and saw the opening titles of an astronaut travelling through the letters, I was hooked. My mum was sympathetic to my love of Sci-Fi, and allowed me to watch every episode despite it being on late.
I loved the two headed alien, I loved Marvin - me and a couple of other kids at school were impersonating him saying "I'm just going to stick my head in a bucket of water" for weeks - I loved the space cow that wanted you to eat it, and I loved the Vogon poetry, even though I had no idea what "micturitions" were or why they should be funny.
I got older, and devoured the books. I remembered the TV show but it hardly ever got repeated on TV, much to my disappointment. I got hold of a DVD of the series in about 2001, and loved it all over again.
Sadly Douglas Adams died, and the film he had been working on came out. I'd never seen it all the way through until I bought the DVD for a pound at Cash Converter.
It is, in the main, charmless, and terrible. Hammer and Tongs are fantastic at making Blur videos featuring animated milk cartons, but they evidently realised early on that they were never going to match the TV series, and so altered absolutely everything to put their own stamp on it, as you would expect to be fair. Problem is at no point does it match up to the TV series, except that I'd rather have Zooey Deschanel than Sandra Dickinson as Trillian anyday.
Martin Freeman is boring and bland in entirely the wrong way as Arthur, Mos Def is miscast, the Humma Kavvula sequence is baffling even if Douglas Adams created it specially, supposedly, and none of the design - Marvin, the ships, the Vogons and other aliens and the book - works on 100 times the budget the BBC had.
Worst of all, however, is Zaphod Beeblebrox as played by Sam Rockwell. Setting aside the second head down his neck which is again Hammer and Tongs being different for the sake of it, the idea that Zaphod is some kind of redneck General Custer idiot on speed, rather than the cluelessly louche Mark Wing-Davey properly two-headed interpretation of the character.
The American market was bet on, and the wheel came up red instead of black.
So I will stick with my TV version thank you very much, and hope that Radio 4 Extra broadcasts the radio one at some point at Christmas, as well as repeating Neverwhere. I will never watch the film again, unless I'm somehow desperate for a fix of Zooey Deshanel.
I'm not a Douglas Adams obsessive by any means, but the film is one heck of a crashing disappointment, and frankly, I don't see how it was ever going to be anything else. Such a pity.
When
you have not had scalding coffee thrown in your face, you don't know
how unlucky you are.
There
are these steps at work, mobile gantries stolen from a steampunk
Apollo launch. You can move them around by pulling these bent,
rusting levers that take the support legs off the ground, and you can
push them on wheels where the bearings are oiled knucklebones from a
starving child.
Push
them into position for the spectacle. Summon the spectators, the old
women knitting before the scaffold, the cackling whores. The other
staff in others words, they are as good as all those, the collective
intelligence thereof. Drawn from large screen football, the only
thing that could tear them away, not even the burning of their own
children would normally stop them watching.
Prod
the fucker up the stairs at sword point while ducking under the
flying lumps of shit I wish everyone else would throw at you while
thinking the man who deserved them might have been me. Put it out of
your mind, Tudor master of ceremonies, the Lords of the Humiliations,
the Chamberlain of Suffering.
There
is a noose affixed to a criss cross of sprinkler pipes and girders
that shake in the rain. It hangs down like guts fallen from the guts
of a disembowelment. Yeah get your neck in there, you scrawny fucker.
The safety cage at the top has been crudely removed by the
cortex-less repair men who's normal function is to bang broken
wheels on trolleys so they are even more broken.
Look up
there. You see your god up there? I hope so. God lies within that
hoop of rope. Push his head in, set the knot behind the mis-shapen
inbred right ear. Give him a second to think, give him a gentle lean
out over the void to the massed “ooohs” of the crowd as they bang
their cans of Relentless together. Then shove hard.
The
rope doesn't drop for long. Who wants to break his neck too soon
anyway? Legs kick out thrashing, and as intended he shits himself
over the loathsome toads from the offices, who lap it up like thirsty
dogs and then turn to lick the faces of their frightened Eastern
European slave girls. Another parasite climbs up his legs, the length
of his body and sucks his eyeballs out saying “I love you, I love
you!”
I kick
him in the face and send his sprawling into a crowd of secretaries,
shit and vomit. This is the best fun I've had in years, and I turned
my conscience off especially. I'd best not turn it back on.
Sitting two computers down from me at the library. Blonde hair, running leggings, trainers decorated with a flash of orange. Foreign trainers, not English. perhaps not even of this Earth.
She is booking flights with her brood mother, maybe to Riga. Her mother gave birth to her and 600 others like her in a larval chamber on their homeworld. They were despatched out through the galactic neighbourhood, to observe, report, and monitor. She is a spy breeder, specifically chosen by the hive elders.
She looked at me just then, clutching the printout of her Ryanair details. Ha, the perfect cover story, why fly Ryanair when she could easily get a ride in one of their space runabouts? She probably works at one of the local warehouses or cake factories, and I know for a fact young genuine Eastern European women disappear from these places, never to be seen again.
Abducted for breeding purposes. Most of them don't survive the experiments and are used to feed new larvae. Those are the lucky ones, the survivors are trafficked back to the homeworld and used as hybrid mating stock for the industrial drone classes.
She's gone now. I'm sure she's reporting to her controllers that I spotted her. I ought to be in fear for my life, they will come through the walls as I sleep tonight.
As I sit writing this, head sore from rum and astronomy dabblings last night in my garden, there is a distinctly misty look about the world outside. The grass is lush and green, with no frost tickling it like yesterday, and the grey sky has come down from the air to meet it.
A number deal of mysterious events are usually presaged by mists...
I think of Napoleonic battlefields, of tales of modern day people seeing phantom armies from the era emerging from banks of mist, for example. The Hound of the Baskervilles prowled the misty moors, HG Well's Martians travelled to Earth in cylinders that trailed a green mist, and of course had a toxic mist, the so called "Black Smoke", at their disposal.
Many famous UFO encounters began as people encountering a strange mist. I think of the famous Barney and Betty Hill abduction, that started off as they drive into a bank of fog. The cases of the Avises in the UK started similarly, and eventually led to a terrifying abduction painting, the worm faced aliens with glowing eyes, carrying out an examination on Mr Avis. I first came across this illustration in a UFO book in the early 80s, and like the Hopkinsville Goblins featured in the same book, made it occasionally rather tricky for me to sleep with the light off.
I wonder what would happen if I were to run off into the mist one day. Would I encounter phantom armies or mythical beasts? Would I find glowing eyed, worm faced aliens insisting on giving me an intimate examination? It does not bear thinking about.
Yet I want to run off into the mist. Fog is the most wondrous atmospheric event there is; everyday objects like people and cars are reduced to indistinct shapes; moisture clings to every surface and if the temperature is below freezing, it makes everything into a crystalline wonderland.
I don't know what lurks within the mist. But I must encounter it, shed all my fears. And when I run off into the mist, I may not come back.
Winter has closed in on me. I don't mind the cold, I enjoy being out in it, if I am warm enough.
But I never am. My winter skin is a pattern of open sores, death of a thousand cuts sores, bleeding out, staining my gloves, dripping down my pen.
Paperwork covered in haematological fingerprints.
I probably have Reynaud's Syndrome. Poor circulation, paralysed capilliaries. Cycling is agony. My ankle is a flaming mass of crackling skin. Moisturisers don't help, steroids only briefly. The wounds gape millimetres deep, washing my hands becomes a stinging displeasure, greatly exacerbated by my obsessive compulsive contamination fixation.
My unhygienic workmates make it all worse. My hands feel like an open invitation for syphyllis and other diseases carried by the unsalubrious. Norovirus magnet. Filth agents.
And still the wounds gape. In two weeks, I will look like a junkie with a penchant for carpal injection.
I wish I could have a skin transplant, or have synthetic skin like Commander Data. He doesn't have a problem with excema, jammy bastard. I want new skin. New skin for old ceremonies, Leonard Cohen said.
I want new skin for new bicycles and new gloves that don't lead to unbearable cold pain and chilblains.
Today,
as a group of folk sat in the canteen at work lightly watching the
Grand Prix qualifying, or quietly reading, or staring into the middle
distance with a look of lobotomised despair, some of the usual
overweight and unpleasantly sweaty subjects came in and took control
of the remote control.
“Mind
if we put the football on?” they asked with a redundant question
mark. They were going to whether we screamed in protest or not.
The
football in question wasn't even a football match, as such. It was
watching three people watching football matches that you aren't
allowed to see, while and endless string of numbers, letters, and
non-existent place names in Scotland scrolled down the screen at the
bottom, and staid static on the left.
This
screen, which looked like a really messy “Frames” style website
from 1997, enthralled this bunch of guys who collectively were less
attractive than Masterblaster from Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, and
also worse company.
All I
could think about, as more people told more things about footballing
men we couldn't see, was that these men, who are just about if not a
bit below the fabled “living wage” were sat watching, and
discussing, the activities of a bunch of men who earn seventy
thousand pounds a week.
Men who
in a few years will earn more in five years than they will earn in
lifetimes.
And are
they angry? Are they shouting, cursing, launching an uprising,
storming the Bastille? Are heads rolling in blood soaked streets. Are
there hell!
Football
gives these guys something to talk about and something to live for
where otherwise, there would be nothing. Rather than make them mad at
the who spewing iniquity about the whole thing, they shell out chunks
of their low wages to watch them, willing sponsors of their
pacification.
Juvenal.
Panem et Circenses. Keep the hoi polloi amused and distracted, and
make them pay for the pleasure. For while the little men on the
screen kick a round thing around, and there little eyes lap it up and
fill up their heads with it, they will not be kicking down the gates
of the palace, or doing anything at all that might actually improve
their lives.
And I
suppose it gives them a sense of community, of belonging, that I have
never had, so perhaps they are the ones who are correct.
I'm always saying
this...dreams of trying to keep away from fearsome tripodsof varying
colours in a deserted modern London...paralysed as finally one loomed
up over Tower Bridge and reached for me with grapple claws sharply
open.
Another time I was trying to
cross a wood near Horsell Common, in the dead of night, and the
Martians had sent out strange bio-machines to patrol the woodland –
mechanical metal birds, with big cone shaped heads, lit up in
christmas light flashes and hunting me making soft synth owl sounds.
It cornered me behind a
fallen, burnt out tree, and I woke up a-shiver.
But for all there
technology, as HG Wells kept pointing out, the Martians were feeble
and vulnerable under Terran conditions. But no-one ever did the
obvious.
No one ever waited until
they had all climbed down from their fighting machines for the night,
and then treated them to what Wells rather more talented rival Jules
Verne would have said was “A fine application of English fists.”
In short, why didn't anyone
ever just walk up to one and twat them?
I imagine doing it myself. I
leave the artilleryman to his delusions of underground society, seek
out the nearest Extra-Terrestrial nest, and evade any patrolling
tripods and drop upon the tentacled monsters unaware.
And then I'd just march up,
and punch their lipless, slabbering faces smack in their luminous
disc – like eyes. I'd punch them over and over again, fist making a
sound like someone hitting a bag full of liposuction by-product. Look
at its tentacled flabby body trying to get away, when it can barely
move in our gravity.
Kick it for good measure.
Kick hard and often, leave army boot imprints in its leathery hide,
fungal lesions starting too ooze a pus type substance. It can “Ulla”
all it wants, it won't do it any good.
Kick it like a deflated
football until it bursts. And then start on its friends, until the
world is our again. Don't wait for the bateria! Smash their alien
faces in!
It’s not as blatant as it used to be
on TV cookery programmes, but its appearance on Masterchef the other
day reminded me that eating bone marrow is still very much an in sort
of fad.
It always seems to be presented as a
sort of deep fried mini scotch egg, a little round parcel of offal,
to be sold for 16 quid as a starter by Michelin starred “Brit-Chefs”
on the ghastly gastro pub circuit. The sort of people for whom The
Obese Goose or whatever it is called, is just not experimental
enough.
I’m all for utilising the whole of an
animal. Farming for meat is expensive, barely-to-un-sustainable and
thus using the whole of the beast for food is ethically the right
thing to do. But please, let me eat it as reconstituted cheap ham, or
ground up eye-and-ballburgers.
I am not a Buffy monster, or a space
creature with unusual tastes in organs. Ergo, the idea of scoffing
into tripe, or kidney (piss making) or liver (shit making) or any
intestinal or ocular apparatus is vile. But no, the new Brit-Chef
scoops out parts that should never ever see the surface of the plate,
and foists them upon a gullible public.
“Oh dahhling…that warm calf’s
throat salad with an experience of lung was just deeeee-viiiiine. And
cheap for twice the price at 18.99”.
If I was a glooping, slurping creature
with the wrong number of arms and legs, or none at all, I might be
interested in eating such hip concoctions. But I’m not. Give me
burgers, or cheap ham, or turkey twizzlers.
New Order sang about one without ever
explaining what one was.
Whatever one is, I don’t think I’ve
ever had one.
First up, is establishing what is being
talked about. Is it a “Bizarre Love” Triangle, or a Bizarre “Love
Triangle”.
The latter is easy to explain. Back in
the mid 1980s “Love Triangles” were sex toys bought by those who
had been mutilated in horrible accidents or attack by wild animals
and could no longer achieve sexual pleasure through more linear
devices. The Bizarre one in question was presumably seen in Affleck’s
Palace in Manchester by a member of the band or their management, and
was a custom made triangle studded with rubies and crystallised fish
eyes for extra pleasure.
That deals with that. A “Bizarre
Love” Triangle involves three couples who have intercourse with
each other in a complex series of rituals designed to give birth to a
mildly satanic creature with magical powers. Five of the group sit at
each point of a pentacle in a place charged with power where ley
lines meet, while the 6th, always a woman, stands at the
centre of the pentacle naked and chanting the words of power that
will enable the process to succeed.
At a given signal, a diviner inspects
the six with his rod, and the rod indicates which two should have sex
in order to produce the devil’s progeny. It doesn’t matter if two
women or two men are involved in the final act, because the spells
cast have charged all of their bodily fluids with procreative force,
and all internal cavities with the ability to nurture an embryo.
Exactly one year later, the satanic
child is born, and grows rapidly. Within a year, it is fully grown,
and capable or wreaking evil upon the land.
The insides of our bodies, the slew or
supremely organised mess and gore that lies inside all of us, is a
Schrodinger’s cat, a blood soaked feline wreathed in nerve and
sinew waiting for the knife.
For how do we ever really know our own
internal structure? We never see it. Until it is X-Rayed or MRI
scanned, it isn’t there and the conditions of imaging (i.e.
measuring) our structure must change it – Heisenberg’s
Uncertainty Principle says so.
We can’t ever see our own heart our
liver or lungs. We only have the word of others that they are there.
If you were to try and take a look at your own heart, you would
almost certainly kill yourself in the process.
I’d like to think, in my own case
certainly, that until you take a scalpel to my rib cage, I don’t
actually have any internal organs. I certainly don’t have a heart.
I think that my body is actually part of the multiverse, that the
eleventh dimension and all the branes it contains, is actually within
this unsleek skin. My insides are not a butcher’s shop slab; they
are stars, and black holes and quasars and masers.
Starlight shines, and yet, as I know
for sure, there must be an awful lot of dark matter and dark energy
in there too, in the cranial space where my brain is thought to be by
conventional science.
It is ironic too, that the means of my
escape from drudgery are contained within me, a journey into the
universe! And I can never reach it.
It occurs to me that when people try to explain the concept of Space-Time they always use an analogy of a foam mattress or the surface of a trampoline to illustrate it. Gravity is then shown to be what happens to Space-Time you sit a mass in it - it creates a dip, or hole, in the surface of space, that objects - usually rolling marbles! - fall in towards.
"So, if Space-Time really is like a trampoline" I wondered to myself, "would this form of space travel work?"
What I had in mind was a sort of bounce effect.
If you were to take a large mass, and then thrust it into the surface of Space-Time using some sort of exotic energy or field source, you could drive it into its surface like an acrobat, and then harvest the spring back effect to lift it out of Space-Time.
I would imagine, to observer's in the 4 dimensional universe, you would disappear in a shower of energetic relativistic particles to mark where the object "took off" from.
And then it would travel out of time, either straight up or down, or perhaps in a non-existent curve, and arrive back in our Space-Time in another shower of energy as its energy is absorbed by the 4 dimensinal universe. It may stay in place if enough energy is scrubbed off, or it may "bounce off again" somewhere else.
I wonder what there would be to see outside of Space-Time? Where gravity bleeds into our world, and where light perchance bends back on itself.
Having just missed what I think what was the original TV version in the Save the Children charity shop, I found a 5 movies for 6 quid Hammer compilation with this classic movie on it, and snapped it up.
This is the 60s cinematic version, featuring Andrew Kier as Quatermass, and a young but not looking it Julian "The Shield Will be Down in Moments Lord Vader" Glover as the cliche sceptical military bloke.
T and A hunters will be sorely disappointed after seing this rather misleading poster
The plot, the same as the TV original, involves maintenance work at a London Underground station unearthing skeletons what turn out to be previously unknown species of hominid from several million years ago. Further rummaging by a gang of archaeologists reveal a long buried space capsule.
At about this time rocket scientist Bernard Quatermass turns up on the scene, and fails to stop the military taking over the investigation of what they end up believing to be a Nazi propaganda weapon.
All the while, increasingly powerful paranormal phenomenon are taking place in the vicinity of the eponymous "Pit", and Quatermass discovers that over the centuries, many terrifying phenomena have been seen in that part of London - Spring Heeled Jack type glowing apparitions. When the previously empty capsule suddenly reveals a sort of mini-hive of dead alien locusts...
The three legged martian locust is unearthed
...Quatermass somehow determines (with no evidence at all) that these creatures are Martians, who were involved in experimenting on primitive primates to alter early man.
Things now get rather bizarre, as he works out that the psychic happenings are caused by a sort of mental cinematic projection into people's brains. Rigging up a Heath-Robinson brain viewer to an early video recorder and monitor, and attaching it to his damsel-in-distress assistant's head and sticking her in the capsule, reveals the truth.
The Martians had been enganged in some sort of genocidal race war, and the extreme violence of these events has caused a great evil to be couped up in the Pit - and now it has been released!!!
It is these scenes of Martian warfare that stick in the memory. Utilising small Martian models in a sandpit, unintentionally amusing scenes of puppet carnage follow, as the creatures are stuck to pieces of card and pulled along through the sand, manhandled like a child playing with a star wars figure, wafted about on strings, and thrown into holes by unseen FX merchants.
It reminded me of something, but what? The old educational children's show "Watch" used the figures pulled along on cardboard strips to animate their tales of the nativity, but that wasn't it. And then it occurred to me what it was.
Michael Bentine's Potty Time!
This was anarchic children's TV show from the 1970s that I only just remember, a sort of puppet "Horrible Histories" of its day, involving the former Goon presiding over occasionally rather racially dubious portrayals of historical events.
Anarchic, and much filled with explosions and destruction, this will be only remembered now by those hitting 40. THere's not much to see on Youtube either. But Quatermass and the Pit reminded me instantly of it.
The 70s might have been a grim decade, but there was some great Television around.
When I was very young, I always enjoyed
going to stay with my father because he had, GASP, a VHS video
recorder. We didn’t have one of those at home…
This large beast, a top loader of
sturdy build, possibly made by Sanyo, sat next to the television, and
spent much of its time being used to record episodes of Dallas – as
boring to me then as it is now – and far more excitingly play
rented films from the wonderful “Gogglebox” – a pair of shops
based in Altrincham and Sale that had tabletop Space Invaders, the
latest movies to rent, and also an under the counter stock of pirated
films just out at the cinema.
I saw ET in that manner.
And also, I saw a number of fairly grim
horror movies. “The Exterminator” sticks in the memory for the
mincing machine scene, made ludicrous in retrospect by the fact that
the meat packing mobster survived despite having gone through the
machine in its entirety.
And then there was Halloween 2. I
hadn’t seen the first movie, so had no idea what was going on at
all, other than the fact that a scary man was wandering around very
slowly killing people in horrifying ways. I remember the
“duh….duh-duh…” music that accompanied his relentless
footsteps. I remember a throat being cut in all its crimsonly graphic
glory. But that was nothing compared to two other death scenes.
The first was a case of mistaken
identity. On the part of the victim, rather than Mr Myers himself,
who having slain the boyfriend in silhouette, took his place behind
his busty naked nurse ladyfriend. Who had no idea that Myers had
turned up the temperature of the hot-tub to boiling point.
She got the idea pretty quickly though,
as Myers dunked her face in the water a few times, and we heard her
deafening screams as the camera showed the flesh being scalded off
her face in loving close-up. Over and over again he boiled her; over
and over again we saw her increasingly ravaged face.
One big whole world of shudders.
In the other memorable scene, another
nurse – the hospital setting being well stocked with pretty nurses
for slaughter purposes – goes into the doctor’s office. Can he
help explain all the mutilations that seem to be occurring? But no,
she turns his swivel chair around when he fails to respond, and sees
the hypodermic needle embedded in his right eye, the eye socket
pooled with blood.
She screams and retreats. But as she
does so, we see Myers in his iconic mask emerge from the shadows and
grab her around the throat. Again in highly detailed close-up, we see
Myers deploy another hypo, moving it in slowly towards the side of
her eye with that sort of pleasure-less relentlessness that typifies
his character.
And as I screwed up my child eyes in
sympathy, the needle went in through the side of her occipital
cavity, through the bone and into the eyeball itself.
I never figured whether the poor woman
died of this violation in itself, or whether she was injected with
something to kill her. It didn’t and doesn’t really matter.
What does matter is why was an 8 year
old watching this in the first place? Although thrilled to be
watching films like this, it still left some images scarrred onto my childish brain. All I can say, I was always attracted to the dark, macabre and diseased as a child. Didin't harm me. But others wondered if it would.
My hometown, like many others, is full
of strange little old brick buildings that seem little used, and
never have any visitors going in or out.
The old bowling green pavilion. Various
perma-locked old public toilets. Outhouses on the edge of public
parks. Car park attendant shelters no longer used since automation -
the old man in the orange flashed donkey jacket kicked out onto the
street to slowly strave to death while being taunted and urinated
upon by passers-by in favour of non-functional ticket machines
swallowing nickel coins for no sticky paper prize.
By the cemetery, a plot of land with a
brick structure stands next to undistinguished housing, a “For
Sale” sign flapping in heavier breezes. Still there. Still
undeveloped.
They must still be standing for a
reason, otherwise greedy councils would flatten them – every tiny
little space has a value. I wonder why. Who really controls them.
What really are they used for. What “really” lies within?
They are obviously control rooms,
observation posts, and the likes. The forces that would infiltrate
our society and act for powers beyond our solar system – in one
case, within it – use the apparently unused old buildings for their
own nefarious purpose. The perma-closed public lavatory, for example,
is run by human-cultivating carnivores from Tau Ceti, who monitor the
vital signs of folk walking past, and pounce on those with the
nourishing characteristics required.
Seeing as they like meat rich in
ethanol, the mortality statistics of street drinkers are explained.
The worm-men of Triton, our only solar
system based visitors, live in bowling green pavilions all over the
United Kingdom. They are secretly digging our our richest and most
fertile soils from underneath the surface, and exporting them back to
the homeworld to wriggle in. Soon, they will no loger be able to
conceal their activities, as our huge tracts of our farmland will
cave in on itself, and we will begin to starve.
Parkland outhouses are home to mutants
from a waterless world monitoring our political instability, awaiting
a time to pounce when we are at our weakest. Empty houses house the
empty skulls of the watchers of Vega, living cameras with no thoughts
of their own, they seek to collectivise all. These mindless space
communists have fascist rivals, the disused telephone exhange
dwelling Maggotoids of Mizar, and even as they vivisect the homeless,
the Vegans seek to start a war with them.
A war that will kill us all in the
process, even if they don't kill us first. So remember, watch those
funny little buildings. Ignore them at your, and our, peril.
In every library there is a magic book.
You just have to find it.
It’s different in every library. It
might be a book on new styles of management in one, a camping guide
in a second and a large print copy of a Jackie Collins in another.
Its magic properties vary too.
Sometimes nothing happens other than all the text in every other book
in the library turning dark green. Sometimes it transports you to
another library where the magic book begins with the same first
letter as the one you touched. It could make you a Prince or even a
King of the land that you live in, or it may turn you into a rat.
The method of magical activation is
never constants. Touching the book’s spine may be enough to invoke
the power of wizardry, but in other cases you may have to lick page
39. In general, the more powerful the magic invoked, the more extreme
the method of initiating the spell. There is a book in the University
of Ougadougou that makes 85 golden cows out of nothing if you slam
your genitals between pages 283 and 284 of the manuscript – Volume
15 of the Encyclopaedia of Bacteria. All spells found in romance
works are activated by pressing your nipple to every instance of the
word “the” on the blurb on the inside cover.
It is always fun to watch people look
for magic books. Especially the most dedicated of seekers.
When you have a head full of knowledge,
can you fill it with any more?
I’m writing in a panic. I’m
panicking because I’m being unproductive. I thought the way to
become productive again would be to write about panicking about
unproductive. There is so much in the world I want to know about. Is
it an OCD, Tourette or more Apsergic trait? I don’t know.
I’m also in a panic because I don’t
know how to make use of the knowledge I have in a way that could
actually make my life better – the more I know, the more it upsets
me that I’m not doing anything with it. The knowledge I’ve gained
in my life seems more and more useless, as my days fill with moving
boxes for very little money, and my nights fill with frustration.
There is a lot I can give to the world,
rather than freak show displays of tics in the street and a
non-ending stream of cynicism. I write, but I’m giving myself away
for free to very few people. Sometimes that seems like a very good
idea mind you, the thought of being a latter day Emperor Norton
appeals very much, throwing ideas around in the open air like the
philosophers outside the Library of Alexandria. But I don’t want to
live in poverty either!
I will keep throwing myself against the
wall until I stick.
My mind was always full of spaceships.
To contradict Arcade Fire, it was always a place where all spaceships
went.
My mind first became full of spaceships
aged about 5 or 6 at infants school. Buck Rogers had appeared on
television, and I was thrilled with those wonderful twin pronged
starfighters with their exciting double fin at the back that I could
never draw at the right angle. Meanwhile, my parents met for the
first time, and my now stepfather played me Jeff Wayne’s “War of
the Worlds” through headphones to keep me out of the way while he
made dinner for my mum.
I thought it was the most exciting
thing I’d ever heard.
After that, although I couldn’t draw
for toffee, let alone a curly wurly from the swimming pool sweet
machine, any piece of paper I could find was filled with crudely
drawn Martian tripods destroying everything. Meanwhile Buck flew
overhead lasering unidentified craft out of the universe.
The Blakes 7 “Liberator” cruised
through deep space, the “ball” at the back always drawn with
green felt tip.
My head was then filled with technical
specs for spaceships that were either taken from television, or real
life, so that a Gemini capsule from the 60s could be spiced up with
guns and an engine capable of “Standard by 9”. Salyut 6 acted as
a base for a cast of heroic space fighters, who piloted their Firefox
craft from a sort of spoked wheel arrangement of docking hubs around
the Soviet era space station.
Rival and incompatible technologies
were conflated together and I told endless mental stories about the
whole thing. I still do, although the characters have long since been
transplanted into a 50s retro tech environment flying early jets like
the Meteor, Vampire and the Messerschmitt 262. My heroes also spend
rather less time being threatened with the tesla-coil filled
“Evaporation Chamber” from Buster Crabbe era Flash Gordon, a fate
that to my childhood mind was the grimmest imaginable.
I wish my mind was still full of
spaceships, and the desire to draw them, no matter how badly. But,
the Tourette brain grows older, and it becomes full of the far less
exciting, but far more terrible, trials of modern life.
Beautiful? That is a very strange way of speaking of Soviet Art. You normally associate words like "utilitarian" or perhaps "propagandist" about the imagery of the Soviet Union; it is after all designed to unite and uplift the masses, and get the manufacture of tractor parts and beetroot production in line with the latest five year plan. Or something.
The fact is it is far more beautiful than that.
Yes, it serves a purpose. It shows the superiority of the Soviet Union over the rest of the world; it shows the superiority of the men, women and even dogs of that nation. These are heroic figures, in heroic poses, who are somehow still portrayed as doing their all for the Motherland and not themselves. But the colours are vivid and lush, the retro space technology something to drool over, and the art itself is far less bombastic than other forms of Soviet propaganda with its giant Lenins and Peasants of Progress.
There is a tremendous feeling of exploration, and of pushing back frontiers. There is the blackness of space, and these people and vehicles bringing life, light and colour to it. I think it is wonderful.
A general piece of Soviet Space Programme promotion
The heroic, and tragic, Laika aboard Sputnik 2
The all time hero Gargarin of Vostok 1 commemorated
Still an all time heroine in Russia, Valentina Tereshkova
Soyuz 10 mission badge
My all time favourite: Soyuz 18 mission badge
The late 70s - Soyuz 26 / Salyut 6 stamp
Mention must also be made of the great Soviet cosmonaut artist Alexei Leonov. He made the first walk in space aboard Voskhod 2, showing considerable presence of mind to save his life in the process. He made many paintings of space subjects, including the one below, "Near the Moon", which inspired the famous shot from 2001 A Space Odyssey, although Kubrick made it vertical for aesthetic reasons.
Cosmonaut Leonov's "Near the Moon", inspiration for 2001
I may have written about this TV series and book before, but really, I don't care. If I have, whatever sentiment I expressed at the time hasn't changed, so please accept my consistency over time, if not my memory.
I've been re-reading my small hardback copy of the book endlessly at work, and before that, I used to read it religiously every time I went to stay at my father's when I was young, scaring myself by reading it late at night, but unable not to and save myself some nightmares in the process. And further back, I remember seeing the TV series when it first appeared, and always having to turn my head away at the last second to avoid the Skull of Doom's terrifying gaze.
I had started to reading about UFOs at a similar sort of time, and was already a confirmed astronomy nut, 7 years old. But a scaredy cat one, the paradoxical stargazer uneasy in the dark. They all spoke of a world that opened up far beyond that of a reasonably teasable - if not bullied or utterly miserable by any means - little boy with platinum hair with muddy brown streaks in it, who never really fitted in.
It was a huge world, with no boundaries, inhabited by creatures of a fantastic nature, who unlike the monsters and creatures of the children's stories he found so, well, childish, there was a possiblity that they might exist. The Yeti maybe a far fetched thing to believe in, but it is still a far more likely thing to exist than a bad tempered troll beneath a bridge.
The Patterson Bigfoot film scared me witless, the film I saw for the first time on this television programme, the familiar jaunty man in a gorilla suit lolloping across the forest. The child me saw the still close up of the "creature's" face staring at the camera, out of the screen, and it made my heart judder.
There was the Alma, the Loch Ness Monster and the other wonderfully named water monsters Ogopogo, Manipogo, Champ, and Caddy. There was Loy's Ape, the Pgymy Elephant, the King Cheetah, the Giant Octopus, the Giant Squid. Many viewers may have been introduced to Fort and Forteana, and more scientific mysteries were covered, based around the rhyme and reason behind ancient sites like Stonehenge, Newgrange, the Nazca lines and the Chalk figures of the South Downs.
All these stories delivered with a slightly scary Gordon Honeycomb narration.
Some of these creatures, like the Giant Squid and the beautiful (thanks to a mutation) King Cheetah, are now known to exist. This does not subtract from their near-fantastic nature.
And so, as I sat in a works canteen with rain lashing on windows, the grey endless outside, the grown up me read of these wonderful and strange entities and occurences, and it filled my brain with knowledge and transported me away. I wish the book were ten times longer.
“Um, I don’t think this film is
really suitable” said the soft dad, the former failed labour
candidate for the town, as his two children and I watched “The
Sword and the Sorcerer”. He evidently thought it was a Disney
fantasy romp, safe for us to watch on his toploading VHS. When he saw
the breasts, he realised he was wrong.
I have seen this film essentially
twice, on the occasion mentioned above, and again when ITV broadcast
it late one night in about 1986 and my folks taped it for me on our
FRONTLOADING video recorder.
The plot, which I can’t remember in
any case, is entirely irrelevant, featuring the medieval Nazi Titus
Cromwell kidnapping heroines to slake his foul desires and engaging a
nasty wizard-monster to help his drive for world domination. “Tonight
I will make love to you as no other man can” he informs the
Princess, before her meaty thump reveals he routinely has to wear an
armoured codpiece when seducing wenches. The wizard, he rather
stupidly double crosses, and it kills him. Probably.
No, it’s not the storyline that grabs
you, essentially yet another in the Conan / Krull / Beastmaster
Fantasy boom of the early 80s. It’s the sword. Where the other
films had to make do with single bladed weapons, Talon the hero
acquires a magical sword that has THREE blades. And not only are
these blades capable of slicing other swords in two, they can be
fired like bullets into the guts of an enemy at the touch of a
button.
"Cease your wrongdoing, or face my triple bladed wrath unleashed!"
How I wanted one when I was a child.
Instead, I had to make do with a stick.
The film stands out in others ways. It
is full of nudity, with gratuitous visits to the castle brothel
aplenty. It is also staggeringly cruel, with the hero crucified at a
banquet at one point before freeing himself to stick nails in the
faces of the per-usual clueless enemy soldiers. Other scenes feature
one of the great characters of Fantasy cinema, the shaven headed
palace torturer, as he chews his way through his pain dungeon
shouting lines like “These two didn’t have any more to
say, so I cut out their tongues” and “Don’t worry little girl,
it won’t hurt until I hit the bone.” Classic.
For some reason, I can’t remember the
film being shown on British TV for well over twenty years, and the
DVD is pricey. Come on Horror or SyFy, get your finger out!
The thousand different shades of green
I can see outside the window are quite breathtaking, as I daydream
away over this keyboard wondering when inspiration might find its way
in to my fingers.
There are no diggers working away
anywhere in my vicinity thank the stars, but for some reason I have a
vision of one visible between the birch trees, a savage looking JCB
digging up the bowling green, scattering brown earth and burnt umber
onto the palette. It shakes its jaws and more lightweight matter is
dispersed into the damp atmosphere.
And then it came to me. Instead of
having a mere artisan JCB digging in the dirt, could you have a more
sophisticated intra dimensional digger, carving its way through space
time? Tunnelling like the Eurostar to the galactic destination of
your choice?
It would require colossal energy,
perhaps akin to that of a Black Hole, perhaps even powered by one, to
operate, and would have jaws the size of a medium sized asteroid. Its
teeth however are as small as quarks, and move like a quantum chain
saw as they slice the fabric of space apart.
The more it digs, the more it sinks
into a well in space-time of its own creation, a relativistic jet of
super energetic matter indicating where it once sat on the surface of
the universe. The navigating entity, man or machine, uses complex
multi dimensional spinor mathematics to plot a path through the rent
in space, and although the process takes forever relative to the
machine, it takes place out of time and thus to observers takes no
time at all before it carves its way back to the surface again, at
the chosen destination in whichever galaxy, or indeed universe, of
choice.
The passengers are now ready to embark
in the shuttle vehicle, to fall out of our space, only to re-emerge
to here knows when, to see wonders beyond imagination.
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.
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.
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 5th 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…
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.
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.
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.
