Who Will do the First Striptease in Space?

We live in a world now where such things as lap dances have becom regarded as a common, low brow, peasanty-footballer viewing pursuit, and burlesque, although still an exotic pursuit, is something that can safely be discussed on 7pm chat shows and other mass media.

Nudity for pleasure on Earth is just sooooo over.

Other frontiers are of course available. Despite the recent Spaceship 2 accident, the race for leisure trips into space goes on unabated. Soon it won't just be the preserve of serious types with degrees in aeronautics, “The Man in the Street” - as a Tory councillor type patronised me the other day – will be up there too.

And where there is leisure, there is pleasure.

Up until now, as far as is known, being naked in space has been a purely practical exercise for the purpose of showering in a pretty unromatic bag of water droplets. To live permanently in space, one would think there must be breeding in space and there have been rumours that on one military shuttle missions, experiments into the practicalities of weightless sex were carried out. Results unknown.

Newton's third law will be a real headache for sex “up there”.

One would think however that shameless exhibition would be a lot easier, and I reckon it will happen a lot sooner that you think. I'm surprised that no-one was hired a so called “vomit comet” for adult movie production purposes, but I guarantee you that pretty early on in the space tourism industry, one of the major adult production houses will hire an entire flight of Virgin Galactic or their equivalent, and even if “fluidic exchanges” may be banned on grounds of risk of short circuit, stripping off should be no problem for folk of any sex.

It will be filmed, streamed, and sold. I give it seven years, tops, before it happens.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 01.04.15

  

The Duvet Spaceship

I guess this is continuing a theme of childhood memories – I've been writing a lot of such material lately, trying to get a grip on parts of my past, to try and find in the child the Tourettic perhaps Aspergic fellow I am today. Although I seem to have spent a lot of time scrawling about the killer hornets of the Greek islands, or the pretentious kids I was forced to share holidays with, rather than find any significant psychological insights.

I sometimes wonder if every child has had a spaceship, or a submarine, or a car, or a nest, or an anything, constructed out of their duvet. Nowadays I think of my duvet as a tent, a tiny one man shelter I'm staying in on a bad weather day in the Lake District. But as a child, it doubled as a spaceship, and a home in a cave.

Getting the duvet into the right configuration was always tricky; I remember always being very OCD on getting the duvet in the correct folding pattern to enable it to feel like a tiny space capsule, rather than the inside of an obese silkworm. But once it was set up, you could retreat within, and leave a tiny opening to act as a porthole. I used to imagine I was being put in suspended animation and being sent on a space journey designed to last a thousand years.

Although it usually only lasted until Saturday Superstore came on, and you wouldn't want to miss that, in case someone called Matt Bianco a wanker again. Eventually I was rewarded (years later) when someone asked “Five Star, why are you SO FUCKING CRAP?” If you were in space for a thousand years, adrift like Major Tom, you might miss something like that.

Eventually I grew out of space, and pretended to be a sort of Stig of the Dump figure, living in a cave up a cliff surrounded by puffins.

Playing make believe has never left me, and I'm glad it hasn't, no matter how strange it might seem to others. 

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 13.02.14

A Mind Full of Spaceships

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.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 25/10/2013

The Beauty of Soviet Space Art

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

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 23/10/2013

Design Classic - The Buck Rogers Starfighter

When the TV show "Buck Rogers in the 25th Century" arrived on British TV screens in 1981 or so, I was captivated. Not by the storylines, which even as a young child I could see were rubbish. Nor by Gil Gerard, who sporting what a friend of mine later described as a "utility haircut", was a long way behind S and M clad Avon and his grittier Blake's 7 chums. And as for Erin Grey's charms, well they only became apparent much later, in a post testosterone influx kind of way.

No, it was the spacecraft - the beautiful starfighters, with their twin pointy noses and excitingly angled fins, and different look - that caught the imagination of this viewer. And better still, even to a klutz like me, the basic shape was easily copiable through the medium of lego. When I finished my classwork early, which being a spoddy sort of kid I always did, I always got first crack at the lego and was chruning out various variants of Buck and Wilma's starfighters in chunky handfuls of coloured bricks.

They populated the never ending Aspergerish stories of my imagination, although sadly they haven't done so for a long time. I wished I had a toy, but when it appeared - and a couple of my rather more spolit schoolfriends got their mitts on them - I was gutted. Why oh why, did it have an ugly bar between the nose prongs THAT WAS NOT THERE ON TV!!!

Hah Corgi, you lie! I never saw a toy that looked like the one on the left there. You only got the version that looked like a spaceship designed for slicing vegetables, not cutting through the interstellar medium. It put me right off them, and they disappeared behind X-wings and Colonial Vipers in the stories of my mind.

Corgi! You destroyed a small piece of my childhood!

WORDS COPYRIGHT BLOODY MULBERRY 18/05/2013