"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
Showing posts with label war of the worlds. Show all posts
Showing posts with label war of the worlds. Show all posts
Monday, 8 December 2014
Saturday, 16 August 2014
The Untold Tales of "The War of the Worlds"
I've been watching Jeff Wayne's "War of the Worlds - The New Generation" DVD - originally bought as a Christmas present for my folks but still unopened 8 months down the line. The Victorian costumes the musicians are wearing are to die for and the updated music is still amazing, but some of the vocal performances are not as strong as the original DVD production.
Like the fact that the terrible Richard Burton head was ditched, and the noticeable steampunking of the stage show. Some of the extra dialogue is pretty risible, however.
Idle Jeff Wayne chit-chat is not why I'm here however. It struck me while I was watching that all the way down the line, "The War of the Worlds" is a story told through the eyes of a single person, the first-person journalist narrator. Later christened "George Herbert" by Wayne - as in Herbert George Wells - we only see what he sees, only interact with what he interacts with. Obviously there is his brother too (as I've stupidly only just remembered) but that is so essentially the same story that in all later versions it is easily converged with the narrator's.
I was thinking of all the potentially really interesting tales of the Martian invasion that have been left untold. The extended serialisation Wells wrote, if I remember correctly, features some corking extras, like the scientists who was vivisected by the Martians in a rather twisted piece of satire. But there must be others.
There are obvious ones of course, like that of the narrator's wife in Leatherhead - what traumas did she suffer while waiting to be reunited with her husband? Or that of the Artilleryman, what sense of purpose did he lose after the Martians died when he realised his dream of being a working class Lord of the Underworld was over?
But think too of all the people never mentioned in the book...the nameless dead, the anonymous survivors. Who were the people who discovered the dying Martians before the journalist? Who survived being kept as a living blood donor in the invaders' food baskets, and don't say Tom Cruise with his bloody Hang Grenades.
Who met a Martian close up, and attempted face to face communication, or perhaps hand to tentacle fighting. What happened to those who stayed in an East End of London that still remembered the Whitechapel murders? Who got closest to a Martian cylinder without being razed out of existence by the Heat Ray?
So many stories.
I wonder how many people have tried to create "spin offs"(ugh I hate that word) from the original novel; I would imagine it's a tricky thing to do because the rights to the Wells estate are complicated. I shall research this.
Research, then perhaps see if I could produce something of my own.
Copyright Bloody Mulberry 16.08.14
Like the fact that the terrible Richard Burton head was ditched, and the noticeable steampunking of the stage show. Some of the extra dialogue is pretty risible, however.
Idle Jeff Wayne chit-chat is not why I'm here however. It struck me while I was watching that all the way down the line, "The War of the Worlds" is a story told through the eyes of a single person, the first-person journalist narrator. Later christened "George Herbert" by Wayne - as in Herbert George Wells - we only see what he sees, only interact with what he interacts with. Obviously there is his brother too (as I've stupidly only just remembered) but that is so essentially the same story that in all later versions it is easily converged with the narrator's.
 |
| One of Alvim Correa's beautifully atmospheric illustrations for a French War of the Worlds |
I was thinking of all the potentially really interesting tales of the Martian invasion that have been left untold. The extended serialisation Wells wrote, if I remember correctly, features some corking extras, like the scientists who was vivisected by the Martians in a rather twisted piece of satire. But there must be others.
There are obvious ones of course, like that of the narrator's wife in Leatherhead - what traumas did she suffer while waiting to be reunited with her husband? Or that of the Artilleryman, what sense of purpose did he lose after the Martians died when he realised his dream of being a working class Lord of the Underworld was over?
But think too of all the people never mentioned in the book...the nameless dead, the anonymous survivors. Who were the people who discovered the dying Martians before the journalist? Who survived being kept as a living blood donor in the invaders' food baskets, and don't say Tom Cruise with his bloody Hang Grenades.
Who met a Martian close up, and attempted face to face communication, or perhaps hand to tentacle fighting. What happened to those who stayed in an East End of London that still remembered the Whitechapel murders? Who got closest to a Martian cylinder without being razed out of existence by the Heat Ray?
So many stories.
I wonder how many people have tried to create "spin offs"(ugh I hate that word) from the original novel; I would imagine it's a tricky thing to do because the rights to the Wells estate are complicated. I shall research this.
Research, then perhaps see if I could produce something of my own.
Copyright Bloody Mulberry 16.08.14
Saturday, 7 June 2014
George Pal's 1953 War of the Worlds
Found this classic movie on DVD at a market stall a couple of days ago, and couldn't resist adding it to my 50s sci fi collection.
Which I'd love to say is "Burgeoning" but really isn't.
I remember as a child I saw it for the first time as part of a wonderful regular weekly slot of sci fi films on BBC2, a halcyon time when I saw "The Day the Earth Stood Still", "It Came from Outer Space", "The Forbidden Planet" and many other classics for the first time. I loved watching every single one of those films, they thrilled me so much.
But somehow the War of the Worlds was a disappointment. It may have had an incorrect American setting, but that wasn't the real problem. The real problem was Jeff Wayne. Having been introduced to that classic album by my stepfather to be in about 1979, when I thought of Martians, I didn't think of Pal's cutesy ET creations with multicoloured eyes flying around in underripe bananas with a streetlamp stuck on.
I thought of terrifying, tentacled blood drainers destroying the best of Victorian England in their Mike Trim designed death machines, the fighting machines of legend. And the creations of Pal's movie just didn't measure up in the childish imagination.
But watching it again, it stands up well to the test of time, and certainly delivers a well placed Heat Ray blast to Spielberg's 2005 very silly effort with its hideous children, and Tim Robbins. Gene Barry with his glasses on makes a rather less obvious action hero than other movies of the time, and although the constant screaming of Ann Robinson is a bit of a cliche, and the religion and churches aspect a bit of a drag, the special effects aren't. The fighting machines, apparently based on manta rays, are a mile away from the usual flying saucers every movie of the time was chucking at the drive-in audiences, and the heat ray and "skeleton beam" weapons effects are far ahead of anything else that was in cinemas in the 50s.
The martians, although strangely cute, are more otherwordly than in other sci fi efforts of the period with exception of the single eyed horrors of "It Came from Outer Space", and I also like it because of the proto-geekery weight given to science, as opposed to military might.
If only the Priest had been played by Phil Lynott...
Copyright Bloody Mulberry 07.06.14
Which I'd love to say is "Burgeoning" but really isn't.
I remember as a child I saw it for the first time as part of a wonderful regular weekly slot of sci fi films on BBC2, a halcyon time when I saw "The Day the Earth Stood Still", "It Came from Outer Space", "The Forbidden Planet" and many other classics for the first time. I loved watching every single one of those films, they thrilled me so much.
But somehow the War of the Worlds was a disappointment. It may have had an incorrect American setting, but that wasn't the real problem. The real problem was Jeff Wayne. Having been introduced to that classic album by my stepfather to be in about 1979, when I thought of Martians, I didn't think of Pal's cutesy ET creations with multicoloured eyes flying around in underripe bananas with a streetlamp stuck on.
I thought of terrifying, tentacled blood drainers destroying the best of Victorian England in their Mike Trim designed death machines, the fighting machines of legend. And the creations of Pal's movie just didn't measure up in the childish imagination.
But watching it again, it stands up well to the test of time, and certainly delivers a well placed Heat Ray blast to Spielberg's 2005 very silly effort with its hideous children, and Tim Robbins. Gene Barry with his glasses on makes a rather less obvious action hero than other movies of the time, and although the constant screaming of Ann Robinson is a bit of a cliche, and the religion and churches aspect a bit of a drag, the special effects aren't. The fighting machines, apparently based on manta rays, are a mile away from the usual flying saucers every movie of the time was chucking at the drive-in audiences, and the heat ray and "skeleton beam" weapons effects are far ahead of anything else that was in cinemas in the 50s.
The martians, although strangely cute, are more otherwordly than in other sci fi efforts of the period with exception of the single eyed horrors of "It Came from Outer Space", and I also like it because of the proto-geekery weight given to science, as opposed to military might.
If only the Priest had been played by Phil Lynott...
Copyright Bloody Mulberry 07.06.14
Friday, 22 November 2013
Punching a Martian
I used to have Martian
dreams a lot.
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!
Copyright Bloody Mulberry 22/11/2013
Friday, 25 October 2013
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
Sunday, 25 November 2012
The Creeping Terror of Mars...
It's not there to be seen at the moment, it's crimson brilliance hidden away until it next approaches opposition in a year or so's time. Jupiter entertains all night, Venus glitters in the frozen mornings and soon Saturn will be shaking off his duvet just before the dawn.
But not planet Mars, not for now.
And in some ways, this suits me fine.
To see Mars, late at night, in silence, on your own, is to be reminded of the tentacled terrors that we know DON'T, but REALLY DO, wait for their chance to cross the gulf of space between us and devour our living blood. I go inside after observing Mars, and every hanging coat, every shadow, every shadow cast by a streetlight, becomes an animate creature of terrifying, horrifying, scareifying Martian origin waiting to put a clawed finger on your shoulder the moment your eyes close.
You wake in Sleep Paralysis, and just beyond your frozen visual periphary, an upright bipedal grey martian prepares his probes and samplers for journeys into unmentionable parts. They control the horizontal, they control the vertical. They control the speed with which they open up your stomach and eat your intestines while you watch.
Observing with a telescope at 2am, as I have done, is worse. The green flash of launching cylinders is an imagined nightmare only a heartbeat away, the collapse of civilization under piles of mouldering, mutating red weed.
I shiver with fear every time I look at it. I bet many of you do too, as you stand alone surrounded my menacing whispering trees. But we all come back for more to see the God of War gaze contemptuously down at us, seeding our mind with fears...
But not planet Mars, not for now.
And in some ways, this suits me fine.
To see Mars, late at night, in silence, on your own, is to be reminded of the tentacled terrors that we know DON'T, but REALLY DO, wait for their chance to cross the gulf of space between us and devour our living blood. I go inside after observing Mars, and every hanging coat, every shadow, every shadow cast by a streetlight, becomes an animate creature of terrifying, horrifying, scareifying Martian origin waiting to put a clawed finger on your shoulder the moment your eyes close.
You wake in Sleep Paralysis, and just beyond your frozen visual periphary, an upright bipedal grey martian prepares his probes and samplers for journeys into unmentionable parts. They control the horizontal, they control the vertical. They control the speed with which they open up your stomach and eat your intestines while you watch.
Observing with a telescope at 2am, as I have done, is worse. The green flash of launching cylinders is an imagined nightmare only a heartbeat away, the collapse of civilization under piles of mouldering, mutating red weed.
I shiver with fear every time I look at it. I bet many of you do too, as you stand alone surrounded my menacing whispering trees. But we all come back for more to see the God of War gaze contemptuously down at us, seeding our mind with fears...
Friday, 16 November 2012
Is there Life on Mars
Hiding in obscure little canteens at work. The size of phone booths. Populated by me, and a few fork lift truck drivers, an entirely alien race in themselves. Quiet.
And often I had the TV to myself, the fact the remote didn't work is only a minor irritation.
So, a couple of times, I've been able to sit eating my sandwiches (processed hand and processed cheese atop processed bread) and take in a bit of George Pal's 1953 version of War of the Worlds. And you know what, it stands up pretty well!
The colours are lush...the effects astonishing for the time...the spaceships look like they belong on the Paris Metro...the aliens are interesting...Gene Barry is brick of chin but not too wooden...it does follow elements of the book...the heat rays and green ball lightning effects looks great...there are some wonderful stereotyped foreign scientists especially the dutch woman who later found herself in Tenko I must think...buildings being blown up for no clear strategic reason APART FROM SHEER MARTIAN EVIL...look at that water tower go up boys!...Spielberg blatantly ripped off the martians for ET and justice was served when his War of the Worlds turned out to be shit.
It packs a lot into to its 80 minutes. Still deserves to be regarded highly. Although not as highly as a good English set version of the Wells book would be if it ever got made. And not by Pendragon Pictures.
And often I had the TV to myself, the fact the remote didn't work is only a minor irritation.
So, a couple of times, I've been able to sit eating my sandwiches (processed hand and processed cheese atop processed bread) and take in a bit of George Pal's 1953 version of War of the Worlds. And you know what, it stands up pretty well!
The colours are lush...the effects astonishing for the time...the spaceships look like they belong on the Paris Metro...the aliens are interesting...Gene Barry is brick of chin but not too wooden...it does follow elements of the book...the heat rays and green ball lightning effects looks great...there are some wonderful stereotyped foreign scientists especially the dutch woman who later found herself in Tenko I must think...buildings being blown up for no clear strategic reason APART FROM SHEER MARTIAN EVIL...look at that water tower go up boys!...Spielberg blatantly ripped off the martians for ET and justice was served when his War of the Worlds turned out to be shit.
It packs a lot into to its 80 minutes. Still deserves to be regarded highly. Although not as highly as a good English set version of the Wells book would be if it ever got made. And not by Pendragon Pictures.
Tuesday, 20 March 2012
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)