My "Ashes to Ashes" Hair Struggle

Much as looking like Keeley Hawes might be very very jolly for some chaps, it is not of her that I speak, rather David Bowie in his all-time classic "Ashes to Ashes" video, complete with black skies, exploding kitchens and Steve Strange.

I remembered it, vaguely, as a child in 1980, but not clearly, and it took the "History of Rock Video" all nighter on the BBC in 1986 to put it back in my consciousness. There was a half hour Bowie segment, and I was absolutely enthralled when "Ashes to Ashes" appeared and seemed a thousand times better than I remembered.

And then, there was his hair.

 

 

Not the best shot there has ever been, but the best one I could find. It was long at the front, parted, but sort of quiffed over so it was hanging over his (strange) right eye. It was immense to me, the birth of a new Mister Mulberry, the gonk with the terrible curls and waves into the semi-hip teen.

 

 

The hair would be the vanguard of this transformation. That was the plan anyway. But even after the hair was cropped short and the back and left longer at the front, the crucial change away from early 80s mullets, it was still far too wavy to make it look like the suavily weird Mr Bowie.

 

This didn't stop me from standing in front of a mirror for hours with this bizarre round hard toothed brush with a sort of boingy end. I'd dig it in at the front like a gardening fork, pull the hair out straight as I could, then sort of curl it round the brush to straighten it out against the wave.

 

The strands could then be draped across my eye in the appropriate fashion, and so I would look the Bowie part.

 

For all of about five minutes. Ten, if I used industrial amounts of mousse and hairspray (the brand with the sort of Mondrian painting on the cans) and gave my hair the texture of a mummified jellyfish. After that, the curls would spring it back to where it sodding well was, only with the addition of a weighty coating of utter gunk.

 

 

This ritual would persist for months, with the same result. I never learned from this, when David Byrne appeared  in my life, I would go for it again, with more "product" and even worse results.

 

People just don't remember what a trial it was to be a teen with wavy hair in the 80s, they really don't. "Ooooh, perm!" I would have yelled at me, by pocket Bryan Ferries with a girl on each finger.

 

Worse was folk saying "Girls would kill to have hair like yours!"

 

Thanks Granny, for saying my hair looked like a woman's. Thank you very much.

 

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 17.11.14

The Pub Travels Through Time, but Regresses

My former favourite pub is a time machine...

I swear to god it is something to do with the cellar. I caught a glimpse down there once, I didn't see any barrels of beer or spare bottles of spirits or crates of over priced coke bottles the size of thimbles.

Instead I saw a blue glow like Cerenkow rediation, and the sound of some massive demonic device that seemed to be sucking all the power out of the pub and setting off fire alarms, and bringing forth smoke.

This device seems to be some kind of time regression device. It's the only thing I can think of it being, For it is caused evolution, of the human race in particular, to run backwards.

Sometimes, I wonder if that also includes myself.

When I first started going, in the dim mists of (pub) time, the pub was a quiet stronghold of the intelligentsia, and dammit we were proud. The only pub open till 2am, it was our own speakeasy. It got more popular. Students were there playing music. There were lock ins for the chosen few, until 830am in one case.

Then the bad people heard about it, and initimidation arrived, along with horribly cheap coke snorted in the medievally unhygienic lavatories. The lock in bar staff left, and bar staff who encouraged the presence of thugs arrived.

The hairlines got lower, the knuckles began to drag. Faces began to bear the mark of inbreeding, rough voices, IQs lower than the pool balls used on the (sign of doom) pool tables. Fruit machines for the hopeless gambler. DNA decaying, you could see strands of it disappearing out the window, synapses dying just by being in there.

Bouncers on the door. Sub humans now present, girls with cottage loaf bun hairstyles, lacquered so they are hard and shiny, like the crappest bargain hunt antiques. Voice boxes have now de-evolved to the point where they can only make harsh, guttural sounds. As for the men...

Ballards Drowned World...people have lost the need for brains, they are operating with their spinal columns alone. Floodwaters rise, the pub is filled with giant ferns for the rabble to fight in. They spend so much time punching on the floor, the local pub-goer now walks on all fours. They copulate in the pub by masturbating onto the floor, the females then rub themselves in it like a lamprey or hag fish. 4 weeks later flat headed children are born, and she is ready for the next litter.

I'm watching all this. Recording it. Scientific observations from my corner. Taking genetic samples from drool and spittle and breeding fluids.

My once favourite pub is now in the Pre-Cambrian.

BOOKS - 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson

Having seemingly, and unconsciously, avoided sci fi novels since the death of Iain M. Banks, I found myself reading a work on which he seems to bear a significant influence on.

Another one, in fact.

In fact, I find myself thinking that the work is almost a prequel to Banks' "Culture" universe, with early forms of terraformed planets, terrarium spaceships with evocative names, and a form of AI that has developed well beyond Turing Test levels.

I'm probably a mile out with this assessment, but then again I'm hardly Clive James when it comes to criticism.

The story involves terraforming artist Swan being involved in an apparent accident on her adoptive home of Mercury when her city - which rolls around permanetly out of the scorching sun - suffers an apparent projectile strike that nearly claimed her life; and left her cancerous and wandering tunnels to survive in the company of a new acquaintance, the lanky Wahram, native of Saturn's moon Titan.

As she investigates the incident from one end of the solar system to the other, it becomes clear that the incident on Mercury was no accident, and only intelligences of the very highest order could have arranged the attack, but who? We also see her on Earth, attempting to re-introduce extinct animals to the North American landmass from "space ark" terraria to a flooded, struggling planet where most folk capable of doing so have long since left.

It is a far easier read than Banks' work, and although not possessing the incredible span of his imagination, it is easier to grasp the spaceborne society of the novel. It also acts as a fascinatingly deep study of sexuality and body modification; males and females as we know them are not the dominant genders with many people choosing to have the genitals of both, or neither. DNA from other species, both alien and not so, are also combined with human with varying degrees of taboo.

The world of 2312 is one where people can sing like birds, and have experience sex as a male and a female simultaneously.

The Swarm and Crap Cinema's Greatest Quote

"Are you endowing these bees with human motives? Like saving their fellow bees from captivity, or seeking revenge on Mankind?"

"I always credit my enemy, no matter what he may be, with equal intelligence."

So responds Richard Widmark as General Thalius Slater (wasn't he in the Burton "planet of the Apes"?) to Michael Caine, as they and a host of other big star names from the 70s - Ricahrd Chamberlain! Katherine Ross! Slim Pickens! - fight to keep their heads above a mighty, buzzing, nuclear power station destroying tide of AFRICAN KILLER BEES.

"Burn you motherbuzzers!!!!"

It isn't easy, because these bees can kill you with just 6 stings, and if you don't die, agonising hallucinating madness awaits.

Butch Cassidy seems a long time ago, eh Katharine

 Of course, Widmark being the usual military idiot wants to take the shock and awe option, bombing, spraying, and immolating the bees out of existence, but Caine dissuades him with a memorable, ballbusting ecological lecture, delivered in the loudest yell Caine ever used in his career. Blowing bloody doors off has nothing on it.

That is the point, general! The honey bee is vital to the environment! Every year in america, they pollinate six billion dollars worth of crops! If you kill the bee, you're gonna kill the crop! If you kill the plants, you'll kill the people! No! No, general! There will be no air drop, until we know exactly, what we are dropping, and where, and how! Excuse me!

Of course, they are both right. Caine lures the bees offshore using some sort of sonic gizmo, where Widmark is finally able to deploy his napalm on the pollinating apid psychopaths. But not before most of the stars die, all the extras die - best scene; an old teacher screaming as her kids are agonisingly exstingulated - and Henry Fonda overdoses himself with bee venom in a fruitless attempt to find an antidote.

AAARRGGGHHHHH

Doctor Kildare's bedside manner comes in for criticism

This mega camp Irwin Allen disaster (in all senses) classic was shown last night on BBC4. Iplayer while you can and give yourself a treat.

I Love the Silurians!

The Horror Channel's Doctor Who repeats have been an absolute godsend for me; wallpaper TV I can write to without ever. having to concentrate too hard. All of the Pertwee and Baker era storylines knock the modern era into one of those "cocked hat" things - whatever is a cocked hat FFS - and the fact that most episodes appear to have been dug out of a bog make it easier to ignore, or indeed enjoy, the daft costumes, sets, and rubber suited monsters.

So. Doctor Who and the Silurians. I knew what the Siluruans were, roughly (things to get confused with the Sea Devils) and I knew they were among the best loved monsters. But I had never seen their 1970 story until now.

It is, or rather they are, fantastic.

The thing is with these Silurians is that they are not really monsters at all. They may be up to no good, but it is only initially in reasonable self preservation...their leader even has a sense of burbling charm...no mere evil green blobs on wheels, these fellows. Their high intelligence shines through.

Achh, who am I trying to fool? The charm is in the daft turd brown rubber suits; the fluttering eyelashes; the aforementioned burbly voices that make them sound like "The Fifth Element" Mondushawan on acid; they have a funny stumbling walk as if their arms have been strapped by their sides while their amphiboid heads bob back and forth; they have a light in their foreheads which have a duel purpose of killing people and moving coffin like hibernacula around; their faces are silly, and as ever when they do have a plan to hatch for the usual earthling killing purposes, it is far too long winded and complicated for it ever to work, especially when they set it out to the Doctor beforeheand in the tradition of every movie bad guy.

I love them, for every single on of those reasons, and more.

FX and FX2 - The Deadly Y-Fronts of Illusion

I managed to pick up both of these very 80s thrillers - with a loose element of sci-fi - at Oxfam over the weekend for not much money, and was looking forward to watching both of them. Neither of them seem to crop up on UK television much these days.

I was initially stunned to see Lalo Schiffrin's name turnv up in the credits, but the super heavy 1986 analogue synthesizer tunes won't appeal to "Bullit" fans.

The plot of "FX: Murder by Illusion" is actually pretty clever - special effects genius Bryan Brown (THE Australian actor in the 80s, apart from Mel Gibson who wasn't actually Australian) is hired to fake the assasination of mob boss Jerry Orback (Law and Order ahoy!) so he can join the witness protection programme. But the good guys turn out to be not so good, and Bryan finds himself fighting for his life as innocent passers by, and his girlfriend, are iced in the crossfire.

None of this is as alarming as the two standout scenes in the movie; the first when we are treated to a glimpse of Brown in his white Y fronts of a morning, and a second where he descends upon a bad guy like one of those flying squirrels.

Luckily, he overcomes these nightmarish visions to win the day, with the aid of some classic analogue FX tricks and chubby Brian Dennehy, playing the same sort of lumbering cop he played in the Skorpions favourite film, "Gorky Park". Both end up waltzing off into the sunset with 15 million dollars of mob money amid some jarring tourist film of Switzerland.

Onto FX2 "The Deadly Art of Illusion", and we find Brown still battling corrupt cops AND District Attorneys in league with the Mafia as an FX stunt to trap a sex killer goes wrong and the father of his girlfriend's child - hello Rachel Ticotin from Total Recall! The money, and moustache having all ran out for Dennehy, he teams up with Brown again to see off the bad guys with the aid of a terrifying movement micking robot clown, and an early sighting of virtual reality in the cinema.

Dan Brown must have written the bit of the script dealing with stolen Vatican gold medallions

 

 

The films are horrifically dated now, although there are less rolled up jacket sleeves and big hair on view than you'd expect. I found them an entertaining afternoon, but I shant be reaching to the back of the DVD shelf to watch them again any time soon.

 

I have no wish to see the robot clown again, let alone those Y-fronts...

 



The Unknown Villain - Boy Number 6 Kazuo Kiriyama

Battle Royale is a movie probably little known outside of fans of Manga and those "Tartan Asia Extreme" DVDs, and hence its chief antagonist does not have the reputation he deserves.

He is Boy Number 6, Kazuo Kiriyama.

Nothing behind the eyes

The Manga apparently gives him a complex backstory, that he is an intellectually superior child that had been rendered essentially sociopathic by an accident in the womb that caused to all intents and purposes a partial lobotomy.

The film just presents him as a blank "transfer student" who's first act one the game the commences - the game being the teens fight to the death until only one remains scenario pinched by The Hunger Games - is to be able to kill a gang of 6 heavily armed opponents with a paper fan.

Throughout the film he kills without mercy, using his movie standard M10 with everlasting magazines to kill boy and girl alike without making a sound. The only utterance he ever makes is when he makes an  inhuman cough into the megaphone used by two girls in a failed attempt to unite the students, before using it to broadcast a dying girl's death rattle to the whole of Battle Royale island.

The face of death

He is a killer far above any campy Bond villain or lumbering Michael Myers, and it is time he was recognised as such.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 08.10.14