"The Prestige" and the Cinematic Pub I'd Most Like to Drink In

Whenever I watch "The Prestige", Christopher "Inception" Nolan's superlative and apparently under-rated (not by me) movie about rival magicians in the late 19th century, one of the many thoughts I have rattling around my head is this;

"God I'd so love to drink in that pub! It looks amazing."

David Bowie as Nikola Tesla, and Hugh Jackman as The Great Danton

"The Prestige" features many pubs; stews of East London, champagne dens of the West End, but one reigns supreme in my eyes. It is featured in two scenes where Hugh Jackman's Danton character meets up with his fixer played by Michael Caine, and it beyond irritates me that I can't find any stills featuring it.

A lot of people, I surmise with no actual evidence whatsoever, probably like the idea of drinking in wild, decadent cat house bars, like those ones featured in Westerns, or going further back in history the pig shitted riot of Tortuga's brothel in "Pirates of the Caribbean." But really, would you really want to drink in that place in reality. All the brawling, gunfights when you are trying to read a good book, and lice ridden clientele?

No, you really want to visit a bar like that featured in the two scenes I mentioned, a beautifully elegant establishment with a high glass ceiling  -giving an orangery feel - lots of refreshing plants, and glass racks tended to by smart gentlemen in bowler hats before high quality ale is served forth to richly whiskered patrons. Sadly, it's a set constructed in the entrance atrium of a modern building, I believe, and doesn't exist in reality.

Because I would so want to drink there. It so looks like my kind of pub.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 20.08.14

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.

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

On Talking to the Cat that’s no Longer There

Sad to say, our much loved moggy finally found herself on the wrong side of the Schroedinger’s Cat paradox, and died a few days ago..

She now sleeps under cloud trees in the back garden, marked by a little cairn with a “cat stone” on top of it - a tabby painted round, smooth rock - the family having decided that this was a nice peaceful spot for her.

All the words we use to deal with the death of both pets, and humans, are all euphemisms of course. “Rest”, “sleep”, “put to sleep” and the like, and our behaviour is a kind of euphemism too. People talk at gravesides, I’ve been talking to the cat under her little monument outside.

I justified it by worrying she was lonely outside, the cat never having spent a night out in all her time with us, and so I say a few words to make sure she isn’t, and ask her what the plump looking blackbirds are up to. I imagine her leaping from tree to tree, peering in bird’s nest and being naughty, or sitting on a branch looking at me as if I’m stupid as I talk to thin air or give the cat stone a little stroke, furry Maine Coon tail swaying laconically

This is all for my comfort of course. I miss her, as do we all, ergo I need to talk to her, to reconstruct her. I know the cat isn’t really there, and not being religious in any way, don’t believe there is a spirit of a cat there.

And yet…

...perhaps in the world of science not yet discovered, the science to come, there is a reason she could still be there. Some “out there” types believe the Universe is essentially the same as a hologram and even a tiny section of it contains all the information that there is in the whole. Perhaps the soul is a physically identifiable quantity that really exists, and thus her mind has slipped into my beloved eleventh dimension - if it has, I envy what she’s seeing. Maybe she is a true quantum cat and can exist in multiple states a la Schroedinger.

I don’t know. But in any event, I shall carry on talking to her about the birds, and giving the cat stone a little pat.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 11.08.14

James Herbert and his Horrid, Nasty Rats

To revisit my childhood, I've just re-read "Domain", the second of James Herbert's trilogy based on a mutant strain of black rat terrorising Epping Forest. Not merely by making a mess everywhere and causing a spot of Weil's disease, but by killing lots of people and taking their heads back to their hideously deformed two headed leader so it can eat their brains.

Together with "The Rats" and "Domain", "Lair" represents the first horror I ever read, and the horror was so vivid it stuck with me always.

The mass attacks by rats are terrifyingly described; Herbert clearly loves getting into our Winston Smith like 1984 heads, and invoking the primal fear the long incisors and scaly tails can cause in people. These giant, three foot long rats with the strength of a pitbull terrier don't just kill, they eat in bloody, visceral detail.

They bite the fingers off vicars attempting to escape from a fresh dug grave the rats are violating. They eat the toes of an adulterous (of course) woman as she indoors in outdoor sex with her lover, before tearing deeper into her flesh. They devour a tent full of Barnardo boys. They blind a man by eating his eyes, and cause a man to wonder why he can still feel the rat eating his heart.

A moving tube train? No problem for the rats, who slaughter the evening commuters before slowly eating through the cupboard the stationmaster was hiding in. School children are devoured en-masse. Cinema-goers are devoured en-masse. And in "Domain", a post nuclear holocaust London throws rats into the mix of radiation sickness and rabies atomic war throws up, a high Rad count being no protection against being eaten.

Worse, was the fact that in the "The Rats" if you survived the attack, you would die within 24 hours that would cause you to lose your senses and your skin to turn yellow, stretch and tear over your skeleton.

For the youngster, the fact that Herbert would throw in a wide array of terribly written sex scenes would provide a little light relief from the rodent atrocities that would infiltrate your dreams at night and make you want to sleep with the light on. No form of strictly heterosexual forms of intercourse is left undescribed, and just like in any American horror movie of the 70s, the participants are always first in the queue for a violent death.

And finally, few folk who ever read "The Rats" will be able to forget the phrase "You couldn't fuck a Polo mint with that!" in any kind of hurry.

Copyright BLoody Mulberry 09.08.14

The Peugeot 205 as Space Vehicle

My stepfather still has his 25 plus year old Peugeot 205, its his pride and joy, his love, his baby, his metallic blue tangerine flake baby.

And to me, like all our other cars, but this one especially, it was a spaceship. Yes, another thing in my life that was a spaceship, an escape from being a weird kid at school, an escape from being ignored by all the damn girls, a way out of tedious maths and sciences I could no longer do.

It was an all age thing, from childhood to adulthood. How many times have I written or thought about making spaceships out of things.

The 205 was, and is, the best because of its metallic spaciness, soft top - yeah, cabriolet spaceships are not much use in space I know - and fabulous internal retro stylings out of the 50s - all manner of knobs and levers that could be used for various thruster and life support services.

It was small, you could imagine the confinement of a Gemini or Apollo crew, I think actually there was more room in the 205 than in a Gemini spacecraft. Going to Mars in a 205, no room to stand or more realistically float about.

It's still there, and this common theme, this storyline running through my head forever, escape! But now, more likely on a bicycle or running, than in a space equipped Peugeot 205.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 08.08.14

"Pele's Soccer" and Other Retro Footie Games

Recently at work, a group of 32 lucky punters took part in some kind of FIFA14 World Tournament. The game itself is very life like, it almost pours off the screen into the real world, and the moonlighting managers (three hour lunch break today eh chaps?) sit and cheer like real fans.

Am I taking part? Am I watching? Like hell.

For me, the shiny modernity of a modern football game just doesn’t cut it. It has no quaintness, no charm, and frankly if you like football that realistic, why not just go and play in the garden for pity’s sake?

I liked my football games a little more old school. Not that I was any kind of gamer now, then, or ever, but as any kid does, I enjoyed playing on my friends computer’s, and soccer type games actually offered some of the few decent opportunities for live head to head contests.

It goes all the way back, in fact, to the 70s, where visiting my father’s house I came across a classic Atari cartridge console. It was the second video game I’d ever seen, after an early “Pong” console on holiday in Arran, and it belonged to the son of a very famous footballer of days gone by. My stepbrothers used to borrow it, and I loved it, especially the “Combat” cartridge with the biplanes.

The game that got played the most was the first football game, the inimitable “Pele’s Soccer.” No flash manager mode here, you were limited to selecting a formation of, er, 1-2 as your men, shown in plan view as hexagonal blocks with sticky-out little feet, were clearly skewered together in a fixed equilateral triangle, kidneys impaled. It didn’t seem to stop them running, as they flew up and down the pitch accompanied by a marching little sound like a centipede tap-dancing. The round ball was a square and only travelled in straight or 45 degree lines (much like England) and a shrill whistle blasted out of the screen if it went out of play.

It's all action on the wing

The scoring of goals, a relatively easy business as the console controlled goalkeeper had the speed of a shrivelled slug, was signalled by a computerised fanfare, and firework display graphics nicked from the advert breaks on the Benny Hill show.

I say scoring was an easy business, I should have added “if you were playing me” because I hardly ever caused Benny Hill expressions of goalular delight, while my stepbrother and his cousins would regularly stuff twenty past me in an eight minute game. I always tried to claim it wa because I had the crap joystick where the handle grip would come off.

They would say it was because I was crap. They were right.

I played other olde school football games on various platforms. “Football Manager” on the Sinclair ZX81 offered, um, a blurry grey screen interrupted by score reports and the chance to manage Newport County, but it was the progenitor to one of the most successful game series. The Spectrum version had highlights; black or red stick men either scoring or not scoring, in very jerky basic.

“Match Day” on the Spectrum was a real cut above any previous game, however. It was probably the first to have anything even approximating playable, realistic action, and you could use Panini 82 World Cup annuals to name and commentate upon all your players - “And what a goal for Boniek!!!”. You could even play on a black pitch, but too bad about the unstoppable goals from throw ins.

That were scored against me by my friend. In great numbers. I never won a game of this either.

Scoring in "Match Day". Just like I never did

“Pele’s Soccer" was still the best though. The great man even endorsed it. That’s how good he thought the three impaled hexagons in a triangle were.

Copyright Simon Hodgson / Bloody Mulberry 30.07.14

Painting the New Worlds of Space

Space is just out there waiting, an undiscovered, unspoilt quantum wilderness. I’ve written before about a planet of poets, trying to poet their way to a new society and watching the crops they sowed wilt in a blight of pretentsion.

Where do artists fit in in this creative universe? Well, I figure perhaps the best place would be the asteroid belt, great grey rocks that may soon turn out to be the future prosperity of Earth as the corporations mine them out for iridium, titanium and all manner of valuable metals.

But in the meantime, they are lifeless boulders with the complexion of ashes. From the size of footballs to hundreds of kilometres across.

Ready, and waiting, for interplanetary gentrification. Enter the artists.

“Art for an Intergalactic Race” proclaimed the flyers in every city. “One Small Step for a Man, a Giant Leap for Human Culture” was emblazoned on giant banners over the motorways/freeways/interstrada. “Leave Your Mark on God’s Creation” was painted down the side of a skyscraper in Salt Lake City. Applicants were required to do nothing more than proclaim their fitness, after all, there were plenty of asteroids to go round…

Every artist is given a small spaceship and a very large supply of paint, special paint that can coat with thick colour in layers only a molecule thick. The spaceships are on preprogrammed autopilot so all the artists have to do is eat their freeze-dried space food and urinate into a rubber hose. It is a very boring voyage, and all the artists have to do is talk to twelve other artists of their choice. All these thirteen way conversations are beamed back to Earth to be broadcast on very very earnest radio stations in the dead of night, listened to by no-one but a few insomniacs and deranged cultural commentators.

Eventually each spacecraft arrives at its randomly allocated asteroid, and every artist disembarks to begin their project under a glittering hail of stars. All wear spacesuits part from the Japense conceptualist Umagi who walks out of his spaceship naked and allows his decompressing intestines to form a ribbon around a minor planet the size of a house.

“Is he encompassing the asteroid, or is the asteroid encompassing him?” was the debate back on earth.

Other artists went for entire coatings of one colour, including one who claimed to have used transparent paint. One had taken along some of Rothko’s ashes, and used two colours before he realised he had hung the asteroid upside down. Abstract space squiggles - very tedious and predictable - decorated others, while another carved out the huge asteroid Vesta into the likeness of female genitals and coloured them in crimson reflective paint. He thought he was celebrating womanhood on an unprecedented scale. Most said he was a sad exploitative old man.

Asteroids ended up as moon sized pastoral scenes, fluffy clouds above fluffy sheep, green fields on a bedrock of scheiss and silicate. Thee are impressionist asteroids, expressionist asteroids, and a descendant of Duchamp urinated on the surface of one and said that asteroid was now both a urinal AND a work of art.

The urine froze into yellow space crystals before it hit the ground.

Asteroids were red, asteroids were blue, asteroids were Mondrians, others were Koons.

The asteroid that eventually caused a mass extinction on Earth was a Vettriano...retro dancers on the beach wiped out all life, as others had previously thought Vettriano had wiped out at.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 26.07.14