But please reassure the minions and old timers that I will be unobtrusive while I keep an eye on things. I will be crouching the other side of an invisible line, behind an imaginary Chinese wall inside a transparent box wearing a different hat, running a computer simulation of the current situation from behind an informal desk fellating a made-up banana. They are not to worry about me. Not until I creep up in the dead of night and hit them over the head with a piece of two-by-four with a single six-inch nail sticking out of it.

The genius from the  Thick of It, Malcolm Tucker, is back and his latest election strategy for labour has been published in the Guardian.  Fantastic!

Still From "Storm"

At the 2008 Robin Ince run “Nine Lessons and Carols for Godless People” in London, comedian Tim Minchin performed his 9 minute beat poem “Storm.”  Tracy King was at the event and afterwards approached Tim with the proposal of turning the poem into an animation.  He quickly accepted.  The film is not finished yet (there is a production blog here) but an official trailer has been released and it looks amazing.  I can’t wait to see the full nine minutes.

The full audio is also on you tube:

They called themselves Big Star and never made it big or found stardom, and there, along with a 2:49 song called “September Gurls” that shimmers and chimes with all the hopeless longing you ever felt for someone you never got to hold or to keep, is the pocket history of power pop.

A good essay on the latest four disc box set from Big Star, “Keep an Eye on the Sky” can be found here.

I once saw Ok Go live in 2000/2001 in a little pub in Bristol, where they could clearly play but were never going to set the world on fire – although they did play a versions of Totos “Hold the Line” which was quite funny.  To be honest I am surprised they are still going especially as all of their effort seems to go into videos rather than the music.  Ho Hum.

However to relieve the tension of not watching “Ready, Steady, Cook” whenever I need to I can simply hire my own Brian Turner for the day and forget all my £5 bag of food worries and the best part is that I won’t have to put up with Ainslie Harriott gooning around either (I wonder what he is like on an off day).

Why Fake Faces is under the impression that we need a replica Brian Turner I am not sure, I would have thought that the real one can probably handle all the required media engagements without too much trouble.  Maybe he doesn’t have a car and this is the only solution.  Odd.

Poster for Blur: No Distance Left to Run

BBC 2 showed the Blur documentary “No Distance Left To Run” last night and being a great believer in using technology to improve your life, I had videoed (I have no usable term for saving on the Hard Disk of my V+ box that is quite so quick) it to watch this evening.

The documentary is a mix of four talking heads, Damon, Graham, Alex and Dave, interviewed separately and then spliced with footage old and new and hung around the concept of the mini tour of the UK which finished with an awesome headlining slot at Glastonbury 2009 and two big Hyde Park gigs.

It was a good insight into what it must take to be in a band with four individuals who have their own lives. By no means as depressing as Radioheads Meeting People is Easy film it did have some similarities (Alex James sitting in front of a camera doing radio idents with the slow realisation that this was going to be a soulless exercise was almost exactly the same as in the Radiohead documentary). It was also clear that these were four friends, four very different personalities, who had been through it as young men, had been incredibly close and then as lives progressed and pressure built up around them, slowly disintegrated.

The film though, was ultimately redemptive. They had got back together, not to make money or a new album but to be friends on one last adventure. This adventure culminates at Glastonbury where Damon breaks down and cries just before singing This is a Low and afterwards declaring how happy he is to be with his friends playing music. And then, finally, finishing with the magic of a Glastonbury crowd singing Tender right back to the band. It was good to go back to the nineties for a while, Oasis v Blur for number one, Brit Pop and Indie discos, it was good to revisit Glastonbury but I’m reasonably happy to be back in 2010.

I’ve thrown in an early version of the song Sing from the bands first album demoed when they were still known as Seymour and the video to Beetlebum, a song that reminds me of wandering into the large Virgin megastore in Cardiff to buy the single – I don’t know what is there now…

Noisy, Greedy Cat

As I was up at a ridiculous hour, I went for a walk around the park – which I have never been to since moving into the area 9 months ago.  I took my camera as it was a bright morning and I was feeling creative.  However, I was still feeling sluggish and slow and I was disappointed with every photo I took.  They were all very dull, lacking in any clarity of thought or reason for being.  A picture of empty playing fields is not too interesting.  Anyway I am posting what I have been able to salvage from my morning stroll – albeit it is only post processing that has brought any life to the subject matter.  B for Effort but C/D for execution.  I am usually the other way around (or at least like to pretend!).

Motspur Park Gasometers

Sir Joseph Hood Memorial Playing Fields

I went to see him as part of the Unrepeatable tour in the Bristol Hippodrome which was even better than Live at The Ambassadors.  He had really begun to hone his act and knew exactly where his strengths lay and it was clear from this show that he was going to just get bigger and bigger.

Definitive Article, Glorious and Dressed To Kill were released  on VHS/DVD and I bought all of them, each one a step on from where he was before.  Pure, consummate comedy genius.

However, I then went to see his Circle tour in Cardiff and it was basically a Greatest Hits.  I remember everyone leaving the show and complaining about the price of a ticket to see routines that had already been performed and consumed a hundred times in our living room.  We had gone to see new material, things that would mark us out from those that hadn’t bought a ticket and been unable to see the show.  We felt ripped off and I began to lose faith in him.  I bought the Circle DVD when it came out and by that time although he had clearly developed a routine that was not just a rehash of previous videos, it did not seem to reach the same heights of previous work.

I have since then had diminishing returns with Mr Izzards output.  I hardly smiled when I watch the latest DVD, Stripped, and I’ve only watched Sexie once.  I’m not sure why this is, maybe I have seen so much of his output that I know how his mind works and I get to the “funny” bit before he does,  I find he is over reliant on surreal ideas and strange names these days without any central core to what he is saying – although i appreciate he is trying to educate as he goes by hanging the stand up on various stages of history – but for me it no longer works.

However, I was able to put all this to one side when I watched “Eddie Izzard: Marathon Man.”  This was the Izzard I knew from my youth, funny without trying and yet still clearly angry and upset about the death of his mother when he was only six.  The documentary is in three parts (one yet to be broadcast) and follows his Sport Relief attempt at running 43 marathons in 50 days.  As he says “I’ve run before but mainly for buses!”  He spends 5 weeks preparing and as he is an out of shape 48-year-old with flat feet makes you wonder how he will achieve this.  He is easily distracted and doesn’t seem to really listen to anything that experts might have to say to him, he only really seems happy when he actually starts running and it is just him and his determination, a drive which is fuelled by his personal demons from his youth, to follow through with this madcap scheme.  It is a fascinating insight into the man and what makes him tick and he really comes alive in the presence of other people which makes him seem like a charming and likeable bloke.

I want to see the film Believe, a documentary about him (although it feels a little bit like an ego trip on his behalf), but it is going to have its work cut out to beat this piece of, essentially, feel good TV.

Oh, and if you like you can donate to sport relief here (which was the main point in his running all of those marathons).

Martian Sunset From Mars Rover

In the first episode he discusses the sun, its origin and it’s effect on our planet (and the rest of the solar system).  I enjoyed the view back from the solar system of the sun and they broadcast the Mars Rover pictures of a Martian sunset.  (I remember putting a photo of this in my diary when the pictures were first released and accompanied it with one sentence: “The Sun is so small, it breaks my heart.”) Finally he goes on  to explain what will happen in 5 billion years as the sun reaches the end of its lifespan.

This left me wondering what the human race will be doing in 5 billion years, will we have avoided wiping ourselves out, will we have evolved or will a much superior form of intelligent life have taken over by then?  I have always liked the idea that the human race is simply the universe trying to understand itself (a theory touched on by Douglas Adams of course) and that intelligence is what all atoms will tend generate given 13 billion years.  But how much more will we know and what will we be capable of given another 5 billion? Damn these short life spans, I want to see infinity and understand.

Books from 1939

I spent the afternoon at the Imperial War Museum, one of London’s many fantastic free museums, which gave me an opportunity for some picture-taking.  I was surprised at quite how large it was although this did lead to some amusing phone conversations when people got lost:

“Where are you?”

“I’m in World War One.”

“Oh, I’m in the Holocaust.”

“Well you better get out of there, I’ll meet you in the trenches.”

The World Wars One & Two exhibitions in the basement were huge (and at times confusing to navigate – especially World War Two) but it was interesting how much information they had and what made it come alive were some of the smaller things such as propaganda flyers, newspaper headlines etc.  What my history teacher would have called primary evidence.

Gas Mask from WWII

In fact the Holocaust Exhibit was probably the most impressive part of the museum, although after a while it did become a bit overpowering.  There is a large scale model of Auschwitz, which I didn’t spend anytime looking at, it just made my skin crawl. The rest of the exhibit though was incredibly detailed and in-depth.

I once went to the Pinkas Synagogue in Prague where the Jews that had been killed from Bohemia region (some 80,000) had had their name inscribed on the walls.  They were big walls and there were a lot of names which filled them. This brought home the holocaust to me and the scale and impact.  No museum or textbook or film has ever come close to standing in that room surrounded by name after name after name.

The one thing that really struck me from the Imperial War Museum today was from a video of talking heads, which was really beautiful, with all these concentration camp survivors sharing their stories and experiences. One Jewish woman stood out more than the others for me.  She was talking about  the experiences she had suffered and whether they had informed her personality and the way she interacted with the world today.  She said (and I paraphrase slightly):

“It is as when you throw a stone into a lake.  At first there are large ripples where the stone breaks the surface and these become smaller ripples as time passes and then, eventually, the surface of the lake becomes calm again and flat.  But the stone still lies at the bottom of the lake and that stone remains in my heart.”