Some people I'd like you to meet

Halloweeeeeeeeeeeen movies.  Monsters and that.  YEAH!

I love monsters, me.

From being terrified of Daleks at the age of five, to being terrified of Smash Martians at the age of five, to being terrified of Rainbow at the age of 42, monsters have kept me nervous and spellbound all my life.  The first dreams I had were about monsters.  Clown monsters.  Puppet monsters.  A man with a painted face called the Carrot Man (he ate carrots and sometimes people).  A thing like an egg with teeth.  I suffer from night terrors (yet another autism symptom, it turns out - possibly triggered by my hypersenses kicking in during deep sleep, apparently) and you'd think I'd run like bloody hell from looking at the wretched growling things in the real world.  But no.  I just can't keep away.

So lists; dated, everyone's done them five years ago.  Bugger off then.  I've got chronic toothache and I couldn't give a fuck what you think.  These are some monsters.  Perhaps not the best or the most famous.  But some of them are nicely obscure and may encourage you to watch a little further.

THIS IS THE LIST OF THE MOST GHOST TRANSMISSIONY MONSTERS THAT THERE EVER COULD BE, PROBABLY, WRITTEN USING WORDS IN SENTENCE USING MY MIND AND HANDS MAINLY

There is no order.  Neither in the list, nor in human existence.  There will be some spoilers.

10) The Thing in the Rocking Chair: Baby (part of the Beasts series)
Jesus.  Beasts was an anthology series written by Nigel Kneale, a man whose work I like a lot, even though he appears to despise humanity.  Seriously, about 90% of his protagonists are foul, violent, corrupt, broken, debauched, shallow, cruel or being controlled by alien meteor slugs.
Baby is an episode of this series.  I'm not going to spoil it, much.  It's all about the atmosphere.  There's this couple, renovating a remote country cottage.  The house has a History of Bad Stuff.  Spooky things happen, usually off screen.  Then at the end...well.  There's a Thing.  In a rocking chair.  I watched this as a cynical, media literate teacher of film, at the age of 38.  And pretty much shat myself.  It's fucking horrible.

9)  The Thing in the Corridor: The Stone Tape
Nigel Kneale again, I'm afraid.  The Stone Tape is legendary; if you read this blog regularly and you've never watched it, please seek it out.  You're in for an early 70s treat.  Short version; science team try to analyse a haunted house, convinced that they're onto a new form of technology and that ghosts are mainly just recordings impressed onto stone structures.  You will be unsurprised to learn that things go wrong.  Very wrong.  The theory is correct, but that recording of the ghosts?  It belonged to...something else.  Something we don't really see.  Something dark with what might be glowing eyes or what might be just little balls of bright light.  The Thing in the Corridor.  It needs a new recording now...

I'm aware that this isn't a corridor. The Thing is OUTSIDE, alright?  It hasn't got there yet.

8)  A big pile of entrails that kills you with swan puppets: Sapphire and Steel 
Sapphire and Steel had lots of great monsters; it's just that they tended to be abstract.  Little bits of light that bring nursery rhymes to life using dead Roundhead soldiers.  A cloud of darkness that makes you relive WW1 deaths.  Mr Shape, about whom I blogged long ago (he really should have his own entry here, but I don't want to spoil his papery horror any more - search the archives if you want to read about him).
So instead, I decided to lead with the aforementioned pile of entrails.  It's not a subtle story.  The last, agonised, vivisected fragments of animal life on earth hijack a time machine and wreak unsettling havoc on their tormentors.  They bring things to life and fuck with time and space generally.  I could cope with all this at 7pm on a weeknight, but not the creature's manifestation as a big pile of guts, intercut with slaughterhouse footage.

And yes.  It turns a pillow into a swan puppet and tries to peck Steel to death.  It also wins at the end, to my great delight.

A swan puppet monster, yesterday.

7) Smash Martians.  Metal.  Knives.

6) The Space Ghost Monster: Look and Read
Look and Read is a schools' TV show.  The Boy from Space is a serial it ran.  They showed it once in 1973 and again in 1981; rather brilliantly, the repeat was framed with the now adult actors playing the same parts and remembering that long ago summer when they met aliens in the woods.  This premise has haunted my imagination for years.  Firstly, it speaks to me about the power of childhood memory.  If you were part of a kids' TV adventure, would you believe it when you grew up?  Or would you try to forget it? For what it's worth, that's a tiny aspect of the plot of Alan Garner's astonishing and beautiful novel Boneland.

Secondly, the stilted "only use 50 basic words" script comes across as though it contains hidden esoteric meanings.  Strange looks to camera and stress on lines like "they'd think we were making it all up", in a way that suggests some comment on metafiction and childhood perceptions.  Or at least, it does if you're watching it on DVD in 2015 and you're an autistic English/Film teacher with a Grant Morrison obsession.

This week; opening the third eye to explore the higher realms.  Have your drills ready.

It's got two great monsters in it.  One's more of a villain: the Tall Spaceman (I like to think he's related to the Tall Man from Phantasm) and a cartoon ghost monster that crops up in the animated educations sequences.  The Tall Spaceman creeps around, hides in bushes, fires energy weapons at classic cars and generally does alien abduction stuff.  The cartoon ghost monster eats other cartoon characters in an attempt to teach tenses and so forth.
I was shit scared of the cartoon monster.  Thought the Tall Spaceman was kinda cool. Like a BBC Terminator.

5) Mr. Babadook: The Babadook
A recent film!  A modern text!
The Babadook is WONDERFUL.  It's one of the best, and most moving, horror films I've ever seen.  I don't want to tell you anything about it.  Mr. Babadook sneaks into your house in a pop up book.  He has his own special rhymes.  So he's a bloody great monster, in all his funny disguises.  But this is a film about class and gender and mental health and isolation.  And the ending...so much more than just another jump scare and cut to black.  So much deeper.  It made me cry, in an oddly happy way.  There's a metaphor in there and it spoke to me on a very primal and powerful level.  Like the film repeats, you can't get rid of the Babadook.  You really can't.  So maybe you need to think about that, and see beyond the essentially meaningless good/evil, sane/insane binary oppositions we fill our culture with.  WATCH THIS FILM.

Yes.  Watch the film.  So my fancy dress idea makes sense.

4) The Sheet: Oh Whistle and I'll Come To You
M.R. James.  You devil, you.  The stories are wonderful.  This 1960s adaptation is astonishing.  The 21st century version is shite.
However, this small, slow, monochrome story of a lonely, mumbling academic who unwittingly stirs up a horrid spectral force in a deserted, out-of-season seaside town leaves quite a few viewers with the desire to sleep with the light on.  It's all about the sleep.  And the way your bedclothes get all messed up.  And the word "dirty", and having alone time.  It's possible there may be a subtext.
The monster is a filthy bedsheet that groans and roars, except that we suddenly understand the sounds are the noises that our terrified, thumb-sucking protagonist is making.  Until a big man bursts in and saves him, causing the dirty sheets, which have risen up high, to lie back down again.
Like I say, I'm sure that there's some hidden agenda here, but I just can't spot it.

3) The Thing in the Map: Mr. Humphries and his Inheritance
More M.R. James.  This wasn't even a 'real' adaptation; it was a schools' TV job for ITV, designed to demonstrate the power of music in a film piece.  Presumably, they used this story as it was out of copyright.  Dude inherits big house, with spooky maze.  Dude investigates and finds evidence of dodgy ancestor doing dodgy magicy things in the maze.  Dude makes map of maze.  One night, map comes to life and horrible rotting face claymation zombie ghoul thing comes out of it.  Dude screams.  Your current author howls in terror at the age of six on a sick day from school and never, ever forgets it.
Please note: I use the word 'dude' in the correct sense of 'a city dweller unused to country ways', as in 'dude ranch' because I am ridiculous.

Just imagine what it could have been like.  Go on.

2) Everything on Dramarama ever: Dramarama
Possessed sailor dolls.  Evil reflections.  Malevolent invisible forces that mess with your Scrabble game to send threatening notes.  The voice of God on a radio phone in.  Thanks for fucking with us so much, Dramarama.  Because everyone expects a cheap version of Poltergeist to be on at 4:45 in the afternoon, don't they?

1)  The Greatest Monster of Them All:  but you'll have to watch from 1:29:20 in to find out.  Or watch the whole thing.  It's got VINCENT PRICE in it, you fools.  Why would you not watch Vincent Price at Halloween?
NB: it might not be a massive surprise.  I mean, they don't announce "It's...Dracula!" or anything like that. It would be good if they did.   But the don't.  However, this is The Monster Club and it needs watching like anything, because it's the most fantastic fusion of 40s/50s/60s/70s horror tropes and stars with the styles, fashions and dreadful music of the early 1980s.

Vincent!

And yeah, I could have said the Tall Man (who's actually my personal favourite) or Dracula (Lugosi?  Lee?) or any of the classic Universal monsters, or the Daleks.  But the thing is; I find all those monsters oddly re-assuring.  The ones above?  They're the ones that got to me, just a bit.  Writing about them gave me a little, genuine chill.  Just a flicker of unease that's going to stay with me for a while tonight.

Well, apart from the last one, that is.

Morningside: if you lived here, you'd be dead by now

When we're small, we feel powerless.  And yet, we have the freedom to imagine, to create our own worlds and live in them, something that a lot of people sadly lose as they grow older.  The downside to that mental freedom is that we tend to populate our worlds with monsters.

Movie monsters and threats tend to reflect adolescent and adult fears.  The fear of invasion, home or the body itself; the fear of disease, of loss.  Many horror texts touch on the fear of the poor, of the working class; when this is done well (Night of the Living Dead), a good film-maker can explore the nature of class conflict.  When it's done badly, you end up with Eden Lake or Them, revolting films about how horrible all poor children are.

But few films really touch on the deep fears of children in a way that strikes a chord with our memories and experiences.  The Babadook is one; I'll be writing about that example soon.  Wes Craven's New Nightmare is another.  These are texts that present childhood terror as being about something more than just the monster in the closet, which is ironic as they both feature some of the best screen monsters of all time.

Tonight, the Celluloid Screams festival is showing one of the greatest horror movies to examine this theme: Phantasm.  Tragically,it's on at 2:30AM and I don't see myself being able to make that, especially given the state of my car at the moment; it seems a little too metafictional to go to a horror movie event with a car that might break down at any moment, miles from anywhere (which is entirely possible, if I take a long and inexplicable detour over the moors, rather than just driving the five minutes direct route home).  Also, 2:30 AM.

Naturally, spoilers will follow.

Phantasm is the story of Michael, a troubled child with a tragic backstory.  It appears that his parents died in car accident.  His older brother Jody has to return from living a rather vague travelling party lifestyle to look after him in small town America.  And this is the quietest small town ever; it seems to be an eternal summer's day when everyone else is on holiday, the schools and shops are closed, a distinctly unsettling 1979 early closing Thursday for ever and ever.  Jody's frustration at being imprisoned here radiates from the screen; he spends all his time working on a very fast car, riding his bike, or drinking at what looks like the only bar in town.  Michael isn't oblivious to this and spends much of the early part of the movie in a state of anxiety that his only relative is about to leave without him; the terror of abandonment runs through every scene.  I've read some reports that suggest that this was the original focus of the film and that the supernatural elements fell into place almost accidentally.

Everything so far in the movie has the texture of a dream; the kind where you run to meet your friends but they've long gone and you're left alone.  Everyone has that dream, right?  Everyone?  Um?

And this is where it gets really good.  This is where one of the great (under-rated) cinematic monsters shows up.

Best.  Eyebrow.  Ever.

See, Michael becomes convinced that there's something weird in the local cemetery.  He starts spying on the mausoleum there and discovers the chief undertaker is (a) ridiculously tall and (b) inhumanly strong.  Oh, and the bodies are vanishing from the graves.  And peculiar little hooded figures keep running through there at night.  And someone's stabbing young men to death during late night graveyard sex.

So then it all goes wild and I'll leave you to discover more for yourself; I'll not even mention the spheres.   You'll know them when you see them.  They are FANTASTIC.  Or the old witch lady who seems to control reality.  Or the tuning fork gateway.  Or what's in the barrels.  Or the Lavender Lady.  Or the Wasp Finger.

But I will mention Reggie.  He's the ice-cream man.  He's balding and puzzled and resolutely normal, a working class hero who refuses to give in.  He stoically accepts all the crazy stuff and joins with Mike and Jody to defeat...well what?  The Tall Man?  Really?  Is that REALLY what this movie is about?

No more spoilers, but towards the end, the action starts to follow the logic of a dream rather than the logic of cinematic narrative.  Each terror Mike must face seems symbolic; the sexually alluring Lavender Lady, the clawing hands of the earth, the Tall Man himself, waiting at the end of the journey.  Possibly.  The terrors we face as we move from childhood are all waiting in the forest at the end of this story.

Well, not quite the end.  The final terror, the one Mike has to face at the very conclusion; that's something worse than a supernatural undertaker.  Much worse.  I suppose some people might find the revelations dull or predictable or just plain silly; personally, I think the ending is moving and powerful.  Look at the way the characters are filmed at the conclusion of the last fight scene.  The camera is telling you something about the story, the distance between the brothers.  It's quite beautiful and I never get tired of watching it.

Some of the movie may seem cliched; I reckon that this is where many of those cliches were actually born, the final shot in particular (which is VERY similar to a much more famous final moment from another much more popular film, made a couple of years later).

I love this film, so much.  It doesn't bother with explanations.  This is happening.  Deal with it.  All these years later, there are still questions; who's the old Witch Lady and how does she make things vanish into thin air?  What is the Tall Man, exactly?  Where's the Red World (you'll see)?  And what exactly was happening all along?

Don Coscarelli, the mind behind this movie, abruptly altered the VERY end moments in order to dilute the emotional charge.  We'd originally have ended with a return to reality.  The dream would have ended.  Forget that!  Coscarelli went with diving further into the nightmare and as a result, we got four sequels.  They aren't quite as great as the original, but they're imaginative, gory, silly, entertaining and they uphold the tradition of ditching narrative sense, cause/effect and exposition (except when the script deliberately starts contradicting itself).  They have largely the same cast from the original and the story continues in real time.  Phantasm 5 was completed a few months ago; it's rumoured to be the final conclusion to the sequence.

I am unrealistically excited about this.  You've been warned.

The fourth movie brilliantly used unseen footage from the original to create a peculiar sense of doubt about the narrative; how much of this is "happening" and how much is the traumatised night terrors of a small boy in 1979?  I've always thought that the best interpretation is a simple one; remember how confusing and nightmarish the adult world sometimes seemed when you were young?

Oh, those final lines:

Ice-cream man...it's all in his head.

and

It's just the wind.

Gives me the chills every time.  Van drives off into the small town 1970s night, red tail lights the last thing we see.  Minimalist theme kicks in.  Turn the lights on.






ERRATA: last time I talked about John Carpenter directing Halloween 3.  He didn't.  He was the producer.  Tommy Lee Wallace directed the movie.  I doubt he'll ever read this, so I think we got away with it.  Don't tell the horror film police.

Octoberish 1

Everything's just the walking dead.  Look at Halloween and notice that every last little aspect of it, right back to theoretical Samhain celebrations is about the dead coming back to pester the living.

Many writers have tried to establish a connection between handing out sweets/putting lanterns out and the ancient offerings we conjecture might have been offered to the spirits on dark autumn nights long ago.  The drive behind these narratives is to validate Halloween, to authenticate it as an echo of ancient religious activity.

Which is missing the point on a huge scale.  The emotional force that drives dressing up scary/transgressive and wandering around in the dark and the cold is not an echo or a memory of anything; it's precisely the same function.  We can't know what went through the head of anyone who may have hypothetically followed similar ritual patterns 1500 years ago (or whenever).  Who are we to say that they believed fervently, evangelically in the power of the spirits of the dark, in the cold days when the leaves change?  Might they not have just been enjoying a night in that liminal half state, when ghost stories might just come true and it feels like a celebration is all the more needed?

RuPaul Charles once said that he disliked Halloween; he felt that it was marginalising and reducing the power of dressing up.  To paraphrase, we're born naked and everything else is drag.  Therefore, to just have one night when it's OK to assume another form is to diminish the importance of costume, of drama.  Or, as one might say, every night should be Halloween.

He could well have a point; looking at the average Halloween night out, there seems to be precious little in the way of scares.  Likewise, the costumes aren't always as frightening or transgressive as they might be; they allow a certain degree of illusionary freedom, to dress as a different gender to that which the individual does not always identify with, or to dress in a manner that mainstream society might view as unusually sexually provocative.  In other words, a certain licence is granted, albeit an illusionary one; it should go without saying that, as RuPaul might argue, anyone who needs to wait to Halloween to express their sexuality (or any interpretation or exploration thereof) in a manner of their choosing is deeply unfortunate (again, I might add a caveat that many people are restrained in this by other social factors around them and that occasions like Halloween could allow a freedom denied by forces outside the control of the individual.  In other words, you can drag up without getting beaten up).

Might Halloween become truly transgressive?  I don't have the time or the academic might to explore the concept of the masked, transgressive, frightening, healing shaman figure in enough detail, but, all the arguments above notwithstanding, there is something to be said for the idea of the night where everyone becomes a masked shaman.  It just needs to be a little scarier, is all.

Halloween not scary enough?  Samhain night?  Two rhetorical questions designed to provoke a cinematic answer.

Took my time, didn't I?  Watch the Magic Pumpkin.

Halloween 3: Season of the Witch.  Oh, what could have been!  John Carpenter is an unfairly maligned figure in cinema.  There's a much repeated line of argument that his best work was done by the mid 1980s and the rest has just been a sad decline.  Nonsense.  There's something interesting, or disturbing, or original in every film he's ever made.  Ghosts of Mars is a space western with zombie Martian demon monsters.  The Mouth of Madness is genius metafiction for Stephen King obsessives.  If you've not seen Cigarette Burns, go and find a copy now, it's only an hour long.

Anyway, having made Halloween and defined the slasher film forever, Carpenter wanted, not unreasonably, to move on.  He returned to what was beginning to look like a franchise, but had no interest in Michael Myers stabbing people up anymore; his idea was a truly fantastic one.  Every year, make another Halloween film.  Release it around Halloween (duh).  Every film to have a completely different plot and, somewhere in the movie, you can catch a glimpse of the previous Halloween film playing on TV or something.

(It just occurred to me that having to write "every movie to have a different plot" as though that's a wild and unusual idea says something rather dull about the movie industry, but, self-referentially enough, making that point is in itself a cliche, so this paragraph is now infinitely regressing and you will never finish reading it.)

So, Halloween 3 is a fine tale which I will not spoil more than is necessary.  Suffice to say, we have a man who is very angry at the commercialisation of his favourite celebration and plots a horrible revenge on American consumer society.  Now, again without spoiling too much, let's not pull our punches; his planned revenge really, really is horrible.  Perhaps it's because this is the first horror film I ever saw, but this film crosses that boundary into a quite astonishingly dark place, if you let yourself think about it too much.  Admittedly, some of the execution (of the executions, heh) leaves a little to be desired, but many of the sequences have a shocking edge that gets right under the skin.

As it were.

Interestingly, it's one of the films where everything isn't the walking dead; the monsters here are truly monstrous, but they're in disguise, in suits and ties and smiles and the glad-hand.  Underneath is a seething mass of corruption.  When you watch the Magic Pumpkin, it's all going to come to the surface.  The surface of you.


What's the point of this entry, beyond weird rants about dressing up, clockwork murderers (seriously, watch it, you'll see) and trying to avoid the word "I" as much as possible?

October is my favourite month of the year.  No surprise.  Probably said it before.  This year, the world seems a bit oppressive, both figuratively and literally.  The savage removal of the rights of the individual, piece by piece; I'm watching as the trade union freedoms that generations of my family fought for are being ripped away.  The schools system that I pretty much live for is dying right in front of me.  The poor are being told that no-one cares and it's their duty to sweat and die, so that the world can carry on exactly the same as it did last year.

It all got a bit much.  Alongside lots of other things, some of which were a bit Autism related.  I just hit the point of figuring out "aha!  I've actually got a really fucking serious disability and, oh, by the way, lots of those issues you have that you've always thought you might be able to deal with and get over?  Nah, that's just your brain doing what it's always going to.  Enjoy those team meetings when you not only want to scream, but you have to bite into your lip and clench your fists to stop yourself 'cause that feeling's never going away".

In the light of all that, you know what made me feel better?  What gave me back some fighting strength?  What's putting me back on track?

I watched Night of the Living Dead.  And realised something.

I'm not normal.
I'm transgressive in so many ways.
People are offended by me, for lots of reasons that I'm still feeling a bit sensitive about, so we'll leave it at that for now.  Let anyone else be whatever they want to be, but I'm the zombie, I'm Halloween.  I've got a pumpkin for a head and I'm the living dead, I'm Ghoulhardi and Ivy Rorschach.

Not bowing down to gods and spirits but acting like we're both, because we're all so much better than we think we are.  And the scare stories won't get us to behave, won't get us to follow the dress code and the gender code and the keep your head down code, no, they'll be real scare stories about ghosts and skeletons that remind us that this is a very short life indeed and we intend to make it merry.  For EVERYONE.

And this is Halloween and I'm going to celebrate it so much that Halloween runs right through until September 2016.

So Ghost Transmissions: next time, I'm unpicking one of the real greats of horror cinema, and a movie that's got a lot more to say than you might think: tune in next time for PHANTASM!


Pleasant screams, monsters.

New Series

We're back at work for a new series.  I seem to have been recast over the summer and the set is looking a bit different, but it's all testing well with preview audiences so far.  There might be different opening credits but I'm only partially non-diegetic so I can't really tell without breaking the fourth wall a little too much for this early in the season.

Like some hellish rollercoaster of devilfun, I'm attempting to run Ghost Transmissions as a straight dive right down from here to Halloween, unless I get distracted by sequins or someone waving a laser pointer near me.  Since we're starting this Bradbury-esque meta-ramble in September, let's take a look at the world outside my window.   Well, there's a skip, my car, a woman talking to a cat, my cat looking angrily on at this, and the woman in question turning round to notice me staring at her.  It's like Springwatch or something, this.  Except in Autumn.  We should try and think of a name for that.

When I was merely a small Ghost, I had a primary school teacher who set me a wonderfully evocative task; write an essay called "September", about, well, you get it.  I've never forgotten the way she told us to look at the mist over the school gates, the frost on the yard for the first time and the subtly changing tones in the sun's light.  I've also never forgotten the fifteen minute rant she had about why CND were betraying our country and how nuclear arms were crucial to world peace.  The year was 1983.  We lived in Sheffield.  Threads, people, THREADS.

OH GOD NO THREADS OH GOD WORST THING.  Also, the old town hall was way better.

So I thought about Autumn properly, in formal calendar terms for the first time.  But I'd been aware of the seasons before, just in my own ordering system.  Streetlights on = darktime.  Rain and car lights go blurry = darkestcoldtime.  Vomiting with excitement = Christmas.  Immensely relaxing taking down of decorations and cleaning house = un-named peaceful silent zone after Christmas that I still long for sometimes (check out the Aut kid sighing with relief as the tinsel comes down).

Never had a Halloween, because EVERYDAY IS HALLOWEEN, CREATURES.  I didn't get called on for much at school, but I was always on demand for ghost stories.  I knew loads and I still do.  What used to disturb me was that the other kids would demand I tell them specific stories that I'd told them before...except I hadn't.  They were completely new to me.  Self generating memetic supernatural invasion incident!  Definitely.  Where was I?

This time of year was when decent Saturday morning kids' TV started again, but you can read all about that in a hundred other places.  As soon as there were more than ten sites talking about Tiswas, it lost the mystique somehow.  I'm not interested in interviews and nostalgia in this form; I don't want to know behind the scenes production details.  It's the fevered, half-remembered dreamland of TV that I want.  The Ghost Transmissions, in fact.

So, we're now moving into darktime, to talk like a pretentious 9 year old GhostTransmitter.  That edge of cold creeping in and the sense that there's a world moving and changing outside the curtains.  Scene shifting behind the magic curtain.  You know it's really darktime when you have to shut the turn the lights on before it's time for John Craven's Newsround.  (Brief distracted moment of hauntological ecstasy over the Radiophonic Workshop theme tune).  The dark feels safe, as I said earlier this year.  Safest I felt when I was a kid.

 - And then, years later, being in sixth form college, seeing the sunset against the woods outside the window on a late lecture, the sudden rush that I was alone and didn't know where I was going anymore - nothing as intense, or as sad, or as beautiful as that feeling, the two or three times since that I've felt it - 

All those people leaving home.  We migrate in Autumn for some daft reason.  Leaving home, going towards the cold, not caring.  The excitement of being eighteen and living in one room on the edge of Rusholme and Moss Side, the cold wind and bright sunshine.  In Manchester!  That must have been the last fucking sunshine I saw for three years.  All the new students are turning up in Sheffield now.  They have special flats with heating and everything.  I'd tell them they were missing out but they really aren't.  May no-one else ever have to walk to the electricity token machine at 11:30PM.  Now that was an odd and memorable Autumn.  As far as I know.

I'd like to conclude by quoting that legendary old misogynistic right wing shite Philip Larkin (I went through five different adjectival descriptions of him then till I found one that was neither gender specific nor disablist).  In Toads Revisited he talks about the comfort in embracing the dull nature of work and the passing of seasons when "the lights come on at four at the end of another year."

It's cheerful as ever, as he goes on to describing this as the journey "down Cemetery Road" - thanks a bunch Larkin, I used to work in an office on Cemetery Road and never once walked down it without feeling your damp stary presence at my back.  Well sod this.  The lights go on at four because there's a whole world of dark and mad and Halloween capers and fireworks going off in the night.  If the price you pay is getting older, it's worth it.  Me, I'm putting my skull mask on, fitting my glasses over the top and singing the bleedin' undead Internationale (a spectre is haunting Europe.  Do you see?)

This is the very best time of year and I intend to make everyone love it all the more.  Halloween all year round, creatures!  Remember, fancy dress is for life.  The rest is just pyjamas.

The Penny Farthing and the Tiger

I've been going out on a bike a lot recently ("a lot" means statistically in comparison to the rest of my life so far from birth and is therefore completely accurate and impossible to argue with).  Whilst I bleed out of my eyes on the hills of Sheffield, a great thought occurs to me, partially due to oxygen starvation.  Were I a better human, I would see revelatory images of a better world, Trotsky's last testament represented in glorious transcendental detail.  But it's me, so I saw scenes from a shit 1970s horror film that used to turn up on BBC 1 on a Friday night.

And this got me thinking, as my calf muscles began to liquify.  The role of cycling in the media!  I've spent all day talking about socialism and cycling, which made me terribly happy.  Now for my light desert of - well, bikes in odd places on TV and that.  Um.

Everyone used to have bikes on telly.  Children's Film Foundation kids were always setting off at the start of the holidays on their bikes and finding smugglers or Electric Eskimos (it's a thing, a real thing, I swear).

I have a degree.  It's not a good one, mind.

There's a beautiful bit in the sublime HTV series Children of the Stones (and if you still haven't watched it, why not) when two kids are talking and one offers to show the other around the village.  They can do this because there's a spare bike in the shed.  Just lying around.  A spare bike in the shed because everyone needs a bike when you're a kid.  My brain is clearly not a place for the fainthearted or easily confused, but this sequence makes me inexplicably happy in a way I can't articulate.  I mean, I don't have a spare bike in the shed and my shed is also padlocked up and there's an old George Foreman grill blocking the door anyway.  But just imagine a world where there were just spare bikes lying around.  Actually, this world is Amsterdam and by "lying around" I mean "so easy to nick that it stops being an issue."

Anyway, why is today's title "The Penny Farthing and the Tiger"?  Well, the particular set of images that occupied my visual processing cortex (no really, I stop seeing the real world, it's fairly dangerous for a cyclist) originate in a sympathetic and well thought out exploration of mental health issues.  It's a film called Tales that witness madness.

For the benefit of my fellow neurodiverse, my previous statement was a joke.

Tales that witness madness is a portmanteau horror film, four stories with a linking theme.  The tiger has fuck all to do with the penny farthing, but I like tigers and it turns up unexpectedly in a sequence that I've always enjoyed, primarily due to my vague distrust and resentment towards SOME (I stress SOME) mental health professionals.  Can I spoiler you up?  There's this psychologist who's a dick.  He gets eaten by an imaginary tiger that becomes real.  The end.  That's the framing story.  There's another one about a spooky sex lump of wood.  There's little else I can add to that particular matter.   It's a lump of wood.  It's spooky.  It starts to look sexy.  That's what happens, I promise you.

We're concerned, however, with the segment about the evil ghost and his time travelling penny farthing that possesses people.

I really can't improve on this.  I think that's David Warner.

Just read that last sentence again for a minute.  Bask in its glory.  And then watch as I try to spin this out; there's very little merit in me retelling this one.  The above sentence covers the entire plot.  See, I was about to try and explain it in more detail, but all that happened was that I just said the same words in a different order.  There's this old penny farthing.  Some guy rides it for a laugh.  He gets possessed and travels in time, because of an evil ghost.  I don't know what else to tell you.

Alright, alright, penny farthings.  The Prisoner, right?  My favourite TV show ever apart from all my other favourite TV shows ever?  The penny farthing was the iconic flag and mascot of the enigmatic Village.  The great McGoohan freely explained the penny farthing (about the only thing that he ever did).  He said that it was an ironic symbol of technological progress running out of control.  I love McGoohan dearly but I'm convinced that he's just making shit up as he goes along now, so I'm going to move on.

OK.  Um...there was a kid's book called The Furious Flycycle.  It was advertised in the back of all the old Puffin books that I had.  I never saw a copy.  Never read it.  Can't help you.  Next.

Oh, here's a good one.  The Time Machine.  HG Wells.  The time machine?  It's a bike.  I can't take credit for spotting this, but anyway, it's got a saddle and handlebars and it's really fucking easy to fall off.  It takes you from your everyday street to somewhere green where you can have adventures.  My bike does that too, though the adventures aren't quite as cannibally.  Also, no-one swore at the Time Traveller when he was having trouble on the hills.

Wells was a keen cyclist (so I say in that way you do when you're halfway sure of something but can't be bothered going to look it up) and there is a powerful trend towards the bike as a symbol of working class freedom and movement, especially in the early 20th century, which would tie in with his politics nicely.  Shame he then says that working class people turn into man-eating trolls without help from their social betters, but hey, it's HG Wells and he made my childhood feel happy so he gets away with it.

What else crossed my disintegrating head as I climbed the hills?  This.

We tell kids from an early age to be careful on the roads, and quite right too.  Yet, I can't help thinking that what they actually get told is to beware on the roads, which is quite a different thing.  The roads are lethal.  That's where cars live.  Cars won't stop for you.  Cars are coming to get you.  They might drive right into your school and slap you around a bit.  There's this underlying sense that the car is always in the right because it's big and expensive; pedestrians and cyclists are irritations, distractions, obstructions.   We incubate a sense of fear and submission before motor transport.

Well, that's how I heard it anyway.  I've spent the day surrounded by fearless motherfuckers who don't take any car crap from anyone, so it's possible I may have been listening to the world too hard again.  I blame the cycling proficiency test.

I'm getting a tabard like that, but mine will say "Expropriate the banks"

Timeout card

I got diagnosed this month.  I'm autistic.

Not the biggest surprise in the world; man who writes blog about minutiae, weird observations and pop culture has ASC.  

For years, I thought I suffered from depression and that this was the main problematical factor in my life.   Now I'm seeing it from a new perspective; my depressions and mood swings coincide with certain other events; for instance, I get both depressed and strangely angry after walking along busy roads or after long meetings, or in brightly lit shops.  More than two hours in a pub or restaurant also seems to trigger this.  My clinical psych tells me that my senses are taking in way more than they should and that the executive functions of my brain aren't able to distinguish what's important.

I took some time, thought about my reactions to the world, made some notes and observations.  Read a lot.  Some thoughts came to me, so I'm going to use this space to talk about them.  It's not the usual material and I genuinely won't mind if you don't want to read it.  Things are tough all over and they aren't getting any better, as Tom Waits once said.

 - Everything is conversation.  Seriously.  EVERYTHING.  If I'm talking to you, my brain is also listening to the music playing in the background and to the traffic noise outside and to the wallpaper and the feel of my socks.  And it's giving it all equal importance; all those things are speaking to me.  Each one has a message.  Today, I was trying to listen to a friend tell me about his daughter, whilst Hot Chocolate were standing behind me explaining their opinions on human relationship theory.  Also, the curtain rail above the firedoor was explaining that it had been removed some time ago and here were the screw marks to prove it.

 - If I shut my eyes at you, it's nothing personal.  It really helps.  Cutting off one sense for a few minutes helps me focus on the others.

 - So does coffee.  Yeah, but we all knew that anyway.

- I have reality hangovers.  Really do.  So, after a social engagement lasting longer than 90 minutes or so, I feel wrecked, morning-after-a-festival wrecked.  Headache, jittery, sick, not wanting to speak to anyone or do anything more complex than staring at YouTube.

- You need to be really, really clear when you explain stuff to me.  Example: "Look over these lists of names.  Put a tick next to the ones that you think should enrol on the literature A-level."

I couldn't do that because no-one told me what to do with the ones who I didn't think should enrol.  I had to go and check.  You put a cross or leave it blank, apparently.  Who knew?

- The telephone is the work of Satan.  I'm poly.  I'm in two long distance relationships.  I NEED the phone.  It keeps me with the people I love.  However, I have a question: HOW THE FUCK DOES ONE USE THE THING?  I interrupt constantly.  I reply by nodding.  My stress level goes through the roof.  I make random sounds or speak in a mumbling whisper.  I make up words.  I forget to listen.  I say "yes" when I mean "no" and vice-versa.  Bringing me to my next point:

- It's another language.  If you've ever been in the situation where you know just enough to get by in another language, you might be able to get this one.  I very, very often feel exactly like this; I'm just following the conversation.  But sooner or later (sooner if I'm tired or there's a lot of other things going on) the words start to confuse me (or rather, the meaning become less and less clear).  I guess that this is a result of the aforementioned lack of processing/filtering ability, but it feels exactly like asking someone for directions in Berlin and losing the thread somewhere around "gehen sie rechts"; I recognise some phrases but any nuance or detail is gone.  

 - I don't know who you are.  Well, I mean, if we've been on holiday together, or been on a picket line or we share a parent, I reckon I've probably got a good idea who you are.  Everyone else will have to put up with my quizzical look as I try to remember your name and why you aren't that other person with blonde hair.  I will stare at you a lot whilst I do that.  One of the few fuckin' times I can do eye contact.  Here's a thing: I've failed to recognise myself in a mirror before now.  If I'm stressed or if there's a lot of stuff going on around me, I sometimes mistake photographs for people.  And not in a funny, old timey haunted house movie way either.

- I'm going to tell you stuff.  I mean, if you've come here to read this, you know how I write.  Thing is, I'm very likely to talk exactly like this in real life too.  What one of my partners refers to as doing 'Wikipedia entry' at people.  The classic stereotype of ASC; I'm going to talk at you, faster and faster, my voice becoming more and more monotone, totally ignoring your anguished expression and, in extreme cases, the fact that you ran off twenty minutes ago.  

- There's embarrassing bits.  Yeah...see, before I started investigating whether I might have ASC, I worried about my mental health.  There are days during when I feel horribly depressed, as I've mentioned, often when I've just had too much input going on.  But there are also times when my frustration takes over.  I thought I was going crazy, punching the wall, banging my head, sometimes screaming or shouting randomly.  Thank fuck I kept this out of sight of everyone else.  I feel very, very sensitive about admitting to this, but it happens.  And now I know that it happens because it's a classic symptom of ASC.  And you know what makes it all worse?

- Pretending to be normal.  Yeah, did this a lot.  I'm not going to anymore.  Now, there's a lot of comedy mileage in the concept that my behaviour up until now has been me trying to be as normal as possible.  

  I would copy the behaviours of people around me; laugh in the right way at the right time, smile at the appropriate points, ask them the same questions they'd just asked me.  But I'm not very good at this sometimes.  I would start using their accent by mistake.  Or laugh too much when I didn't understand.  Or get the smile wrong, so it all went a bit The Man Who Laughs.  

Expression #34: mild pleasure at an amusing story about someone's dog

  You know what I felt like?  It's an old stereotype, but it's like being an alien, trying to copy the apparently random actions of the people around me.  It's horribly, horribly stressful and it leads right into having a meltdown of some kind later on.  So I'm not going to do it anymore.  This isn't always nice for the people around me, which makes me feel really bad; I talk like a robot sometimes now and that's going to make people feel weird, which is Not Good.  In future, I'm hoping to be able to strike a balance so that I can talk to the people I care about without being either The Joker or the android guy from Prometheus.  

This GIF is making me laugh quite a lot.  Ha.  Ha.  Ha.

I could totally carry this look off.

I suppose it says quite a lot that this is the terminology I use to explain how I see human emotions; using pop culture references to explain important emotional issues is a Thing, apparently.  I'm so sorry that this isn't making the most sense...

- Not making much sense.  Yeah.  You said it.  Well, I said it actually, but you know.

- BIG emotions.  Don't believe all that crap about lack of empathy or coldness.  If something makes me sad, I might cry for hours.  If it makes me angry, I feel like I can tear the city down around me.  Yeah, Hulk SMASH puny political debate.  And happy?  Oh, I can laugh myself into a frenzy, bouncing off the walls at the very oddest things.  The word "tea" for example, is hilarious.  As is the phrase "smoked all them fags" and "please accept this punch in the face".  The other day I remembered that I owned a copy of The Evil Dead on Blu-Ray and laughed for five minutes in sheer joy.  That, my friends, is a bit fucked up, innit?  Ah well, I was cheerful. And terrifying.


Now here's the thing, and if you've stuck with me this long, thanks.

I wouldn't change this for the world.

I like being me.

I see all these crazy patterns in the world.  I get entranced by tiny perfect details.  I think and act and respond to situations like a cat.

How could I want to give that up?  

I can lie awake at night and listen to a thousand little voices of the city around me.  I can replay songs and movies in my head pretty damn close to word perfect and dream whilst I'm wide awake with my eyes open.  I see the all wonder and sadness and beauty and sheer outright screaming joy in the world around me and I can see it all at once, all together rushing into my head and I feel it so hard that it hurts, so that I look and act as though I'm completely insane and I couldn't care less anymore. 

And that's all.  Normal nonsense very soon. 

Summer

When I lived with my parents, I'd sleep with the windows open in the summer.  Try it sometime, if you never have; it's worth putting up with the moths just to hear the city at night.  

Sounds drifting in close and falling away again.  You could hear a single three AM car from half a mile away, speeding through and then off somewhere else.  The occasional voice singing, shouting, laughing, fighting.  And when there was nothing else, the voices of the trees, the wind.  I remember lying back, trying to identify each sound; creaking of the wooden fences, dripping pipe somewhere down the road, cat's pawsteps right on the very edge of hearing.  Just now and then, every so often, there'd be the call of a train passing through the tunnel at the bottom of the hill.  The two-tone sound that echoed like a welcoming ghost.  A haunting sound, but not a frightening one.  

I paid such close attention.  I tried to write down what it made me feel like.  I tried to express the joy of living in the city, of the summer heat and the friendly dark and the songs of trains and cats.  Thing is, I also had a black and white TV set and a pair of headphones.  Literary ambitions had no chance because Grip of the Strangler was on again.  And so the world lost a South Yorkshire Ray Bradbury, which is probably a very good thing.

Last time I promised "actual TV stuff" without first thinking through what that would mean.  I'll level with you, I'm a bit short on ideas here.  It's nearly summer now and, just like back then, I don't feel like watching TV.  I feel like watching everything else, or at least observing it all.  The sounds carry so far and I seem to get a bit lost in thought (massive understatement there, I'm sure you'll agree).   Perhaps in the summer we reclaim our days; children are let out of school for six weeks and the luckier of the adults get freedom from work for all of a fortnight.   

In Summer, the light shines through the curtain and reflects on the screen.  All those afternoon matinees, Great Expectations or The Runaway Bus, it's all the same when a quarter of the viewing area is invisible.  The summer sun is brighter than the telly.  There's a rubbish moral right there for you, I suppose.

This has not been the funniest or most in-depth post ever, but, to be honest, I have a fair bit of Serious Life Stuff on my mind right now, events that I'll write about soon.  I'll return to these themes another time.  There'll be jokes and amusing captions and everything.

Whilst we await a return to normal service, here is a picture of a transmitter in the summer.  Sunrise.  See?

It makes me all Yorkshire patriotic.  Sort of.

Bear with me for a while longer, in other words.

Night, cities, closedowns and dreams: part 1...

I write about the night a lot.  Not consciously or overtly, perhaps, but the theme is often there somewhere.  It seems like there’s something in the nature of transmission which associates with after dark.  Don’t you just love the language of night?  Dusk.  After dark.  Burning the midnight oil.  The small hours. 

As anyone who’s ever shared a house with me will know, I suffer from night terrors.  These appear to be caused by dips in blood sugar, temperature fluctuations or stress.  The symptoms always amuse me; waking dreams, hallucinations and, funniest of all, mild amnesia.  I’ve woken people up before to ask them what my name is.  My partners are very, very understanding people. 

So you might wonder why I’d grow up with this fascination for the night-time world.  As a child, the nightmares were pretty much constant.  But they were so imaginative!  Sinister carnival barkers.  Deranged puppets.  The Smash Martians.  That big floating evil egg in the garden.  Nightmares haunt humanity, but here’s the thing; if they aren’t anchored in some real life issues, we take one of two routes.  We either outgrow them or we learn to love them.  And eventually, you can make friends with your bad dreams.  They are, after all, just made out of us.  When I stared into the face of the laughing Circus Man, I was looking at a part of my own mind, the same part that hams it up in the classroom to this day.  The puppets?  So loud, my fear of being drowned in noise and loss of control, that I came to overcome.  I’m not really sure what the Smash Martians were.  Probably real, I shouldn’t be surprised to learn.  They eat them with their metal knives, you know.  Actually, with slogans like that, is it any fucking wonder I was terrified?

They've got claws.  CLAWS.

So, the night then.  Fearful.  Fascinating. Streetlights flickering on, sodium yellow: on a cloudy night in Sheffield, the whole sky would reflect that glare back, a burnt orange dome over my world.  My father’s job was to repair and install them.  Once, he took me up on a hillside and switched on a whole streetload of lights, opening a small metal panel in a brick wall and pressing connections inside.  One year, he turned the Christmas lights on, hidden behind a curtain like the Wizard of Oz, whilst the Mayor stood on a podium and pulled a big fake cardboard switch. 

Those nights.  Warm and bright inside, but you could sneak up to the window, press your face against the glass, hidden behind thick brown drapes.  Look out into the rainy night and watch the occasional car pass by, red lights into the distance.  Or perhaps on those long car journeys back home, late on Sunday evening, through the apparently infinite Derbyshire farmland; I’d always get excited to see the city lights again.  I’ve been jumpy in urban settings, but I’ve never had that cold agoraphobic dread that I get in the countryside.  Often, the city feels safe at night.  Home.

Home with all that neon out in the streets, when I moved to the city center.  Home with all those horror films, late on Friday.  Home with crackly black and white, with the sound turned right down.  Home, waking up to the test card around 3:00 AM.  I’m very much at home at 3:00AM.  

I really miss the station closedown.  The last announcement (live, of course), with its sense that the BBC center was sleepy and shutting up shop for the night.  The clock, a public information film, the national anthem (that bit bored me, even then).  Then silence and darkness and a sudden voice warning you to switch off.  What do they not want me to see, I thought.  Because I’ve always been like this.  

And is very probably a Czech animation about a piece of string

That after midnight place feels welcoming to me.  Didn’t you ever look up at an office block, with just a single light on?  Or get the late train and pass a single lit up bedroom window?  There’s such a sad beauty to it, that’s sexy as damnation right at the same time.  Every cat I’ve ever lived with has made a swift exit around half midnight, running wild across the terrace backs, over the night fences and the dark ivy.  

Bright and warm, dark and cold, so very binary, so very wintry.  Summer night is a totally different prospect; I just lose the need for sleep completely somehow.  For the sake of this Transmission, let’s stay in the Winter warm.

As I write this, it’s 1038PM and there’s a blizzard outside.  Nighty night. 

I have more to say on this soon, you'll be delighted to know.  In part 2: some actual TV stuff, along with spooky observations and other random nonsense. 

January

You take the decorations down.  You clean the house, launder your work clothes.  Put your festival self away on top of the wardrobe, or stuffed into a cardboard box in the attic, labelled in marker and getting dustier by the year.  

The air seems quiet in January.  

Of course, you could always leave the lights up all year.  That's what I do.

Like this.  Coming together, disparate influences merge to signal that transmission's about to start.  Linking.  Solidarity and remembering the future.  This is the new season in Eye TV.

Welcome to 2015.