Watch Out! Page 27

I'm sure it wasn't like this when I scanned it.  But then it wouldn't be, would it?  

What you have to ask is probably the wrong question.   

The problem may be that you assume that the second and third sentences are connected in any way.  Did you think of looking behind you?

From Watch Out, Page 19

I'm not sure what the time is.  What is the time?

Again, the scan didn't pick it up, but there's pencil writing on the margins of this page.  It reads:

 

"Six sums a day is far too many/None a day is why we wait"

I'm not sure why, but after I read that, I made sure that the office door was locked.  Not the first odd bit of behaviour I've been engaging in since I started scanning these pages.  For some reason, I get really jumpy whenever I see a satellite photo or two men drinking coffee at night.

From Watch Out, page 41

I've spent a few weeks working on uploading some scans from Watch Out.  It's taking much longer than anticipated; there's only me on this project and I've been using the facilities at the Taskerlands research offices just over the city limits.  It's nearly abandoned now, in the last stages of closing down, so it's nice and quiet, most of the time at least.

I did have some trouble with this one.  The scan kept coming out wrong; in fact, it showed an entirely different image, which I presume must be a fault with the hardware.

Pencil scrawl reads "The black car is not in this picture yet"

One of the many puzzles and activities designed to keep the readers occupied and attentive at all times, to everything that could well be around them.

Watch Out - Radio Times

Shortly after my last blog, I was surprised to receive an email containing a partial scan of a Radio Times cover apparently publicising Watch Out.  I'd always been under the impression that the TV series had been shown on ITV, but this would seem to suggest otherwise.

However, I'd advise caution.  The cover design is non standard and seems to be incomplete, though this could be a consequence of the scan.  Whilst this would seem to suggest that the image is not genuine, if any TV show could appear on the cover of a listings magazine that was legally prohibited from advertising it, it would be Watch Out.

However, this is all still unproven conjecture.  There remains no actual evidence that Watch Out was ever shown or even actually made; certainly, the fragmentary accounts of the programme sound far fetched, even disturbing.  We should be wary about accepting urban mythology at face value, especially descriptions as frankly unbelievable as these.

One final note; the vehicles in the image are clearly non-contemporary.  Which suggests that this is indeed a poorly executed hoax and in turn begs the question...why?

The alternative explanation is ridiculous and should not be considered under any circumstances.

Watch Out!

Originally published in the summer of 1975, Watch Out! was written for use in schools and colleges, though concerns were quickly raised over the content and form of the material within.  Sadly, very few copies survive; most were recalled, for reasons now all too obvious. Fascinatingly, some fragmentary evidence suggests that it was produced as a tie-in to a television series, though if this is true, no off-air copies have surfaced to date, though rumours of a soundtrack album have tantalised the more esoteric collectors for decades.

About ten years ago, I was lucky enough to find a partial copy, whilst engaged in reconstruction work at a derelict Pebble Mill comprehensive school.  It's taken some time for me to be able to reconstruct Watch Out! and I'm happy to say that I'll be presenting some selected pages over the next few weeks. 

I'd like to thank the Department of Transmissions for their help in researching and authenticating this fascinating reminder of a missing time.  They've asked that readers with any information about the author or his whereabouts contact them as a matter of some urgency.  

Quality of Light

There.  That moment -

Something about the way that light falls.  There are geometric forms, memory shapes, grasped in a precise moment.  The heat of summer and a long prism of light passing through a gap in the curtains, that you drew to hide behind together.

Catch their eyes, catch your breath.

You're silent, but there's the sound of a car far away, droning of an aircraft fading into the sky, house shifting within its skin.  Always fading, beautifully so, but no end, one note shifting in to replace the ones that have fallen beyond the threshold of hearing.  Sky music.

Colours caught in the air and diamond motes.  Can you remember?  You were there.  You still are.

Winterday

Black and white time, but in my imagination, the sky is red at dawn and sunset.  Red and mist sky.  Bitter burning cold against the skin.

See, you get out of Christmas and into that strange limbo time that tastes of leftovers. Wrapping paper tumbleweeds blowing up the streets and work colleagues trying not to make eye contact with each other, after the one day a year that they lived totally in the moment.  

It makes me impatient.  I'm waiting for something.

I mean, literally, at the time of writing, I am waiting for something (an eagerly anticipated visitor) but I'm always filled with that feeling at this time.  Something about running taps into it.  The wind.  Grey  cliffs and some silence inside.  Crow sounds and the laughter of ice.  

The sky takes on a certain frozen light quality.  There, a broken jet trail falling apart like pine needles.  That sense again.  Expecting.  Senses sharp.  Almost primal, ancient starvation warnings kicking in.  I want to hug stones.  I can believe in turning a corner and seeing the utterly inexplicable crouching in the moorland heather, amber eyes or maybe green, focusing sharp and utterly impossible.  

Our expectations of these days at the start of winter build a context of the liminal, that transformation is possible.  One of the thin spaces in which anything could be possible.  

Hold that feeling, that idea.  It doesn't go anywhere, we just get distracted.  The Noise obscures the Signal, but it's always there, a number station broadcasting freedom data.  The secret that we miss sometimes; every day, every place can be a liminal place.  Every second, just by pausing and looking beyond the immediacy of the day-to day narrative that has been built around us, something more is possible.  

In the cold days of winter, I can see this with greatest clarity.  Every moment is a railway platform and every movement is taking me somewhere astonishing.

Video playlist

The Glitterball - Children's Film Foundation seasonal adventures in a rusty and battered New Town with spherical aliens and a lot of pylons.  I blame this movie for a lot of my aesthetic sense.

At the Earth's Core - I've got a thing for people in animal skins, OK?  And giant steampunk drilling machines.  And evil pterodactyl people.  It was always on in the afternoons at this time of year.

Audio playlist

Belbury Poly: The Owl's Map or Belbury Tales - electro spooky constructs from the collective unconsciousness of a distorted 70s England, haunted by strange voices in the ether and weird glimpses of ancient rituals on the teak framed analogue TV in the corner of the pub.

David Bowie: Low - I don't think I need to explain this.

Spookhouses

...something of a Halloween meditation, somewhere between trash culture and the patterns of relationships.  Alright with that?

Scary times are here again.  That frost on the wind that reminds us of our poor shivering ancestors hoping that the sun would come back again this year and that the wolves might stay away just one more night.  The shadows around us get deeper; we think of the voices that aren't voices.  The thoughts calling on the wind, sweet as a Halloween treat.  The days of the dead, one might say.

Fear: five years old and watching Laurel and Hardy Murder Case.  Crackly 1930s, cheap, not one of their best.  Something in the over-exposed shadows and the old dark house mystery of it strikes more fear than I thought possible.  Their clowning doesn't seem funny.  It seems to be the result of hysteria, babbling with slapstick in the face of the unspeakable. I spend the rest of the night with my fingers jammed into my ears, terrified in case I heard the sound of footsteps in an empty house.

  It's on YouTube.  It's rubbish.

...and then I found this picture and ah, it all makes sense now.

What are we scared of the most?  Being alone?  I wrote earlier this year about my fear of being forgotten, my attempt to embrace that.  I failed in that venture, happy to admit.  I don't want to be forgotten, not while I'm alive, not by my loved ones.  I won't abdicate my place in your thoughts.  Nor do I wish to be the sole focus.  In that, I found a bit more love for myself.

Fear: Don't Be Afraid of the Dark (1970s version).  Tiny creatures infest an old house.  They call out to the mother of the little nuclear family moving in there.  Whisper to her.  Such tiny horrors, gremlin beasts running around the dark corners.  What do they want?  

Simple.  They want to change her.  And they succeed.  The polyester mom, in her A-line maxi  becomes something quite different, that we never see.  We have to be content with just hearing her altered voice from the shadows.  She changes.  She becomes something new and awful.  And not safe.  Not at all. 

I'm so scared of it, nine years old and so scared of it.  And so envious.

I mean, I COULD read a subtext in here if I wanted to.

I run away quite a lot.  It takes huge effort of will not to and I have learned to be brave.  Growing up, always watching my back, I learned survival patterns.  As an adult, I'm only just realising that I still watch my back, all the time.  A partner asked me how I have fun and I couldn't answer, because I knew that I find it hard to let go and enjoy; I'm always watching for the wolves.  Always wondering when they'll strike.  The sound of breaking glass at 330AM, the sudden commotion in the cinema.  The man in the bar who keeps staring and I don't think it's because he likes my nail varnish.

Fear: a nightmare.  The first one I can remember.  I'm in a wonderful happy place.  The Muppets are there; I love that show.  This is wonderful.  Suddenly, they all grow silent, sombre.  A door opens; it leads out into a huge dark field, night, cold air.  A carnival or funfair.  At the entrance, a booth, the open section surrounded by lightbulbs like a backstage makeup mirror.  A man, his face slicked with greasepaint, wearing a black and white striped suit and bow tie, grins from within.  THIS IS THE CARNIVAL!  he screams.  I am terrified.  I can't move.  I must wake up.
       Oh no, he says.  You can't wake up.  There's loads of ways I can stop that.

Fear had become such a part of me that I didn't notice it anymore.  Like the sound of trains so regular that they become part of the day, so you don't even recognise true silence when you hear it.  I simply assumed that everyone else felt the same dread at every movement, every new face.

I decided that this Would Not Do.

My diagnosis of ASC helped.  I knew that my senses were working at a ridiculously high level, but my brain still operated on standard human threat response and the two were clashing.  I learned to manage it, slowly and painfully.  I still am.  Likewise, standing up and telling people I don't know just exactly who I am and how I identify, that helped too.  No-one killed me.  That tired teenage voice, reminding me about getting beaten up for wearing purple, could finally get some sleep.

I made mistakes.  I was scared. Scared of asking questions and having conversations that were so important, hurting people by my confused silence.  Scared of change.  Scared of loss.  There is so much rebuilding to be done, repairing the damage that the terror did to my world.

I listen to my own internal ghost stories.  Let them scare me.  Understand them.  Hold my ghosts close.

Fear: The Mummy.  Universal Studios, Boris Karloff.  Said to be an arch and creepy film.  I plead to be allowed to stay up, to watch it.  Finally, I'm allowed, sitting on my bed with a tiny black and white portable.  I have to twist the analogue aerial in the right direction to get a picture on it.  Swirling and buzzing, an image built of tiny monochrome swarms.  

Karloff.  That face.  Those eyes.  

I'm not scared.  

I want to be him.  The Mummy is not terrifying.  He is driven by love.  He is noble.  He walks in the dark and seeks out his heart's desire.  I am enraptured.  No fear at all.  Not the rapacious, aristocratic Dracula or the mindless Wolfman or the victimised Frankenstein ('s monster).  This is the absence of fear.  This is the moment of light mind, of being entranced.  Body relaxes.  Some prototype mindfulness born from ancient celluloid, creaky transmission towers at midnight and the belief in magic.

I wrap the sheets around me close and whisper ancient Hollywood spells to myself.  

And I'm not scared at all.  

Happy Halloween.

Rain

The summer has different lights. There's the bright optimism sunshine of June and July, deepening into the fiery skies of August.  And as August moves on, the world pales, becomes something else, hinting at what happens next.

And sometimes, you get a rainy night in August.

Clouds form.  Low level, smooth white sky.  The holidays are over, perhaps.  But not back to school yet, not back to work.  Streets emptied and soft rain falls.  Still daylight, but darker, quieter.  Lonelier, maybe?  Rain.  Cement and concrete shines into grey green.  That smell, just there, on the breeze.  The dry sunburned earth of a million back gardens gives up its secrets to the clouds.

Days of summer lost.  The early days of the holiday, that enthusiasm, becomes feverish now.  Something is getting born.  Some new world.  Yet so many faces running inside.  Don't get caught in the rain.  Catch your death.  Keep dry.  Umbrella.  Safe.  Hood up, coat buttoned.

I miss people.  I have so many, many people. The ones I love, the ones I found.  My partners, and not a one of them within less than an hour's drive.  The clouds make the world seem huge on nights like this.  If I'm not careful, it becomes a vice, a grip of cold Sunday night feeling - time for your bath, early to bed, get up early for work, sandwiches made, must be asleep by eleven, iron your shirt, what didn't you do on Friday - don't go out, it's raining, you'll get soaked - 

But that thing.  The big mystery.  Every dull looking life has diamonds hidden in it.  Remember that. Sit around with a roast and bad TV, yeah, it's going to hurt, unless a roast and bad TV is your idea of heaven. I don't have the right to judge anyone, but I still run in fear from that life, because I made myself into something new and pretty that has nothing to do with Sunday night feeling.  Nothing to do with running inside from the rain in the summer time, in case you get wet.

I can't tell you how it feels.  I can't begin to explain.  The rain that falls in the summertime, changing the nature of things.  I took my life and I sculpted it until I looked in the mirror and gasped at what I'd done.  When I could look myself in the face and know that I was happy.

When I met my gaze...and there was an awful lot of eyeshadow involved.  I was standing in the rain.

I'm in a fix here, people.  I'm not going to live in a world of ironed shirts* anymore.  I don't know how to do this, but there has to be a way.

I know what I am.  What am I?
Ambiguous.


Dee X



*Please note, I have never, ever ironed a shirt, not for about twenty years I think.  It's a statement for effect.  The effect is up to you.  "Mild exasperation" is often a good one.

Why We Don't Always

There are simple fears and larger ones.  Insecurity driving so many of them, but what does it come to?  We are scared, scared of loss, scared of being replaced.

If, as I am, you've got a few things going on out of the hetero/neuro-normative (bi, trans, polyamorous/RA, autistic, is there anything else? It'll come to me; oh yeah, teacher, that counts right?), then you get a few of the fears going on.  If your partner meets someone new, you get the Fear.  Just a bit.  No matter how many jealousy techniques you have going on, no matter how much you face your Abyss, your Chapel Perilous, you're still going to get the stabby feeling every so often.

And the form of it is so endlessly changeable.  We all have a universe of them to wake up to; are they better than me?  Younger?  Hotter?  Look better in heels?  (Not the last one, I look better in heels than all of you).  Or perhaps not as crazy?  Less inclined to slur words after 1030 at night?  Able to take things not completely literally and not to recite production details for The Prisoner during after dinner chat?

Perhaps it's not new relationship fear.  Perhaps it's the fear at the end of the street, the sense that when you leave your house, you don't come home again.  The fear of getting lost in yourself.  Once, saddened and drunk, I sat down on a street corner at 3AM and considered how easy it would be just to stay there forever.   I was a long way from home, literally and figuratively.

What is it?  I can't speak for you, but what is the nature of my fear?  I interrogate it.  I talk to it, coax it out, provoke it with images.  It's my fear, mine and mine alone...but maybe it might speak to some of you as well.  And as I talked to fright, I understood a few tiny aspects of part of my Shadow (one of my partners is SO into Jung).

That shadow is the shadow of Forgetting.

I am scared of being Forgotten.

Being forgotten...my gods, all our culture is devoted to telling us that this is the worst possible outcome for a human life!  Abramic religions make reference to being forgotten by various Old Testament style manifestations.  The rise of printed media fills us with dread - what if we aren't written down?  The postal service!  We are forgotten!  No letters today.  Empty mail slot on Valentine's day, Christmas, Birthday.  They never wrote back after the interview. We lost your test results.  There has been an error, please re-submit your details.  What was your name again?

Dickens, telling us not to forget the poor, reminding us that the economically lost are forgotten too.  Remember the dead of Verdun and a hundred thousand other places, but live in terror of the shadow of the Unknown Soldier, symbol of the worst thing; we lost your son in the mud.  Never seen again.

The force of ages.  The weight of years.  Our history is designed to get lost in, and we now fill it with fame and notoriety.  To be Remembered, and this won't be a simplistic rant on the transitory nature of celebrity, with all those classist overtones.  Because why do half of us write and paint, if not to be Remembered, to cling to some form of existence as imagined/implied author?

Oh, there are many people who act in the sheer joy of creation - I'm lucky enough to know so many, but what about me?  Does the fact that I operate behind a pseudonym absolve me of a desire to be Remembered?  I'm guessing that my deep fears suggest not, not at all.

To be Forgotten.  To not matter to those you love the most.  Nonsense, I know rationally.  But I'm human, mainly.  My mind generates odd little lizard thoughts.  Tells me that those I adore are human too...I will drift from their attention, a little further each time...

But here's the thing.

We say Being Forgotten is terrible.
We're wrong.

Memory is our ego.  Memory is our desire to hang on.  Can you name every pupil in your English class when you were 13?  Can you name every cloud you ever looked at?  The shapes of them?  Our lives are generated by processes of physics and biology, which can be understood mathematically, as can a cloud; we see no purpose in memorising each facet of the sky.  Let them move on.

Not that I want to forget.  I want to recall every last possible second of my loves.  I want to remember everything, till my mind cascades.  But I can't, anymore than the world recalls the name of the bricklayer who built the wall of this room 112 years ago.

My loves will not forget me, though they will get distracted every now and again.  They are very, very attractive people.  They are likely to get frequently distracted.  This makes me happy.  I can be forgotten for an afternoon.  Old friends will think on me less and it won't change me where I am right now.

When we choose to be forgotten, perhaps only for a weekend or an hour, it's one of the most powerful things we can accomplish.  The strongest moment of being ourselves.

We choose to be ourselves, the limit of our own senses, with nothing to support us, no illusions of immortality.  We Are.

I can't always manage this; I'm not always that strong.  But I understand a little better...even though I just wrote all this knowing very few people will ever read it, perhaps not even any of those it was intended for, that it will get lost.  I write this because it makes me feel better to write it.

That said, I still intend to raise statues in my name, so maybe don't take any of this too seriously?

Summerlands

That moment.

Remember?

The bell going.  On the last day.

That last day in school.  Time stretching out and no longer sure of what would happen, one lesson to the next.  The whole place is holding its breath, willing the moments along.  A sense of letting go finally, nine month's worth of clenched fist released. Perhaps it almost felt comfortable for you?  For the first time, perhaps, maybe?

And the bell goes.  And suddenly everyone's moving.  But in that moment, something shifts and changes -

And then the corridors are empty, the classrooms silent again and it's all over, all gone.  All the fears and troubles that seemed so huge and devouring, if you're lucky, they've gone, left behind and forgotten.  Old monsters and witches are just papier mache and left in the cupboard.  Paper teeth after all.  If you're lucky.

That sense of scattering, inexplicable because it's really just the same as any other Friday.  But still the feeling that everyone, no matter how old they are, is leaving in a different direction.  In my mind, it looks like a cheap TV crossfade, a double exposure making people vanish into the air like perfect ghosts.  Then there's only the rolling fields under the sunlight, empty and the silence of a school when everyone's gone, not coming back, this year is over.

And we all became summer ghosts, closer to our own idea of ourselves than anyone else's, just for a little while longer.  Six or seven weeks of misrule over our own hearts.





Some authors capture this moment beautifully.  For example:

The Summer Birds - Penelope Farmer
A literal summer of liminal transformation, dreamlike and impossible.  Not saying much more, but you'll be lucky to find a copy these days.

It - Stephen King
Despite what everyone thinks, it's not really about killer clowns.  It's about those perfect/monstrous summers when you learned who you could be...and then forgot all about it when school came around again.

Shadowland - Peter Straub
Not sure why this doesn't get more attention.  Cheap horror pulp cover, I guess.  A twice told memory of a long lost surreal summer in magical hell, told by an unreliable trickster narrator, about how he came to be a wandering unreliable trickster narrator.  "If you go through life with an unchipped heart, you won't get far."

I'm sure that there are classic literary examples.  But I'm all cheap dime store magic and second hand horror stories and I think it's how I'm happiest.

Nightmare in Ecstasy

Shapes emerge from the grey celluloid fog; home movies spliced with flying saucers and the living dead.  Desire reaching out across decades - this is my world, why can't they see it?

Caveat: slight return.  I've talked about this before, but somehow I feel like I need to do so again.  

If you like top ten lists of WORST FILMS EVA then not only do you need to stop reading, but I'm going to fight you.  And I fight nasty and I aim to put my opponents in the morgue.  Not that they're dead.  It's just freaky to wake up in a morgue, when the last thing you remember is having a fight with a camp sociopath on the internet.

There was a lot of this horrid "worst evee" shite back in the 1980s and 90s; it's experienced a revival on YouTube over the last five years, promulgated by pasty faced criticboys who never made a thing in their lives, apart from a dime of someone else's money toadying to rancid studio product.  Well, I'm years past the point when this was at all relevant, but tonight (it's always night when you read this, right?)  I'm going to talk to you about Edward D Wood Jr.  

Half of you have gone "uh?", half of you have gone "Jesus, twenty years too late", half of you have gone "that film with Johnny Depp" and half of you are wondering what joke I'm going to make about maths skills.  Keep hanging, finks.  I'm not going there.  Just walk away and I won't hurt ya.

Well tough to all 200% of you.  I can't get Ed out of my head.  I first saw his most notorious effort Plan 9 From Outer Space when I was about ten.  Quick version; everyone says it's the worst film ever made.  It isn't.  The end.

The saucers always come back in our dreams.  Silver and perfect, out of reach.  Anything we see inside will always be a let down. How could anything live up to that?  What film maker could put the unknowable on screen?  -  "Then one day, they destroyed a town" - the battle of LA, urban legend of WW2 anti aircraft units fighting alien ships late at night - one solitary photo, a bright shape caught in a searchlight beam, like a starlet at Grauman's Chinese Theatre - 

Plan 9 is goth as fuck.  Regardless of what the storyline is, the actual theme is all about playing in graveyards with no money, hanging with your friends in horrible times and being so far on the outside of mainstream that you've forgotten how to get up without a couple of inches of corpse makeup.  Zombies, UFOs, ghosts, vampires, film noir and TV psychics all meld together into a dreamlike void, made on a quarter of  shoestring in the rubble and demolition sites of fringe LA someplace.  

It comes at you, swinging like a champ.  Everyone overdoes everything.  The chief of police is a pro wrestler and Maila Nurmi (*sigh*) is an alien deathbride creature with claws like a wildcat.  The army tries to blow shit up and fails.  The aliens tell 50s America that its values and beliefs are a load of fucking arse and the audience sides with them against the sharp suited b-o-r-i-n-g heroes.

There is nothing here - NOTHING - that isn't repeated in alleged genre classics.  I've got a lot of time for Invaders From Mars, the movie that links childhood nightmares with the science apocalypse, but on a thousandth of its budget, it would have looked just like one of Ed's pieces.  Stock footage and bad alien costumes; the only advantage is that the Supreme Intelligence in that movie doesn't carry a clipboard and go through the evil scheme step by step, like its opposite number in Plan 9 does.

Hollywood shadows - the memory of the Black Dahlia, the all night horror specials on foggy, miniature TV screens - the dying stars.  There were once 13 letters in the Hollywood sign, but they took them down after Peg Enwistle jumped to her death.  So they tell me.  Who knows?  Print the legend.

All Ed's movies have something in common; an aura, a sense of that nightmare reality LA. Unlike most other films of the period, you can sense the horror and despair of Hollywood right there onscreen.  No-one ever jumped on a bus to become a big star after watching one of these; you can smell the disappointment too strongly.  Look at poor Bela Lugosi, ditched by the studios and living out his last days in poverty, supported by his few remaining friends.  Or Maila Nurmi, half skeletal with anorexia, blacklisted and unemployable.  This isn't the world of the popular kids.  This is our place. 

Horror host in the torn dress. My mute vampire queen.  I wanted to be like you-

Note: this is c.1955.  Allow that to sink in for a moment

Which brings me to my next point I guess; how much of Ed's unenviable reputation is the result of arrant transphobia?  He was only truly happy as a woman and this in 1950s LA.  How the fuck did he even survive out there under those conditions?  Thirty years later, smug men in sharp 80s suits were mocking this.  Hipster comedy, supposedly making a break from the past but still laughing when men dress like women.  Ha ha!  Oh, my aching sense of moral outrage.  Look at the some of the alleged classics from the last thirty years, as the supposedly hip and left wing stuff like The Young Ones uses trans status as a mark of shame.  Move on a decade and look at crap like Friends telling Joey that he shouldn't wear lingerie.  I wonder if we've come anywhere at all, our society so desperate to find shame and something to bear our teeth at, like primate packs expelling the weak.  At least we have Rupaul in the mainstream nowadays.  

Ed, looking fantastic as usual

In the dark places of celluloid, in the queer shadows and the scarred, outsider building sites, Ed's movies aren't like anything else you've seen.  He died penniless, having lost everything that ever mattered to him, his scripts, movies, even his pet dogs.  I read his story as a kid, thought he must have been ancient by the end.  He was eleven years older than I currently am, an alcoholic who wrote trans porn for rent money, too forgotten to even register as laughing stock.  Another Hollywood burnout, old flashbulbs dropped in the gutter after the premiere. 

And I don't think I've achieved a thousandth of what he did.   

So, I said I'd write about it.  But -

There'll be billion words written about him today, tomorrow, forever.

This isn't a tribute or in honour of his creativity, his artistry or his presence.  It's about the rest of us.  It's a single, solipsistic piece of writing, triggered by the death of someone I never met.

 - It's in the half heard guitar riffs on the radio, when you don't know what music is yet

Music made sense, when I was small.  Music made sense, and it was boring.  Sense and the explicable is just nothing.  All love songs with obvious meaning, even to a five year old.  And then - well, you know the rest.  When it doesn't make sense, when you crave understanding of something so mysterious and frightening and so very, very powerful and wonderful, when you see that face staring out at you from a ragged poster, the jagged flash, the eyes -

 - More drifting lyrics, half heard singles.  Finding this scene like solving a puzzle.  Up alone in my room on rainy days, with the library books about science fiction films that I could never get to see.  That face, Thomas Jerome Newton, lacking normal eyes no matter which disguise he had on.

 - There have always been visitors -

Eight years old and there's a clown walking on a beach and it is the most frightening and addictive thing I've ever seen.  The words stick to my memory, almost uniquely.

 - My mother said - 

Mystery and makeup.  Two years on, I'm dressed as Dracula and something associates in my mind somehow -

Oh and then.  A long, harsh time.  Growing up autistic but not knowing, assuming I was just insane.  Like walking on knives.  "Broken glass" I nearly wrote just then, didn't even spot that one.  Conformity and gender and sex roles enforced with brutality and ignorance and the determination that there must be no ambiguity.  The Great Terror in South Yorkshire.

 - Oh no love, you're not alone - 

Two years later, nine and a half stone, walking down the street in three inch cuban heels and a purple silk blouse.  Kids threw bricks at me.  Who gives a fuck?  Singing he played it left hand with a girl/friend at midnight.  Eyeliner and lipstick days, no matter what those 1990s documentaries tell you.

Years and years and years.  Twice.  Two times, synchronous events, both times driving, once in the morning, once late at night.  Both times, Life on Mars, like a soundtrack.  In an interview, he said it was a love song and he was very, very right.  Twice over for me, in fact.  Watching the dawn come up over the motorways (I'd love to call it the autobahn, but even I'm not that pretentious, even tonight) and listening to the entire back catalogue.  Driving a long way back home through unlit lanes for five hours, with just the one album looping over and over again.  Smiling at the madness and beauty of life when you just let go and be whatever you need to be.

Changing the makeup, a new role to play.  It's what I've always done.

It feels like that music has been on a loop in my head forever and I don't mind at all.

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"