Life Laundry.

Life The third year of this blog continued in much the same veign as the previous couple, personal blogging and links intermixed with film reviews. It's also the year I began writing for Off The Telly, the TV website which I'd been a fan of for years and was overwhelmed to be even a small part of. My articles from there would eventually become folded into the archives of this site and they're all here, ending with a review of Merlin.  The first more traditional blog project, Scene Unseen began in 2004 but I've already revisited that many times over the years so let's do something else.

Preparing for this retrospective, I've been glancing through those archives and in-between finding the odd massively embarrassing post which the older version of me has very much set to draft so they'll disappear from the web at large (people grow), it's mainly a reminder of just how much the modern world, especially in the area of entertainment consumables has changed.  Just look at the enthusiasm with which I greeted my first DVD-by-post thanks to a freebie in The Guardian.  Little did I know that a decade and a half later I'd still be doing exactly the same thing.  Plus there's streaming.

The epitome of such things is this post from August 2003 written during a packing session for moving house again and having another clear out.  From line to line it's a treasure so I thought I'd provide an update to everything in there and the extent to which the world of 2021 has made it both possible to stop being a hoarder but also the sheer tragedy of what was lost.  There's a couple of moments in here which'll make YouTube archivists cringe.  I mean it's not like I disposed of Doctor Who's Marco Polo for no good artistic reason but still.  I'm getting ahead of myself.

In a fortnight we're moving back to the flat we vacated a year ago for building work. For some reason the packing doesn't seem to be as monumental this time. I didn't really unpack anything so most of my life is still in cardboard. But I filled three boxes tonight and half of everything and that seems to be half of everything I need doing.

When we moved into the temporary flat I filled a wall of the bedroom with boxes and walled them off with a giant piece of fabric and filled in the rest of the room with furniture expecting those boxes to simply be moved back again.  Instead the removal firm decided we need to rebox them into even larger receptacles and so here I was having a "life laundry".

I'm also being very ruthless when it comes to clearing out. Watching Life Laundry has taught me that I don't really need to keep half the stuff I have. 

Told you.  Awful programme.  So much irreplaceable culture lost.

The CD Roms were easy. Most were cover discs with massively old and inferior software on them and some simply weren't compatible anymore. 

Fortunately most if not all of these are now preserved on archive.org.  But keep in mind I was still using Windows 98 so I'm not sure what was incompatible.  Now you can run most of it in a browser.

The paperwork was difficult and filled with value judgements - how long do you need to keep payslips for a job you left four years ago?

You don't is the short answer.  Everything is online now.  One of the gratifying elements of having my student loan forgiven is not having to source facsimiles of payslips ever year.

I've always had a rather excessive video collection. I've hoarded tv recordings and I've got thousands of tapes. But looking through some of the boxes I've already packed I can't think for the life of me why I'm keeping half of them. 

This is true.  Walls and walls of shelves filled with VHS tapes most of which I've now replaced with DVDs that without the boxes fit into a single file box.  It was like sleeping in a Blockbuster Video.  For a while I videotaped everything, diligently recording every episode of The Sopranos which I then didn't ever get around to watching (and still haven't).  

Perhaps I've been spoilt by DVD but what's the point in keeping a second generation copy of Steel Magnolias in full screen which I taped and retaped from ITV ten years ago. 

On to my second DVD copy of Steel Magnolias.  It's also on Netflix.

I've also rammed up against the sticky problem of long play incompatibility between recorders. So all of the Quantum Leap episodes I faithfully collected from the BBC are all unwatchable because I've changed recorders twice since then.

I'd forgotten this was a problem.  Those old Quantum Leap episodes were second generation by the way, after I spent a month or two copying them from SP to LP so that they'd take up less space.  Now I have the whole thing on DVD in box the size of a double VHS release.

Black bagging it all is a liberating experience. 

Honestly, at the time it really was.  But I can't think how many films which have since gone unrepeated and aren't available anywhere went to the tip.  Not to mention all of the advertising bumpers and scraps of live shows which Kaleidoscope would kill for.  Sorry, it's all gone.

There are lots of programmes I would never let go of. Like the Adam and Joe Fourmative Years programme from when Channel 4 celebrated fifteen years of programming; 

A VHS which I kept for many years until it turned up on All4 and now it's on Britbox too.

or the Mark Kermode documentaries about making his favourite films; 

Included as extras on the relevant DVDs.  The Fear of God: 25 Years of the Exorcist is permanently on the iPlayer.

or the John Cusack movie Better Off Dead. 

Have the DVD.

But in the past I've thought it was important to have an archive of all these programmes, in case I had to teach a class, or anyone wanted to borrow them. 

Neither of which could or would ever happen but these are lies you tell yourself when you're a hoarder.

But I realized that HMV has a better archive and Blockbuster loan out things as well. 

But I realized that Amazon has a better archive and Cinema Paradiso loan things as well.

If it's the difference between having a room which doesn't look like the stacks at the British Library Audio Visual section and having a clear head, I'll choose the latter.

Smirks as he glances around the walls full of bookcases, all the books and discs.  Honestly, a lot of this was just making room for newer media.

 I have tapes which I bought or taped five years ago I still haven't watched. Sometimes you have let go.

Within a few years I'd be making all of these mistakes again once I'd bought a HD-DVD recorder which made it even easier to record everything and store it.  The next time I moved and had to dump everything, I carefully checked what was available and still have a lot of these old discs on the shelf, ready for the day I don't still have access to Box of Broadcasts.  But they fortunately take up less space than VHS tapes.

I'm even losing many books. If I've read it and it doesn't have some special significance, it's gone. Douglas Adams and Monty Python are staying, Tom Clancy and John Grisham are going. I'll be keeping all of the literature I studied at school and losing all the literature I collected but never read. I've got all of Charles Dickens' novels just to look impressive on the shelf. I've never read them so why keep them? If I get the burning desire the library is always there and it won't be wasting shelf space when its finished. Already some will be pouring scorn on me, but it's amazing actually how much the human brain can keep in store. I don't need to have the volume on a shelf to talk about it.

Later, not even Douglas Adams would survive with everything other than hardback and early editions ending up in charity shops.  Most of the books I own now are either Doctor Who, Shakespeare related or about film and although there's a lot in there I haven't read yet.  I will.  The TARGET novelisations are sat on the shelves above this desk nagging at me.

There are special cases. My Yahoo Internet Life's aren't going anywhere. 

Still hasn't and I recently took them out of the box and shelved them in all their nostalgic glory.  Of all the magazines of the period, this is the one you would expect to have a collection of pdfs online somewhere.

Neither my Empire movie magazines or SFX. 

Just completed my Empire collection, everything since issue one.  SFX went, another space issue (and not because of the space issues).  Had to choose so kept DWM and Sight and Sound instead.  Ironically my subscription to the latter provides access to a complete digital archive of back issues.

But as a trade off Premiere has gone south as have Total Film (except for the earlier issues when it was new and fresh and Danny Wallace wrote for them). 

I think I still have the first issue of Total Film somewhere ...

Although I know I need to filter my CD collection for the same reasons as above, for some reason music feels different. I know I'll never listen to that Speedball Baby album again, but I really like the cover. And I really couldn't live without the six minute version of Underwater Love by Smoke City.

Listening to the Speedball Baby album again on Spotify.  It's ace.  Wish I'd kept that CD.  Underwater Love by Smoke City hasn't gone anywhere.  Along with what's left of my CDs, it's in a long box under the bed.

Will there be anything I'll regret chucking out? Probably. 

No shit.

Now and then my Dad talks about the mint condition copies of Amazing Stories and Eagle comic my late Gran threw out when she cleared out his boyhood things for him (have you seen how much the former are going for)? But almost everything is replaceable I think and there are too few hours in the day to enjoy anything anymore. And besides I'm always more interested in the things I haven't seen / heard / read before than those things that I have. Which is probably why I can't wait to see what Lucas does with the old Star Wars trilogy in the next few years.

You naïve fool.  Also I'd forgotten that story about my Dad.  That'll explain why I bought him a random issue at a comic mart for Christmas the same year.  Much of Amazing Stories is now on archive.org.

But that's a different discussion for another time. For now I'll just put it in that box over there …

It's still true that I prefer to watch new things, partly because I have a decent memory for films, especially those I've enjoyed.  If the lockdown variants have been about anything, it's trying to find new things to watch and wondering how far in the past something has to be before I can legitimately see it again with fresh eyes.  

Everything has changed.  Nothing has changed.  Unlike music, film companies still ruthlessly hoard their archives and it isn't yet possible to subscribe to one service and have access to everything and nothing is available permanently assuming it ever is at all.  So although I'm subscribed (at last check) to Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+, MUBI and Britbox, I still ruthlessly have a few thousand DVDs filed together "just in case" and I don't see that situation changing soon.  Better Off Dead is still not available to stream in the UK ...

Year Two.

About   As you may have surmised, I'm going to be spending this month trying on a few of the old clothes to see if they still fit.  In the second year, I hadn't really become desperate enough to start any "blogging projects" and was most mixing a few personal items with link posts and film reviews.  At the time I'd begun a new job at Liverpool Direct, the then council call centre run in conjunction with BT which had an eclectic shift pattern that involved a week of 2pm to 10pm shifts every other fortnight (until we went on strike and they stopped as was reported in the Echo at the time) so much like the previous year, it's amazing that anything was posted here at all.

Blog! was an attempt to provoke a reciprocal link by crowning something Blog of the Day.  There's a few examples here.  Often it worked, like the time Wil "Wesley" Wheaton linked back at the start of his blogging journey (in a post when he was also bitching about not getting a role in Rules of Attraction which is presumably why that post has disappeared from the blog as it is now).  One of the first I linked to was LinkMachineGo which is still going strong and still links here often.  Thanks Darren!

TV  Doctor Who's Evil of the Daleks is coming soon which for my interests means we'll be getting a decent recon of the episodes and a remastered copy of the surviving episode two.  The special features also include a making of and the audiobook recorded by Tom Baker although sadly it's not in character as per Power.  I wonder if it'll include the scenes removed in this 1992 release because they couldn't clear the rights to The Beatles and The Searchers.

Film  Last night I watched Doug Liman's Locked Down, sure to be part of what's seen as a genre of films set in this past couple of years about people stuck in their own homes for months on end dealing with various existential crises.  It's absolutely delightful, a new riff on the old re-marriage screwball genre crossed with a heist.  Anne Hathaway's advertising exec dumped her delivery driver boyfriend Chiwetel Ejiofor just before lockdown and now they're stuck trying to avoid each other in a house which isn't small by London standards, but still too close for emotional comfort.  The firecracker script captures those months perfectly (presumably because they were living through it) including the Thursday night doorstep pan smashing for the NHS.  Locked Down has attracted some exceedingly sniffy reviews most of which accuse it of being disposable which misses the point that it's not supposed to be some profound comment on the pandemic.  Those will come later.

History  The New York Historical Society have unearthed early plans for the World Trade Center which I'd imagine would be a difficult read even for people outside the city.  The posted diagrams are chilling, presenting the stairwells in which people were trapped and the position of the towers within the grounds.  I'm not sure if I was fortunate or not to have been ill from work that day and around to witness the television broadcast or simply realised something was happening when the phones stopped at the call centre.

Science  Obligatory Guardian link and Kevin Smith reference.  Flying car makes successful test run between airports in Slovakia.  Of course what people are expecting is The Jetsons but this should be enough to keep Randall happy for a while.

Also...  over on YouTube ... Brie Larson has announced that she's slowing down the posting frequency to her YouTube channel so she can return to her day job or as the rest of the known universe calls it, acting in The Marvels ... LGR introduces us to a CRT screen from 1991 with a pivot which works with both DOS and Windows 3.1 (and compatible software) ... Techmoan turns a medical surplace printer into a selfie machine ... Study Vibes received her exam results ... finally, Be Kind Rewind has a fascinating video essay about Madonna's classic film influences.

Commuter Tales.

Commuter Life   Twenty years ago at the start of this blog, I'd just begun travelling to Manchester to work at the Royal Bank of Scotland credit card centre.  Writing that sentence still feels weird because of the long standing rule about not talking about work, but it's there for all to see on the rolling CV post I began when I was 35 so there's no need to be cagey about it now.  God knows why it occurred to me to start a blog at the same time as a job which was going to take at least two and a half hours out of the day travelling but you have a lot more energy in your mid-twenties and even though days and evenings are the same length, they just seem to last longer.

Now of course, my commute consists of a half hour walk ... somewhere ... and there's not a lot to write about, nothing like this anecdote.  Even if there was, I'd probably post it on Twitter first now that I have the internet in my pocket and don't have to wait until I get home and the dial-tone becomes available after 9pm as per an agreement with my parents when they capitulated to the idea of signing up for BT Surftime's evening and weekend package.  Plus for a large part of this year I was working from home, so the commute pretty much consisted of walking two or three feet and sitting down at this table.

But recently, very recently, I've been travelling on trains again.  Not for work though.  After having spent so much of last year indoors but not feeling confident enough to travel very far, I decided at the start of the summer that I'd walk to all of the Merseyrail Network, or at least the Northern and Wirral Line sections of it.  Although I considered the City Line too, briefly, some of the stations are ridiculously far apart on foot.  Of course, now that I'm writing this and glancing at the map again, the sections inside the margins look potentially do-able.  Best put a pin in that for now.

When I initially mentioned this project to people, some of them assumed this would include some lawbreaking because I'd be actually walking along the rails Stand-By-Me style.  Imagine the relief when I explain that I'm "just" walking from station to station with Google Maps as a guide.  Mostly this involves hiking along the main road which runs parallel to the train line which can either be very close or half a mile away depending on the amount of green space or suburbia in between.  On the first day, from St Michaels to Hunts Cross, that amounted to walking the length of Aigburth Road then dipping along the side streets when necessary.

So far I've completed all stations to New Brighton and West Kirby and I'm two thirds into the Chester Line.  Some days have been idyllic.  The trip between Moreston and Meols involved following the Wirral Circular Trail past Leasowe Lighthouse and along Meols Beach with views of the Irish Sea.  The tide was out and the wet sand was dotted with beached boats offering scenes not unlike dozens of the kinds of landscape paintings I saw when visiting all of those Public Art Collections in North West England.  I eventually stood on a beach at West Kirby which was another happy day.  So many of these lines end at the seaside.

But most of these walks are a trudge though suburbia, houses large and small, mansions and terraces.  This can be difficult to navigate both geographically and visually, especially in somewhere like Tranmere where architectural styles and building materials clash, with sometimes no two houses in the same street matching.  On reaching Rock Ferry there was nothing to do but listen to Duffy's Rockferry in which she sings about building a house with sorrow, and it seems like a lot of people have done exactly that over many years.  Yes, I know she's not singing about this Rock Ferry.  She made it up.  It's Porthmadog on the single cover.

You can follow the project on this Twitter thread, where I post a photo of some aspect of each station when I arrive.  Most don't really lend themselves to anything too scenic or just consist of a couple of platforms, so often I'll snap the station sign and move on.  As long as the name is in there somewhere, that's fine.  It's nice to have a little routine at each stop just to give it a sense of achievement.  I wonder if anyone has attempted similar elsewhere in the country.  Has anyone ever tried to walk the tube network in London?  Perhaps that could be my next project, post-pandemic.  For now, onwards to Capenhurst.

Updated:  @bandanachap on Twitter points me towards Mark Mason's Walk the Lines: The London Underground, Overground in which the author does indeed walk the Tube network.  Not that it's going to stop me.

Sugababes share Blood Orange remix of ‘Same Old Story’ and talk fighting for independence: Another snatch of the press junket and this time Keisha talks about how little she had to do with the creation of the later albums and how she was essentially told to shut up when she attempted any creative control. The album she's talking about is either Change or Catfights and Spotlights both of which gave is some imperious singles (About You Now, Change and Girls) but mostly come across as generic girl group material without its own sound. The Same Old Story remix is fine but you can't really improve on perfection.

Liverpool Biennial 2021: Day Three.

Art Everything ends and in the case of the Liverpool Biennial 2021, that's next Sunday 27th June after just over a month. Most years, the Biennial's enjoyed a lengthy residency in the city, so it's been possible to visit just one or two venues per day and savour the content (for better or worse) but with that impending deadline and entirely having lost track of time, yesterday, I tried to see as much of it as possible in one day, five whole buildings. With FACT's contribution running to late August, yesterday was about working through the temporary spaces, Lewis's Building, Lush, Dr Martin Luther King Jr. Building and the Cotton Exchange (as well as the Blue Coat).

Arguably the Biennial's been at its most impressive when occupying these liminal spaces. Some of the best exhibitions of the past like City Scapes (RIP) at the Copperas Hill Post Office or at Rapid Hardware, have been places in transition between their old utility and new creating juxtapositions between the artworks and their surrounding concrete or brick-based remnants of humanity and that was certainly the case this year. Office doors in the basement of the Cotton Exchange are still intact, the windows indicating these were the workspaces of Inspector Tyador Borlu, Kommissar Reed and Komissa Ga-L-M (its possible some of the letter have gone missing from that last name).

Unlike previous Biennials of course we have a virtual recording of these spaces available for revisit. YouTuber Nostalgia Nerd recently posted a watchable essay about how these liminal spaces work in retro computer games and its noticeable that these 3d models can be navigated using the now expected key combination of W-A-S-D with the mouse allowing us to look about the space like a first-person shooter.  It's not an entirely flexible experience.  Although in reality the visitor can wander around the far corners of the vast space on the second floor of Lewis's, its digital counterpart keeps the user with the boundaries of artwork.

All of this appreciation of the packaging might suggest to you that their content didn't overwhelm me and you'd be right.  Even allowing for eighteen months of avoiding art spaces causing a fair amount of rustiness in my appreciation, its fair to say that there wasn't much to engage me across the venues.  But I should I'd add the caveat that this probably had as much to do with personal taste and expectations than the work just simply being bad, which was so much the case under recent administrations.  It's also possible that some gems were missed or not given due concentration due to the whistle-stop nature of the visit.

The artists brought together at Lewis's consider the nature of humanity and none more so that Diego Bianchi whose Inflation (2021) who presents within the space and on video a series of fleshy objects representing organic matter mixed with the content of garages as well as objects of pleasure and technology, so tires and random metal, wine bottles and mobile phones.  The imagery is redolent of Japanese cinema, notably Akira, Tetsuo: The Iron Man and and Tokyo Gore Police and is an utterly captivating infusion of body horror which finds its apogee in a figure completely covered in junks of concrete.

As the artist and his cohorts wobble about yet more liminal spaces on-screen encumbered by these weighty costumes, we contemplate how humanity itself has to carry these supposed innovations around, offering freedom on the one hand, but restricting us physically on the other.  How many of us find ourselves accompanied with not just mobile phones, but tablets and ipods and also a spaghetti of charging cables and proprietary plugs in our backpacks forever distracted with wanting to know when an electric outlet will be available and how long we'll have to wait for the battery symbol on the screen to drift by to 100%?

The other highlight of the day was at the Bluecoat, Kathleen Ryan's three startling sculptures, Bad Cherries, Bad Lemon and Bad Peach.  Ryan uses semi-precious stones and others to recreate these various rotting fruits, with the most opulent minerals saved for the heart of the decay.  They're both beautiful and horrible as they imitate the colours of decomposition, the brown crazing which builds on the lemon's skin accurately represented.  All three are everything I want from an artwork, a feast for the eyes but with a thematic undercurrent, in this case how wealth inequality and how its happened at the expense of the environment.

If I've any suggestions for future Biennial entries, its to engage with how spaces are used and the kinds of work on display (so no change here).  With some extra planning, the second floor of Lewis's could easily have contained the contents of Lush, Dr Martin Luthor King Jr Building and the Cotton Exchange, none of it feeling particularly site specific. the latter seeming particularly remote, especially on a rainy day when you're wearing slipping shoes without any grip.  I wonder how many people visited the MLK building expecting something more than a two screen video projection.

Plus there are occasions when some spaces are occupied by the presentation of documentaries.  Again, this is dependent on taste, but I once again question whether a gallery space is the best venue for offering a half hour documentary about an Institute of Fine Arts or the importance of the cocoa leaf to the Murai Murai community in the Columbian Amazon.  Given the size of the rooms in which these pieces are projected, are they a way of making the visitor feel as though there's more work on display than there actually is which even as I type feels like an unfair assumption and the fact this Biennial exists is a miracle but I can't help wishing there was more of it.

With the serendipitous nature of exhibition visits, I wonder how many folks will watch more than a few minutes of these documentaries before moving on and whether a creation can fulfil its aims in that time.  Unlike some video art pieces, they're not very easy to dip in and out of.  The Alberta Whittle film which was on display at the Open Eye can still be viewed at the Lewis's building, but on a smallish television within the bustle of distractions elsewhere in the space.  Again I wonder if in future years, thanks to current technology, it wouldn't be possible to present these documentaries in an accompanying portal online so they can seen in a more comfortable setting even if a small donation is required.

After that unwarranted carping, have I enjoyed Biennial 2020(ish)?  Enough to write about it, which is more than in recent years.  There's a definite vibrancy which has been missing from other instalments in the past decade and the presentation has been admirable.  At each venue there is a reception table with extremely helpful and engaged volunteers giving each a sense of occasion with hundreds of copies of the festival guide and shops selling merchandise (although five pounds for a shopping bag is a bit rich for me this year).  So thank you for being able to make it out here in these most difficult of years and I look forward to seeing what you'll achieve in the future when all of this is over.

Jackie Lane who played Doctor Who's Dodo in 1966 has died. As Pip says, like so many companion actors in the period she was poorly served by the production team, especially in relation to her departure even though she had a light comic touch when given the room, as can be seen in The Gunfighters. She quit acting after that but became a theatrical agent, repping Tom Baker, Nick Courtney and Janet Fielding, who also became an agent and helped negotiate Paul McGann's contract on the TV Movie. Even for those who were only on-screen briefly, Doctor Who is a small world. It was a real treat when Jackie made a surprise appearance during the 50th anniversary celebrations. Rest in peace, lady.

The real reason Doctor Who makes fans want to hide behind the sofa Thoroughly brilliant essay from Behind The Sofa alumnus Paul Kirkley about the sheer terror of being a Doctor Who fan. It's particularly pertanent to me because I'm in the overwritten quagmire of a wilderness years first Doctor novel at the moment and although it's a slog and if it had been any other book I would have dropped it by now, the quest is the quest, and so I'm still plodding through the damn thing two chapters a day.

The Coffee Collection: Subway, Hanover Street, Liverpool.

Liverpool Biennial 2021: Day Two.

Art In the last Biennial entry, I wondered if the exhibition at the Open Eye Gallery would be photographed in three dimensions and uploaded as a VR experience. Well, it has and here it is. Indeed all of the Biennial exhibitions have had this treatment including the Tate even though its largely a collection display. So for the past ten minutes I've been wandering around the Open Eye Gallery show even though it closed a fortnight ago.

It's probably more immersive experience through the Oculous Rift headset the Matterport powered VR window recommends.  The experience in browser is rather like a slight more flexible version of Google's Street View, although in slightly higher definition than they usually employ in art gallery reproductions.  Its a good of record of what was in a space rather than an attempt to recreate the exhibition.  Some elements, such as the sculpture, simply don't reproduce.

The downstairs portion of the show features the work of Zineb Sedira, whose series of large scale 2013 photographs depicting the interior of a sugar warehouse in Marsaille can be seen in higher definition on her website.  Much of the draw to these is presumably the scale, seeing the detail of the matter within the spaces and how its effected the storage facilities, which is just about possible to see on screen in the vaguest terms.  Really sorry I missed the chance to see them up close.

The other work at the Open Eye was a documentary by Alberta Whittle, the Bardian-Scottish artist who'll be representing her kingdom at the Viennia Bienniale in 2022 (assuming it goes ahead).  between a whisper and a cry brings together found footage with newly filmed material "referencing the legacy of colonial extraction as the starting point for present-day climate instability in the Caribbean".

Unfortunately, this I have completely missed.  Understandably (presumably) for rights reasons, the VR gallery doesn't contain a link to the film, just a still image with a space containing four plastic socially distanced chairs.  Co-cinematographer Matthew Arthur Williams has some intriguing stills on his website but there doesn't seem to be even a pay subscription version available even though it's also been screened in a typical auditorium setting.  I'll have to keep an eye out for it.  An open eye?

With the rest of the Biennial pretty much closing on Sunday, this afternoon I booked tickets for everything else on Wednesday (apart from FACT which will still be around in August).  Regular readers will know its years since I tried to do it almost all at once so its bound to be exhausting and a fight to fit it all in before gallery fatigue descends.  But fortunately there'll still be a version of these exhibitions online if there's anything I miss or misunderstand.

We Need To Talk About Loki Laufeyson.

TV The new entry in the television anti-chamber of the MARVEL cinematic universe began yesterday and at least in the first episode it's everything I hoped it would be, essentially a Gallifrey episode of Doctor Who in which the titular trickster is caught up in the bloody minded, rigid philosophy of a God-like species keeping watch on the timeline.  What is Owen Wilson's Mobius but in charge of a kind of Celestial Intervention Agency?   What are the security people if not a Prydonian guard?

But I'm not here to discuss the similarities between the series, and here we're heading into spoiler filled waters so if you're in any way squeamish, turn your ferry around and head back to port.  Or go and watch Loki then come back.  Seriously, this is one of those occasions when Lucy Mangan doesn't know what she's talking about and that headline (which she presumably didn't write but nevertheless) is a disgrace!

Isn't it good?  Isn't the Butterscotch Stallion just the perfect foil to Hiddleston's wall bouncing and basically having this post-Incident Loki copying most of us during one of the various lockdowns and rewatch the MARVEL films in chronological order in order to get up to speed character-wise just wonderful as well as heart-breaking?  As every nerd with a NordVPN sponsorship has pointed out, that key moment from the trailer was just a flashback to a prank shows we do not know what's coming next.

Except, do we?  The title Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness exists and there's plenty of evidence from other corners of the MCU that by the end of this series that there will be more than this one "sacred" timeline and that what we're watching here is the creation of that realm so rich with possibility.  But how will this happen when this all powerful agency exists, protecting the timeline from intervention since the beginning of time it seems.

Here's my theory.  Loki's going to herald the multiverse.  More than that, the figure glimpsed at the end of the episode isn't just a Loki, it's the Loki who we've been following in this episode.  At a certain point he realises that these super-beings have no right at all to dictate how time and reality work just to save their own skin and so he hatches a plan, or more's to the point follows the plan he's already watching evolve.

So it's this Loki who's travelling through time, toppling soldiers in order to steal the glowy boxes on the assumption that with enough of them he'll be able to destroy the Time Variance Authority and set the multiverse back on track, including realities were he lived, Frida lived, he's king of Midgard and all manner of other outcomes.  From a certain point of view the Time-Keepers could be viewed as incredibly fascistic, destroying variants because they don't fit their plan.

One point of confusion I've seen is how there can be one sacred timeline when we've already seen other realities already in the MCU, notably in the obviously canonical Agents of SHIELD but also during Guardians of the Galaxy Vol.2 as Stan Lee describes some of his adventures to multiple Watchers, each presumably keeping track of their own reality or timeline.  How can these realms exist if there's a sacred timeline?

Well, because there was a single sacred timeline until there wasn't.  Even taking into account that the TVA themselves can time travel, or at least manifest themselves in any time period which I don't suppose is the same thing, Loki is pulled from the timeline in 2012, which means that Loki is set before the alternate reality episodes of SHIELD and Guardians of the Galaxy, not to mention whatever the results of the time travel in Runaways was (and yes that's canonical too).  

Once Loki's topples the TVA, they're replaced by the Watchers, presumably an infinite number of them, observing the timelines and only intervening in the most dire of cosmic circumstances.  Which means the What If? series isn't going to be just some fun anthology show, but a key part of the overall narrative going forward, demonstrating that there isn't one correct timeline but numerous possibilities.  Perhaps Jordan Peele's voice will cameo as a "live action" Watcher in Loki.

I appreciate to some extent all of this is me trying to make fetch happen again, after it turned out the Evan Peters Quicksilver was just some guy and so there isn't yet some grand plan to co-opt MARVEL movie and TV content past and present into the MCU and explain the mechanics of the Sonyverse.  But it'll be fun to look back at this blog post in five episodes time and see how wrong I was again anyway.

Sorry, but I just don't think the same way some of you do.

Life Every couple of weeks, or at least it feels that way, someone has the revelation on social media that not everyone in the world has an internal monologue which speaks in whole sentences. Here's a page on The Poke from last July which pretty much covers all the basis, from the shock and awe to the "well how other people think" to deep dives into the biological mechanics.

My reaction was the opposite. I've always thought internal monologues, in fiction, in books, comics and on screen, were a narrative affectation, a way of communicating information without having to produce tortured expositions scenes between characters who're already aware of the what's being talked about. Those thoughts which Spider-man could never communicate, even to Mary Jane.

But no, it turns out there are people in the world who's brains are constantly chattering, having a conversation with themselves about everything which is happening to them during the day. It's how they think things through, from what to have for breakfast in the morning, to solving maths problems to considering what's happening in a film while they're watching it. Often it manifests itself in the form of a conversation, especially if there's a choice to be made.

Which I honestly don't understand and can't imagine because I'm in the other crowd, the ones who don't have these internal conversations, don't have a voice in their head reading a book to them and even as I type these words, the first time I know what's going to be said is as I tap the keys. Since we seem to be in the minority, the key question we're asked it always, how do you think about, well, stuff.

To which I can only answer, we just do. After writing that mini-sentence, I paused before writing something else and then the right word just occurred to me and I began typing again. I can't explain how. It's a bit like having a talking to someone, knowing that the words are there and what I want to say and then my language skills make it happen. There's no real pattern to it, and I honestly can't describe how it works. It just does.

If I'm deciding what to eat, I just look through the freezer until I see something and then get it out to defrost, and this only becomes a conversation if its going to be a meal for more than myself in which case I'll talk to others. When I'm doing crosswords or sudoku, the answers are either there or not. When I'm watching a film, even if it's a mystery, I don't think about what's happening internally.

The closest I come to experiencing the internal monologue is when I talk to myself. Then I'll sometimes consider my way through something, like how the plot mechanics of a film are constructed, but out loud, commenting to the no one else who's in the room. Most often this is an explanation, "Dear God!" or something linguistically stronger. Or at the start of a film, I say what I think the ending will be out loud.

Honestly, I don't know how I'd cope if I had to listen myself chuntering from a sedentary intellectual position all the time, like a demented back bench MP. There are occasions after work, when I'm tired of hearing the sound of my own voice and I'm happy to just sit with my mouth closed letting the world, and more important my senses, do without the noise of my generic northern vowels and consonants.

Liverpool Biennial 2021: Day One.

Art This morning, I visited an art gallery. The last time such a thing occurred was a good eighteen months ago, before the slow apocalypse, so the very fact of being able to stand outside Tate Liverpool in anticipation of actually going inside to look at an artwork felt like a milestone.  Just to be clear, the rest of the morning was a shambles.  After completing at the Tate, I'd planned to see the rest of what the Biennial describe as the Stomach/Waterfront Trail but both the Open Eye Gallery and the Martin Luthor King Jnr Building are closed on a Tuesday, a fact I'd completely failed to notice when checking the festival website just before booking my ticket to Tate.  The Open Eye closes on the 6th so I'm not sure if I'll see that now.  Perhaps they'll produce one of their excellent virtual reality thingys.

What was not a shambles was the re-opening of Tate Liverpool.  To keep numbers down, visitors have to pre-book a timeslot even for a free exhibition and as you enter, that's checked and an invigilator gives you some information about how to navigate the one way system in the gallery space and what to do in case of evacuation.  The whole process is incredibly reassuring; even though I'm fully vaccinated now, visits to non-usual indoor spaces are still rare and being able to go anywhere and feel safe is extra important.  A year or so of doing nothing of the sort does lead you to some behaviours and it's going to take a while to ease myself out of them.  It is getting easier, especially in shops.  I've even been to Marks and Spencers a few times.

The Tate's portion of the Biennial is ok.  Mainly drawn from the collection, the key theme is feminism and the specifically the fight against the dominant white, male, hetrosexual narratives which still hold sway in the art world and society in general.  A prime example would be Martine Syms' video installation Borrowed Lady (2016) consists of four large flat screen opposite each other on posts, each containing repeated shots of the artist making sounds and gestures, creating audio rhythms as a comment on how black and especially black, female culture has been appropriated by advertising and culture without acknowledging whilst also fetishizing the source.  Standing inside the circle, the result is confusing and difficult to experience.  Outside you're able to see how at least two screens interact with one another.

But the visually simplest piece ironically has the most to say.  Anu Poder's Tongues (1998) consists of a line of oversized but realistically crafted representations of, yes, tongues, cast in soap (accompanied by a metal dish containing another sat in resin).  The artist lived under a communist regime in a former Soviet Union which limited her freedom of speech, which has incredibly contemporary connections given recent events in Belarus.  Another unintended resonance is that tongues are one part of the anatomy strangers haven't been able to see of one another due to the need for masks, although in some cases that's no bad thing.  With a white stripe right down the middle, Lichen Planus has made my tongue look like a giant pink airport runway.  Onward.

A Viewing order for the The X-Men franchise.

Film Welcome to the feelinglistless breakroom, I'm Stuart Ian Burns.  

About four years ago, after the release of Logan, I attempted to put the X-Men films into some kind of logical viewing order with only minor success. After seeing someone I follow on Twitter try to make sense of it, I had a brainwave. Rather than treat them as a single narrative, just assume they take place in different realities, ala the Sony Spider-Man films and watch them as such, like an anthology series about mutants. 

Logan's Run. 

X-Men Origins: Wolverine 

X-Men 

X-Men 2 

X-Men 3 (or whatever it's called in your end of the world) 

The Wolverine 

X-Men: Days of Future Past 

As I suggested last time, there's a version of these films in which the same Wolverine character is the protagonist who finally has his redemption at the close of Days of Future Past, having undone the mess of X-Men 3. If you watch just these films, they tell a complete story (assuming you're kind enough to accept there are two mutants both called Sabretooth for some reason).

Old Man Logan. 

The Gifted 

Logan 

As I misinterpreted on first viewing, Logan is supposed to be set in a different continuity, perhaps one in which the events of Days of Future Past didn't end favourably. I'm also boldly suggesting that this is the same world TV's The Gifted happened, which also has an absent X-Men and mutants on the run from sinister forces.

The Do-Over.

First Class

Days of Future Past 

Apocalypse

Dark Phoenix

Time works differently in this reality, people or at least mutants, don't age at the same rate as the others.  Essentially this is the reality which breaks off after Wolverine time travels.  Versions of at least the first two films in the 00s trilogy do happen after Dark Phoenix and the final result is much the same but perhaps even further into the future (to explain the different casting especially of your Mom).  This also helps explain the various casting changes from the "Prime" universe, notably Emma Frost.

Elseworld.

Fant4stic

Deadpool

Deadpool 2

The New Mutants

Legion

Ridiculously, Deadpool is referenced on screens and documents in the airplane scenes of Fant4stic which means they're in the same continuity.  Putting Deadpool in a different reality to the other films explains why Colossus is so different to them and it bolsters The New Mutants a little bit by making this other X-Men the one they're referring to with their fate leading in to Legion as the terminal point for mutants in this reality.

What do you think?  Leave a comment and don't forget to like and subscribe. For feelinglistless, I'm Stuart Ian Burns.

Liverpool Biennial 2021: Press Launch.

 

Art  Just seconds ago (at time of writing) the press launch for last year's Liverpool Biennial concluded.  Necessarily delayed until this year, what with one thing and another, and the event happened over Zoom for the same reason.  Which means that unlike previous years you won't find me describing my imposter syndrome or offering an existential recitation of dealing with crowds of strangers accompanied by a sad photo of a half eaten croissant.  On the upside, this did mean I was able to watch with a freshly brewed decaffeinated coffee in hand thanks to owning a silver bean machine that will do that sort of thing.

Thankfully the event was structured as a webinar, so the only faces on screen were the speakers so I didn't have to inflict my lockdown hair and weird storage boxes on the real press people in attendance.  Unfortunately that did also mean that it lacked the opportunity to lig on who else was in the crowd.  Hopefully it wasn't just me.  That would be disappointing for all involved.  Not that for a moment this didn't actually look like this might be the case when my written question was answered first, about the existence of a printed Biennial visitor guide (yes, there is and a pdf version too), but fortunately other contributions were made straight away.

As you can see from the above screen shot, this year's instalment is titled "The Stomach and the Port" paralleling Liverpool's key historic utility with how our body functions or as the festival portal explains:

"... challenges an understanding of the individual as a defined, self-sufficient entity. The body is instead seen as a fluid organism that is continuously shaped by and shaping its environment. A plethora of artistic practices inform this edition: many of the artworks include sound, shun direct representation, de-stabilise gender categories or look at intense forms of contact. Liverpool, and its maritime history as a point of global contact and circulation, provides the perfect ecosystem to situate these enquiries."

Like some of the classic entries, Liverpool Biennial 2021 has a theme that's both interesting and open enough that it'll be up to the visitor to decide exactly how a given artist has reacted to the brief and how the artworks interact with it.  There's a much longer explanation available here.  

From what I can see glancing through the booklet (enough to comment, not enough to have spoilers), there are far more new commissions than archival works than in recent years which means the artworks should directly reference these ideas and the times in which we live (rather a curatorial attempt to make old works fit the theme), which makes me far more optimistic about this edition than I have in a long time.  The quality has been variable in the past decade but this is a whole new team reconceiving what the Biennial can and should be.

Indeed my only fear this year is logistics.  Recent Biennials have spanned up to three months but this whole thing opens on the 19th May and closes the 27th June.  One the one hand this forces me to get my finger out and try and do multiple venues on the same day, but given that most of them require a booking I'm a bit flummoxed about co-ordinating those booking to give myself enough time in each space, especially if I'm following the suggested trails, not wanting to rush to make deadlines, not wanting to have to hang around too much in-between.

But strangely I'm less bothered about safety concerns.  Having timed bookings means they're limiting visitor numbers and if the quality of presentation in previous years is a guide, rules will be followed to the letter.  Plus being fully vaccinated changes the equation a lot.  Please god the next Biennial will happen in a brave new post-pandemic world in which the only barriers are between the artworks and our ability to interpret them.  With Cityscapes.  I still miss Cityscapes.

The Sugababes are actually releasing a new album even if it's an old one.

Music The NME reports that the Sugababes are rereleasing One Touch "featuring demos, rarities and re-workings from the likes of Blood Orange (aka Dev Hynes) and Metronomy."  Accompanying the news is an interview with Siobhan and Keisha, but troublingly not Mutya, last seen parroting Qanon theories about the Royal family amongst others on Twitter and her now private Instagram account.

There's an MNEK remix of Run For Cover on Spotify, the first new material to appear under that name since 2010's Wear My Kiss (Flatline has been expunged along with the MKS profile and only survives in various plastic cover versions.  The remix isn't really my sort of thing, of the kind which would be amongst the ten different versions on a CD single to bulk up the value of charging £3.99 for a copy of Underwater Love by Smoke City.

The interview covers similar ground to previous outings although it's pretty obvious Siobhan and Keisha have continued to go through some things since 2013 and been able to articulate exactly to each other what caused the split when they were kids.  Remember in 2009, Siobhan told the PonyStep website (just four years before the release of Flatline):

"... there was no doubt that I was pushed out. It was clear that there was someone in that band who never wanted me in it and that’s Keisha. She never wanted me in that band and made my life a living hell. It’s funny... all these years on, I’ve grown up and I’ve left it all behind me and I’m not bothered by it. I think a lot of the memories, I have just blocked out because I don’t really like to think of the nasty stuff. I like to think about the good things in life, always focus on the positive, and Zen and all that shit. But I’ll never forgive her. Though no-one forgives that first bully in their lives, do they? No-one does. Even when you’re fifty. Though, on the other hand, it doesn’t matter. You meet so many people in the world. Why would I need to reconcile with that person? I don’t even know if she would want to.

Contrast that with this exchange from the new interview when Keisha's answer a question about how racism contributed to a perception of her being a bully:

Siobhan: “Even as a teenager, it was obvious to me that the three of us were treated differently, especially in other countries. Some people would only direct questions to me. It was awkward and obvious to me then what was at the heart of what was going on, but I didn’t know how to address it then.”

Keisha: “To be honest with you Siobhan, I didn’t even notice.”

Siobhan: “I always did.”

Keisha: “I genuinely didn’t, and then I went into every situation on the defensive thinking: ‘They’re not going to like me anyway’. That was my defence-mechanism: show an attitude first to protect myself. In the past 15 years, I’ve done a lot of work to make sense of this all, but it’s had a very damaging effect and – not to get emotional – I feel really good that we can even have this conversation.”

Honestly, this is genuinely moving and shows how time really is a great dealer.  The absence of Mutya isn't addressed although apparently there's more of this interview to be published, so perhaps we'll find out then.

Anyway, the rerelease is out in October ready for the Christmas market and there might well be actual new material released soon too.

Let's end on Sugababes 3.0 mangling Overload in 2006, for old times sake:

 

In The City. Finally.

Life Hello, how are you? Keeping safe? I know it's been a while, but, you know, stuff and things.  We're all double or fully vaccinated now, which happened relatively smoothly, apart from Dad ending up in hospital overnight after his first jab, although it wasn't until much later we realised that it wasn't the side effects which caused him to repeatedly pass out as fluids were emerging from all over his body, it was the large bag of black liquorice he'd eaten that afternoon which is a no-no if you suffer from high blood pressure.  He had liquorice poisoning.  

After over twelve months of thinking about it, I visited the city centre this morning for the first time in twelve months.  Having been vaccinated and with the proffered statistics on cases and deaths in the local area, I'm a bit more relaxed about going out into the world, albeit still with a mask on throughout and to the point its caused a rash on the back of my ears.  For all that, bus travel is still a psychological step too far, what with some people being incapable of keeping their mask on for the whole journey.

The city centre felt strange.  Even for a Monday morning it was relatively quiet   Much of the visit amounted to me noting what's closed (the Sainsburys at the top of Bold Street, the WH Smiths in Central Station), what's newly opened (B&M in the old Virgin Megastore space in Clayton Square) and what's miraculously still open (the cheap DVD and CD place in St Johns Precinct!).  But having become so delivery sufficient across those twelve months utilitarian reasons for visiting the city centre have diminished considerably.

Not least because we've also updated our broadband connection.  Twenty years ago when visiting the Millennium Dome, I watched the Wierd Al parody of The Phantom Menace on a T1 internet connection which seemed like magic to someone accustomed to dial-up.  Ten years ago, this blog was still being written across a phone line.  Today, it's via a 1.1Gbps fibre connection, which is ridiculous and faster than some universities.  It was a 700mps leap for just a pound extra a month, albeit added to an already relatively expensive charge.

Of course, at these margins, using the web hasn't become that much faster.  Download speeds are only as fast as the servers from which they're being delivered and while pointless saving tracks to offline mode in Spotify is now instantaneous on Windows, grabbing material from the Internet Archive still has some inertia.  But streaming apps are miraculously fast to open now and installing one of the Alien related games the other night, all 13GB of it, took just four minutes.

So despite having been vaccinated enough that it feels safer to go places and do things, at least for now, there aren't that many places I'd want to go and with this broadband connection no need to.  But museums and cinemas will be opening soon and I'll finally be able to look at a painting in the paint and canvas rather than on a computer screen.  Though geographically useful, virtual exhibitions simply aren't a substitute for a thrill of visiting a space and smelling the varnished floors.

Sugababes.com has updated. Up until a few years ago, the domain still hosted the final incarnation of the classic run of Sugababes with a background video of the chorus to Get Sexy blasting out on a loop. Which then gave way to various dummy pages for hosting companies with Go Daddy the most recent (according the archive.org). Now we find the original One Touch logo with letters spelling twenty sprinkled across, some social media and music links and a newsletter sign up box. The impression seems to be that something is happening related to the 20th anniversary of the album release although that was 27 November 2000 in the UK which we've well missed.   But it wouldn't be the Sugababes if there wasn't some lag between intention and result.  Flatline was released in 2013 and we're still waiting for the follow-up.

‘Sexual predator’: actor Noel Clarke accused of groping, harassment and bullying by 20 women.  Extremely uncomfortable and important reading. It's not for me to comment on anything in the article, the words of the victims speak for themselves.

Discussing Skateboarding with Filmmaker Werner Herzog. Skateboard magazine Jenkem decided to approach the director and ask him about their discipline and he's predictably extremely eloquent on a subject he has little or no connection to. But by the end, you'll want him to make a film on the subject even if it's just a collection of found footage and his voiceover, although that's sort of what we have here.

Third time lucky? Inside the RSC’s much-delayed Winter’s Tale. The Guardian visits the RSC during production on the re-imagining of this production which didn't make it to the stage last year.  There will be changes - not as much human contact for one thing.  We also have a transmission date and time.  It'll be on BBC Four at 7pm on Sunday 25 April, as part of the BBC’s Lights Up season.  The programme page is up.  Later that night, there'll also be a repeat of Scuffles, Swagger and Shakespeare: The Hidden Story of English unseen since its first and only broadcast in November 2019.