So the point is I can’t really objectively review a performance by a company who I’ve seen nearly twenty times when, in a way, they’re almost all a continuation of the same performance, it’s just sometimes they’re all sat down talking quietly and sometimes they’re all running about and shouting. I was talking to Tim Etchells, their director/writer/dramaturg/top lad afterwards and he said it’s like a very slow soap opera, and he’s right, the relationships between the performers evolve like those in a soap. It was fascinating watching Jerry being in charge and pushing the newbies about when it doesn’t seem so long since he was the debutante being abused. But still, Richard is the first to break from the initial structure, Cathy and Claire hold everything together and Terri is the chaos provider in the slightly shorter skirt, “what if heroin wasn’t addictive?”

This is, in my personal taxonomy of forced entertainment shows at least, a shouty show rather than a talky show, but it’s much better realised than the last couple of shouty shows, the music is much more sympathetic and less obvious (no 20th Century Boy here, just random Japanese lounge tracks). It’s knockabout, in a good way, not weighed down by Big Themes (although obviously it’s still all about death, as all Forced Ents shows are*). I wonder if the discipline of having to learn dances has made them really cut to the chase with the other bits, to be more focussed on what these characters are on stage for, which I thought World in Pictures (the last big shouty show from 2006) in particular was lacking. I was laughing throughout, although many of these jokes may have been only in my head.

What was fascinating was the number of walkouts. There’s always one or two who have seen a non-specific review or come along with their mates and expect A Play, which it isn’t, but there were probably twenty who were mainly, according to my sources, students from one particular performance course [cough]Sussex[cough] which I find mind-boggling. When we first saw forced ents in 92 (possibly 93) we spent the rest of our time at college shamelessly ripping them off because they opened so many new doors for us, so to walk out an hour in (the show was 100 minutes without interval) is, at its basest, to miss stuff you can nick. If there are more exciting and innovative companies out there I really want to know about them, is it just because the performers are mainly in their 40s now? That The Kids don’t get it? But really, who does theatre (-based performance, for want of a better phrase) better?

I keep on meaning to send Stewart Lee an email asking if he’s aware of them as large chunks of the philosophical parts of his (groundbreaking, awesome) book sound remarkably like Tim Etchells’ approach to performance, I wonder if this is part of the overarching “Mark E Smith is the centre of all that is interesting” theory as both Stew and Tim have confessed to early Fall performances having a big influence on their thinking…

The Thrill of it All continues at the Riverside, Hammersmith until 6 November, then Contact in Manchester, Rotterdam and Vienna!

Both photos by Hugo Glendinning.

*the 90s shows were about drinking, sex and death, but drinking and sex are less apparent now, particularly drinking

he’s been banned as a troll from crooked timber (tho i suspect he’s posting once more, under yet another name): on his own blog he’s furious, frustrated, isolated, relentlessly suspicious, oddly and unexpectedly generous… and consistently fascinating, because of rather than despite the cryptic incompleteness of his posted thoughts, on politics and art, reason and imagination and the self-absorbed rent-seeking intellectual classes:

“One of the many mistakes of the 2oth century was to imagine it might be possible to know without doubt which of our creations would avoid obsolescence. An art or society of ideas, a dream of scientific socialism or of the morality of technological progress, all are predicated on the same assumption, that modernity could mean infallibility, as if a cursory reading of Freud could render one immune to the effects of the unconscious. Such confidence doesn’t work now any more than it did 80 years ago. It doesn’t work for Donald Rumsfeld, or Steve Jobs, any more than it did for Lenin or Le Corbusier.”

preamble: the chinese capitalised (er haha) on A: a known gift for fireworks, B: a known gift for people prettily running with flags, C: spectacular oriental spectacle, D: a population as numberless as the pixels in the ocean — and the Brits limp far behind on all counts; my suggestion is that we should make a virtue of necessity and scrobble our counter-spectacle up round the sense of grumpy, lumpy, stubborn, dry-witted, weird-crop SMALLNESS, the aesthetic legacy of a small crowded windy greenfield crag dropped into the north sea

hence my answer:

—yog sothoth beyond the mountains of madness with the indescribable terror

—the winged fungus-beings in the outer dimensions with the unspeakable grimoire

—the crawling chaos at your study door with the aarrgh — !

(concept courtesy AL EWING and some foax playin the arkham horror rpg at the pembury last night)

i mean, aside from the fact that dashiell hammett never wrote a story called “the red brain”. a little misleading, that! anyhow, tonight’s episode of slugs and stars features the 1927 title story – which was already WELL retro by the time this book came out (1965)

via this excellent, high quality collection of old paperback covers: http://www.flickr.com/photos/calenture/

full size here

So don’t think that being armed with one of the signature covers, and a time machine, you can go back and diddle the Queen Of Crime out of her royalties.

This is also the first clearly branded Marple novel in this series, though the cover image is really quite subdued, perhaps as befits a book called Nemesis. This was snaffled fromt he Amazon French website so it could well be a French edition, though the A MISS MARPLE MYSTERY at the top suggests not.

there’s this, and then there’s wagner

More in depth discussion of this short story collection can be found here at the Mystery File website, also where I nicked the cover from.

Dull in colours perhaps, but not dull in composition. One of the scariest things I ever came across as a cosseted suburban child was the wild flaring nostrils of a horse in a local farm. Horses on TV seem so tame, even the wild stallions* who starred in Black Beauty and Champion the Wonder Horse. Ambulatory devices at best, even when they were stars they seemed like just modes of transport, cowboy cars. So when I ended up in the farm field with some fearless bigger boys, I was shocked to see the true madness in a horses eyes, and these flaming, flaring nostrils.

Shetland Ponies eh?

I believe this might be a Marple, correspondents will I am sure correct me. But the key question is, does this cover make you want to buy this book. Initially no, would be my gut reaction, it looks old, it looks a bit scary but it also is muted and grey. But the details reveal themselves (the repeated magnified little girl / doll in the background). I’m guessing seventies by the minor hyperbole on the strap line, but again willing to be enlightened.

*WYLD STALLYNS!

Nice 3D name logo which contrasts nicely with the deliberately 2D artwork on the cover. You get the feel of the artwork and the mysterious house aspect of one of Agatha’s most (in) famous mysteries. I have been looking for some foreign Agatha covers after a trip to Geneva presented me with a flea market stall full of French, German and Italian Agatha’s. An entire table of foreign language mysteries. I didn’t buy any of them as a fool and his money in a flea market are easily parted, but online searches for some of them have proved harder than I had thought. Rest assured foreign covers are just as diverse!

This is one of a series of fifteen published by Emmanuel Proust, all of whom can be seen here, including Death On The Nile and The Murder Of Roger Ackroyd. The art on this edition is done by Frank Leclercq and as a bonus, here is one of the pages.The various editions are illustrated by different people, but in a similar flat style (not dissimilar to Kevin O’Neill style in the League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen – though with less detail), and here is a page for you to look at.

I have a feeling some of our Agatha fans would be appalled by this version. Me, not so sure. It also gives me an excuse to perhaps look at covers for Agatha DVD’s and even the video games which have been made of her work. And also meant I didn’t have to write the English title of this book!

These kind of seventies book jackets relied on my better printing for covers, good phot representation. But just because your jacket can be photo-realistic should it be? Here we have a truly baffling still life, possibly knocked together by the art departments kids. Not that I have read the book, there may be massive clues in this cover such as the murderer being a wonky eyed blonde bloke whose face you would like to throw balls at, and has a voice like a handbell. So I’m guessing Thom Yorke did it.

Nice to see them still pushing the Dark Chocolate flavours, although I think I’m still yet to see a dark chocolate teacake in this ‘ere London. Then again! I am no teacake fan. Get your marshmallows off me bleeergh cough hack splutter. Even IF they are arguably the most fun to eat in their methodology as long as you do it correctly, ie smash the teacake against your forehead first in order to crack the chocolate coatin. If you like, you can shout “Haaaaaaai-YAAAA!” whilst doing so, but hey, it’s not essential. I’d shout “YAAAMAPIII DAAAAAAI-SKKKIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII” – or I would – if I liked teacakes. But as I don’t – my confession remains…. unmade. DAMN YOU FOUL MARSHMALLOW.

This image is from the 1942 Australian Collins Crime Club edition, as sold in a Tokyo Book auction here for 64,000 Yen (unclear if that was asking price or guide price). That’s about three hundred quid, cos there is a bit of a collecters market in Christie. As for the plot, well the comments crew I am sure will be able to tell you more but its safe to say that cosy English mystery + library = classic. It may actually be one of the few Marples I have seen done on TV – possible in the recent Geraldine James permutation (aka The Biddy in The Library). Note the current UK Harper cover uses a similar idea to the one above, but is much more content in suggesting that library shelves are also places you find lamps and letter shaped nik-naks*. Also that Amazon thinks the book would be prefectly paired with Germaine Greer’s Zastrozzi!

*Not as nice as Scampi and Lemon Nik-Naks.

Which you have to admit is pretty scary (click thru for abject terror).

This doom by giant wasp illustration was done by Tom Adams (website here) and would have been on a Collins edition in the late sixties (this version might be a slight reworking). I can’t find it in situ, but would be happy to see it.

If you have read this one, is the picture an accurate representation of the plot, I know we have a lot of Christie readers round here. And for the future let me know if you have any great other Christie covers. Or want to contribute yourself. Via the medium of the Christie Cover I think we can get a good insight into the literary, art and even political world of the 20th Century. Or just shits and giggles. Or in this case NIGHTMARES!!!

the project: to road-test some of the fillings people have (incomprehensibly) not yet adopted

the fillings of the future:
i: mushrooms fried in pumpkin seed butter, with garlic oil and red wine
ii: fried bacon and date syrop
iii: chopped avocado and marmite
iv: spinach and ginger syrop
v: ham and gentleman’s relish
vi: brie and japanese plum sauce
vii: grated carrot and cinnamon

comments in reverse order of success:
6: ok this was actually just a straightforward wrong-ingredient error — when i couldn’t find any maple syrop i grabbed the plum sauce off the shelf at the last minute in sainsburys without looking properly, assuming it was hoisin, , and didn’t read the label till after i bit into the pancake: early giveaway = “ume plum seasoning: zesty alternative to vinegar”; more warning signals: “this tangy red juice, which comes from the pickling of umeboshi salt-picked plums… ” and “when using this classic japanese seasoning in place of vinegar, reduce or eliminate the slate in your recipe” — ume plum seasoning is quite salty! anyway, rationale for the brie idea was a variant on brie and cranberry; while pancake and brie both have pale an subtle flavours, which mask each other a bit, i think a tart buffer like hoisin would work pretty well…
7: i got this off the net from some menk — it’s HORRIBLE: the carrot makes everything soggy, and cinnamon doesn’t go with either — not quite worse than carrot flavoured turkish delight, which i also heartily disrecommend (haha i see i am #5 in all googleworld for the latter: “NEVER PUT A RED-CABBAGE FLAVOUR BANGER IN YOUR MOUTH — it is the CARROT-FLAVOURED TURKISH DELIGHT of the blood pudding world”) (i turned down a last-minute supper invite from tracerhand for this project, please be aware! never let it be said that freaky trigger does not sacrifice itself for its reader!)
5: ok i wanted to try PATUM PEPERIUM with something else, for symmetry’s sake, and ham seemed least problematic in my pre-taste mind: which was true, but in a rather passive way — the ham is just totally masked and might as well not be there… I JUDGE THAT gentleman’s relish goes nicely with pancake, tho you need to find a way to spread it thin
1: i got a bit overinvolved in the prep of this when i realised that pumpkin seed butter — which i got as a birthday present last year in a mini-hamper of exotic foodie stuff from my ex-ex-boss — is VERY granular and not at all buttery, ie it’s quite hard frying mushrooms in it… i used too much (non)butter, the result was a bit sandy in texture and the pumpkin kind of absorbed the other flavours — but actually the contrast with the pancake is rather subtle and not unsuccessful, tastewise and flavourwise; it’ is rather a lot of prepwork for several strong flavours to be blanketing one another…
3: again a problem with the spreading — niether pancake nor avocado being a particularly resilient surface… perhaps to drop the avocado and the marmite into a blender? but actually the contrast between avocado’s taste-texture and marmite’s is at its best when they arrive in distinct blobs; maybe gently bain-marie the marmite to get it a bit runnier first? (see WORD OF WARNING)
4: this is really nice — i used a bit too much spinach (uncooked young leaves) is all; spinach cooked with ginger is already a classic, so i was just extrapolating
2: horses on devilback (in plankates)! the error here wz the date syrop being recalcitrant coming out the bottle and i gave it a slap and (obv) it ALL came out and drenched the bacon a bit — also i’m not sure this was the best type of bacon (long-lost p^nk s Ft project: to get my head and yours round the qualities of all the bacons, they are sill a total mystery to me): but TOTALLY GO WITH THIS IN FUTURE

WORD OF WARNING 1:
Actually pancake delivery requires close attention to the state of the pan — you know the way the first pancake is always rubbish? Well, ANY break in total attention while making pancakes will produce another “first” pancake when you return to the production line, hence any other prep going on the same time is asking for trouble, esp. prep where you’re working with other pans… I actually only had to throw one pancake away but a couple of the late ones — after a break to taste the early experiments — were a bit rubbish

WORD OF WARNING 2:
Pancakes are filling! I was mostly doing half-and-half here — ie two trial fillings per pancake — as there was only one of me tasting, but even so I had no room for a PROPER lemon-and–sugar old-skool for “pudding”; also sadly the last one i ate was the most “puddingy” ie the HORRIBLE carrot and cinnamon botch :(

CONCLUSIONS:
Further work needed on the spreadability issue (3, 5). 2-4 should be added to the standard pancake filling canon FORTHWITH obv, as shd gentleman’s relish ON ITS OWN. I think brie and hoisin would work. The mushroom deal is too fiddly, but the “sandy” texture of pumpkin seed butter has genuine possibility.

Unattempted (TMFD): while googling I found a recipe for “caramelised satsumas”!!

i. sarah seemed to saying the word BUMPKIN derived from a comical mispronunciation of the word LOCAL — which is awesome ambitious as mispronunciations go! (she was talking abt YOKEL obv but didn’t quite say so)
ii. like all other excellent words, bumpkin derives from the DUTCH = “boomken” meaning a YOG LOG

i. belvedere just means a place that is good to gaze from
ii. belvedere is a suburb of shrewsbury where i grew up, where my school (aged 8-12) was, and the art college my sister went to, and my dad’s current GP, and the place i had my first grown-up job — i don’t know why, as it is NOT a good place to gaze from

iii. this escher picture is called BELVEDERE (click for full size)
iv. the only lectures i went to in my third year maths at oxford were by ROGER PENROSE = the guy (with HIS dad) who developed the optical illusions escher turned into these (to me) utterly evocative lithographs
v. my great friend dr vick is related to escher which is awesome!
vi. all of which amplifies PP’s precise intention only glancingly, to be sure, except that it’s about travel between worlds, and the power (and mortal peril) of imagination, and our own ability to connect
vii. and plus also THREE WORLDS dude, which is an even better escher picture (also click)