Evil Seagulls

Is it just me or are seagulls a bit scary? They look sinister (always frowning!) and they sound even sinister-er…er. Apparently most of them are ground-nesting carnivores and will take live food or scavenge whenever they get the chance. They’ll snatch an ice cream cone right out of your hand and who’s to say they wouldn’t snatch your child too?!

Gulls have prophylactic un-hinging jaws which allow them to consume large prey. Yes, could definitely manage a small child.  They can display mobbing behaviour; attacking and harassing would-be predators and other intruders. Certain species  have exhibited tool-use behaviour, using pieces of bread as bait with which to catch fish, for example.

They are ‘klepto-parasites’ which means they get their food by stealing it from others. That’s a name worthy of a Doctor Who nasty for sure; Invasion of the Kleptoparasites? …it will happen. Gulls have been observed preying on live whales, landing on the whale as it surfaces to peck out pieces of flesh. In their favour you could say that gulls are resourceful, inquisitive and intelligent birds, demonstrating complex methods of communication and a highly developed social structure. On the other hand… have you noticed how, whenever you look at one, it’s always looking straight back at you? Be afraid.

 

 

My daughter Goebbels

I went to see a production of  The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui this week. It’s by Brecht; yes one of the biggies! The cast was brilliant especially Givola who was played by a certain Hannah Jane Kenna (my daughter; time for my bursting with pride scene!).

The play is a satirical allegory of Adolf Hitler in Nazi Germany, whose rise Brecht represents as that of Ui. All the characters have counterparts in real life, with Ui representing Hitler, Emanuele Giri representing Hermann Göring and Giuseppe Givola representing Joseph Goebbels. I hadn’t realised until I saw the play that my daughter was actually playing Goebbels!

Goebbels was Reich Minister of Propaganda in Nazi Germany and one of Adolf Hitler’s closest associates and most devout followers. He rose to power in 1933 along with Hitler and the Nazi Party and one of his first acts was the burning of books. He exerted totalitarian control over the media, arts and information in Germany. Goebbels organized attacks on German Jews including a one-day boycott of Jewish businessmen, doctors and lawyers, and the Night of Broken Glass in which scores of synagogues were burned and hundreds of Jews were assaulted and murdered. He also produced a series of anti-Semitic films. He remained with Hitler in Berlin to the end. After Hitler’s suicide, Goebbels succeeded him as Chancellor. He along with his wife Magda killed their six young children, and then committed suicide. The couple’s bodies were burned in a shell crater, but owing to the lack of petrol, the burning was only partly effective.

Man-eaters.

I always feel like I can’t quite capture in pictures how amazing things look in real life. The more impressive the subject is (you can’t get any more impressive than a lion!) the more inadequate my shots seem. Anyway, these are what I got.

Lions live for 10–14 years in the wild but in captivity they can live longer than 20 years. In the wild, males rarely live longer than 10 years as injuries from continual fighting with rival males greatly reduce their life expectancy. They’re unusually social compared to other cats. Lions don’t typically hunt humans but some have been known to do so. When someone in our party opened the door for a couple of seconds, the rangers went crazy! The lions didn’t attack but they did lick their lips.

 

 

Saw this bad boy in the garden!

The sheer size of it doesn’t really show up on the photo but this big fella made an appearance in the back garden this week. It was just sitting there on the fence looking in through the kitchen window. It was about four times as big as any other birds I’ve ever seen round here! I didn’t know what it was when I saw it but later looked it up on the net and turns out it was a pheasant! It was absolutely beautiful. After sitting looking in through the window for about five minutes it just walked off down the garden like Royalty.

 

 

I can read!

The last few books I’ve read I haven’t really enjoyed and I was starting to think I wouldn’t ever enjoy reading again. But I just finished reading The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes and I completely loved it and read it in next to no time. I’ve never read anything by him before and bought it at random but it’s absolutely brilliant.

The theme is how history and memory can vary according to the person doing the remembering. During the course of the book, the main character learns that lots of (supposed) facts about himself and the people he has encountered in his life are actually based on false memory, mistakes or secrets. The book has serious points to make but it’s also a great mystery. This is the kind of mystery I like; not a contrived puzzle with a cast of cardboard characters  from which you have to guess who did the murder, but a finely observed, multi-layered psychological study.

I love this book because it’s compelling, because it’s fun, but mostly because it reminded me that I really do like to read after all.

 

 

Brookside residents seem real for first time since 1988.

Remember TV soap Brookside? It was the first soap to be shot entirely on location. It got axed from Channel Four a few years ago but the set remains. I took these photos there today.

Brookside  began on the launch night of Channel 4 on 2 November 1982, and ran for 21 years until 4 November 2003. The series was produced by Mersey Television and it was conceived by Phil Redmond. It became very successful for a number of years and is notable for its tackling of realistic and socially challenging storylines. It was at its most popular in the 1980s and the early 1990s.

The above shot shows what was the security post which used to prevent the public entering the set, now abandoned and boarded up. When Brookside was removed from prime-time Channel 4, Mersey Television immediately started using some of the houses on Brookside Close in its other shows Hollyoaks and Grange Hill. Following the sale of Mersey Television to All3Media in 2005, all the properties on Brookside Close became surplus to requirements so all the Hollyoaks characters based at this set quickly transferred to new homes at Mersey Television’s Childwall site. The entire set was sold to a developer who then stripped, gutted and attempted to rebuild the entire interior of each of the 13 houses before making them available for sale to the public in January 2007. The houses were put up for sale at ridiculously high asking prices and in a semi-finished condition. They did not sell and the developer went into receivership soon after. The set then became neglected and fell into decay. Over a year later in February 2008, it was revealed by the auctioneers SHM Smith Hodgkinson that they would be taking offers for the 13 houses, considering bids in the region of £2 million.

In 2008, Brookside Close was once again used as a production set; a local production company was given special permission to use the Close, but this time for a low-budget horror film called Salvage. This was the last time the famous houses of Brookside Close were ever used as a set for a TV or film production.

It was then reported in November 2008 that the 13 properties were to be auctioned off collectively. There was speculation at this time that the series may be resurrected as Dean Sullivan (who played Jimmy Corkhill) had himself attempted to purchase the Close to revive Brookside. However, an unnamed Liverpool-based buyer purchased all 13 properties on 17 December 2008 for although by this time, the Close was in a state of disrepair and once again, speculation mounted as to what would happen to the disintegrating houses of Brookside Close.

 

Eventually, in February 2011, and after years of building work, Brookside Close was finally revived and returned to its former glory. Each house was restored from what was technically an individual film set, to a real home, fit for real-life occupancy. Now aligned and fully integrated into the housing estate that has always surrounded it, ‘Brookside Close’ is now simply Brookside (odd numbers: 43–67) and real residents now occupy the houses. It is therefore highly unlikely that one of the UK’s most famous housing estates will ever be used in a film or TV production again.

Looking at the place today, it brings back memories of when I used to watch the show in the mid-eighties. At that time, it was a really good, well-written drama and it was painful to watch it decline into a third-rate teen soap over subsequent years. Phil Redmond did nothing to save the show from terminal decline, in fact he helped to push it over the cliff of extinction by doing what he always does in TV drama and opting for cheap explosions, sensationalism and ratings-chasing storylines disguised as social commentary. He has to be one of the most overrated TV writers in history. At least the place has now been saved from demolition and is home to real people as opposed to ludicrous, cardboard versions.

 

Something unusual for your living room?

How about buying one of these sculptures for your living room? Sculptor, Ron Mueck, has a new show of his huge hyperreal sculptures opening at Paris’sFondation Cartier pour l’art contemporainon April 16. Before moving into fine art, Mueck was a puppeteer and model maker for TV and films such as The Storyteller and Labyrinth. In fact, he was the voice of Ludo in it.

The above photo shows In Bed. Mueck’s sculptures faithfully reproduce the minute detail of the human body, but play with scale to produce disconcertingly jarring visual images. His five metre high sculpture Boy 1999 was a feature in the Millennium Dome; today it sits as the centrepiece in the foyer off the Danish Contemporary Art Museum in Aarhus.