Monty Python's Flying Circus -
Burglar/Encyclopedia Salesman - 1969
Tuesday, 25 February 2025
Sunday, 23 February 2025
The Phantom Victory
“In The Past,
Politicians promised
to create A Better World.
They had Different Ways
of achieving this, but
Their Power and Authority
came from the
optimistic Visions
they offered to Their People.
Those Dreams FAILED.
And Today, People have
Lost Faith in Ideologies.
Increasingly,
Politicians are seen simply
as Managers of Public Life.
But now, They have
Discovered a NEW Role
that restores Their Power
and Authority.
Instead of Delivering Dreams, Politicians now promise
to Protect Us from NIGHTMARES.
They Say that
They will rescue Us,
from dreadful Dangers
that We cannot See and
DO Not Understand.
And The Great
Danger of All —
"So much of the news this year has been hopeless, depressing, and above all, confusing. To which the only response is to say, "Oh dear."
What this film is going to suggest is that that Defeatist Response has become a central part of a new system of political control.
And to understand how this is happening, you have to look to Russia, to a man called Vladislav Surkov, who is A Hero of Our Time.
Surkov is one of President Putin's advisers, and has helped him maintain his power for 15 years, but he has done it in a very new way.
He came originally from the avant-garde art world, and those who have studied His Career, say that what Surkov has done, is to import ideas from conceptual art into the very heart of politics.
His aim is to undermine peoples' perceptions of the world, so they never know what is really happening.
Surkov turned Russian Politics into a bewildering, constantly changing piece of Theatre.
He sponsored all kinds of groups, from neo-Nazi skinheads to liberal human rights groups. He even backed parties that were opposed to President Putin.
But the key thing was, that Surkov then let it be known that this was what he was doing, which meant that no one was sure what was Real or Fake. As one journalist put it: "It is a strategy of power that keeps any opposition constantly confused."
A ceaseless shape-shifting that is unstoppable because it is undefinable.
It is exactly what Surkov is alleged to have done in The Ukraine this year.
In typical fashion, as The War began, Surkov published a short story about something he called Non-linear War. A War where you never know what The Enemy are really up to, or even who they are.
The underlying aim, Surkov says, is not to Win The War, but to use the conflict to create a constant state of destabilized perception, in order to manage and control.
But maybe, we have something similar emerging here in Britain. Everything we're told by journalists and politicians is confusing and contradictory.
Of course, there is no Mr. Surkov in charge, but it is an odd, non-linear world that plays into the hands of Those in Power.
British troops have come Home from Afghanistan, but nobody seems to know whether it was A Victory or whether it was A Defeat.
..
Aging disk jockeys are prosecuted for crimes they committed decades ago, while practically no one in The City of London is prosecuted for the endless financial crimes that have been revealed there.
In Syria, We are Told that President Assad is The Evil Enemy, but then His Enemies turn out to be even more evil than him, so We Bomb Them, and by doing that, We Help keep Assad in Power.
But the real epicenter of this non-linear world is The Economy, and the closest we have to our own shape-shifting Post-Modern Politician is George Osborne.
He tells us proudly that The Economy is Growing, but at the same time, wages are going down.
He says he is reducing The Deficit, but then it is revealed that The Deficit is going up.
But the dark heart of this shape-shifting world is Quantitative Easing.
The Government is insisting on taking billions of Pounds out of the economy through its austerity program, yet at the very same time it is pumping billion of Pounds into the economy through Quantitative Easing, the equivalent of 24,000 Pounds for every family in Britain.
But it gets even more confusing, because the Bank of England has admitted that those billions of Pounds are not going where they are supposed to.
A vast majority of that money has actually found its way into the hands of the wealthiest five percent in Britain.
It has been described
as the biggest
transfer of wealth
to The Rich in recent
documented History.
It could be
a huge scandal, comparable
to the greedy oligarchs
in Russia — a ruthless elite, siphoning off billions
in public money.
But nobody seems to know.
It sums up the strange mood
of Our Time, where nothing really
makes any coherent sense.
We Live with
a constant vaudeville
of contradictory stories
that makes it impossible
for any real opposition
to emerge, because
they can't counter it
with any coherent narrative
of their own.
And it means that We as Individuals become ever more powerless, unable to challenge anything, because We Live in a state of confusion and uncertainty.
To which the
only response, is :
Oh Dear.
But that is
What They want
You to Say.
Saturday, 22 February 2025
Control Freak
"I have never gotten the sense that Tommy is
mysterious for the sake of being mysterious.
Rather, he is an incredibly guarded person
trying to be less guarded.
But the emotional fortifications Tommy has
built around himself are too entrenched.
When trying to express the parts of himself
he seems to have lost access to,
Tommy offers up fantastical,
sad, self-contradictory stories.
I’ve heard these stories many times."
No one leaves A Star.
That’s what makes one A Star.
—Norma Desmond,
Sunset Boulevard
One afternoon, during the fifth week of production, Raphael approached me on set and said, “We need a line producer. If we don’t have a line producer by the end of this week, I’m leaving.”
Raphael confessed to feeling “embarrassed” by the blinding amateurism of Tommy’s project, especially when he had to do his job in front of Birns & Sawyer’s owner, Bill Meurer, who’d recently taken to yelling at the crew about the disorder that was now disrupting his business. Worse, Raphael kept having to do other people’s jobs. There was simply no organisation. Tommy was constantly hiring and casting and firing and hiring again, all while finding ways to sandwich two jobs into one : I was a lead actor but also the line producer. Sandy was the script supervisor but also the first assistant director. Peter Anway was the Birns & Sawyer sales representative but also, somehow, Tommy’s assistant.
Tommy knew Raphael was upset but didn’t believe he would actually ever follow through on his threat to abandon the production. After all, Tommy had a line producer : me. So what was The Problem? The Problem was this : Tommy didn’t really know what a line producer was. He didn’t know how a film set was supposed to operate. Being a line producer on a chaotic movie shoot is a consuming full-time job, to say the least. The line producer has to run the production, make sure people are paid, help the art department fetch stuff, schedule call times, and do everything else that no director wants to do — and Tommy Wiseau was incapable of doing. To ask a person who is also a lead actor to do these things was self-defeating and ridiculous. I was being forced to rush away from scenes I was shooting, thereby stalling production, so I could order pizza for a starving cast and crew. Raphael was right. We needed help.
Obviously, I understood Raphael’s concern, but I also knew what Tommy’s response was going to be. Tommy had to feel that all decisions were coming from him. If someone else proposed something, no matter how strong the proposal, Tommy would refuse to take any action. And unless Tommy believed he would directly benefit from an idea, no money would be spent, not under any circumstances. If Raphael needed a line producer, he was going to have to tell Tommy in such a way as to make Tommy feel like the idea was his and not Raphael’s — and good luck with that.
New York, Paris, Peckham, Belgrade
Boycie in Belgrade (Trailer)
Join "Boycie" (John Challis) on
his journey to Belgrade, Serbia,
where he aims to uncover why
'Only Fools and Horses'
is so popular in the country.
From a Royal Palace,
to a brandy distillery.
A must watch for any fan of
Only Fools and Horses.
Friday, 21 February 2025
I’m Listening!
“Fine,” Tommy said, spinning around to face the remaining members of his production. “Let him go! We don’t need this guy. We don’t need him.”
Raphael was willing to leave without picking up his last paycheck, but his crew was not nearly as accommodating. They wanted to be paid. Now. It was quickly turning into a mob scene, with the remaining crew yelling at Tommy and Tommy yelling back at them. Poor Peter Anway wedged himself between Tommy and the angry crew members, who might as well have been brandishing pitchforks and torches. “Please, guys,” Peter said. “Let’s all just calm down and talk this through.”
Tommy, the most irate of anyone, yelled, “I don’t have to talk! Calm down nothing! Raphael’s disrespectful. It’s his problem. It’s not my problem!”
“Just pay us, you son of a bitch,” one of Raphael’s people demanded. You could feel weeks of frustration burbling up. Some of these guys were plainly prepared to worsen the asymmetrical quality of Tommy’s face.
Tommy looked at the guy who called him a son of a bitch, his eyes lidded and heavy. Then, something seemed to reboot in his mind, and he made a big, sweeping, carnival-barker gesture. “Everyone, inside! We have emergency meeting!”
Knowing they had to suffer through Tommy’s emergency meeting to get paid, everyone simultaneously groaned as they filed into Birns & Sawyer. The office we wound up in was not large, and the air was suffused with the hot stench of anger, body odor, and bad breath. “Okay,” he said. “So here we are. Let’s have discussion. We have obviously problem today, but we here to talk. It’s America. I’m an American, just like you.”
The absurdity of this comment was met with some giggling.
“American with accent,” Tommy said, waving away the laughter. “So be it.” He looked around. “We like to know who stay today. Because we will continue production. Okay? We are not going anywhere. No one will ruin my movie.” His voice, by this point, was slightly quivering. “Production will continue. Cameras will keep rolling.”
In fact, the cameras were rolling at that moment. At the beginning of production, Tommy had hired a young Czech kid named Markus — he’d been doing odd jobs at Birns & Sawyer when Tommy found him — to shoot the rough footage for a making-of documentary about The Room. Tommy’s orders to Markus were to film everything, all the time. Oftentimes Markus stuck his Canon right into people’s faces. Sandy, at one point, shoved the camera away and said, “Turn that off or I will.” Other members of the production more bluntly told Markus to “stay the fuck away” whenever they saw him coming. Markus revealed this resistance to Tommy, who said, “We don’t care what they say. Keep going.”
And now Markus, ever diligent, was filming Tommy’s emergency meeting. No one much liked that, given the circumstances. “Get your fucking camera out of my face!” one of Raphael’s people said.
Tommy noticed this and said, “No!” His outburst momentarily shut up everyone in the room. Tommy pointed adamantly at Markus. “You keep filming. You may film this strike.” What no one knew — what I didn’t even know at the time — was that Tommy was daily watching all of Markus’s raw footage until the wee hours, which went some way toward explaining why he was always so late in the morning. All this time, Tommy had been spying on his own production. So just about every time someone made an unkind comment about Tommy, Markus was there recording. Just about every time someone laughed about Tommy’s acting, which was often, Markus got it. Tommy knew more about how he was perceived on set than anyone was aware. And now he let people know what he knew. He began pointing out crew members in the crowd and repeating back to them some nasty comment they’d made. “This guy,” Tommy was saying, “this guy here, with the hat? I know what you’re saying. You say I’m bad actor? I say you’re bad crew member.”
Tommy’s emotional insurance policy scheme, if that’s what it was, worked. The mood in the room softened immediately — whether because people felt bad or guilty or genuinely worried, I have no idea, but there was now enough fragile goodwill between all parties to move forward in a civil manner. “We’ll work for you,” one of Raphael’s people said, “if you meet our basic demands.”
Tommy said he was willing to hear those demands.
They were : Tommy couldn’t keep showing up four hours late. Tommy couldn’t take the HD camera home with him every night, because it delayed the already delayed process of setting up in the morning. Tommy needed to pay the crew decently. If the crew stayed for ten hours, Tommy needed to include dinner.
Tommy had heard enough. “Please stop,” he said. “Stop this nonsense. Have respect for producers. You guys are flying in the sky.”
“Then pay us,” someone new said, astonished that these reasoned and reasonable demands could be called “nonsense.” “We’re done!”
“Yeah,” another said. “Just give us our check and we’ll get out of here. We don’t want to work for you.”
Tommy kept repeating, over and over, that all this was “nonsense,” that in Hollywood this was “how things work.” “Be professional,” he said. “Stop this crying.”
I said, over the arguing, “Tommy, just pay them.”
Again there was silence. Tommy looked at me, at them. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but we don’t have enough checks at this time. And I notice you guys, all of you, you say very condescending things in your statements. It’s on the camera. Look, we will pay you later. We cannot pay you now.”
Uproar. The crowd was closing in on Tommy; his directorial force field was rapidly giving way. “Guys!” Peter Anway said. He was standing next to me, in the back of the room, trying to shout sense into someone, anyone. “Everybody calm down! It’s fine.” No one acknowledged him. Peter looked over at me, terrified. This shoot was his responsibility. If a fight broke out and Birns & Sawyer got turned upside down, Meurer would likely fire him. The battery powering Peter’s famous, plugged-in grin had expired. Tommy was almost certainly going to be assaulted if something wasn’t done — even though he might well have deserved it.
Tommy would milk this power position as long as he could. Even if he were physically attacked, he’d refuse to do the right thing. “Tommy has checks at his house,” I said to Peter.
“Go get them,” Peter said.
I muscled through the crowd and went to Tommy’s apartment to grab a handful of Bank of America checks from the huge stack on his living room table. When I got back, everyone was lined up waiting outside Birns & Sawyer. I held up the checks and they cheered. “Thank you,” Peter Anway kept saying. “Thank you. Thank you.”
Tommy spent an hour writing out checks. His signature, illegible on the smoothest and most lucid of days, was an infuriated slash. After every slash, he handed the check to its recipient and said, “Go inside and make copy. We need a copy!”
“No, no, no, Tommy,” Sandy was saying. “I’m not your assistant. And I’m telling you this scene is just . . . this is ridiculous. It’s totally, totally ridiculous.”
“No, it’s not,” Tommy said. “It’s how I want it.”
“That doesn’t mean it’s not ridiculous!”
When I approached them, Sandy looked over at me with an all-praise-God-you’re-back expression. Sandy mistakenly believed that Tommy listened to me.
At issue was the fact that Lisa begins the scene talking to her mother on the phone and ends by walking her to the door. Yet, somehow, their entire conversation gets recorded on Johnny and Lisa’s answering machine? Tommy was adamant that the answering machine record the conversation, so that, in the next scene, Johnny can find the tape on which Lisa admits she’s having an affair. Tommy had been alerted to the rather intractable space-time conundrum the scene created, but he was fixated on having Johnny find the recorded conversation. In the end, Tommy decided to shoot the scene so that Johnny overhears Lisa and Claudette’s conversation from the condo’s spiral staircase. Then, when Lisa and Claudette leave the scene, Tommy wanted Johnny to proceed to the phone and hook it up to a tape recorder.
I’ll start with the most obvious problem : The living room set was fifteen feet across. Johnny would have had as much luck hiding from Lisa and Claudette on the staircase as he would lying at their feet. An only slightly smaller problem was the method by which Johnny sought to record his future wife’s future conversations. Bugging a phone generally takes a little more effort than plugging it into a yard-sale tape recorder, and you need a different kind of tape than a ninety-minute Maxell — which Johnny, of course, happens to already have in his shirt pocket. None of it made any sense, but this was what Tommy wanted to shoot. Some crew guys were setting up the coverage shot of the tape recorder when I came in.
“You can’t shoot that,” Graham told Tommy. “Sandy’s right.”
Tommy was wholly unruffled by their concerns. “We shoot like this. How we want.”
“How you want,” Sandy said. “I don’t want to shoot it this way. You don’t need to have Johnny record anything. You already have him overhearing the conversation.” It was an undeniable point. Johnny hears his future wife admit she’s having an affair. Does he now need proof he has proof?
“I disagree,” Tommy said.
In interviews about The Room, Tommy always shows an unusual amount of defensiveness about Johnny’s tape-recorder surveillance of Lisa. He maintains that Johnny’s method is a legitimate way to record telephone conversations. Tommy believes this because, in his personal life, he has taped his own phone calls for years using similarly low-tech techniques. Whenever anyone called him — including me — he put the call on speaker and hit record on the same yard-sale tape recorder he now wanted to film. This was why he always said “I’m listening” whenever I called. He was listening. He was also recording. I know all this because I eventually found a huge cache of tapes with hours and hours of phone calls on them, some of which were ours. I confronted him. He denied it at first. When he realised he couldn’t deny it, he claimed he’d done this to study my accent, in order to lose his own. I told him that didn’t sound like a very plausible explanation, and from then on, I hung up on him if he ever put me on speaker. Then he became paranoid that I was taping him. Whenever we were on the phone, he would repeatedly ask me, “Does anybody listen this conversation?”
Sensitive
Sensitive The Untold Story trailer (2020)
Watch full documentary "Sensitive - The Untold Story"
on www.sensitivethemovie.com
In 1991 Dr. Elaine Aron made a discovery that revolutionized
how we view 20% of the population that are highly sensitive (HSP).
Her research was the subject of the groundbreaking documentary
Sensitive-The Untold Story, featuring Alanis Morissette.
"....well, I knew something was up when My Family
was looking at me, somewhat strangely;
and I remember probably about 10 years ago,
My Father and I were sitting down --
I was hosting a show in Canada
and he was having A Moment,
and I was crying about something intense (for me),
which he'd gotten USED to, I suppose; at that point he said to me,
he said "Alanis I'm so sorry we just never really knew
what to DO with you..... We were at a loss --" "
That DEFEATIST RESPONSE
Adam Curtis Wipe 2014 on Vladislav Surkov
"That DEFEATIST RESPONSE has become part of a new System of Political CONTROL --
and to understand
HOW this is happening :
You Have to Look
to Russia.
This is Vladislav Serkov -- who is a Hero of Our Time.
Serkov is one of President Putin's advisors, and has helped him maintain his Power
for 15 YEARS -- but he has done it in a very new way.
He came originally from the
avant-garde art world -- and those who have studied his career say that what Serkov has DONE is to import ideas from the world of Conceptual Art
into the very heart of politics.
His aim is to undermine
People's PERCEPTION
of The World,
so they never know
What is REALLY Happening.
Serkov turned Russian Politics into a behwhildering, constantly changing piece of Theatre -- he sponsored all kinds of organisations, from Neo-Nazi Skinheads, to Liberal Human Rights Groups..... He even backed parties that were OPPOSED to
President Putin.
But The Key Thing IS that
Serkov then let it be KNOWN
that this is what he
was doing --
which meant that no-one was SURE
what was ‘Real’, and
what was ‘Fake’.
….or, of Course —
Vice-Versa
Planet of The Birdmen
You don’t yell at a sleepwalker.
He may fall and break his neck.
—Joe Gillis, Sunset Boulevard
.
“So you lived in L.A. for a while?”
“No,” he said. “Was like . . . commute. I would fly to L.A. on Thursday for class and fly back home the same night.”
I’d never heard anything so ridiculous. How did he afford that?
“I know, so crazy,” Tommy said. “But I have to take class. I want to be filmmaker. I make movie in class. I got A minus.”
“You made a movie? What was it called?”
“Robbery Doesn’t Pay,” Tommy said proudly. “Tiny little thing. Shot on the super-eight.”
He showed me a couple of frames of the tiny little thing, which consisted of a large, hairy-looking guy in a white T-shirt casing an L.A. neighborhood for a car to steal, all of it scored to Orgy’s cover of “Blue Monday.” Surprisingly, Tommy wasn’t in the film.
“Enough for now,” Tommy said. “Time to rehearse.”
We ran through the scene a few times, after which I suggested we put the scripts away and go off book. Tommy was hesitant but agreed. To give him a minute to prepare, I asked to use his restroom. There I found a professional makeup mirror and a pair of rusty twenty-five-pound dumbbells on the floor next to the toilet. Above the toilet was a large framed poster of the Disney character Aladdin.
Going off book turned out to be a bad idea. Tommy couldn’t remember anything, not even lines made up of nothing more than “Yes” or “No.” When he couldn’t remember his lines he waved his hands around, shouted, made up new lines, or did all those things at once. His mouth and mind had trouble establishing any lasting connection to each other; English was obviously not Tommy’s first language, but I was beginning to wonder if it was even his third or fourth. When he wasn’t being hysterical, he was critiquing my performance. “It has to be big,” he kept saying. “It has to be powerful.”
Of course this guy loves Brando and Dean, I thought. They’re captivating actors because they know exactly when to yell, when to floor it. Tommy believed you had to floor it for the duration of every scene.
What on earth compelled this man to want to act? His money explained his condo, his Mercedes, his weekly acting-class commutes to Los Angeles, but nothing I’d seen or heard so far explained him. I was no longer rehearsing a scene; I was private investigating another human being.
“What’s Street Fashions USA?” I asked him, in the middle of our scene, motioning toward one of the shopping bags in the corner.
Tommy looked over at the bag, suddenly uncomfortable. “I do marketing — you know, retail stuff.” He stopped himself. “My God! You are such nosy person!”
I found it hard to believe that this guy could do marketing for Fangoria magazine, much less fashion. The Street Fashions USA locations listed on the bag were Haight Street, Beach Street, and Sutter Street. But the bags were cheaply printed; the Levi’s logo didn’t appear to have its standard, trademarked look.
“You don’t seem like a retail guy to me,” I said.
Tommy took this with a good-humored shrug. “You don’t know me yet. I have many skills.”
“So why acting?”
Tommy’s hands retreated into his pockets and I sensed him fight some small, quick battle over how much to tell me. “Well, you see, since I was little kid, it’s always been my big dream to be actor, for long time. I try Los Angeles, et cetera, but it didn’t come out right. Then I have business here, so I stop the acting. But then, to make long story short, I had accident. I was driving and got hit by guy who runs the red light.”
He’d said this so quietly, and soberly, that I didn’t dare say anything.
“It was pretty bad,” he went on. “Like wake-up call, you could say. I was in hospital for many weeks. After that, I decide to go back to my acting dream.”
He picked up his playbook and we continued rehearsing. After a few read-throughs, Tommy asked if I wanted to grab dinner. I suggested a Chinese place called Hunan on Sansome Street. While waiting for our food, Tommy once again began to tell me that I could succeed as an actor if I wanted it enough. “You can be star, but you have to be more powerful. When you are aggressive in scene, this is worth one million dollars.”
“What about you?” I asked, not trusting the thickness of what he was laying on me.
Tommy didn’t answer that question. Instead he started playing with his chopsticks, which he’d learned to use, he said, when he was living in Hong Kong. But I brought him back to the question: “What about you, Tommy? Tell me.”
Tommy set his chopsticks aside. “For me,” he said, “I always wanted to have my own planet. Call it Tommy’s Planet. Build a giant building there, you see, like . . . Empire Tower. Some casino thing. My planet will be bigger than everything.”
I found myself unexpectedly charmed by this burst of subdued bravado. It wasn’t obnoxious. It was sort of endearing. I felt like I’d just asked a child what he wanted to be when he grew up. And a child had answered me, honestly, with no adult filter telling him what was and wasn’t possible.
“Your own planet,” I said. I wanted to laugh but I couldn’t. In fact, I had goose bumps. This man sitting in front of me had no detectable talent, did everything wrong, wasn’t comfortable saying how old he was or where he was from, and seemed to take an hour to learn what most people picked up in five seconds. Still, for that moment I believed him. I believed he could have his own planet.
“Yeah,” he said, looking up. “I see this big thing and big light and big events with stores and hotel and movie. All these things all together. It will be spectacular.” He reached for his glass of hot water but hesitated before lifting it to his mouth. Tommy peered at me from beneath his large protruding brow. “And you can live in my planet, if you decide. Maybe I let you stay for little while.”
What did I think of living on Tommy’s planet? I wasn’t sure. What I was sure of was that Tommy had something I’d never seen in anyone else : a blind and unhinged and totally unfounded ambition. He was so out of touch, so lacking in self-awareness, yet also weirdly captivating. That night there was this aura around Tommy — an aura of The Possible. Stick with him, I thought, and something would happen, even if I had no idea what that something might be. Maybe that was it : Tommy made me listen to the right voices in my head. This big, childish vision of his—what was it if not every actor’s secret dream?
My own planet was increasingly icy and lonely and minor. And while I did not rule out the possibility that Tommy’s Planet was a civilization-ending comet headed my way, what if it wasn’t?
“Here,” Tommy said. “I have present for you.” He handed me a red-white-and-blue pen, the casing of which bore the Street Fashions USA logo. He gave it to me as though it were a sacred scepter, as though I’d passed some test. When I looked more closely at the pen, I saw something else : a tiny globe with the words TOMMY’S PLANET printed across it.
“My planet will be bigger than everything.”
“People Are Very Strange These Days”
You don’t yell at a sleepwalker.
He may fall and break his neck.
—Joe Gillis, Sunset Boulevard
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