The moving finger rants

What are you doing with your free time, pajh? you say. Well, since you asked so nicely, I'll skip the otherwise obligatory free time, what's that joke, and go straight to the incontrovertibly true answer: these days I spend my free time dressing up in skintight Lycra® and wrestling with men I barely know.

I may have mentioned in a previous post that Hollywood-grade motion capture systems create the potential for new narrative paradigms for the 21st century. Well, mostly I mentioned that they allow a specific actor, that actor being me, to hear the single most beautiful phrase ever expressed to an actor. We'll get to new narrative paradigms later. Meantime, there have been a number of very rapid learning experiences while working with thew new tech, not least of which is that I actually don't look totally terrible in skintight Lycra.

Unsurprisingly, most of the research in gyroscopic technologies these days is being done by the ballistics division of the US military and their contractors. Many of my readers may not have a particular interest in the increasingly accurate science of the transformation of alleged insurgents into chargrilled jerky from a distance of many kilometres, but fret not! for those of us so callously disinterested in how to blame friendly fire on technology, there are subsequent benefits for all of us (except for the families of the alleged insurgents, presumably): benefits like the upcoming Wolverine movie, and Skrillex' latest tour. I am, as ever, all about the trickle-down.

Yay us!

Another benefit of the fact that this is all repurposed military technology is that it's all incredibly robust. The suit comes in a case that is waterproof to 500 metres, and also conveniently scaled to comply with most airlines' regulations regarding carry-on luggage. In the event of a terrorist attack on a plane in which such a case was stored, it's more likely to survive than the black box. I dread to speculate on the newspaper headlines once the crash recovery team have spent a week attempting to recover data from it. Apparently the Captain spent twenty minutes trying to have an elaborate fistfight with the first officer, followed by an extended period of merengue dancing, with occasional periods of jazz hands. This presumably contributed to the crash, but exactly how is a question we hope maybe to have answered by next week.

Oh yes, the mocap. The suits are surprisingly accurate and expressive, to a level that I didn't think was possible. And you can play the mocap live in realtime into any 3D world you care to devise. In the following examples, we're going to be using Minecraft, because Minecraft. Also, because Minecraft is incredibly pretty, and it shows you just what you can do with a blocky Steve guy with no facial expressions.

Ye First Video: Meet the Creeper

In this short film I play the Creeper, which while it's not exactly a speaking role, does have the benefit of being in the title.

Took us about five minutes to shoot. About an hour of getting the suits configured first, but that's just teething. On a regular film shoot I spend much more time hanging around waiting, and there are usually fewer copies of Transmetropolitan lying about with which for me to occupy my time. These suits are awesome.

Ye Video the Second: in which pajh does acting

I know I'm a middle-class New Town bastard these days, but I do still pay attention to my acting when I get the chance. I have the most popular text-to-speech voice in the known world, and physical acting is no less an important discipline. I have done courses. I've done the Alexander Technique. I do stretches properly before I perform mocap (judiciously excluding the stretches that are likely to tear the €500 lycra suit, natch). I'm not by any means attempting to put myself up there in Patrick Stewart territory, but I think my research has paid off. In this second video I have more of a starring role.

I showed this to stormsearch and she got about twenty seconds in before she had to pause it and proclaim, oh god. It's you. Something about the way I hold my head slightly to one side, it would seem. And then there are little things, like the fact that apparently I pick my right foot up when I'm considering something. I didn't know that about me until I watched it expressed by a blocky Minecraft Steve.

The level of expressiveness and the subtlety you can get from the tech is quite incredible. I'm quite excited to see where this goes next.

In my Copious Free Time, obviously.

So this is me walking through Newington on my way between the organic food market and the artisan vintners & victuallers, carrying my organic jute tote bag—emblazoned with the logo of the local specialist American/Mexican delicatessen—currently stuffed with Polish honey-flavoured Wódka Żołądkowa Gorzka and copious quantities of sopocka. Carefree I stroll along, my second-best girl at my side and my mind on a double mocha latte with three sugars, when a mad bearded Scotsman runs up, addresses me by name and thrusts a script into my hand.

This happens more often than you might think.

To be strictly accurate: it was a mad bearded Scotsman with whom I'd already worked a few times, and he took my email address so he could send me a script. He'd just been running a casting session and had apparently had a poor turnout. By the time I got home, his production assistant had emailed the script across.

If I were to attempt a summary of this script in one line of dialogue, it would go something like this:

COME WITH ME IF YOU WANT TO LIVE, likesay ken ya wee dos radge, Grasshopper.

It's brilliant. I would be an idiot to turn this gig down, despite the fact that I can't do the accent he wants. I've got a better idea for the accent. This is going to be awesome.

A good day.

Quite some time ago, I opined that I'd have to change my name if I was to do any Proper Acting. The first suggestion in the comments was that I just go for Paj Hamilton.

I wasn't initially keen on it because casting directors, not a class of people known for their liberal attitudes or their in-depth scrutiny of CVs presented for their attention, are likely to think I'm Indian. This might have a tendency to limit the available roles. Also, if I was called Paj Hamilton, then every time I go on Parkinson—you have to consider this sort of thing when setting out on a potential career in the media—I'd have to spend the first half of the slot explaining how I got such a peculiar name before they'd let me get on to plugging whatever it is I'm supposed to plug. So I've been sticking with Paul A J for formal purposes and pajh to my friends while I think of something.

Over the last fortnight, every single acting-related email I've had, from multiple sources, has misspelled my name as Paj.

Who am I to argue with market forces?

Okay, so henceforth I'm Paj Hamilton for acting purposes. This evening I signed off my first email as Paj, and, despite the fact that the email to which I'm responding addresses me as Paj twice in the same font as I'm writing, it still looks weird. Perhaps practice is required: I should do more acting, then.

I'm still pajh as far as you lot are concerned. I'm only Paj when I'm working.

Welp, 2011 is two weeks old now, and thus far I am significantly less than impressed. I'm putting you on notice, 2011. You've got fifty more weeks to pull your socks up or else... or else.

That said, this morning was rather fun. I attended an accent workshop at the Lyceum Theatre, based on their current production of A View From The Bridge. I saw A View From The Bridge once, many years ago, while I was still in school. I was far too naive to pick up on any of the subtext and recall very little except people shouting I took the sheets offa my bed for you over and over again. Fifteen years on, having actually had opportunity to look at a couple of pages of the script, what strikes me is Miller's stunning ability to use voice to draw his characters. In paragraph two on page one, Alfieri says that he's an Italian-American immigrant, Brooklynite, came from Sicily aged 25 and educated at law school. By the time he tells you all that, you already know, just based on the way he uses language. It leaps off the page at you.

Miller is a fucking genius. I'd give both nuts to write like that. And he married Marilyn Monroe, too. Bastard.

Accents: the first thing you do with an accent is work out where it comes from in the mouth. The Scots accent is quite far back in the throat. Mississippi-type ah do declay-uh voices are very high up in the roof of the mouth; Liverpudlian likewise. The Brooklyn accent is so far forward that it's dripping off the front of your bottom lip like leaden drool. I nearly dislocated my jaw getting it right.

(I neeyuhly dislowcaded my jawuh is a fun phrase to say in Brooklynese. Saying it just now, I nearly dislocated it again. I've invented physical onomatopoeia and, with it, an excellent name for a rock band.)

I was doing fine until about halfway through the session, when the bloody dire Daleks Take Manhattan jumped into my head and wouldn't leave. The whiny nasal showgirl woman kept repeating Laslow on a loop in my mind. To compensate I dropped the pitch of my voice, so my own version of Brooklynese sounds like a more thuggish version of Mistuh Diagoras.

Two hours work, and now I can say cawffee correctly. And I have an urge to watch Goodfellas tonight.

Yeah. I've decided, the film company can't have this back. I'm never taking it off^[0]. You can't make me.

Sean, said I to the producer, if it makes it easier for you... if it's one thing less for you to remember... I can just hold on to this for the duration of the shoot. I promise not to use it for personal sexy times or anything.

He gave me a Look, so I had to clarify: I know some weird people. I was joking, but the moment I got home, stormsearch came over all why, hello, Captain. I may be learning things I didn't necessarily want to know. Oh well. Engage!

I came home from the shoot having stopped by Sainsburys on the way back, so I had a bag full of frozen food. Naturally the first thing that came to mind was not J, please put these things in the freezer, but instead was Doctor Crusher, place these items in stasis. It turns out that J is Crusher now. This makes sense. Television has taught me that no ship can have more or less than exactly one hot redhead.

A couple of minutes ago I found myself involuntarily performing the Picard Maneuver. It's true. These things ride up, yo.

Let's get one thing clear: Joseph Ratzinger was conscripted into the Hitler Youth. He had the misfortune to be born in Germany 73 years ago. He was fourteen years old, probably not very bright (it's always the family idiot who takes the Cloth), and if you didn't join you got shot. Calling him a Nazi Pope is lazy. Let's blame him for all of the things that are his fault.

That said, this ridiculous speech in which he equates atheists with Nazis simply goes to illustrate the levels of hypocrisy that only an organization like the Catholic Church can reach. The Nazis were bad: on this His Holiness and I agree. But you were there, dude, and what the fuck did you do about it?

I wasn't born until long after the Nazis had been defeated. If I had been, you can be sure that there would have at least been a blog post or two. But Ratzinger paid lip service to their morals, waited sixty years, and then tried to blame all of their crimes on atheism. You bastard.

I watched a reasonably interesting documentary [Iplayer, available until Wednesday] about Ratzingerdict last night, notable mostly for further displays of this same hypocrisy. The documentarian is a gay Catholic and he interviews a couple of other gay Catholics. All of them seem to be fine with the concept that their own Church wants them to go to Hell (it's not a priority for me), because the Church does many other good things. It then totally fails to specify what those other good things are, but at one point the VO mumbles something about building a dialogue with the faithless. He then spends the rest of the hour talking about how much the Pope hates secular humanists: more so, it would seem, than he hates child molesters. Dear reader, you might want to use this as an indication of the Holy Father's balance of mind. Secular humanism is a great evil to be stamped out, believes the Pontiff—and this is, after all, the reason for his visit to these shores, the UK being a hotbed of secularism. I, for one, am (still) proud to live in a third world country.

The documentary jumps about from place to place and never reaches any sort of conclusion. If it were up to me, given the same raw material, I could have done an interesting, poignant piece about a man who grew up liberal, formed hardline opinions during the student riots, wants to continue his scholarly work but can't because he's duty-bound to be the Pope. Could have been a marvellous, humanizing piece about the man behind the monster, still totally within BBC impartiality guidelines. But even the Catholic who produced the documentary about the man doesn't seem to know what to make of him.

Plus, they get as far as interviewing his elderly brother, and this is apparently some sort of journalistic coup. This is the BBC. It should have gone like this:

Dear [some cardinal, any one, really]

Hello, we're the most respected broadcasting institution in the world, and we'd like to do an interview with your boss. Tuesday okay for you?

The Pope is many things: he's a doddery old man with a charming smile, and almost everything else about him is monstrous. But he's not a Nazi. He's just very, very bad at Godwin's Law.

I have been trying to review Vincent and the Doctor for some days now. It's been difficult, because I'm not sure I've watched it yet. At all the bits to which I know I should be paying the most attention, my vision goes all blurry. Maybe I got a bad .avi encoding or something. I should try downloading it again.

Dammit. In order to write this review, if review it can be called, I've had to watch bits of it: and as a result, I need to watch the whole thing again. I'll see you all later. Maybe I'll do some more reviewing at that point.

Seriously: if you don't like this then you're an empty shell that partially resembles a human being. I'd love to help, but this is your problem, not mine.

And I still want Rory back.

(See, it's of Azkaban because it had Dobby in it. ( Which just raises further questions: )

It was inevitable that an episode entitled Amy's Choice was going to be at least somewhat feminist in tone, but about halfway through, I started to wonder if it was really feminist or just a male scriptwriter who Doesn't Get It trying to be feminist. So I spoke to some women, and we came up with an interpretation with greater nuance.

It's really coming to something when I have to pull out my old Jung books in order to write a post about Doctor Who. Childrens' fuckin show, is it?

I was awesomesauce bottled tonight. Gods, but I've missed the stage.

And now, a gift for my loyal readers: your very own pajh-inna-box. Go to cereproc.com, and select William (Southern English) from the Live Demo list in the topbar (requires Flash). You can make me say anything you like. If you make me say anything nice about David Cameron, I will find you and kill you.

scattergather is already finding it useful for phrases like please drink my booze, I do not want it.

People are totally willing to pay me real money to talk into a microphone.

Form an orderly queue, ladies, there's enough pajh to go around.