[ chain reaction ]

AFTER THE ALAN MOORE- INTERVIEW:
Brian awakes to the gentle sound of exploding galaxies and the Islington Green Radio Choir For Disadvantaged Children, recording Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (-with an indignant Dame Judy Dench, yelping and swearing and kicking the walls down from inside the broom closet she was confined to by class bully Brutal Tim, who remembered to tie her up like a true bondage artist before he fled to the tranquility of the BBC recording studio-), leaving her absent from the glorious spectacle which is about to take place (-even the studio technicians covers their ears when the cataclysmic belching starts, the director despairs, two boys are suspended for shouting rude words and tossing little bits of gum and rubber-balls into the hair of pretty girls, Viola the tired-looking teacher hushes up the offenders and urges everybody to behave, a fluster of sticking-out-tongues and unprintable words are exchanged before they resume the "singing" and splendid lowbudget-effects which the BBC have so painstakingly trained them to perform, during the jungle-hot summer school with fuckall refreshments and thermometer crawling beyond dripping sweat, soaking the worn-down studio carpets with irremovable stains-)

-The aetheric wailing of theremins and bolivian insect-buzzing from archived Attenborough tapes enriches the atmosphere of amateur radio drama, as the director quietly despairs over these anaemic kids' inability to learn even the most simple songlines, a non-existent musicality which he later learns to work to his advantage, equipping the kids with bogus laser beams and tiny cardboard figures of daleks while they get green lights to go ahead with the other phase of the play, which involves a very tired Aphex Twin running around the room dressed in a giant Maize Cob(tm)-costume, wielding a triangle and urging the kids on to start their cacaphonic canon of Speak-and-Spell machines which the play now requires, being the phase where our hero descends on the alien planet near Pheibos and Kodos, populated by mysterious blob-like amoeba creatures, solely communicating in Morse code and quadratic equations.

A baffled silence emerges when Brian walks into the studio, dressed in a plain moroccan kimono and sipping his cup of organic tea. -"Don't worry about me, just go on", he muses, kicking off his slippers and leaning himself to the studio walls with a relaxed elegance, feigning immense interest in such an unstructured play, or maybe his interest is genuine, anyway you can never tell, his enigmatic smile reveals nothing, is as much of a mystery as the creaking calculators, now singing their last verse as their circuits is about to overheat in the hands of untrained schoolchildren, blippety-blopping their way to eternal doom.
A gong is struck, William Shatners pre-recorded voice narrates the alien enounters taking place in this fictional soap-opera, lending an air of glamorous gloss to the generally un-spectacular affair. Noone applaudes, but Brian smiles gently and enthusiastically, infecting the kids with his optimism, pushing their boundaries, atonal sing-song voices culminating in a grandiose crescendo, everyone in the room joining in on the faux-cosmic shout-out, their grand elegy to the stars, every eye gleaming with innocent joy, every spine tingling with space-travelling excitement.
With the burp of a rusty Mini-moog and the glittering of a Space Echo-rumble, the choir fades out and everyone gets invited to Brian's for tea.

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[ Brian Peter St. John Le Baptiste de la Salle Eno : OBLIQUE STRATEGIES ]