#simon wroe

Vor dem Urlaub, solange ich es noch weiß, noch das gelesene in Kürze. Es ist diesmal noch bizarrer geraten, als sonst. Chop Chop: Schauerliche Zustände in der Gastronomie. Sadisten und Psychopathen allesamt, wir haben es immer geahnt.

Richter Di ermittelt undercover im geheimnisvollen Fall Der Wandschirm aus rotem Lack. Weil mir die viktorianischen Krimis ausgehen zur Abwechslung einer aus der Tang-Dynastie (618-906).

Was gibt es heut bei der Polizei? fragen sich zwei Herren, die beide bei einer Arbeitsmaßnahme im Kölner Stadtarchiv teilnehme. Zu essen, sie essen bei der Polizei. Oft gibt es “Pikantes”. Einer steigt minderjährigen Knaben nach, der andere engagiert sich im SPD-Ortsverein. Dafür vertragen sie sich ganz gut.

Das Windloch ist eines der großen Bücher meiner Kindheit, und erklärt möglicherweise, warum ich oft so spitzfindig mit Formulierungen bin. Ich habe eine Ausgabe mit Zeichnungen von Paul Flora, von der außer mir niemand je gehört zu haben scheint. Dieses Bild ist aber auch nett, der Tagdieb ist sehr gut getroffen, Onkel Titus sollte aber zwingend einen Hut tragen. Vielleicht scanne ich ihnen da mal was.

Leider nicht mit Gorey-Bildchen ist meine Ausgabe des ganz und gar unmöglichen A Room in Chesey Square (A witty novel), einer Art etwas unerernsterer The Line of Beauty für die 50er-Jahre.

                The man behind the Mighty Boosh's Bollo and Spike Jonze's Wild Things talks about his life as the film industry's "primary primate".

IN his 30 year career, Peter Elliott has been attacked by most of the animal kingdom: chased by black mane lions, clawed by a panther, mauled by chimps more than once, almost flattened by stampedes of zebra and wildebeest and – scariest of all – elephants in fancy dress.

Elliott, a short, limber man of 5’5” and 52 years, wears his wounds with pride. For the actor and animal movement expert, each injury is a badge of experience. “For the amount of time I’ve been doing this, I’ve been quite lucky. I’ve still got all my fingers,” he says. Were any creature to relieve Elliott of his digits, the chances are it would be a member of the ape family. He has devoted much of his professional life to simian study, even ­infiltrating a group of chimps to earn a place in their hierarchy. As the “film industry’s primary primate”, he has starred in Gorillas in the Mist, Congo, and surreal comedy series The Mighty Boosh, in which he plays the DJ gorilla Bollo. He’s such a ­lifelike ape, in fact, the LAPD nearly shot him for being an escaped wild animal. Most of the world’s hi-tech gorilla suits are built on his frame, and he can speak “chimp” – a nuanced collection of pants, hoots, grunts, whimpers, barks and screams. Until recently, he could converse with the primates of London Zoo from the garden of his flat in Gloucester Avenue, Primrose Hill, opposite the suitably named Darwin Court. “Most people think they’re little cuddly things but chimps are probably the most ­dangerous animals to work with,” he says. “A fully grown chimp is about eight times stronger than a man in the upper body, as ­emotionally stable as a one-year-old child, with an IQ of about 85. Submissiveness is a good idea.” The son of a ­woodwork teacher, Elliott was “always one of those kids that would come home with pockets full of animals” during his Hertfordshire childhood. His monkey mania began in 1978 when, aged 21, he auditioned for a part in Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan. Warner Bros had done a test film with a mime artist in an ape suit and panicked: it was terrible.  Elliot, 18 months out of drama school, was flown out to LA and appointed head of research and development, with a stratospheric budget and an army of underlings. He went from happy-go lucky acrobat to Hollywood silverback in one agile leap. The film’s producers wanted to mix real apes with human actors in costumes. Elliott spent two years trying to find out if this was possible, concluding it was “completely mad. Everyone was going to get their arms and legs torn off.”  At the time, the height of gorilla impersonation was hairy stuntmen running around on two legs. Elliott, who trained as a method actor, decided method chimps were needed. He spent months at the Oklahoma Primate Centre observing ­behavioural patterns, sounds, and mannerisms, and talking in sign ­language to a chimp called Washoe. “The doctor had to tell her to sign slowly because I wasn’t very good,” he recalls. Improvising for up to eight hours a day, Elliott sometimes fails to leave his work at the studio, pant-hooting in ­restaurants and barking on public transport. “You get into a strange stream of consciousness that can be difficult to switch out of,” he says. “Working with ­animals makes you realise how out of touch we are with reality. You learn great respect for them, probably more than you respect people. They still live in the real world; we live in a large, architecturally designed zoo we call a city.” Elliott is an unpredictable interviewee: switching from howling primate to middle-class father-of-three to wave to an anxious-looking neighbour. He is prone to starting sentences with “When I was living with the Masai” or “If there is such a thing as a controlled stampede, you don’t start it with a ­shotgun”, and the ­pleasant flat he shares with his children and wife (a teacher at the Central School of Speech and Drama’s movement department) is crammed with animal models, artefacts, and hundreds of porcelain penguins from his many trips to Africa and beyond. Recent projects include big budget Hollywood productions like Where The Wild Things Are and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, but his first choreography ­credit was for the slightly less slick Quest for Fire, which makes the ­dubious claim of having “over a million years of evolution in one movie”. It was while filming Quest he got caught in the mammoth stampede. “Well, it was 14 ­elephants dressed as mammoths,” he corrects. “So they were already quite annoyed. Nobody had told me elephants can run about 30 miles an hour when they get going. I had to roll out from under them. Then they went through the wardrobe tent, through the make-up tent and off into the wilds of ­Scotland. It took us about eight hours to find them all.” For Elliott, that’s another day at the office.

Nothing to do with Argos or Ikea, but proof you can get drunk on words.

This helpful list of Norse dwarves, known as the Dvergatal, appears in the middle of the ancient Icelandic poem, the Voluspa. Odin is hearing about how the world was created when the "catalogue" begins. I recommend you read the list aloud for full intoxication. Perhaps leave the English out altogether.

As a side note, Icelandic name laws are incredibly strict. Were these mythical dwarves alive today it is likely many of them would be embroiled in lengthy legal proceedings.