20 years ago today Jim Henson died. He touched a lot of people with his work and made a big difference in a lot of people’s lives. Not bad for a puppeteer. He certainly changed the course of my life. These are two videos from the memorial held for Jim at New York’s St. John The Divine cathedral.
The first is comments and a song by Harry Belafonte and was, for me, the most memorable moment of the day.
As we had entered the church we’d been given little foam butterflies on long thin black rods. To the folks who puppeteered for Jim they knew these “toys” well. In his shows, in wide shots, there were often areas of the frame where no other characters were visible and he would often call for butterflies or other small critters to be wiggled from behind bushes and rocks to fill the frame with movement and life. It was perhaps the most rudimentary form of performance on the shows - lying on the studio floor and wiggling some floppy wings at the end of a rod - but it was always fun.
As Belafonte began to sing everyone in the crowd spontaneously raised their butterflies and waved them over their heads. The entire church sprang to life with colour and movement. I will never forget the surge of emotion which swept over us all.
The next is Jerry Nelson’s tribute to Jim where he, as Floyd, reads his poem to his Fearless Leader.
It was my distinct pleasure to have worked so very briefly with the gentle god of poetry, bpNichol who - when he wasn’t tearing up the soundscape with the Four Horsemen - wrote scripts for the Jim Henson Muppet series Fraggle Rock. That’s where I met bp and discovered his work.
Today I fell down a bit of a nostalgic rabbit hole when I stumbled across a little thing called Virtual ][. It's an emulator for the Mac that allows you to run old Apple II programs. I was immediately flung back to 1982, hiding up in Stephen Finney's set decorating offices on the second floor of VTR Studios, hunched over the awesome machine that was the Apple IIe featured on the show in Doc's workshop. When it wasn't needed on set the computer stayed in Stephen's room. When I wasn't needed on set - and even sometimes when I was - I was upstairs in Stephen's room.
Rediscovering games like Aztec and the wonderfully accessible Applesoft Basic programming language was a real treat for me today and I have already wasted far too much time playing Galaxians too.
But then I remembered bp.
After bp passed away Jerry Juhl, the late head writer for Henson, lent me his copy of a stunning little work that bp had crafted, in Basic, for the Apple II computer back in 1984. It was comprised of visual and verbal puns, animated across the screen to create further layers of meaning and emotional context. Like all of bp's work it was deceptively simple, slyly powerful and utterly charming to behold. I still have my bootlegged copy of that disk but I no longer have a drive from which to read it.
Obsessed, I conducted a search online to see if it could be found anywhere. I love the internet. It's called: bpNichol's First Screening.
Fred and Ginger is my favourite.
bp was always fascinated by language and how it could move people and shift and change meaning and how even when contained upon a page or spoken aloud or captured on a computer disk it always remained as something capable of morphing and transforming itself into delightfully unexpected treasures. From his notes included with the disk:
As ever, new technology opens up new formal problems, and the problems of babel raise themselves all over again in the field of computer languages and operating systems. Thus the fact that this disk is only available in an Applesoft Basic version (the only language I know at the moment) precisely because translation is involved in moving it out further. But that inherent problem doesn’t take away from the fact that computers & computer languages also open up new ways of expressing old contents, of revivifying them. One is in a position to make it new.
Many thanks to Jim Andrews, Geof Huth, Lionel Kearns, Marko Niemi and Dan Waber for their work in keeping this work alive, making it new, so others can continue to discover and enjoy it. Go to their site where you can find out more about the journey First Screening has taken from its inception as a work in Applesoft Basic to its presence on the web today.
And if you don’t know bp’s work please visit his site and immerse yourself in his rich and touching use of language.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to get back to the next level of Aztec.
