Eddie Braben
Graham Linehan has just told me on Twitter that Eddie Braben died today, he was 82…
Eddie Braben was the writer that almost single handedly propelled Morecambe and Wise to super stardom throughout their time at the BBC in the 1970′s, as he was the man that wrote virtually everything they said, although not how they said it, that was Eric’s particular skill.
It’s a bit late and I’m afraid I haven’t got the energy to write a glowing obituary just at the mo, so I’m going to put this short video clip up instead, as to me it says more about timing, comedic lines, silliness and middle aged men sharing bedrooms than words ever could..
Genius indeed.
Secret Cinema : G.O.O.D = S.H.*.T
We went to Secret Cinema last night and despite some early misgivings about the whole event, it turned out to be far more disappointing than I ever feared it might be.
Secret Cinema is like Fight Club; you’re not supposed to tell anyone about it, but in light of the fact that we did everything we were asked to, fulfilling our side of the bargain, as you will see if you read on, I think the organisers fell well short of what could be reasonably expected of them.
Hence any perceived contract is null and void, and hence me feeling free to tell you all about it. So click away now if you don’t want spoilers…
The experience all started off intriguingly enough, as over the course of the week leading up to the event, we had to enroll online into a company called G.O.O.D, answer questionnaires to generate our security levels and the Departments to which we would be assigned. We had to dress appropriate to our new stations, print out business cards and bring specific items with us such as newspapers, marigold gloves and brief cases…
Also on the plus side, the organisers had obviously put a lot of effort into it: the disused office building in West Croydon was decked out over six or seven floors to resemble various scenes and aspects from the secret film, which was… Terry Gilliam’s wonderful Brazil, which I must admit I was well chuffed about, as I’ve always been a huge fan.
The recreation of the office floor in which Sam Lowry worked with Mr. Kurtzman’s office tucked away at the back was particularly well done, whilst the restaurant with the string quartet and box like illuminated, numeric menus was also pretty impressive.
So the first hour or so was all pretty good, with signing telegram roller girls, freelance heating engineers, and red boiler suited Central Services personnel all running around and interacting with the (huge) number of guests (or employees as we were encouraged to think of ourselves) milling about the six or seven floors that were open to us.
The problems started when after an obscure announcement telling us to follow the screens and not our dreams, we tried to find out where the screens were and where the film was being shown. The be-costumed people we asked were either evasive or just plain idiotic and as our frustration grew we were directed to the lifts to get even more frustrated by being taken to floors where only a couple of tiny televisions were showing a DVD of the film…
So we bought more drinks at extortionate prices from bars with massive queues and not enough staff, to calm us down and continued to look for the feature presentation. We met more and more angry and frustrated people as we traipsed from floor to floor, looking for any sign of the film. We found art installations (on big projector screens please note), freeform dancing and performance art and small monitors showing the film but with the sound turned down (although you could hear the soundtrack in the stair towers bizarrely enough, but that was on the other side of two fire doors).
Eventually (after an altercation of which I’m not proud) we were told that the film would be projected onto the outside of the building in a courtyard area, sometime after about 9 o’clock when it got dark. It would only start from where the film was up to at that time however (it started at 8.00pm) and we could only watch it through the office windows, which were too high off the floor when sat down, as you can imagine from this screen grab of the building below…
It did occur to me that this was all part of the experience. Brazil is all about petty bureaucracy and small mindedness after all, and maybe the actors were under instruction to make life as difficult as they could for us. All of which would have been OK, if we’d then seen the film as a reward.
Sadly though, I can’t think of this as anything other than a total con. Effectively it cost us £43 each for a few hours membership into a very expensive drinking club in less than salubrious surroundings, miles away from home in Croydon, with some side shows to dull our senses. About 25 of us went last night for a friends 40th Birthday, and all of us left either angry, disappointed or both, quite rightly believing that our collective £1000 could have been far better spent on almost anything else we could think of. Indeed the birthday boy and his wife were going to look into getting a refund, so ripped off did they feel…
It’s all such a shame really as it’s undoubtedly a good idea, and could work really well. We met some people who saw Prometheus and said it was the best thing they’d ever done (although they did get to see the whole film on a big screen)
We may have just hit a bad night or a ridiculous and over ambitious production, but I for one will not be duped again…
Saul Bass’s Birthday Video
A very quick one today, as I’ve simply borrowed the video from Google’s search page.
I’m a huge fan of Saul Bass’s graphic style (having written about him on these pages before) and although the thought of Google appropriating his effortless style by association sits a tad uncomfortably with me, I’m a realist and know that’s how it all works…
And besides, the video is a pretty clever summation of some of his best work. I’m even quite liking Dave Brubeck’s jazz tune this morning (but don’t tell my And)
And don’t bother sending Saul your best wishes either… he died in 1996.
Delia Derbyshire & the BBC Radiophonic Workshop
Last Saturday (May 5th) would have been the 76th birthday of the pioneering electronic musician Delia Derbyshire, a name that may be unfamiliar if you are not my side of 40, British or a bit of a geek.
There is however at least one of her tunes that you will recognise, as Delia was responsible for generating the futuristic bleeps, whooshes and synthetic sounds that combined to make the original Dr. Who Theme, which despite being made 50 years ago in 1963, is well worth a quick listen now, to remind yourself how good it still sounds…
Although credited to Ron Grainer, who wrote the basic melody, it was Delia who after three weeks of hard work recording noises and splicing together bits of magnetic tape, created the sounds and atmosphere that continue to make the tune as memorable today as it was then…
Delia (who sadly died in 2001 of alcoholism related problems, just as renewed interest in her work was beginning to pick up) was a key member of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, a name synonymous with the sonic and musical experimentation of the 1960′s and 70′s.
Formed in 1958 the Workshop’s original brief was to provide incidental sounds for radio and TV shows although this was quickly expanded and the team (which included Daphne Oram, Brian Hodgson and Paddy Kingsland) was soon creating theme tunes and other impressively futuristic sounds not only for The Doctor but also for The Goon Show, Quatermass & the Pit, Blakes 7 and The Hitchhikers Guide to name just a few.
Each of the members was also a composer in their own right and Delia wrote and recorded many original compositions, one of her most well known (and strangest) of which is Ziwzih Ziwzih OO-OO-OO-OO from 1967. If you think it sounds odd today, imagine what it sounded like back when everyone looked this….
Delia was also involved in two offshoot groups in the mid 1960′s: the brilliantly named Unit Delta Plus (with Peter Zinovieff, inventor of the first British portable synthesizer the EMS VCS 3) and Kaleidophon (with David Vorhaus), neither of which had great musical success at the time, but both of which have since been the subject of much reassessment by musicians who see in their experimental electronic recordings, the beginnings of today’s digital soundscapes…
There a number of videos on YouTube about Delia & the Radiophonic Workshop, and the ones below I think are the most interesting. It’s fascinating to watch how sounds were created by speeding up and slowing down tapes, playing them backwards and then chopping everything up and making loops…. It must have taken hours and hours to do what any self respecting sampler can do in seconds today…
(I’ve no idea what the ghostly chap in the background is all about…)
There’s also an excellent 1 hour audio mix here put together by Soundhog, which through a mix of spoken word and music, gives a pretty good oversight of what they got up to over in their Maida Vale studio…
As a final aside and if you’re interested in this kind of music like me, I’ve also come across this BBC TV programme from 1979. Called The New Sound of Music and presented by Michael Rodd, it’s a wonder of optimism, science and massively complex technology. I especially enjoyed seeing David Vorhaus in the last section (Part 4) who at about 7.40 mins seemingly invents Goa Trance at least 15 years before anyone knew what to call it…
Truly Impressive…
One final excellent BBC TV programme of related interest can also be found here… (noted more for my records than anything else)
Build your own Richard Neutra House…
Now that’s a blog post title to grab the attention of architects with a love for Modernism..
Richard Neutra, one of the best American architects of last century gained a reputation for designing beautiful and elegant houses, mostly on the West Coast, mostly with large overhanging flat roofs and azure blue swimming pools but always with an enviable style and conviction.
Well I’ve just read on Architizer, that thanks to a new partnership between the Neutra Architectural Office, Richard Neutra’s son Dion (who took over the office after his father’s death in 1970) and the California Architecture Conservancy, it’s now possible to buy a licence that allows you to build a brand new house from the original plans of 12 of Richard Neutra’s finest designs, including the Lovell Heath House, The Richard Bailey House and the Kaufmann House (click on the document to the left to find out more…)
I’ve been thinking about this rather intriguing offer, and I can’t work out who I think it’s aimed at.. Will a 60+ year old Neutra house designed for a specific site in California, work as well (or at all) in contemporary Dubai, Coventry, Moscow or Buenos Aires? Surely local constraints would make an exact replica impossible, and arguably inadvisable: flat roofs in Oslo, swimming pools in Reykjavik…
At college we talked much about the Genius Loci of a place, the spirit or uniqueness of a location that should inform any development proposed there. Despite the usual lazy criticisms of Modernist architecture being a universal solution and non site specific, Neutra’s version of Modernism was most definitely a tailored response. Not only to the immediate landscape and the client brief, but also to the technical innovations available at the time, and you only have to look at the Case Study Houses programme to appreciate the variety and quality that Neutra brought to his designs and which can be seen in these images below of the Kaufmann House from 1946.
Maybe this project is more about taking the essence of the original design (the key moves if you like: flat planes, rectilinear geometries, lots of glass) and then using them to make another building, which by definition won’t be the first building, which takes us back to the beginning of the conundrum (who is this aimed at) and which then begs the question, why don’t the design office of Dion & Richard Neutra use their skill, knowledge and experience to, wait for it… create a brand new house designed specifically to fit the clients requirements…
Still it would be pretty cool to own a Richard Neutra House, and if you were fortunate to own a site overlooking the sea, in a warm sunny climate (and this is no longer available) then why not…
Jacob Epstein: Portrait Sculpture @ NPG
A couple of weekends ago we went to the National Portrait Gallery to see the recently opened exhibition of Jacob Epstein sculptures. Regular visitors to these pages will know that I’m a bit of a fan of Mr. Epstein and his amazing ability to create wondrous shapes from stone, and this small but perfectly formed display of sculptured heads does not disappoint.
It took me a while to get past the large photo of Epstein near the entrance to be honest. Depicting a man who doesn’t look like he’s enjoying the photography experience in the slightest, what caught my attention (apart from being strangely reminiscent of Picasso) was his left hand.. A huge and slightly misshapen thing, presumably the result of thousands and thousands of hours of holding chisels and stone cutting tools..
The heads here however were all made firstly by being modeled in clay and then cast in bronze. Rather than produce a faithfully realistic image, Epstein aimed to capture the psychological and physical presence of the subject, which when you see the works collected together here, is undoubtedly what he did, as despite all of the subjects being long dead, the heads seem very much alive…
There are maybe 12 or 15 sculptures on show, each of a contemporary of Epstein including George Bernard Shaw, Joseph Conrad, Vaughan Williams and Epstein himself, and each is accompanied by a photo and in some cases a short story about the sitter and the sitting..
My favorite quote is actually about someone I wasn’t aware of. As Epstein wrote later in his autobiography… “Imagine Don Quixote walking about your studio and sitting for his portrait! This was R.B. Cunninghame Graham. In the head I modeled he seems to sniff the air blowing in from the Sierras, and his hair is swept by a breeze from afar”. Look at the photo to the right and tell me you can’t see what he means….
As an aside, C-Graham was on the commissioning panel for the so called “Atrocity in Hyde Park” that was Rima, a monument to W.H. Hudson that Epstein completed in 1924 (a year after this portrait sculpture) and which C-Graham expended much energy defending against a largely hostile press, due in no small part I would like to think, to his appreciation for this portrait. And as a further aside, looking at Rima now (below) it’s difficult to see what the all fuss was about…
I’ll leave you with a selection of some of the other portrait sculptures on show.. all of them magical, and all well worth going to see…
