In praise of the Monorail…

I’ve recently completed and submitted (for hopeful publication in a respected arts and culture magazine) a short piece of writing all about the wonders of the monorail, in my opinion, a timeless and much misunderstood mode of transport that deserves far greater support.

The essence of my argument is that the monorail’s almost Pavlovian depiction as THE earthbound transport of the future, has resulted in it being underused and mistrusted as a viable urban commuter option in the large majority of today’s’ Cities..

Evidence, I suggest, can be found in countless imagined future cities in countless films, books, comics and TV programmes of the last 100 years or so:  Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1926), Things to Come (1936) Francois Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 (1966), in Mega City One (Judge Dredd’s home in 2000AD) and Logan’s Run, the writings of Arthur C Clark, Philip K Dick and Iain M Banks to name just a few.

Couple this often over exaggerated and/ or improbable Sci-Fi imagery with the monorail’s undeniable association with novelty rides, at things like World Fairs, Disney Land resorts and countless airports and zoo’s the world over, and the character assassination is complete…

Thankfully however, attitudes have been changing over the last couple of decades or so, and successful urban transport systems can be found in Sydney, Kuala Lumpur, Tokyo and Moscow to name just a few of the forward thinking cities who have recognised the many benefits of electrically operated aerial monorails including reduced land take, reduced emissions and quiet operating volumes.

Due to copyright reasons, it’s difficult to include found and uncredited images with written articles published in proper magazines. On my blog of course no such restrictions apply, so I’ve collected below some of my favorite images, ones that I think best illustrate the idealism, excitement and overall futureness of the monorail…

Some Very Special Portraits…

  

These most excellent portraits were a present from my 4 year old niece who drew them from memory over Easter…

Those of you that know us, will no doubt agree that she’s managed to get our likenesses pretty much spot on, especially my bodyshape.. its uncanny..

Truly a remarkable talent…

Chris Haughton… Good at drawing.

I’ve been seeing these wonderful book covers around in shops for a while now and I’ve finally got around to finding out a bit more about whose been making them…

Not being a parent, I have to go and find these things for myself you see, so forgive me if I’m rather behind with discovering George and the little lost owl…..

Chris Haughton is an Irishman by birth but has lived in many countries since. His most famous book, A Bit Lost about a baby owl that falls out of its nest and has all sorts of adventures trying to find its way home to its mum, was written whilst he lived in Seoul and was first published there in 2011.

As well as A Bit Lost, Chris has written a number of other books including Oh No, George, which from the cover alone looks very intriguing, so I shall have to go and have a read next time I’m in Foyles or Waterstones… (sadly two of the few remaining bookshops left on the high street, but PLEASE don’t start me on that one, we’ll be here all day…)

Chris has obviously got the knack for this drawing lark, and there are lots of other rather fine illustrations and paintings on his website here...

Tarik Barri & Atoms for Peace.

I saw this Atoms For Peace video for Judge Jury and Executioner for the first time earlier this week, and I was so completely awestruck at it’s rhythmic layering and beauty, I watched it three times. See what you think…

 

This amazing piece of work was made by the audiovisual composer Tarik Barri. Can’t find much biog about him online but his own site here offers some philosophy and insight as to who he is and what he does.

Suffice to say that his main interest appears to be in the interplay of the audio and the visual. He tells us “I try to discover new forms of beauty through the influences that seeing and hearing have on each other. In my work they’ve become inseparable: the viewer hears images and sees sounds”

A bold statement indeed, but I think he’s on to something. If you watch this film with headphones on as I was last night, the experience is intensified and it’s difficult to imagine one without the other.

It’s also difficult to get my aging brain around how this kind of rich visual experience is created. Barri refers to software that he writes himself but whether this coordinates models made in other software or some such is way beyond my knowledge to comment on I’m afraid…

But however it’s made, it looks fantastic. Look for the bit when at about 20 seconds in, what seems to be a figure appears from the background synching perfectly with Flea’s bass noise. But there’s nothing figurative here and we are soon in a Man Ray/ Moholgy-Nagy type sepia Constructivist landscape of shifting layers, shapes and lights. This all subliminally slows down to reflect Thom Yorke’s almost mournful humming, until the bass kicks in again around 1.30 and the choreographed random spinning starts again.. Very nice. I could watch it for hours..

The song’s pretty excellent as well to my ears. Not quite as instant as the previous single Default I thought initially, but its growing on me and I’m certainly looking forward to the album being on Spotify so I can listen to the whole thing…

I’ll write about Stanley Donwood’s ever excellent artwork another time…

Victor Ambrus

Known chiefly for his work on the TV programme Time Team, Victor Ambrus is an artist with an enviable ability to create beautiful and highly believable historical scenes based on a combination of his knowledge, imagination, what he can see at the actual dig site (often no more than grass, mud and stones) and what the archeologists of the show are suggesting used to be there…

He is also however, a highly respected illustrator of children’s books. Using a loose pencil, pastel and water colour style, he produces wonderfully vibrant and expressive images that have an appeal to both adults and children alike.

Ambrus has been producing these wonderful illustrations for many, many years, and has said about himself: “I have spent my lifetime drawing, having illustrated over 250 books. My main interest is drawing the human figure and animals from life”.

Wikipedia has an impressively long list of these works including books that he has both written and illustrated himself. The earliest titles date back to the mid/ late 1950′s, and looking at the titles, it’s quite likely that I may well have had some of them (the Puffin books from the 1970′s especially) when I had when I was young…

Arnaldur Indriðason & Icelandic Crime Fiction..

These last few months I’ve been mostly reading The Reykjavik Murder Mysteries by the Icelandic writer Arnaldur Indriðason…

The key figure in these stories is Detective Erlendur who on the face of it is fairly stereotypical cop; he’s a loner, he’s divorced and his grown up children don’t really like him, although unlike most of the other literary sleuth’s I’ve read, he does usually do things by the book and is not prone to over the top outbursts of rage or anger.

What I really enjoy about these Reykjavik Murder mysteries and the stories that Arnaldur writes his chief protagonist into, is that they are absolutely credible, possibly even to the point where they border on the mundane. There is rarely more than one body in each novel, and they are almost always discovered within the first few pages. The rest of the story revolves around the Icelandic landscape, the Icelandic weather, relationships with other police officers and lots of basic detection work, visiting people, asking questions and trying to piece together what happened…

Detective Erlendur lost a brother on the mountains when he was young. The body was never found and this sense of loss and lack of closure permeates the missing persons cases to which Erlendur is always drawn. Iceland has one of the highest suicide rates in the world and the temptation is for the police to assume that many of the missing people have headed off into the wilderness to take their own lives. Erlendur however sees things as more complicated than this and picks away at the evidence in the hope of finding answers.

It’s all very low key, but it’s undoubtedly the strangeness and lure of Iceland and the Icelanders themselves that attracts me; the cold, the dark, the constant smoking, the eating of sheep heads… and the seemingly unrelenting drabness of it all, conjour up, along with Arnaldur’s wonderful prose, a world very different from my own…

Check out this trailer for the excellent film verison of Jar City from a few years back… If this appeals, then Detective Erlendur is the man for you…

Tim Doyle Graphic Prints

Walking around the covered Greenwich Market area avoiding the snow over the weekend, we happened across The Flood Gallery print shop and in particular the very fine work of Tim Doyle, an American graphic artist working out of Austin, Texas.

There is an impressive range of work available in the gallery, and all at very reasonable prices, £40 to £50 for unframed, signed & numbered limited run editions can’t be bad.

As with most of the graphic art that really appeals to me, Tim Doyle has a distinctive, confident style with a taste for referencing film, TV, music and popular culture, that gives his work an immediacy and vibrancy that really sets it apart.

In the prints they had for sale in the shop yesterday (included below), Doyle has chosen familiar and iconic scenes from Blade Runner, Breaking Bad and various Tarantino and Wes Anderson films to create a series of wonderful images that manage to distill the essence of a scene (or in some cases the film itself) into a single image.

I’m still not sure why I didn’t buy the White Dragon/ Blade Runner one there and then really… something I think I might have to go and rectify shortly…

Kim Jung Gi – Artist Extraordinare….

Another find from my good friend Wong today… the unbelievably gifted Korean artist Kim Jung Gi.

The video below shows him drawing at an comics expo a couple of years ago, and to see the almost super human confidence with which he brandishes that Sharpie pen is most impressive… He doesn’t seem to pencil it out first either, just gets on and draws…

Comic art may not be your thing, but this work is about so much more than superheroes and mutants. Gi draws recognisable things from everyday (with the odd fantasy element here and there for good measure) and draws them in a dense, layered way that really brings them to life.

On the basis that you’re unlikely to have the time (or the will) to spend 75 mins watching the whole thing, just watch the first 3 minutes as he draws the dude and the chicks in the car, then skip to 11 mins and watch him draw the elephant with the howdah on its back, and then just randomly skip through the rest to marvel at how the whole thing appears as if by magic, from the paper… Unbelievable.

What leaves me speechless is how he can know what all these disparate things look like; engines, animals, people in scuba gear, Formula One car pits, motorcycles, personalised jet packs…  all drawn with phenomenal accuracy and total believability..

If you’ve got even less time, the images below are of the finished piece. Took him a couple of hours I think…

Obviously a young man with a very exciting future. You can find loads more examples of his enviable ability to draw online, but here are a few of my favorites…

And one final video of the man at work, and I ask again, how is it possible to draw a motorbike in that much detail from memory… Genius

Munich 1972 Olympic Sticker Book…

This is the cover of a book I had when I was a youngster. It was produced by Esso Petrol to celebrate the Munich Olympics of 1972 and in it you could collect all the stickers that your mum and dad were given when they filled the car with fuel…

To say that I loved it, would be an understatement. My mum reminds me that I carried it around almost constantly for about six months around the time of the games.

With all the excitement of the London Olympics last year, I was reminded of this book, and bored my little And telling her how cool it was and how, thanks to my understanding parents, I had managed to collect all 40 stickers, (christ knows how much that must have cost them in fuel). I asked my M&D about it before last summer’s games and although they both remembered it well, neither knew what had happened to it.. So that was that really and I thought little more of it..

The reason for writing this post however, is that I am now the proud owner of three copies of this book….

The first one I bought in a second hand market near London Bridge back in October. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw it, and was even more chuffed when the woman only wanted 50p for it. It was a bit knackered unfortunately, and the previous owner had only managed to collect half the stickers, but looking through the pages I was amazed at how familiar it all seemed, despite not having seen it for nearly 40 years.

Roll forward to a couple of weeks ago and we were in Leicester killing time between Christmas and New Year (as you do) when in a £1 sale box outside an odd little second hand bookshop was another copy of the album, but this time with all stickers present and correct and moreover, in pretty amazing condition as well… I snapped it up, knowing full well I really didn’t need two of them, but easily justifying the purchase as it was complete…

Then guess what, last week I got a parcel through the post. My M&D had only gone and found the original sticker album lurking somewhere up in the loft… so from none to three in as many months without resorting to the ever giving interweb.. (where there are of course hundreds available…)

Looking at it again now, what I like about the album is its graphic simplicity. Hardly any information overlaps, there’s not too much text on each page and the combination of photos, stickers (obviously) and the now dated but still to my eyes, rather stylish drawings, results in a thing unquestionably of its time, but resonant I would suggest of the optimism and excitement of the Olympic Games (especially if you were a seven year old boy).

Democratic Donkeys v Republican Elephants…

Firstly a huge congratulations to Mr. Obama.

I’m both pleased and relieved that the American public saw sense and voted in the only real contender for the top job. From where I stand, the world would seem to be a much safer place in the hands of an honest, believable and credible man like Obama sitting in the White House, than those of a rather dodgy Mormon…

Anyway enough with political opinion, that’s not what this blog is about, but Obama’s second term win and the almost blanket coverage we’ve had over here in the UK, has prompted me to write about the rather odd logos that represent each of the parties : a donkey and an elephant…

Firstly the Democratic Donkey.

Apparently it dates back to the 1820′s, when the Presidential candidate Andrew Jackson used the image of a donkey or jackass in response to the nickname he’d been given by his opponents.

He took the intentionally derisive name and redefined it in terms of being strong willed, smart, hard working, reliable and brave, a twist that obviously worked, as Jackson became the very first Democratic President of the US in 1829.

The Republican elephant came into being in the 1870′s after a drawing by the famous American cartoonist Thomas Nast. The cartoon (shown below) showed the Democrat’s donkey hiding under a lion skin scaring all the animals in the zoo with only the elephant remaining unafraid…

Not much to base a choice of logo on perhaps, but it stuck and the elephant has been used ever since, supposedly representing strength, dignity and persistence.

One thing that does occur to me looking at the two logos is how similar they are, both have a red bottom half and a blue top with white stars and both are animals…

If I think about the different logos for the Political Parties here in the UK, they all have a very distinctive colour and appearance, which I would have thought was essential when you’re trying to distinguish yourself from the others… (not easy in a coalition as the increasingly irrelevant Mr Clegg is finding to his cost)

Maybe this lack of distinction is part of the problem with US politics. It’s all so much to do with personality rather than policy (the face and character of Obama versus the face and character of the other guy) that the identity of the party itself becomes secondary, almost irrelevant.

In fact, as I’ve researched for this post, it would appear that neither party has ever really claimed one colour over another and in fact it’s only since the 2000 elections when a TV company denoted blue States and red States on a map of the country, that the colours have become more separated and synonymous with one party or the other…