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.

For Sale – A Modernist Masterpiece

We were out with friends last week and somewhat out of the blue, they mentioned that they had recently been tempted to move out of London.

After expressing surprise at such a statement (especially from these two who live in the heart of urban London in Golden Lane, near the Barbican) I was directed to these photos from the ever wonderful “House Porn” site The Modern House.net.

These pictures illustrate what I can only describe as what looks like an almost perfect place to live, and I suddenly understood why they might by contemplating such a big move…

Designed by the Architect Peter Womersley and completed in 1954 (then extended in ’56), Farnley Hey  has everything you could ever want from a Modernist home: a Grade II listing, strikingly good looks, acres of space, timber and stone finishes throughout, floor to ceiling windows, a double height living room, beautiful built in furniture, clever use of existing site levels, 4 bedrooms and a double garage… It was even awarded an RIBA Bronze medal in 1958.

And all for a not unreasonable £575,000.00… Yes it’s a lot of money, but when you compare what you would get to some of the other properties for sale on the The Modern House website in and around the Capital, I can see why it all became rather tempting.

The thought that such beautiful houses as this are still available to buy and live in, is something I haven’t really considered before, and it got me to thinking how fantastic our own mid century teak furniture and 1960′s ceramics would look occupying these rooms…

You see how easy it is to fall in love with a good building, I’m already thinking about gazumping my friends…

Not really though. Sadly (for us not the house) it’s all the way up in the The Yorkshire Dales, and the daily commute (3 to 4 hrs via Wakefield apparently) back down to South London would be a real bugger…

Frank Dobson in The Shrieking Violet…

The Manchester based webzine The Shrieking Violet has just reached an impressive 20th edition, so a huge congratulations to its founder, curator and editor, Natalie for such an achievement. Long may she continue to self publish…

Natalie has been kind enough once again to include a piece I wrote about a largely forgotten and overlooked artist Frank Dobson, a man who in the 1920′s was considered by many critics as amongst the first and best of British Modern sculptors, ranking alongside the likes of his fellow Englishman Eric Gill as well as the American Jacob Epstein and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska who was French.

Dobson’s is a sad story to some extent. Despite being at the very cutting edge of early Twentieth Century modern art, time and changing tastes were not kind to him, and through a refusal to move away from a romantic, figurative style generally (and the female nude specifically) his work was eclipsed by the likes of Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth, as their radical reinterpretation of abstract forms made him look old fashioned and out of touch, so that today his name is barely a footnote to most art histories…

A screen grab of my article is below, but I would urge you to visit The Shrieking Violet site on the link above and have a look through some of the previous editions.

I’m now a Wikipedian…

I’ve just had my very first Wikipedia article created, which I’m rather chuffed about. Apparently that means I can now call myself a Wikipedian (should I ever wish to…)

I Initially found writing and editing in Wikipedia rather daunting I have to admit. The entry obviously all has to be done to conform with the familiar house style, which means formatting everything into an unfamiliar code that determines such things as text size, headings, sub-headings, web links and references etc. Printing out a copy of the style and layout manual undoubtedly helped, so that after some perseverance and lots of coffee, it finally began to make some sort of sense.

Perhaps unsurprisingly (for those that have visited my blog before) my first article is about my favourite artist and sculptor William Mitchell, a man who I believe is very deserving of finally having his own entry…

It actually took two goes to get the artcile approved. My first attempt was considered to be too subjective and that it “read like an advertisement.” But after removing some of the more gushing adjectives and the reference to his forthcoming autobiography (hmm) hey presto, a new Wikipedia page has come into being…

Now that it’s been created, the plan is to improve it by adding photos and images of Bill’s work and elaborating on some of his phenomenal achievements over the last 50 years or so…

You can get to the page by clicking the screen grab below… and as it’s Wikipedia, you can of course add to it yourself…

The DLR and London Docklands (before anyone took them seriously…)

I love the internet, you can find so much amazing stuff, things you never even knew existed, just tucked away waiting to be found…

Take the photos that accompany this post for example. They are all borrowed from Steve White’s amazing Flickr site here, where he’s gathered over 1100 images. I can’t begin to imagine how long it must have taken to scan in all those original prints…

I came to London at the end of the 1980′s to do my year out and take my Architectural Diploma and by the early 1990′s was working for a Greenwich based architectural practice. Then, as now (apart from buses of course) there were really only two ways to get to Greenwich from north of the river:  overground from London Bridge or via the Docklands Light Railway (DLR).

In the early 90′s the DLR (much like the Docklands themselves) still had something of the novel about it: driverless trains, elevated trackways, unfinished stations, continuous weekend and evening closures, an abundance of blue powder coated steel structures and a track that stopped north of the Thames at Island Gardens.

What Steve obviously did and what I regret not doing, was documenting these early days with his camera, and for someone like me who regularly used the fledgling service to commute to work, his images are a treasure trove of visual clues and reminders of what a different world it was back then, covering everything from Tower Gateway to Beckton and Stratford and all points in between.

Admittedly these images won’t mean much if you’ve never been to the Docklands or had the opportunity to ride on the DLR, but trust me when I tell you that NOTHING looks like this anymore: not the buildings, the landscape, the trains, the stations… its all now super shiny, super busy, super dense and super expensive…

Even having lived here over the last 12 years and experienced it all first hand, it’s still staggering the rate and amount of change the Isle of Dogs has been through. The huge empty spaces around West India Quay (above) and Limehouse (below) are particularly impressive especially when you think that these photos were all taken less then 30 years ago…

I’ve taken the liberty of stitching a few of Steve’s photos together to give them a more panoramic feel, but even without doing that, the amount of space that the developers had to work with must have been simultaneously exciting and intimidating…

So a huge thanks to Steve for taking the time to document it all, I for one am very appreciative of his efforts.

The above four photos are especially poignant for me as they show the old Island Gardens station as it was before the extension below the Thames made it all redundant and it was demolished.

Being the end of the line, the tracks split into a V either side of the central steps so that one train could wait for the other before it ran along the single track that ran most of the way to the next station, Mudchute. Reliability was not the DLR’s strong point in the early days, and I used to spend seemingly endless hours on these two platforms waiting to get back to civilisation in North London. 

It’s incredible to think that when Steve took this photo in June 1988, looking north from Heron Quays, nothing of the Canary Wharf existed… at all. One day I should go and take the same view as it its today and put it up here for comparison…

Google Beatbox…

A quick & silly one today…

Copy the following into Google Translate…

pv zk bschk pv zk pv bschk zk pv zk bschk pv zk pv bschk zk bschk pv bschk bschk kkkkkkkkkk bschk zk

Then click the speaker symbol bottom right…

How cool is that? (makes you wonder what other sounds GT can generate…)

World of Wong… (a)Live and Direct

I wrote a while ago about my good friend Wong’s graphic skills and a new site he was working on to showcase all his wonderful work…

Well I am pleased to be able to report that World of Wong is now up and running and open for business…

Flick through his pages and you will experience a wild diversity of beautifully crafted images. Quite how he finds the time and has the patience to make all those perfect lines is beyond me, but I think you’ll agree that the end results are certainly worth the effort.

He’s hoping to get a physical show organised soon to spread the World of Wong even further, and I wish him all the best with that. I sincerely believe that he’s got both the talent and the ideas to make it happen…

World of Wong…

My very good friend Wong sent me this link the other day…

World of Wong is a project of his that I hope will see his amazing work reach a deservedly wider audience…  I think you’ll agree he’s off to a flying start with that logo…

So tell your friends and keep clicking back to see his site grow in intensity and brilliance…

The image below is a sneak preview which I hope he won’t mind. He gave me this drawing of a giant fuck-off robot suit a while back. He sits on the book shelf watching over me & Little A, and we love him…

More robots please Wong…

Jim Morrison predicts Techno….

How’s this for prescience….

This is apparently from a 1970 American TV music show, and demonstrates how easy it can be to predict the future, especially if you’ve done as much Acid as Mr. Mojo Risin allegedly had.

Sadly Jim was only around for another year or so after these prophetic words (he died at 27) so he never got to see how right on the money he was and how much beautiful music electronics, tapes and machines have made over the last 40 years…

Realtime Construction Clock

THIRD UPDATE…

As of May 2013 (and possibly much earlier I haven’t checked in a while) The Russian Esquire site no longer works.. Sorry about that, you’ll just have to make do with the extract on the app site…

SECOND UPDATE…

Success… Try this this site.  It belongs to Russian Esquire Magazine which seems to be hosting the clock. I got it from the artists own blog, so hopefully it’s safe… It’s not full screen like the previous one though, but at least it’s in real time. Press the fourth tab across the top for London time (I’m not sure what the others read, other the fifth one is Moscow and the last one is probably Tokyo)

UPDATE…

Would you believe it, 3 hours after I posted this, the link to the realtime video has stopped working.. it now leads to a rather strange music video.. So I’ve had to substitute a new link that takes you to the clock creators’ website, where you can buy it as a $30 app or watch a 3 minute extract..

Bugger.. I’ll have to keep an eye on it and see if I can find the link to the realtime site… or if anyone comes across it, please let me know…

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My friend Dan sent me this link yesterday to one of the best sites I’ve seen in ages…

It’s a real time clock being made by a group of guys in safety hats with wooden planks, steel bolts and step ladders on some rough ground in what looks like Berlin.

It runs for the full 24 hours, so click on it at any time, day or night and there they are, constructing the numbers: lit up at night and stripped to the waist in the afternoon…

I especially like the way they all move off to the side once the time is finished so it’s all nice and tidy. Then if the next time requires only a small modification, one person comes out after quite a long wait and moves a single plank. As and when more digits need to change however, they all rush out quite soon after the previous time and hurriedly start rearranging the planks…

Genius, totally brilliant. Like all excellent things, it’s simple, very effective and mesmerising…

(I haven’t watched it long enough to see where the join is yet. I’m sad, but not that sad.. actually I probably am, and I’m sure I’ll find it soon…)