The Stink of Excellence
Modern Toss [moderntoss.com] is back… BACK! A second series has been commissioned by Channel 4 in the UK and airs mid-January. If you missed it the first time around you can grab a copy of the inventive, visually appealing and a little bit rude comedy series on DVD from this month and, of course, there’s always the books if you’re into reading and shit. That is all. See you later, yeah.
Review 2007: Things of the Year #1
Make Do and Mend bag with typography by Non-Format for the Re-Bag exhibition and Progress Packaging [progresspkg.co.uk/re-bag].
Tomorrow Comes Today
Perky Pop Practitioners, Saint Etienne [saintetienne.com] have been collaborating with film maker Paul Kelly ever since they released the film to accompany the album, Finisterre [plexifilm.com]. Together they are helping us hold onto the fragments of London’s recent past including many of the old style cafés that are disappearing under an avalanche of Starbucks and Pret a Mangers. They have put a bunch of their films up on YouTube too including this one about the New Piccadilly Café which closed only a couple of months ago, along with snippets from their latest feature, This is Tomorrow.
What’s Up #21: MacGregor Harp
MacGregor Harp [pnmnl.com] is a CalArts [calarts.edu] graduate, currently working at Brand New School [brandnewschool.com]. Under the moniker Phenomenal, MacGregor produced some suitably slick graphic design and posters that fizzle and pop with colour like candy bars for yer eyes. He has also had a crack at the blog/print interface, using the ever excellent Vvork [vvork.com] as a template [pnmnl.com/vvork].
You may also want to check out Scrap [scrapla.com], a very limited edition (a run of about 30 copies per edition) photocopied ‘zine’ featuring contributions from Ed Fella [edfella.com], Cameron Ewing [staypressed.com], and Nikelle Orellana [nikelleorellana.com] amongst others, that MacGregor helps puts together.
Roll Up!
Dig ’em out, join up [facebook.com/sleeveface] and get Sleeve Facing [sleeveface.com]!
My Worst Job Ever
3 seemingly unrelated things that help tell the tale of my worst job ever:
1st thing: Everyone has at least one job that sucked or that they sucked at. I like to think I’ve managed to avoid most career blunders (although I’ve had plenty of time off from saying ‘No Thanks’ once too often). But desperate times often call for desperate measures, especially when establishing yourself in a modern metropolis like London so… Quite a few years ago now, in order to facilitate a move from Brighton to London, I made the rash decision to put graphic design aside in favour of an editorial role at a place called Purple House. The job was still design related, but this time I was collecting it rather than creating it. I sucked at this. I assumed having knowledge was enough. I didn’t even think about having the call creatives up and ask them to send in work or having to spend days just emailing people back and forth. Asking people you admire for favours was daunting especially when you’re on a deadline. Anyway, I sucked and they knew it. I had to go and 3 months later, in a sort of mutually agreed way, I did. That was my worst job ever and why I never want to work in editorial again.
2nd thing: The latest issue of Creative Review is rather good [creativereview.co.uk]. I’m tempted to call it one of the best they have ever produced. After their ‘Month in the Life of a Designer’ featuring Michael C. Place [wearebuild.com], they have just put together an issue focussing on a ‘Month in the Life of a Client’, guest starring Will Gompertz, Director of Tate Media [tate.org.uk/media]. It’s great not just because it features commentary from the many of talented individuals that revolve around the Tate brand such as James Goggin [practise.co.uk] and Non Format [non-format.com] but also because it’s so nice to hear from a client that actually likes Graphic Design. You get the feeling that many clients take on Graphic Design as a personal battle of wills, ignoring the commercial implications explicit in it’s everyday practice. Not so at Tate. There is an acknowledgement that good Graphic Design is a commercial necessity and good Graphic Designers as valid contributors as any other professional. So, if you are feeling down about the whole Graphic Communication thing, read this issue and feel your spirits lift.
3rd thing: Purple House was a publishing house set up by Will Gompertz, now at Tate Media. I say ‘was’ because Purple House is no more. Very little evidence of it’s existence remains. It was an odd sort of place that produced lavish and distinctly unique publications focusing on various creative fields. During it’s brief tenure the publishing house produced Zoo Quarterly. A lush, hard-bound, phonebook-sized periodical chock full of creative work from around the world. Expensive to produce and to buy. Zoo Quarterly used to retail at around £100 an issue [amazon.co.uk]. Needless to say, it was a hard product to sell. You couldn’t give it away, it was too expensive, and therefore was hard to get it in front of people to show them what it was about. Purple House’s email newsletters called ‘Newswires’ were much more accessible and radical at the time. But, I guess, email newsletters soon became a pest and not something people really wanted to pay for. Eventually, the publishing house closed and since then a few of the core editorial team members have ended up at places like Creative Review. Deputy Editor Mark Sinclair and staff writer Eliza Williams are both Purple House alumni. Purple House also gave credit to, now well established, creatives such as James Goggin (who designed later editions of Zoo Quarterly) and Hyperkit [hyperkit.co.uk] (who designed the Newswires).
So, in the latest issue of Creative Review, the Purple House legacy lives on and I’m again reminded of a job I totally sucked at. Good issue but. :)
Live from Golden Lane
Boicozine HQ has just moved to Great Arthur House on the Golden Lane Estate in the City of London [housingprototypes.org] (for those who think I’m over stating the location, ‘City of London’ is the name given to London’s business district and it’s local council, often referred to by residents as ‘The Corporation’). The Golden Lane Estate [goldenlane.co.uk] is considered one of the key prototypes for community housing after the war and Great Arthur House was the first residential building designed by architects, Chamberlin, Powell & Bon [wikipedia] who went onto design and help construct the sprawling Barbican complex situated adjacent to the estate [barbicanliving.co.uk] and the, soon to be demolished, Milton Court building. It feels like kind of an experiment to see what it’s like to live in London’s first post-war highrise and an early prototype for ‘council built’ community living. Expect pictures and bits and bytes about this on Boicozine during the next year.
Fun facts about Great Arthur House:
— At the time when it was built (it was completed in 1957), it was the highest residential building in London standing at 15 stories high (not including the roof terrace).
— The complex includes a roof terrace with an ornamental pool and a 2 story structure under a sweeping canopy which currently houses the lifts and machinery. Although renovated a few years ago, the rooftop remains locked away due to health and safety regulations.
— Great Arthur House and the Golden Lane Estate are protected by a Grade II listing for it’s architectural importance as a community housing prototype and it’s relation to the Barbican.
— Many of the ‘quirky’ features installed inside Great Arthur House, such as the galley style kitchens and storage for various utilities inside entry ways, can be seen as early prototypes for features within the Barbican complex.
Review 2007: the Films
If we learnt anything in 2007, it was to avoid films where the title is set in Red Hot Futura Extrabold or Gill Sans Display — see [here], [here], [here] and [here]. The more distorted or ‘3D effect’ the type, the more arduous the film. Mainstream Hollywood films continued to rely more on their marketing spend and less on quality or originality. When you see a mainstream Hollywood film these days you can almost see the guys in cheap suits peering through the two-way glass into yet another focus group, mentally stripping the film down to the bare necessities it needs to appeal to commonherd America. In some weirdly subtle response, a lot of the mainstream cinema chains (well in the UK, at least) became increasingly lack-lustre in their presentation. That certain ’specialness’ that makes seeing a film at the cinema preferable to seeing one from the comfort of your sofa [sofacinema.co.uk] has been tarnished somehow. Vue in Leicester Square [cinematreasures.org] has seen fit to do away with the human-in-a-ticket-box in favour of a credit card machine. Yerg! Still, as always, there were a few nuggets of goodness to chew on this year as long as you knew where to look…
Inland Empire [imdb.com]
You have to make time for David Lynch’s [davidlynch.com] Inland Empire. If you’re a ‘quick fix’ kinda cinema goer (which I can be sometimes too) then this film would have had you pulling your hair out in the cinema. I wrote a brief review when it came out and then bought the DVD and am still watching it every now and then. Mr Lynch’s technique of letting a film build itself scene by scene means you can dip in and out of it if you like or just hone in on the scenes you find intense, funny or whatever. This is film making for film lovers and a must see if you’ve ever enjoyed sitting in the dark for a couple of hours and having your head fed.
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Disturbia [imdb.com]
The easiest way to describe Disturbia is like a modern take on Hitchcock’s Rear Window for today’s not-especially troubled teens, where our protagonist has a angle tag instead of a wheelchair and a hot babe in the swimming pool next door instead of Grace Kelly and her overnight kit. It wasn’t necessarily clever but it was thrilling without dipping it’s toe in the torture porn tub and fun in a way ‘gross-out’ comedies haven’t been for a long time.
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F for Fake [imdb.com]
F for Fake was released on DVD this year as part of Eureka’s Masters of Cinema series [eurekavideo.co.uk]. This is Orson Wells at his most mischievous and inventive. Apparently made in answer to well-known critic Pauline Kael’s insinuation that Welles stole the script for Citizen Kane, the film partially documents a couple of famous 70s fraudsters living it up in Ibiza, a painter of fake masterpieces and the man who penned the fake biography of Howard Hughes and ends as a lesson on cinema and the suspension of disbelief. It’s fast, mind-boggling fun.
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Electroma [imdb.com]
This was the year we got to see French dance act Daft Punk’s first foray into feature film making minus their own original, custom built soundtrack. It’s an audacious and possibly overly simplistic film. The fact that their is no dialogue should tell you it’s a bit of a test but the visuals are often reward enough. You enjoyment totally depends on your state of mind at the time. My suggestion: watch it when you’re feeling relaxed and not up for much of a challenge, you’ll like it a whole lot more.
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Southland Tales [imdb.com]
Southland Tales is as odd as it’s route to the screen… possibly more so. For a start, the cast is so weird. It includes Sarah Michelle Gellar, Justin Timberlake, Mandy Moore, the funny little psychic woman from Poltergeist, The Rock… I mean Dwayne Johnson, Christopher Lambert, Seann William Scott… the weirdness just goes on. Eli Roth even turns up to get shot in one of the shortest scenes you’ll ever see him in. The plot will blow your mind and visits places similar to those last seen in Wild Palms and Mulholland Drive via some pretty catastrophic world events, the words ‘This is the way the world ends’ gets uttered more than a few times. All this from the hot young director who gave us Donnie Darko. Originally around three hours long, this is the two hour version of the film, released after a lot of cut and paste plus a layer of heavy duty CGI and some deliberately dubious (through still pretty hideous) ‘on screen’ graphics had been applied. See it but expect a big mess and very little answers by the end.
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Sunshine [imdb.com]
There seemed to be a real lack of any stand-out or break through films this year. Not to say it was a particularly bad year… it was just sort of ‘middling’. As was Danny Boyle’s first voyage into Science Fiction. Actually, ‘middling’ was unfair. Sunshine is an above average Sci Fi adventure with lush visuals made for the big screen and nice use of some hoary old Sci Fi cliques. The DVD has some pretty cool short films produced by crew members and hand picked by Danny Boyle himself.
There are a few films I never got to see that I’m sure are worth a mention. Control springs to mind and, I’m sure will be on many people’s lists. If you want to add your own review, leave a comment at the end of this post and roll on 2008.
Digital Stoner Art
Just a quick link to something that caught my eye. They’re calling it Desktopography [desktopography.net]. It’s kind of like stoner art for your desktop. Sounds dodgy but is actually kind of cool.
Review 2007: Introduction
Everyone loves an end of year list and they’re a bit fun to put together, so we thought we’d have a crack at it this year. Look out for Boicozine’s first collection of annual reviews on the topics of Film, Music, Graphic Design, Politics and whatever else we can think of, liberally sprinkled throughout Boicozine over the coming weeks. Agree, disagree or feel we’ve overlooked anything? Then be sure to leave us a comment or two. Hopefully they’ll be a few special guest reviews too… I’ve just got to get round to emailing them out. I was going to attempt to sum up 2007 in one word but it’s hurting my brain. Turbulent, maybe? I don’t know. How has it been for you?
