Barnflakes

Spitting at Shakespeare

2012-01-26T22:49:00.007Z

In 1989 I had the mixed blessing of seeing Dustin Hoffman perform Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. We had almost front row seats. What I remember most – in fact all I remember – is Hoffman quite literally spitting out his lines. In abundance. I thought there was a leak in the roof there was so much liquid coming down. Some years later, in 2005, I saw Michael Gambon in Henry IV at the National Theatre, also spitting as he spake. And just a few days ago at the cinema, I saw Ralph Fiennes in his directorial debut as Coriolanus*, where he can often be seen spitting ('You banish ME?' *Spit* 'I banish YOU!' *Spit*). So it comes as no surprise that, according to a Washington Post blog post, Shakespeare's plays are known to produce more spit than any other playwright. In fact, theatre or film directors are known to request more spit from actors when they are under performing: 'Give me more spit!' is an often-heard line at Shakespeare's Globe theatre.

But spitting – or expectoration – though 'currently' (say Wikipedia) unacceptable in the west – unless you wear a tracksuit and live on a council estate and have a particularly nasty cold – is acceptable in other parts of the world. Like India. If Shakespeare had his way, it would be acceptable the world over. After all, didn't he write, 'The world's a stage, so spit on it'. Or something.

*My boon companion and I – luckily – just missed seeing Ralph Fiennes in the flesh. My friend, having been one of the make-up artists on Coriolanus, had wanted to confront Fiennes in the Q&A session (at the Everyman in Maida Vale) after a showing of the film to ask him why she hadn't been invited to the film's premiere. But after she had a double Jack Daniels and Coke in the cinema bar just before the film, and a double Pimm's and lemonade after it, it was probably for the best that the Q&A tickets had sold out.

Top 10 Scottish Bands

2012-01-25T00:05:00.004Z

1. Belle and Sebastian
Best album: Tigermilk (1996)
2. Boards of Canada
Best album: Music has the Right to Children (1998)
3. Orange Juice
Best album: You Can't Hide Your Love Forever (1982)
4. Teenage Fanclub
Best album: Bandwagonesque (1991)
5. Cocteau Twins
Best album: Treasure (1984)
6. Incredible String Band
Best album: The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter (1968)
7. Arab Strap
Best album: Philophobia (1998)
8. The Beta Band
Best album: The Three EPs (1998)
9. Mogwai
Best album: Young Team (1997)
10. The Jesus and Mary Chain
Best album: Psychocandy (1985)

Tonight is Burns Night.

Lookalikes #19: Mickey Mouse & Joy Division

2012-01-24T00:05:00.003Z

Atrocity exhibition: Mickey's Unknown Pleasures T-shirts, top and above, right; Peter Saville's original cover, 1979, above left

I'm still not entirely convinced this isn't a hoax but Disney have apparently starting selling Mickey Mouse T-shirts based on Peter Saville's iconic Joy Division album cover, Unknown Pleasures (according to Pitchfork and Rolling Stone). This is wrong on so many levels I don't know where to start.

Joy Division's name comes from the areas in concentration camps during World War II that operated as brothels where female prisoners were forced into prostitution for Nazi guards. Joy Division made great but depressing music. Lead singer Ian Curtis killed himself in 1980, aged 24. There is nothing remotely child-friendly or Disney-like about Joy Division.

The cover, designed by Peter Saville (who also designed all their subsequent releases), was taken from an image of the first radio pulsar discovered in 1967. I guess in this post-ironic and post-postmodern world, Disney appropriating Saville's appropriation is, well, appropriate. Besides, like with most works of art more than five minutes old, it loses its original meaning and simply become iconic and harmless.

Here's what Disney have to say:

Inspired by the iconic sleeve of Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures album, this Waves Mickey Mouse Tee incorporates Mickey's image within the graphic of the pulse of a star. That's appropriate given few stars have made bigger waves than Mickey!

You know what's worst of all, though? I want one!

Banana vs Apple

2012-01-23T00:05:00.000Z

The Velvet Underground have taken legal action against the Andy Warhol Foundation for trademark infringement of Warhol's iconic banana image, which the band claim is recognisable as the cover of their first album, The Velvet Underground and Nico.

The lawsuit was launched when the band discovered The Warhol Foundation had agreed to licence the banana image on cases and bags for Apple iPhones and iPads. Maybe the band just don't like the clash of fruit.

The banana image is already found on plenty of items, from earrings and pillows to shoes and sweets. And no one can accuse the foundation of selling out – Warhol himself would have been delighted to see his art on as many products as possible.

Woody Allen's wise cracks

2012-01-22T12:48:00.003Z

Woody Allen's film titles – white EF Windsor on black with some old jazz on the soundtrack – have remained reassuringly constant for decades.

I seldom think of Woody Allen as one of my favourite directors, but maybe I should. I mean, I love all his films, even his less successful ones. And though we may think of his films as 'mere' comedies, perhaps they should be taken more seriously. After 41 films, we should be calling Allen an auteur. There aren't many other directors in modern cinema who have produced such a rich, funny, thematically consistent yet stylistically diverse body of work.

Starting today, the BFI are having a season of Allen's films, Wise Cracks: The Comedies of Woody Allen. Of course, Manhattan is already fully booked.

Nerve.com have rated every Allen film from worst to best.

More about Woody's favourite font here.

Lookalikes #18: breastfeeding big cats LP covers

2012-01-19T15:18:00.005Z

Singer Lynn Carey of the band Mama Lion breastfeeding a lion cub on the cover of Preserve Wildlife (1972); breastfeeding a tiger on the cover of Tigermilk by Belle and Sebastian (1996).

Nico's top ten lovers

2012-01-18T16:27:00.003Z

Born Christa Päffgen in Cologne, Germany in 1938, Nico moved with her mother to Berlin, 'a desert of bricks', aged seven. By 15, after a hard childhood, she had success as a model and went on assignment to Ibiza, a place she would love throughout her life. Renamed Nico and now a blonde (apparently at the behest of Ernest Hemingway), whilst in Rome she found herself acting in Fellini's La Dolce Vita.

By 1960, in New York, she was taking acting lessons in the same class as Marilyn Monroe. In 1962 she starred in the French film Strip-Tease, also singing the title track written by Serge Gainsbourg. In 1964 she met Brian Jones and had a record produced by Andrew Loog Oldham, with guitars by Jones and Jimmy Page. Back in New York she worked again as a model and had an affair and a child with Alain Delon. She met Bob Dylan in Paris and he gave her a song.

In New York she was introduced to Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground, singing three songs on their first album, The Velvet Underground and Nico. She left the band, though stayed in contact, performing live with Lou Reed and John Cale for Le Bataclan, Paris, in 1972, and having Cale produce and play instruments on several of her solo albums. Her post-Velvets solo debut, Chelsea Girls, with its pleasant folksy tinkerings, penned by ex-lovers Dylan, Cale, Reed and Browne, does nothing to prepare you for her next three albums: The Marble Index (1969), The Desert Shore (1970) (released together on CD as The Frozen Borderline a few years ago) and The End (1974). Armed with her trademark droning harmonium, haunting, deep, monotone vocals and a stark, chilly atmosphere, these albums make Leonard Cohen's records sound like party music.

Addicted to heroin then methadone and drifting from country to country, the next decade became her wilderness years. She would only release a couple more records, including Camera Obscura (1985), produced again by John Cale. She died in 1988, aged 49, of a cerebral hemorrhage after falling off her bike in Ibiza.

For someone who supposedly didn't like sex, Nico had an impressive series of famous lovers. Jim Morrison was her 'soul brother' who encouraged her to write her own songs. By all accounts she was not a very nice person; perhaps a Nazi sympathiser, perhaps a racist, certainly tortured and depressing but also iconic, beautiful and enigmatic.

1. Jim Morrison
2. Alain Delon
3. Lou Reed
4. Bob Dylan
5. Leonard Cohen
6. Brian Jones
7. Iggy Pop
8. Jackson Browne
9. Jeanne Moreau
10. Philippe Garrel

London through its charity shops #18: Pimlico

2012-01-11T21:02:00.001Z

I have alighted at Pimlico tube station to visit Tate Britain many, many times over the years. I always thought Pimlico, in Westminster SW1, was a quaint, quiet residential area with a few cafes – I never realised there were actual shops there. But having heard good things about its charity shops I decided it was worth investigating.

From Pimlico tube station, the best way to approach Pimlico's charity shops (though many of them seem to be geographically closer to Victoria tube) is to head along Tachbrook Road until you hit a small food market. On the left is a FARA Kids, small but bright and colourful. Keep going then turn left onto Warwick Way; on the opposite side of the road is a regular if pretty chic FARA. Like with a lot of its shops now, there's a downstairs with media and bric-a-brac. Upstairs is a good selection of clothes. Likewise Oxfam, a few doors along, has a downstairs with lots of DVDs, books, CDs and mainly classical records and an upstairs with men's and women's clothes.

Round the corner on Wilton Way is a very nice-looking Trinity Hospice, well-arranged with a slightly vintage vibe to it, also selling knitting wool and accessories. Round another corner on Upper Tachbrook Road is yet another FARA branch – this one called Retromania and selling mainly vintage clothes, though also some records, books and nick-nacks. It's a beautiful, fascinating and unique shop; great to have a rummage around in; you'll find everything from retro Chanel space suit outfits (£630) and Alexander McQueen cocktail dresses (£300) to Libertines-style military jackets. I was only allowed to take one photo (tiger and guitar-playing bear in a cage, above) but IDOL magazine has a feature about it along with some nice pics. A bargain basement had books and other paraphernalia for £1 and upwards.

Back onto Warwick Way for a Sue Ryder, quite average by comparison to Retromania and Hospice of Hope, which is a little further along and across the road. A charity shop blog I occasionally look at is Charity Shop Tourism, which found Pimlico – and Hospice of Hope in particular – a bit overwhelming. Certainly, upon first entering you'd think you were going into an exclusive chic boutique and not a charity shop. The black and white floor tiles, tidy, sparse racks of clothes and the shop assistant with a severe bob and a duster in hand, actually dusting her wares as if they were priceless antiques and not secondhand crap, were all a bit foreboding. Especially as I was the only other person in the shop. But it turned out to be quite good, reasonably priced, with a good selection of CDs. And the woman with the bob even smiled at me eventually.

On my way back to the tube station, quite by accident, I came across Crusaid (an HIV and AIDS charity) on Churton Street. Described by one charity shop reviewer as the 'Harvey Nicks of charity shops', it has a fine and funky range of clothes and bric-a-brac. In the back room are lots of records and books. The books are well-arranged with even foreign language and gay sections.

Up until M16 worker Gareth Williams was found dead in a sports bag in the bath of his Pimlico flat in 2010, Pimlico was most famous for the film Passport to Pimlico (1949) – where the neighbourhood declares independence from the rest of Britain – though it was not actually filmed in Pimlico itself but about a mile outside it. Anyway, it's a curious place that for some reason I've always liked. I'm not the first to say Pimlico has an air of faded gentility about it, but it's one of the things I like about the place.

The shopping part of town is a revelation to me, previously only ever gone to Pimlico to visit the Tate. The shops have a nice vibe to them; a bit posh, yes, but also pretty friendly with a village feel to the area. The charity shops are mostly all pretty interesting and unique; a most welcome respite from the usual bland homogeneous high street charity shops.

London through its charity shops #17: Tooting

2012-01-08T14:34:00.008Z

Squinting in one of Tooting's indoor markets we could half-imagine we were in an Istanbul souk. Sort of. Though it lacks the authentic ethnic edge of, say, Dalston, Tooting SW17 still feels a million miles away from, say, Putney (though it in fact only a 270 bus ride away). Tooting may never be cool, also lacking Dalston's hipster quota, but it's a bustling, interesting place with great Indian places to eat along Upper Tooting Road – though my brother (and Time Out) recommend a tiny Lebanese restaurant called Meza at 34 Trinity Road; booking ahead is essential as there are only five tables in the place.

Considering there are so many shops (especially striking are the ones selling beautiful saris) in the area, my boon companion and I were shocked to find only five charity shops, annoyingly quite spread out too. Our first stop from Tooting Broadway tube was a smart Octavia along Tooting High Street, with a good range of clothes and books. Hidden away under the clothes racks were some records.

Charity shops are usually small, cramped and cluttered. Tooting's Oxfam (pictured above), further along on Upper Tooting Road, is massive but sparse and tatty. With a tiny men's clothes selection versus a huge women's clothes section. And some books.

Wandsworth Oasis Books, opposite Tooting Bec tube on Trinity Road, looked great, but was unfortunately closed when we passed by. Age UK, on Mitchum Road, was small and cramped but had nice stock, including some good art books. Paws, unsurprisingly, is an animal charity shop, just off Mitchum Road on Trinity Road. It's small and cluttered with loads of bric-a-brac and stacks of bad records and, surprisingly, a great selection of CDs. In fact, if post-rock or indie rock is your thing, it's perfect. No Age, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Cat Power, Orange Juice, Dirty Three, Cut Copy... all £2 each. Ergo, my Barngain of the day is the 2CD Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven by Godspeed You! Black Emperor.

Top 10 Film Musicals

2012-01-05T00:09:00.010Z

Most people wouldn't admit to musicals being their favourite genre but when they're good, they're sublime. They're still popular once in a while, but it's only every few years when one takes hold of the public imagination, such as Chicago (2002) or the more recent Mamma Mia (2008), which I have recently watched and didn't mind second time around (and noticed it's at least the fourth time Colin Firth has played a homosexual, after Another Country, A Single Man, Relative Values and perhaps Apartment Zero; he's also played someone with a stutter three times).

It's a shame musicals aren't more popular and populous, as at their best they're a perfect blending of emotion, motion and music: the best cinema has to offer. It can sometimes take a while to get used to the artificiality of characters suddenly breaking into song, but once you do, it becomes quite natural and the song and dance becomes more emotional, expressive and meaningful than mere dialogue.

It's great when a non-musical 'serious' director attempts making one, such as Woody Allen (Everyone Says I Love You), Jean Luc Godard (Une Femme est une Femme), Tim Burton (Sweeney Todd), Martin Scorsese's flawed New York, New York, Robert Altman's underrated Popeye or Lars von Trier's Dancer in the Dark, starring Bjork.

1. Singin' in the Rain (Kelly/Donen, 1952)
2. The Wizard of Oz (Fleming*, 1939)
3. Cabaret (Fosse, 1972)
4. Mary Poppins (Stevenson, 1964)
5. An American in Paris (Minnelli**, 1951)
6. Grease (Kleiser, 1978)
7. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Demy, 1964)
8. West Side Story (Robbins/Wise, 1961)
9. The Blues Brothers (Landis, 1980)
10. Everyone Says I Love You (Allen, 1996)

*When I first got serious about cinema and reading books about directors I could never understand why the director Victor Fleming wasn't held in high regard by film critics. After all, he directed The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind – in the same year (!). But whereas, say, Hitchcock and Hawkes were lionised for their themes and styles, Fleming was more a craftsman for hire than an auteur. And his two biggest films, The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind, were also directed by other (uncredited) directors as well as Fleming, and produced by the influential Mervyn LeRoy and David O. Selznick, respectively.

But a recent biography of Victor Fleming called An American Movie Master, written by Michael Spagow, attempts to set the record straight by placing the director amongst the greats.

**Along with Bob Fosse and perhaps Ken Russell, Vincente Minnelli is best known as a director of musicals. He was married to Judy Garland; they were the parents of Liza Minnelli, who starred in Cabaret and New York, New York. And was hilarious in Arrested Development.

A Book of Hedgerow Berries

2011-12-30T00:02:00.005Z

A Book of Hedgerow Berries; Oxford University Press; 1949; Written by Dorothy A Ward; Illustrated by Marjorie Gillies

What a lovely book. There's something quite modest in the way it tells you it's a book, rather than just stating 'Hedgerow Berries'. I love the cover – the design for all the Chameleon Books, I guess (this is number 29). Its size and format are remarkably similar to Ladybird books. The illustrations, which look like watercolour, are excellent.*

The introduction states: 'Our English countryside has the reputation for being one of the most beautiful in the world, and one of its most distinctive features is the hedgerow'. This may well have been true in 1949 (just about), but post-war has seen the amount of hedgerows in England halve.

As the English Hedgerow Trust says: 'Hedgerows are a fundamental part of the heritage of the British countryside, defining the nature of the landscape and providing a major shelter and food source for a huge variety of mammals, birds and insects. Hedgerows are effectively a vibrant ecosystem, a huge nature reserve in our small and (over) intensively farmed country.'

* In fact, my only gripe about the book is, er, it wasn't given to me as a Christmas present, but to a close family member instead.

This is my last post of 2011. Have a Happy New Year and see y'll in 2012, a 2009 disaster movie directed by Roland Emmerich and the end of time according to the Maya calendar. Can't wait.

Merry Kitschmas

2011-12-21T05:00:00.001Z

Merry Christmas all.

Previously on Barnflakes:
Merry Xxxmas
Top 5 Christmas albums
Christmas Peasants

The seasons of life

2011-12-20T00:05:00.005Z

The seasons are a well-known metaphor for the four stages of life: birth and childhood being spring, youth and young adulthood summer, autumn is middle age, and winter, old age and death. People seem to want to live in a perpetual spring, with, er, a perpetual spring in their step, youthful-looking hair and skin, good teeth and bones. How boring. Old friends not seen for years think it is the ultimate complement to say, 'You haven't changed a bit!' I, however, think it is the ultimate insult. Life is a journey. I like to see people aged and haggard, weathered and withered, not looking like a goddamn spring chicken all their lives. Grow up and old. Get on with it. I embrace autumn and winter. I've been content in the winter of my discontent for about twenty five years now.

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FYI: This is post #500

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Lookalikes #17: Timothy Spall and Nicholas Bro

2011-12-19T00:05:00.002Z

British actor Timothy Spall and Danish actor Nicholas Bro, currently seen as Justice Minister Thomas Buch in the popular TV series The Killing.

Lookalikes #16: Officer Crabtree & Inspector Gustav

2011-12-18T00:05:00.003Z

God moaning: Officer Crabtree (apparently based on Edward Heath!) from 'Allo 'Allo!, played by Arthur Bostrom, and Inspector Gustav, played by Sacha Baron Cohen, from Martin Scorsese's new 'family film', Hugo, a strong contender for worst film of the year.

Best and worst albums of the year 2011

2011-12-17T00:02:00.000Z

BEST
PJ Harvey Let England Shake
tUnE-yArDs Whokill
Girls Father, Son, Holy Ghost
Paul Simon So Beautiful or So What
Kate Bush 50 Words for Snow
Ry Cooder Pull up Some Dust and Sit Down
Wild Beasts Smother
The Horrors Skying
Real Estate Days
Battles Gloss Drop
Fleet Foxes Helplessness Blues
M83 Hurry up, we're Dreaming
St. Vincent Strange Mercy
Gil Scott Heron & Jamie XX We’re New Here
Half Man Half Biscuit 90 Bisodol (Crimond)
Josh T. Pearson Last Of The Country Gentlemen
Bon Iver Bon Iver
Atlas Sound Parallax
Onehtrix Point Never Replica
Lou Reed and Metallica Lulu (If only for the opening lines, 'I would cut my legs and tits off / When I think of Boris Karloff and Kinski / In the dark of the moon'. I quite like the cover too.)

BEST REISSUES

Throbbing Gristle 20 Jazz Funk Greats
A great, if misleading cover: there aren't 20 songs and they're not exactly jazz or funk or greats. The cover photo isn't the idyllic setting it seems either: it's the popular suicide location Beachy Head. Fine reissue with bonus CD of live tracks.

Serge Gainsbourg Historie de Melody Nelson
Worth the price of admission for the cover alone, but luckily this Deluxe Edition comes with the original album plus a CD of outtakes plus a DVD.

The Beach Boys The SMiLE Sessions
Worth the 43 year wait? Almost.

Can Tago Mago
Deluxe 40th anniversary reissue of the landmark Kraturock album with a second disc of live tracks, marred only by including the vastly inferior original British album cover (and, according to some Amazon reviewers, a poor quality live disc).

The Raincoats Odyshape
This one's been hard to get hold of for a while so good to have it back. Robert Wyatt guests.

Miles Davis Live in Europe 1967
Twenty years after his death, a new Miles Davis album still seems to get released on a monthly basis (not that I'm complaining). Now we have the Bootleg Series Volume 1, consisting of three CDs and a DVD, with the Miles Davis Quintet. Great stuff. Just two years later Miles would be producing a very different kind of music with a completely different band. Also worth a listen, Bitches Brew Live from 1969, came out this year too. (Neither are a reissue -- nor are the SMiLE Sessions technically -- but you know what I mean...)

WORST
Adele 21
James Blake James Blake
WU LYF Go Tell Fire to the Mountain
Jay-Z & Kanye West Watch the Throne
Radiohead The King of Limbs
Florence and the Machine Ceremonials
The Weeknd House of Balloons
Lady Gaga Born this Way
DJ Shadow The Less you Know, the Better
Drake Take Care

Previously on Barnflakes:
Top 30 albums of 2010

Books of the Year 2011

2011-12-16T00:05:00.009Z

Following Art Garfunkel's (once again) lead of listing every book he's read, here's the books I've read this year, so not necessarily books released this year. In fact, I don't think any were released this year* (if you're looking for such a list, let me direct you to the Guardian).

The Innocence of Father Brown GK Chesterton
Dirty Havana Trilogy Pedro Juan Gutierrez
Just my Type Simon Garfield
The Mouse and his Child Russell Hoban**
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet David Mitchell
Life Keith Richards
Psychogeography Merlin Coverley
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Robert Louis Stevenson
Books vs Cigarettes George Orwell
Bound for Glory Woody Guthrie
Seasons of the Heart Alan Spence
But Beautiful Geoff Dyer
Bicycle Diaries David Byrne
The World's Wife Carol Ann Duffy
One Day David Nicholls
On Chesil Beach Ian McEwan
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Douglas Adams
The Rings of Saturn WG Sebald
Night Train Martin Amis
Rolling Thunder Logbook Sam Shepherd
Moonfleet J Meade Falkner
Rip it up and Start Again Simon Reynolds
Trouble with Lichen John Wyndham
24 Party People Tony Wilson
Catching the Big Fish David Lynch
Big Baby Charles Burns
Put the Book Back on the Shelf: A Belle & Sebastian Anthology Various
Complete Persepolis Marjane Satrapi
Perverted by Language Various
Black Hole Charles Burns
Four Tales James Hogg
Fugitives and Refugees: A Walk Through Portland, Oregon Chuck Palahniuk
A Time of Gifts Patrick Leigh Fermor
Collected Stories Tennessee Williams [currently reading]

Keen-eyed/well-read readers may spot a few graphic novels and books of poems, which may have taken just an hour or two to read. It's true. But this is more than balanced by The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet and A Time of Gifts, both of which took me months to get through.

*Unless I'm allowed to include the recently published Saul Bass book which I'm slowly getting through. It's massive! And amazing.

**RIP Russell Hoban, who died a few days ago, aged 86. His Riddley Walker is one of the most amazing books ever written.

Lookalikes #15: Azari & III and VU's Squeeze

2011-12-15T00:05:00.006Z

Azari & III's fine self-titled album, released earlier this year, is a dance record with lashings of soul, electronica and house; and the Velvet Underground's last LP, Squeeze (1973), not really a VU record at all, seeing as Doug Yule was the only original member of the band playing on it. It's pretty bad but quite rare.

Space Invaders Crossword Puzzle #3

2011-12-14T00:05:00.000Z

Across
3. Rays of light (5)
7. Round and round (7)

Down
1. To -- or not to -- (2)
2. Exist (2)
4. Part of circumference of circle (3)
5. Make believe (3)
6. Question (3)
8. Sun God (2)
9. Musical note (2)

Richard Branson in Vague

2011-12-13T00:05:00.008Z

I don't throw bombs, I watch films
– Tom Vague

Sir Richard Branson on the cover of Vague No. 21 (1989) wearing a balaclava (is he a rapist or a robber? I guess the metaphor is the same either way). The cover was designed by Sex Pistols-designer and Branson-hater Jamie Reid, still an anarchist after all these years: as well as protesting against the Criminal Justice Bill and the Poll Tax, more recently he was seen at the St Paul's Occupy.

Though Vague magazine includes staples of 1970s DIY punk (or post punk) fanzines, by the 1980s it was a glossy-looking counter culture publication, and the first fanzine to be perfect bound. And it didn't just feature music, going off as it often did into other tangents, including cyber-punk, politics, situationism and psychogeography.

Its creator, Tom Vague, originally a Wiltshire man, (born in Mere, I think, and went to art college in Salisbury. Vague describing a 'punk rock scene' in Salisbury is quite hard to believe… though it was the 1970s), is nowadays a prominent chronicler of Notting Hill (though rich and dull now, it's worth remembering this was the scene of the race riots in 1958 and, up until the 1980s, had a significant alternative and counter culture scene) and has been writing for over thirty years, producing fanzines, pamphlets and CDs.

The inside front cover of the magazine reproduces a leaflet handed out in a new Virgin Megastore in Glasgow (remember this was 1989):

'Hi, mugs!

Put all your money in a pokey bag and give it to me at the NEW
Virgin Hip Super Market

Hello suckers! Us wonderful people at Virgin have arrived in Glasgow! We call ourselves Virgin because we like to attract customers that are young and gullible (if they had any fucking sense they'd rip us off!). Who was it sang 'Do you think it's funny, turning rebellion into money?' Funny? We're laughing all the way to the bank!! And don't forget our new Virgin credit scheme… Be hip and impress your friends in easy monthly repayments!! Bring your giros, small change, your granny's pension book… We'll take it all!! Bring your rebellion and we'll sell it back to you!! ... Must go now… the Russians have got some kind of rebellion in Poland, and they want me to come over and package it and make it harmless…
See ya
Richard Branson'

Vague magazine was usually for sale at Virgin Megastores, yet issue twenty one mysteriously went missing.

In more recent news… Richard Branson has bought Northern Rock for a bargain price, half, in fact, of what British taxpayers have paid out for the ailing bank since 2007. Richard Branson has announced he'll be opening a new luxury game reserve in Kenya. Richard Branson has invited Kate Winslett over for Christmas at his Necker Island, to thank her for saving his 90-year-old mother from a terrifying inferno when the guesthouse caught fire after lightning struck.

Alien Underwear

2011-12-12T00:05:00.004Z

There are those who think this scene from Alien is the most erotic in cinema history. I'm not going to entirely disagree. I came across this film still from Alien, had a bizarre yet erotic dream involving Sigourney Weaver, then bought the 9-disc Alien Quadrilogy DVD box set the following day. Go figure.

Previously on Barnflakes:
I'm in Love

Wiltshire loves and hates

2011-12-11T00:05:00.006Z

Salisbury is sumptuous
And Devizes, divine
Bradford (on Avon), beautiful
Avebury is ace
Lacock, like a peacock
Shrewton, shrewd
Malmesbury has a malthouse
Pewsey is pleasant
Tisbury 'tis interesting
Mere, sincere
Alton Barnes, beguiling
And Honey Street, real sweet.

But Bishopstrow is boring
And Warminster worse
Trowbridge is terrible
Westbury, a curse
I hate Heytesbury
Stonehenge is stern
Codford is fishy
Chitterne: a shit urn
Chippenham's crap
Swindon, a slum
Marlborough, mundane
And Wilton... waning.

Space Invaders Crossword Puzzle #2

2011-12-10T00:05:00.003Z

This one has a film-related theme (mostly). With thanks to Jude.

Across
1. Old film classification: aged five and over (1)
2. Old film classification: over 18 (1)
5. Out of fashion (5)
9. Show (7)

Down
3. Thank you (2)
4. You and me (2)
6. Slide over snow (3)
7. Thin film director (4)
8. Director of Anatomy of a murder (4)
10. Good movie (3)
11. Small part (3)

Ode to a night

2011-12-09T00:04:00.002Z

The cheerless baron harks his way across the turmoil moors.
He says she is a witch but we don’t agree.
The bitter figure inherits his own will:
It records the lies he tells it.
The prayer about the angels is a sad indictment of the storm that forever bleeds.
They’re German; they say “bye guys” or is that her name, I don’t know.
Everything sits on the table or moves about.
Tomatoes in the bag, oil on the side.
It feels hard but where’s the (sharp) point?
The emptiness inside is also outside.
If that’s a sin then I don’t know what.
(He believes it was the leaves that made him sneeze).

– 1991

Tagalog for Tea

2011-12-08T00:04:00.001Z

When I came back to London from the Philippines, I got a job in the account’s department of an Estate Agent’s in Chelsea. Every morning at 9:30am the maid would come and serve us tea. Dressed in a traditional black and white maid’s uniform, she was a chirpy, chubby middle-aged Filipino woman who looked like she hated us all except once when I tried to thank her in Tagalog, then she burst out laughing and I went bright red. I think my accent was bad. You can tell a lot about people by how they take their tea. Workmen, labourers, plumbers, all manual workers, take two. Media people, contrary to popular belief, take none at all.
– 1999

Previously on Barnflakes:
Not for all the tea in China

Space Invaders Crossword Puzzle #1

2011-12-07T00:04:00.008Z

Have you been eating your Barnflakes every morning? Here's a Space Invaders crossword puzzle to test your knowledge of the past year's posts. Send your completed crosswords to me. First person with the correctly completed puzzle will win a copy of Pulp Poetry.

Across
1. Fifteenth letter of the alphabet (1)
2. Letter which best expresses sleep (1)
5. The country Bobby Fischer died in (7)
8. The opposite of them (2)
9. Brimless hat worn by men in the near east (3)
10. The dark, inaccessible part of our personality (2)
12. Bruce, American singer (11)
14. Writer of beat novel On the Road (7)
15. Printer's measurement (2)
16. Egyptian spiritual self (2)

Down
3. The Hammer couldn't be without it (2)
4. Indefinite article (2)
6. From the Danish, meaning 'play well' (4)
7. Effect which occurs in the respiration of barley (5)
8. A 2009 Disney/Pixar animated film (2)
11. Village in Mali (2)
12. Offensive, pejorative word for someone (3)
13. Meaning 'born as' (3)
14. Out for the count (2)

Please note: not all clues are referring to previous posts. Though some are. Also: not all intersecting words strictly make sense. Most do though.

Album cover: Tortoise's TNT

2011-12-06T00:02:00.001Z

Yesterday's post, Robert Frank's French first edition of The Americans, reminded me of the cover for Tortoise's 1998 album, TNT. In a similar vein to Saul Steinberg's sketch, the cover of TNT is a doodle made by one of the band members on the cover of a blank CD-R. Genius. Good album too.

Book Cover: Robert Frank's Les Americains

2011-12-05T00:02:00.003Z

Of all the different covers for Robert Frank's The Americans, this French first edition, published in 1958 when no American publisher would touch it with a barge pole, is by far my favourite. It's ironic or even perverse, perhaps, that a now-iconic book of photographs should have what looks like a sketch on graph paper for its front cover. But I love it. With the graph paper lines resembling a skyscraper and the people milling below like ants, it sums up the alienation which informs many of the photos within the book. The drawing was by cartoonist Saul Steinberg, most famous for his illustrations for the New Yorker magazine. Funnily enough, just a few years before, Henri Cartier-Bresson's almost-equally influential photobook, The Decisive Moment, was published in France as Images à la Sauvette (in 1952)… with a cover illustration by Henri Matisse.

As Martin Parr stresses in The Photobook: A History (Volume 1), the French edition of The Americans was a different book altogether to the American version produced in the States the following year. The French version was full of texts about America written by the likes of Steinbeck, Whitman, Miller, Faulkner and Simone de Beauvoir (making it almost look as if Frank's photos were simply illustrating the text) with a decidedly anti-American slant. The American version removed all the French text and put in Jack Kerouac's famous introduction. Nevertheless, Americans didn't get it, both the subject matter ('a degradation of a nation!') and technique ('meaningless blur, grain, muddy exposures, drunken horizons and general sloppiness'). Since then its reputation has soared, with The Americans now considered a masterpiece, and the most influential photobook ever.

According to AbeBooks, the French first edition is the most collectible photography book of all time. I now own two different versions, unfortunately not the first edition, which would cost in excess of £2000.

Previously on Barnflakes:
Robert Frank's Ridiculous Ratios
Random Film Review: Cocksucker Blues

Top 10 Travel Books

2011-12-04T00:02:00.004Z

1. The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin
2. A Dragon Apparent by Norman Lewis
3. The Great Railway Bazaar by Paul Theroux
4. The Road to Oxiana by Robert Byron
5. A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush by Eric Newby
6. A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor
7. Arabian Sands by Wilfred Thesiger
8. Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell
9. Bury Me Standing by Isabel Fonseca
10. Among the Russians by Colin Thubron

Also recommended: Their Heads are Green and Their Hands are Blue (or anything, really) by Paul Bowles; Voices of Marrakesh by Elias Canetti; Bound for Glory by Woody Guthrie; On the Road by Jack Kerouac; As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning by Laurie Lee; The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway; Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson; Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West; The Rings of Saturn by WG Sebald; Bitter Lemons of Cyprus by Lawrence Durrell; Venice by Jan Morris; An Area of Darkness by VS Naipaul; A Year in Marrakesh by Peter Mayne and Yoga for People who can't be Bothered to do it by Geoff Dyer.

Apologies: Bill Bryson fans. I'm not.

Previously on Barnflakes:
Top 5 Great Gay Travel Writers

Refractory

2011-12-03T00:04:00.000Z

Extracts from another (see here and here) abandoned 'novel', circa. 1994.

re-frac-to-ry adj

1 : resisting control or authority
2 a : resistant to treatment or cure
b : unresponsive to stimulus
c : IMMUNE, INSUSCEPTIBLE
3 : difficult to fuse, corrode, or draw out

He told me he remembers swimming in a flooded gold mine in Borneo during World War II. It still sounds like the most exciting thing I've ever heard.

Empty, sordid discussions in template, tepid surroundings. Used crates of Coca-Cola litter the huge warehouse. Pigeon shit and pigeons. A lot of dark wetness. A purpose-burst water pipe. A couple of torches, a couple of people. No batteries. Disused but used. Manuscripts for post-modern poets. Statues with sliced-off faces (then painted over). Two hermits not kermits. Concise, compressed people. Unable, though, to perform the tasks society asks them to. So they occasionally play blackjack but both pretend every card is a blackjack and can get away with it, as it’s so dark. They lie, though two out of fifty-two cards will indeed be blackjacks. In these instances they are not lying. They lie about twos, aces and others and the probability of lies is less still. These games are pointless or seem pointless. Hey, they pass the time. What they look like no one knows (no one knows about them). Not because of the darkness but who cares at all? They’re kept sane and the same. They get hot then cold then hot then cold just like everybody else. No teeth, though, too much Coke. OTT. Over dose. And it rots the lining of your stomach. Coca-Cola. Oh dear. No Coke left either, though they wouldn’t know that.

These lads haven’t been inside all their lives, of course. No, they did it by choice. And even if they have got into a slight rut at the moment, they’re still happy, but a different, hopeless, depressing kind of happiness. Hey, for all we know they want to do fuck all just so their lives will go slower, seem longer. They don’t have much conception or use for time which is kinda man-made. Then again so are playing cards. Time passes nicely.

There’s a constant supply of poisoned water trickling out from the burst water pipe. A step up from Coca-Cola anyway. They mostly eat raw pigeons and pigeon shit. Rats with wings. The pigeons get in, and if they’re lucky, out, through a small black hole at the top of the building in one of the corners. Their wings echo in the silence. They kill them by throwing up empty cans of Coke. Torn open so as to be sharp and dangerous. Yes, it’s a fairly unhealthy way of life. They smoke cigarettes too. Well, they can’t light them cos they have no light so it can’t be too unhealthy. They’ve had the same pack of ten Marlboros for two years. There’s still ten there. The filters are a touch soggy now, that’s all.

I love therefore I hate... The dark rain caresses, almost masturbates, the almost mutilated (in mind already), (the) thin, long, dead male body in the road or is it more natural in the countryside?

The cold abstract beauty of Le Samourai: 'I like it when you come round because you need me.' It was on TV at the time. Ha. 'I’ve never worn a moustache.' Precise and cold. Clinical. It’s how life is at the moment.

"What do you think about, Costello?"
"I never think." (Le Samourai, Jean-Pierre Melville, France, 1967)

Before, years before, Max and Ralph go back to Ralph’s house, after some magic mushrooms. Things different, off license a space station, floor moving, teenage girls are aliens, can’t walk properly, laughing like a hyena. This is just after he’s recycled all his magazines and his past, a quite scary and good feeling, feeling freer, naked, after he’s talked to her for over an hour on the phone. Shit, he wishes he knew where he is what he wants what he wants to do, to say. After an embarrassing party full of horrible embarrassing Australians – Trish the Dish being the centre piece. Max feels awkward, doesn’t know what to do, for the first time in a long time. After this, they’re home. They go into the living room where Ralph’s dad, David, has a woman on him, laughing, her hair and face in his lap, she tosses her head back as they come in (she’s quite oldish, orange long straight hair, but could well be Judy Davis from Naked Lunch). David, sitting there, watching TV, cat beside him, cup of tea, relaxed, chatting to Ralph and Max as if there was not a woman perched on his lap. Then, when Max leaves, lots and lots of insects on the outside walls of the house (it’s an alleyway) – two narrow white tall walls now with lights, a little passageway leading to main street. Gets home and doesn’t know who he is. He’s an alien. He watches TV. Ha.

Top and bottom are different, yet the same. The same because they are so different to the mid, the norm, the middle which is where most of us are. So they’re both so far apart from this mid, so unimaginable that they’re both similar in that respect.

You get a telephone call from a girl you like and who likes you. You’re about to go for a bike ride with someone else, you say. (It’s raining and muddy). Can she come over afterwards, she asks. You tell her she can, you’d like to see her. You phone her when you get back. You’re tired, muddy, cold and your legs are killing you, having not cycled for months. You feel refreshed, though. You wake her up, she fell asleep reading Wuthering Heights. She says she’s tired, drowsy, and she does sound like it, she sounds like her mother or a witch. Different, anyway. She needs an hour or so to wake up, she tells you, then she’ll be at your house. An hour or so later she phones you again to say she’s sorry, she’s still feeling tired and drowsy and won’t be coming over. She asks you over, it’s not that far, a short bus ride, but you lie and say you feel the same way (tired). A little while later you both fall asleep. When you wake up you wonder about the point of anything.

On the way home: A couple looking dead blue sitting down together as one, part of the same thing in a car as part of the car (a blue 1970s SAAB V6), in fact, which is also blue in a ghostly way. They were in the blue darkness, lonely and dead. Then: clichéd newspapers blowing in the wind but so dangerously and sharply, wrappingly, kinda like doves or birds in shape somehow. The moth leaves in the black trees. The mad drunk kicking the phone-box that you’re in, scared and silent. Show someone you love them by setting them free / And Molly being nice to me.

Max said something about if you can see someone’s face in your mind then you don't need to see them again because your memory of them is complete, there’s no mystery, no point in seeing them again. If the memory of the face has faded, you need to see them again, there’s a desire to, because something of her is missing from your mind and for a reason.

Life, around this time:
Max: 'What do you expect out of life?'
Ralph: 'Something I'm not expecting.'
He needs to add some life to his spice.

She's reading a book in a library, just casually flicking through the pages. A man's heavy footsteps approach her. She whispers to him: 'Come outside, I'm going to kill myself'. She walks out of the library and into a lift. A man in the lift with her tries to pull down her trousers (she's wearing trousers). She whispers to him: 'Don't do that, I'm too vulnerable'. The man asks: 'Ground?' DING – DOORS OPEN. She runs out of the lift and into a landscape of whistling reeds and rustling leaves. She runs through the leaves and jumps into the bath, splashing around in it.

EXT. NIGHT. RAIN.
She stands just outside the house, in the rain. But she has a blue and white polka dot umbrella. Only her eyes are not in shadow. It’s like a film noir. The light in her eyes is from the open door of the house where the man stands. He’s standing on the step and is quite tall, so she looks up at him and asks if he’s sad. He says he’s not, not really, the same as usual. She leaves, looking sad but beautiful with her umbrella. Later, he goes out without an umbrella, hole in one shoe, half to find her, half to find the girl in the phone box. He finds neither, so goes home.

Who to blame

2011-12-02T00:04:00.001Z

The way this world has panned out is only one possible outcome of billions. There are possibly parallel universes showing alternative versions of this earth. Sometimes I feel as if just one person has designed everything in this world (and his name's not God). Shops? Buildings? Cars? Roads? It often feels and looks so dull. I want to blame this one person, ask them what they were thinking. Why weren't we asked if we wanted things to turn out this way? Barbed wire, guns, estate agents, rat poison, uneven distribution of wealth, McDonald's, cigarettes, capitalism, reality TV. It all seems so unnecessary, so unfair.

But there's no one to blame. Councils, businesses, governments, no one wants to take responsibility. Apparently the onus is all on us, but we feel powerless, dishevelled, worn out. Maybe we're all to blame. Even the locker in my local swimming pool doesn't want to take responsibility for any loss or damages incurred. Everything is 'at your own risk'. Enter, swim, proceed, park at your own risk.

There was a Jorge Luis Borges character who wanted to create a world. So he made houses, provinces, rivers, valleys, tools, fish, lovers, then at the end of his life realises that this 'patient labyrinth is none other than his own portrait'. (For the life of me I can't find the original Borges' story; the above is a Jean Luc Godard quotation referring to the making of Pierrot Le Fou. Ah, to be a French intellectual, eh?)

Previously on Barnflakes:
Don't Blame us

Patrick Leigh Fermor, well met by moonlight

2011-12-01T00:02:00.006Z

Although I had an inkling that the travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor had something to do with the film Ill Met by Moonlight, I wasn't sure what, exactly. I assumed he had written it*. So I was somewhat surprised to find on the opening credits (above), Dirk Bogarde actually playing him.

And although there are many films about writers (see my top ten), it's rare to find a film about a writer which has nothing to do with them being a writer. Ill Met by Moonlight is one such film, concerning as it does the audacious yet true plan by two English officers to kidnap a German commander in German-occupied Crete in 1944. The two officers were Major Patrick Leigh Fermor and Captain William Stanley Moss, who wrote about the event in his book Ill Met by Moonlight, published in 1950. Their mission – parachuting into Crete, kidnapping Heinrich Kreipe, Commander of the 22nd Air Landing Infantry Division, taking his car and driving him through 22 manned checkpoints, abandoning the car, being pursued on foot by German soldiers across countryside and mountains, and finally escaping via boat to Egypt – was, amazingly, a success.

The film, adapted from Moss's book, was one of the last films to be made by the director/producer team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. Unfortunately it's a rather pedestrian affair, with lots of stiff upper lips, enlivened slightly by some sumptuous outdoor photography (actually of the Alps, not Crete) and rousing music. Powell and Pressburger's extraordinary series of films, including 49th Parallel, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, A Canterbury Tale, I Know Where I'm Going!, A Matter of Life and Death, Black Narcissus, The Red Shoes and The Tales of Hoffman, all made between 1941-1951, would be in decline by the time of Ill Met by Moonlight, 1957. Just around the corner for Michael Powell was Peeping Tom (1960), the film which effectively sealed the end of his film career, certainly in the UK.

With the passing of Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor, DSO, OBE, in June this year, aged 96, gone is a certain type of English adventurer and gentleman, which stretches back to Lord Byron and includes travel writers such as Wilfred Thesiger and Robert Byron (amazingly, Byron was only ten years older than Fermor, yet seems to belong to another epoch. However, I didn't realise he died so young: he was only 35**). A BBC journalist famously described Leigh Fermor as a 'cross between Indiana Jones, James Bond*** and Graham Greene'.

Though Leigh Fermor's travelling started when he was eighteen, having decided to walk from the Hook of Holland to Istanbul, he wouldn't write about these formative travel years until many years later. A Time of Gifts, first published in 1977, details the first leg of his walk across Europe in 1933, a fascinating time with the continent on the brink of changing forever.

Leigh Fermor's prose is remarkably descriptive and florid, his flights of imagination immense, his references – to architecture, languages, literature, art, customs, geography, culture, history – enlightening and often baffling. It's the sort of book that quotes Latin without any translation. A Time of Gifts is a 284 page book which took me months to finish. I struggled with every single sentence. But it was worth it (I think).

The book is praised by most but has its detractors. Leigh Fermor lost some of his diaries written at the time of the voyage, so critics have pointed out that his remembering the amount of detail in the book over forty years later is extremely improbable. Yet to take the book at face value is perhaps a mistake. As his Telegraph obituary mentions, the book is 'a brilliantly sustained evocation of youthful exhilaration and joy, and perhaps the nearest equivalent in English to Alain-Fournier's masterpiece of nostalgia, Le Grand Meaulnes.'

Leigh Fermor arrived in Istanbul in 1935, then travelled around Greece. He joined the army and fought in Crete and Greece. In Crete he lived for over two years disguised as a shepherd in the mountains, before planning the abduction of General Kreipe. He wrote his first travel book in 1950 and spent much of his life in Greece. He married but had no children.

*He did write one screenplay, based on a novel: The Roots of Heaven (1958), an adventure yarn directed by John Huston and starring Errol Flynn, Trevor Howard and Orson Welles.
**Travel writers seem to die very young… or very old. Bruce Chatwin, who had his ashes scattered near Leigh Fermor's home in Greece, died of AIDS aged 49; whereas Thesiger was 93, Eric Newby was 86 and Rebecca West, 90.
***Leigh Fermor was in fact a close friend of Ian Fleming.

Portland & Austin: tales of two cities

2011-11-30T00:05:00.003Z

We can never fully imagine a place until we've actually been there and felt it, smelt it. The body needs to smell the coffee, feel the air, the pavement beneath the feet. Reading about a place, hearing about it, seeing photos or videos of it; it doesn't matter – they're all subjective accounts; there's no such thing as armchair travelling – it has to be done in person.

We all have different ideas of what a place will be like before we've been there. I remember Rachel imagining Bangkok to be all wooden shacks (which it wasn't); I imagined New Orleans to be the same – and it was, mostly. Likewise, cities such as San Fransisco, Ho Chi Minh and Jakarta conjured up preconceived ideas before I actually visited them. Once I got there, most of my preconceived ideas went out the window. In a good way.

Portland, Oregon and Austin, Texas are two such places I haven't been to but my mind has built them up as semi-mythical cities; liberal, progressive, creative and pleasant to ride a bike in. I know people in both cities; hopefully they'll put me up for a few nights and I'll find out. Both cities are as deeply steeped in myth and mystery (for me) as, say, Damascus and Bethlehem.

The main thing about both towns is they're just so cool. My Own Private Idaho was shot in Portland, and Old Joy, starring Will Oldham, ends there, after a weekend camping in the near-by Cascade mountain range. Steve Jobs quit Reed college, Portland, after a term, but it didn't seem to affect him adversely. Harry Smith, Lance Bangs, Mel Blanc, Matt Greoning, Elliott Smith, Courtney Love, Stephen Malkmus and Gus Van Sant were all born (or live/d) there.

Chuck Palahniuk, writer of Fight Club and resident of Portland, wrote a quirky guide to the city, Fugitives and Refugees: A Walk in Portland, Oregon in 2003. The title comes from Katherine Dunn, author of cult novel Geek Love, who calls Portland the home of America's 'Fugitives and refugees'. No ordinary travel guide, Fugitives and Refugees tells you the location of Palahniuk's tonsils (in a bush) before delving into 'strange personal museums, weird annual events, ghost stories and sex clubs'.

Beth Ditto (of Gossip), waxes lyrically about the city in The Guardian way back in 2007, calling it 'The friendliest big little city in America'. She cites its cheapness, temperate climate, creativity, abundance of thrift stores and 'its amazing music scene – Elliott Smith, Sleater-Kinney, the Dandy Warhols and the Shins have all been based in Portland'. I really think she should lay off those waffles, though.

'Keep Portland Weird' is a local bumper sticker slogan, based on the 'Keep Austin Weird' slogan, both of which are intended to promote local businesses and keep the cities individual.

Austin, Texas is the self-proclaimed live music capital of the world. I first remember seeing the place in Richard Linklater's movies Slacker (1991) and a few years later, Dazed and Confused (1993). The city has loads of film and music venues and festivals (such as SXSW). Cool famous people who have lived there include Wes Anderson, Terence Malick, Daniel Johnston and Mike Judge. Uncool famous people who have lived there include Owen Wilson, Sandra Bullock, Matthew McConaughey and Stevie Ray Vaughan.

Austin is home to the largest urban bat colony in the world, who live under a bridge. Cult Brit writer Iain Sinclair sold his literary archive, forty years worth of shopping lists, notebooks and dead insects, to the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center in Austin.

What makes both cities cool is they're not really big tourist destinations, there's no must-see attractions (except the bats). The best things to do in them, from what I gather, is hang out, walk around, listen to music, buy some books and records. The perfect things to do in a city.

Infographic of my music collection

2011-11-29T00:05:00.002Z

Do you find the above: Confusing? Ugly? Pointless? Yes, yes and yes? Oh good, then check out The Guardian article about the backlash against infographics.

Animal Architecture: London Zoo's Penguin Pool

2011-11-28T00:01:00.003Z

Just as the residents of many listed council estates in England are probably unaware they're living in architecturally significant buildings, so the penguins of London Zoo's Grade I listed, Berthold Lubetkin-designed Penguin Pool were probably also oblivious to the importance of their modernist habitation.

Though the penguins haven't lived in Lubetkin's creation since 2004, it's doubtful they've given it much thought or missed it since. Especially as earlier this year they moved into the new Penguin Beach, four times the size (making it England's biggest penguin pool) of their last home and a lot more pleasant all round. The penguins certainly seem a lot happier.

The Lubetkin Penguin Pool (built in 1934) is a key modernist structure, being one of the first made using the then-new material reinforced concrete. But Lubetkin, like many architects, whether designing for penguins or people, seems completely oblivious to what it means to actually live in one of their structures. His Penguin Pool seems a sterile and soulless environment for both penguins and visitors, having to look down on the penguins over a wall. Penguin Beach, by contrast, has underwater viewing areas where visitors can watch penguins swim at eye level, or platforms for watching them from above.

After the penguins moved out of Lubetkin's pool, it did retain a water feature. This now seems to have gone and the pool looks a bit dilapidated. Sad but typical of how we look after our listed buildings. I'm not a huge lover of nature (or zoos) but do like a lot of the older buildings at London Zoo, many of which were designed by prominent architects. The zoo holds two Grade I and eight Grade II listed structures. If the animals could speak, I'm sure they wouldn't share my architectural enthusiasms: not many of them look very happy.

Warminster folk

2011-11-27T00:06:00.003Z

Welcome to Warminster

It's tempting coming from a cosmopolitan city to look down on country folk as being simple, narrow-minded, boring and lacking culture (except skittles) and sophistication. But I do feel bad being so harsh on Warminster, Wiltshire (like here and here); okay, so it does consist of the elderly, the disabled, the moronic and the terminally dull, but there are still some good people there. Some of them exude a quiet dignity, grace and contentment you don't often see in the city. In other words, they seem happy. They like to tell a funny tale (usually the same one multiple times), and are warm, giving and entirely unpretentious.

Take Arthur. Of gypsy stock, he was literally born in a circus tent some seventy-six years ago. His parents were gypsies and it's said his pregnant mother was actually dancing before she gave birth to him. And when she did it was on a bed of hay. Then she continued dancing. People were tougher back then.

Arthur's had a colourful life. He was a semi-professional football player and was offered a professional position at Crystal Palace but Arthur's wife, Maureen, didn't want to leave Warminster. 'It's always the women who hold us back' (we joked, some time ago). Arthur married Maureen – whose parents had sawdust on the floor of their home – in his early twenties. Since the football he's had a variety of (mainly menial) jobs: driving trucks for the nearby M.O.D; unpacking bananas in supermarkets; working in local factories. He used to swim across Shearwater lake every day, before and after work. Arthur's also been a singer and actor, and still sings and acts, when they let him, for the local theatre. Even in his seventies, a head full of bright white hair, he keeps busy, as a pheasant beater and still doing some driving. Over the years Arthur has seen UFOs, aliens, ghosts and a huge green man straddling a road as he drove between his legs. He's never been abroad and didn't have a passport until a couple of years ago. It's his ambition to go to the States, 'where the cowboys are'. But he can't find anybody to go with.

One of Arthur's favourite stories is about the deadly, tropical spiders that used to be found in the banana boxes when he worked in the supermarket unpacking them. One night in bed he was woken by a noise on the floor in his bedroom: a spider had got in (from his coat?) and was creeping across the carpet. He got up, threw a blanket over it and stamped on it. A variation on the story involved a friend of Arthur's who stuttered. The two men were in Arthur's home and the man with the stutter pointed to a spider on the floor and wasn't quite able to get the words out: 'T-t-t-t-here's a sp-sp-sp-sp-spider o-o-on the f-f-f-f-floor!' I have heard Arthur's spider stories more times than I have met him.

One of his best and oldest friends is Tom. They still play skittles together sometimes. Tom walks like John Wayne with his bow legs. His wife, who actually can't feel her own legs (but apparently walks fine), wants Tom out of the house all day, every day, so he amuses himself by doing odd jobs like removals.

The man who walks around town singing was in a car accident some years ago and has lost much of his memory. Though he seems loopy wandering around singing, whenever I visit Warminster I find his voice reassuring and soothing. I've overheard him talking to people in shops and he seems surprisingly lucid, talking about his daughters and local matters, so I'm not sure exactly what's wrong with him. He's certainly got a good voice.

Small towns have more than their fair share of gossip, intrigue and scandal. Sometimes the locals are a bit too desperate for gossip. We were alerted recently to a rumour about Jane Silbury, old school friend and mother of three, having a nervous breakdown and seen 'wearing strange clothes and talking nonsense' – but it was a false alarm: she's been wearing strange clothes and talking nonsense most of her life.

At my ex-partner's secondary school, Kingdown, back in the mid-1980s, 50-year-old Heather Arnold, head of maths, became obsessed with fellow maths teacher Paul Sutcliffe, 39. In a fit of jealousy, she butchered his wife Jeanne and their eight-month-old daughter Heidi with an axe at their home in Westbury. The next morning she taught her classes as usual, before going on the run and eventually being caught by police. On her way into court in 1987, some 150 people jeered Arnold and threw 'oranges, dog food and coins' at her. The slightly-built and grey-haired woman broke down in court when she was handed a double life sentence. (She has now apparently been released.)

Kingdown school has now cleaned up its act but in the 1980s and 90s it didn't have a lot of luck with its teachers. Besides the maths teacher being a murderer, two other teachers, Mr Lucas and Mr Kirby, were probable paedophiles (Lucas certainly was; Kirby had an affair with a student and used to talk about sex all the time).

There have been several other grisly murders in recent memory which really affect small towns like Warminster or nearby Westbury (or Hungerford – not that far away – the sleepy, pretty, Berkshire town will forever be known as the place where Michael Ryan killed sixteen people with rifles and a pistol in a Rambo-style massacre in 1987), including the death of Billy the homeless man. Billy lost his job, home and wife, eventually becoming a homeless alcoholic. One night, after getting into an argument with another homeless (and mentally ill) man, he was brutally beaten to death. Another homeless man, Rory, was a brilliant mathematician who looked like a big bird and was usually to be found perched on railings or in the cricket pavilion in the park. He couldn't take normal life; he was a tragic character and just faded away and died.

Former soldier Miles Evans murdered his nine-year-old stepdaughter, Zoe, in 1997. Her disappearance sparked what was then the biggest ever police search for a missing person. Zoe's body was eventually found in a badger sett near her Warminster home.

There has also recently been a spate of middle-aged (or older) men hanging themselves in the area. This sometimes happens in places where there's not much to do. When people retire (or get made redundant or get divorced) they have even less to do. It's no accident that Warminster's premiere website, Warminster Web, has the phone number of the Samaritans directly above its masthead.

Names have been changed – except for the murderers and paedophiles.

Notes on Beth Gibbons & PJ Harvey

2011-11-26T00:05:00.003Z

Beth was born in 1965, Polly Jean in 1969; both were raised on farms in Devon and Dorset, respectively; two counties that border each other in the west country of England. Beth Gibbons is lead singer and writer with the band Portishead; she's also recorded an album, Out of Season, with ex-Talk Talk bassist Paul 'Rustin' Man' Webb. In total she's recorded five albums in twenty years (and that's including a live album). PJ Harvey has recorded ten in the same amount of time. Both make popular yet dark, depressing music, some might say. Unlike many British musicians, they didn't go to London to pursue their dreams but stayed put to lead their bucolic existences. Both seem shy, withdrawn, and don't go out much, or do a lot of interviews (though Harvey has done a lot more than Gibbons). Whilst PJ is at least a little odd, Beth seems pretty down to earth, almost one of the girls, and most of the time lives a normal life, until having to perform with Portishead reminds her she's sort of famous. PJ, we imagine, lives the artistic life to the full, sitting in her cottage all day picking at her autoharp. Neither are conventionally beautiful yet exude sensuality and dark passions. Seeing them live only confirmed my suspicion that they are both national treasures and goddesses.

The Films of Dario Argento

2011-11-25T00:05:00.003Z

One hell of a headache... Suspiria

In terms of thematic consistency it's said that all great directors remake the same film over and over. And then there's Dario Argento, who seems to quite literally make the same film over and over again.

The Italian horror maestro started his career as a film critic whilst still at school, then became a screenwriter, most noticeably on Leone's Once Upon in the West (1968). Soon after he directed his first feature, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970), which perhaps owes a debt to Leone for some of its compositions and close ups; also, perhaps, for its music as Leone regular Ennio Morricone supplies the soundtrack, as he would for the next two Argento features, Cat O'Nine Tails and Four Flies on Grey Velvet. Nevertheless, Argento, aided by ace cinematographer Vittorio Storaro (who would go on to work closely with Bertolucci and Coppola), makes the film all his own and it includes what would soon become his trademarks: spectacular, stylised set pieces, misogynist ultra violence, lavish camerawork, bold use of colour and great music, courtesy either of Morricone or the Goblins (who had composed music for George Romero). These elements would reach their peak in such films as Deep Red (1975) and Suspiria (1977), where he dared to go where Hitchcock only dreamt about going.

But, still, it's hard to know exactly where one stands with Argento. On the one hand, I picked up so-called classic DVDs of his in Poundland for – yup – £1 each, where they look like budget exploitation flicks, and indeed I usually think of Argento as a misogynist sleaze merchant. But on the other hand, his work is seriously debated on the blogosphere as high art, and recently many of his films have appeared on Blu-Ray with Suspiria being praised as a semi-surreal masterpiece (though his more recent films aren't received as well).

But I've always felt, with their preposterous plots (where I guess who the murderer is within minutes – it's usually the most unlikely candidate), hammy acting and dodgy dubbing, all we really need to see of Argento's films is the edited highlights – the glorious, gory set pieces – a sort of best of Dario Argento (which you can probably find on YouTube). After all, most bands and singers have a Greatest Hits, so why not filmmakers?

Psycho killer, qu'est-ce que c'est?

Argento himself is quite a weird and creepy-looking guy. There's a funny piece of footage on the extras section of the Poundland DVD of Cat O'Nine Tails. Argento and Tim Burton are being filmed at Argento's geeky horror/sci-fi memorabilia shop and museum in Rome. But whereas Burton is all smiles and autograph signing, Argento is retiring and awkward, looking like a serial killer. Bless. In fact, for such a strange looking man, it's amazing he's fathered such a foxy (in a creepy kind of way) daughter, Asia Argento.

Four funerals and a wedding

2011-11-24T00:05:00.000Z

People like to divide the world up into two types of people: the rich and the poor, say, or the beautiful and the ugly, the have and the have nots, the givers and the takers. One of my own is those who can talk well and those who can write well (those who can do both well are exceptional). My other is those who get invited to weddings, and those who get invited to funerals. I'm strictly funerals; indeed, in the space of a year I have been invited to one wedding and four funerals.

Top 10 Australian Bands

2011-11-23T00:05:00.000Z

1. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
2. AC/DC
3. The Triffids
4. The Birthday Party
5. The Avalanches
6. The Go-Betweens
7. Cut Copy
8. Cold Chisel
9. Midnight Oil
10. Wolfmother

Do say: Couldn't give a XXXX
Don't say: Where's Crowded House, Jet, Silverchair and INXS?

Notes on fashion

2011-11-22T00:05:00.001Z

Like history, soap operas and, well, virtually everything, the story of fashion is a circular one. But also a tricky one. The actual amount of people indulging in 'pure fashion' in any one period is very slight. When we think of the 1960s we think of flower power, free love, drugs, bell bottoms, Mary Quant and psychedelic tie dye clothing as if everyone in the western world were indulging in such practices. In fact, it was only forty-seven people on a sunny afternoon in Carnaby Street in August 1967. Everyone else was going about their business, wearing old-fashioned suits and flat caps. In fact, take any so-called fashion epoch and the same thing occurs: only a handful of people are indulging in the fashion of the day, and these are the ones who get picked up by the media and photographed (in the postmodern 1980s was everyone wearing either shoulder-padded suits or acid-house 'smiley' T-shirts? Er, perhaps? No. The answer's no). Or, in the old days, the fashionable were the rich, powerful, religious or royal who could afford to have their portrait painted. In 16th century Renaissance Italy we think of everyone wearing flowing robes and capes, but this was only the important people likely to be painted. Most common people were actually walking around in jeans and T-shirts.

On the buses

2011-11-21T00:05:00.000Z

The bus chugged away towards Walthamstow tube station for a while then conked out and came to a standstill. Unable to get any response from the driver, we patiently waited. And waited. Most passengers got off, including the pretty woman who had sat next to me. I was tired, so I stayed put. The bus was almost empty now, then suddenly revved up and was back in action. Some people piled back on to the bus, others went for the one behind. The same pretty woman came back upstairs and sat back down next to me again like a new formed habit. My mind drifted, briefly, and I imagined she and I were a couple, living in a flat in Walthamstow, on our way to work like we'd done so many times before. There was no need for conversation, we were tired anyway, yet content sitting next to each other staring into space. She gets off, suddenly, without so much as a goodbye. But that's okay, she wasn't really my type, rather prim and dressed in a business suit. What I mean is, I wasn't her type.

Top 10 films about film-making

2011-11-20T00:05:00.002Z

1. Day for Night (Truffaut, 1973)
2. 8 1/2 (Fellini, 1963)
3. The Player (Altman, 1992)
4. Mulholland Drive (Lynch, 2001)
5. The State of Things (Wenders, 1982)
6. Peeping Tom (Powell, 1960)
7. White Hunter Black Heart (Eastwood, 1990)
8. Strangers Kiss (Chapman, 1983)
9. Shadow of a Vampire (Merhige, 2000)
10. Living in Oblivion (DiCillo, 1995)

See also: Man Bites Dog, Last Tango in Paris, Son of Rambow, Passion

London through its charity shops #16: Wood Street, E17

2011-11-19T00:05:00.003Z

Wood Street in Waltham Forest is rather rundown in a nice way, but at first glance, with its fried chicken joints and budget mobile phone shops, perhaps unappealing, but spend some time there and its charms reveal themselves. For a start, it's nice to see a High Street (of sorts) with no boring chain shops.

There are two charity shops. New Life charity shop is cheap and tatty with loads of clothes and bric-a-brac, as well as a fair amount of books and CDs. FEI Education & Cultural Trust charity shop is quite small so half its stock is outside, such as boxes of records (pictured, above right). Inside are a few books, CDs, lots of clothes, including some colourful Indian dresses, one of which my boon companion bought for £4. My barngain of the day: Wild Beasts – Smother, CD as new, £1.

Wood Street also has a charming, if smelly, Antique City Market and Collectors Centre (above left) with lots of interesting stalls and little shops selling records, books, bric-a-brac and tat. Further along the road is a cool Australian-like wooden shack called Second Nature, selling Organic and Wholefoods.

The word plaza is a Spanish word, consisting of an open urban space with a cathedral, administrative centre and law court. Wood Street's recently-built 'plaza' will probably never get confused with one in Spain, consisting as it does of a concrete wasteland and five blocks spelling the word PLAZA (otherwise you wouldn't know it was one). Though it lacks the three Spanish architectural ingredients, it does have three of its own: a monstrous tower block, a post office and an Co-op.

Just off Wood Street is the fascinating Gods Own Junk Yard, an amazing collection of 'New & used neon fantasies, salvaged signs, vintage neons, old movie props and retro displays'. Most recently featured in October's Vogue magazine, above. The owners run their own sign-making business over the road, and will open the Junk Yard up if you ask them. The signs have been collected from films including Batman, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Eyes Wide Shut.

Joseph Cornell: Worlds in a Box

2011-11-18T00:05:00.001Z

Unable to get to sleep late last night, I pulled off the bookshelf a book of Joseph Cornell's selected diaries, letters and files (called Theater of the Mind). It was just the thing to send me off to sleep, Cornell's diary entries alternating between the list-like and dreamlike.

Joseph Cornell (1903-1972) made collages and films but is most famous for his exquisite wooden boxes made from every day objects he found and collected. His assemblages have a mysterious, surreal, dreamlike quality with their surprising juxtaposition of objects. They often contain worlds he would never see: of international travel, hotels, flight, European art, theatre and glamour. Joseph Cornell remained strictly on the ground. He lived in the splendidly (and aptly) named Utopia Parkway in Flushing, New York, with his mother and disabled brother his entire life, and remained there when he outlived them both.

Entirely self-taught and somewhat reclusive, spending his days scouring secondhand bookshops, junk shops and flea markets, Cornell had all the makings of an outsider artist. But towards the end of his career he became quite well-known, meeting artists including Yoko Ono and Andy Warhol, writers like Susan Sontag and filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage and Larry Jordan, all of whom embraced his work. Of course, fame didn't affect him at all, except he was able to hire assistants (usually young women).

(Like my theory that all lonely, strange, perverted men could be cured of their woes by the love of a good woman…. all outsider artists could be cured by hanging out with famous artists – which perhaps saved Cornell from total obscurity.)

His short films, too, are like extensions of his boxes and collages: self-contained, dreamlike worlds and found objects. His most popular film, Rose Hobart, 1936, comprises almost entirely of re-edited footage from a B movie in which the actress Rose Hobart starred and Cornell was obsessed with. In Cornell's hands it almost accidentally becomes an experimental, surreal, dreamlike experience. Later, with the help of Brakage, Jordan and Rudy Burckhardt, he shot his own material, usually filmed in parks around New York City and featuring birds and/or young women, such as The Aviary (1955) and the lyrical Nymphlight (1957), both of which now look like direct influences on my Pigeons are People (1993) video.

After his mother and brother died, Cornell produced less work and became more lonely and reclusive. He died, alone, a few days after his sixty-ninth birthday.

John Carpenter & Kurt Russell

2011-11-17T00:05:00.003Z

Russell and Carpenter on the set of Big Trouble in Little China, 1986.

Sure, there's Ford and Wayne, Scorsese and DeNiro, Hitchcock and Grant/Stewart, Herzog and Kinski, Burton and Depp but least we forget John Carpenter's string of great films made with Kurt Russell: Elvis (1979), Escape from New York (1981), The Thing (1982), Big Trouble in Little China (1986) and, er, Escape from LA (1996; unfortunately a pointless remake of his earlier classic). With the exception of Elvis in 1979, a made-for-TV movie (Carpenter had just finished Halloween and wanted to try a non-horror genre; it's actually pretty good), their subsequent films together cast Russell as a tough (yet flawed), cocky, wise-cracking anti-hero. Best seen wearing an eye patch.

John Carpenter has only made one film since 2001's poorly-received Ghosts of Mars (though I loved it) and that's this year's poorly-received The Ward (I hadn't heard of it until like ten minutes ago). And Kurt Russell's not been in a good film since, er, Stargate (1994)? Overboard (1987; hilarious)? It surely must be time for a reunion. Au contraire, reckons Carpenter in a recent interview:

'[Kurt Russell's] so rich, he doesn't need to work with me anymore. He has a vineyard, he has a bottle of wine that he sells. Kurt's an entrepreneur, he doesn't need to work with me again. But it would be fun to work with him again.'

What about a follow up to Big Trouble in Little China? 'Kurt Doesn't want to do it, he's embarrassed by the failure of that movie.'

What about the embarrassment of every movie he's been in since then? Huh? I loved Big Trouble in Little China. It sort of successfully transported my favourite genre(s) – the Hong Kong Kung Fu Comedy Horror Film – to Hollywood. And it had Kurt Russell in it.

Previously on Barnflakes:
The Tedium is the Message mentions a curious, little-known Kurt Russell fact.

Face, Off

2011-11-16T00:05:00.006Z

Mirror, mirror... Eyes Without A Face, Face of Another and Seconds

With its themes of identity, change, disfigurement, beauty, appearance and superficiality, films about plastic surgery (and obviously, Hollywood is a place where every actor has it done) can make for visual, complex and captivating cinema which explores both the physical and psychological aspects of the process.

Even before plastic surgery was commonplace, films were made about the subject. The Raven from 1935 stars Karloff and Lugosi in an adaptation of Poe's poem. The Face Behind the Mask (1941) stars Peter Lorre as a man facially deformed in an accident who eventually saves up enough money to have a realistic mask created for himself. Dark Passage, 1947, starts Bogart and Bacall. More recently there's been Cronenberg's Rabid (1977) and John Woo's Face/Off (1997). And if we are to take the etymology of plastic surgery from its Greek origins, meaning 'the art of modelling malleable flesh', then there's the revolting Human Centipede films.

Pedro Almodovar's latest film, The Skin I Live In, features Antonio Banderas as a plastic surgeon. Its poster is reminiscent of Georges Franju's Eyes Without a Face (Les Yeux Sans Visage), made in 1960. At a time when most films were shot in colour, Franju's French masterpiece was made in black and white (as both Hitchcock's Psycho and Wilder's The Apartment were also, in the same year). An unsettling, horrific, yet often poetical and surreal film, Eyes Without a Face concerns a doctor attempting to reconstruct his daughter Christiane's (Edith Scob) disfigured face. He does this by kidnapping young, beautiful women and grafting their skin onto his daughter's. Gross-out scenes include a graphic depiction of a woman having her face removed; poetical scenes include Christiane walking silently around her empty house wearing her blank ghostlike mask, as she does for much of the film. And the justly famous, final shot of Christiane walking away from the house, releasing her father's dogs with the freed white doves flying around her.

Two more notable black and white plastic surgery films from the 1960s are Face of Another (Tanin No Kao) and Seconds, both made in 1966.

Face of Another pairs writer Kobo Abe and director Hiroshi Teshigahara together once again, after they made the extraordinary Woman of the Dunes several years previously. It features a Japanese businessman who receives a lifelike mask after being facially scarred in a fire. The mask gradually changes the man's personality and his wife eventually leaves him.

On paper, Seconds looked like it was going to be a great success. Directed by John Frankenheimer (Birdman of Alcatraz, The Manchurian Candidate), photographed by James Wong Howe (Sweet Smell of Success) and starring Rock Hudson, it flopped during its initial release but has since become a cult film. The opening credits (created by Saul Bass, who also designed the – unused – poster, above right) give an indication of what's to come, with a human eye filmed in close-up by a distorted lens (looking like Repulsion's title sequence for a second) to give an unsettling, paranoid feel. The film has the bored, frustrated and middle-aged businessman Arthur Hamilton contacted by a mysterious agency, 'The company', to create a new identity for him. This involves faking the death of his old self and with the help of plastic surgery, giving him a new one, in the form of Tony Wilson, played by Rock Hudson. Wilson tries to adapt to his life as a handsome artist on Malibu beach, a life not all that bad really, but finds something lacking and feels an emptiness inside.

Eyes Without A Face, Face of Another and Seconds form a trilogy of sorts. All are highly stylised, filmed in stark black and white and often alternatively beautiful and frightening. All are thematically rich, exploring ideas about identity, society and image. All have depressing endings. As a general rule, films about plastic surgery tend not to end happily.

Notes on Vincent Gallo

2011-11-15T00:05:00.006Z

I don't spend much time thinking about Vincent Gallo (b. 1961), and when I see him in a good film, such as this year's Essential Killing (which is essential viewing), where in a starring role he doesn't have a word of dialogue, I can even briefly forget about what a jerk and egomaniac he is. But then I saw his website. It's hard to know whether to take him seriously or not. It's obvious he takes himself very seriously indeed.

I'm still not exactly sure what he's famous for (or what he should be famous for). Sure, he's been a model for Calvin Klein. For a while he was a painter. He's been in a few unknown bands; one of which, Gray, was with a then-unknown Jean Michel Basquiat. Since then he's released some albums, mainly of film music – alarmingly, I find myself owning one of them: Recordings of Music for Film; actually fairly pleasant if monotonous tinkerings. In the extensive, amusingly candid liner notes ('the chubby film student girl paid me $15 to fuck her, clean her apartment, and do the music for her'), as well as consisting of much blagging and slagging off, it mentions that by 1983 he owned 5,000 records, which, if true, is possibly the most impressive fact about Vincent Gallo I've ever read. He is currently in a band called RRIICCEE.

He's been the director of three films, one a near masterpiece, Buffalo 66; one a disaster, Brown Bunny, and one presumably so bad he's decided to shelve it (Promises Written in Water, 2010), along with, apparently, every film he makes from now on. He's also an actor (Goodfellas, Arizona Dream, Palookaville, Coppola's Tetro a few years ago). But even after this impressive and interesting resume, I still think he's most famous for being a narcissistic, weird, offensive*, outspoken jerk. And then there's his website, 'for Vincent Gallo by Vincent Gallo'. Looking like it was designed in the late 1990s, it's mainly pretty standard, consisting of an extensive CV of his acting, directing, music, artwork, writing and photography credits.

Then there's the merchandising section, where you can seemingly buy everything he owns (at a price), from a 'Good Brown Hat', signed, $750 (sold out) to, er, his sperm, for $1,000,000. If, ladies, a million bucks is out of your price range (and assuming you find Gallo irresistible – not everybody does, it seems), for a mere $50,000 you can book an evening or weekend with the man to fulfil your 'wish, dream or fantasy'. Other artifacts range from a childhood bedspread – 'only one available' – still available for $3,120 to a 'spectacular' signed photo from the set of 'his masterpiece' Buffalo 66 for $1,575. And T-shirts, wallets, gloves, helmets, purses, girls skirts, books, paintings, tables, drumsticks, an inflatable Charles Manson… all signed by Gallo. And worryingly, mostly sold out. Or so it says.

The classified section of his website is almost even more bizarre, consisting of his want lists: mainly old Western Electric hi-fi equipment, microphones and guitars. From the liner notes of Recordings of Music for Film I guessed he was pretty into his recording equipment by the way he geekily listed each item he owned: 'a Western Electric 91A amplifier, a Marantz Model 1 and a Western Electric 757 speaker… a Garrard 301 turntable with an Ortofon arm and cartridge'.

Cool or fool, geek or freak? All and more, more or less. Maybe he's lonely. But his ego is that far ahead of his talent that he reminds me of M. Night Shyamalan.

Why Vincent Gallo? is a blog that unfortunately doesn't answer its own question.

*When critic Roger Ebert called The Brown Bunny the worst film in the history of Cannes, Gallo responded by calling him a 'fat pig with the physique of a slave trader'. Gallo then apparently cursed Ebert with cancer, which, er, Ebert actually now has.

My daughter's (aged 5) top twenty films

2011-11-14T00:01:00.001Z

1. Grease (Kleiser, 1978)
2. Return of the Jedi (Marquand, 1983)
3. Sleeping Beauty (Geronimi, 1959)
4. The Fox and the Hound (Berman, 1981)
5. Clash of the Titans (Davis, 1981)
6. The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (Hessler, 1974)
7. Pocahontas (Gabriel, 1995)
8. Tarzan (Buck, 1999)
9. Tangled (Greno, 2010)
10. Peter Pan (Geronimi, 1953)
11. The Railway Children (Jeffries, 1970)
12. Tinkerbell and the Great Fairy Rescue (Raymond, 2010)
13. Bambi (Hand, 1942)
14. Mary Poppins (Stevenson, 1964)
15. Bedknobs and Broomsticks (Stevenson, 1971)
16. Aladdin (Clements, 1992)
17. Pirates of the Caribbean (Verbinski, 2003)
18. The Aristocats (Reitherman, 1970)
19. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (Hughes, 1968)
20. Star Wars (Lucas, 1977)

I last did a similar list a couple of years ago, when my daughter was three. There I mentioned getting her to watch Jan Svankmajer's version of Alice in Wonderland by the time she's four. Well, it took me a year later, and though it's not on the list, she did love watching it, aged five. Really, though, I don't know how half this stuff gets on her list. Grease? Star Wars? Pirates of the Caribbean? And only three films from the last decade? I'd have a word with her mother.

Previously on Barnflakes:
My daughter's (aged 3) top ten films
Chapman or Chapman (mentions in passing my daughter's film watching habits)

Australia first country to ban cigarette branding

2011-11-13T00:01:00.001Z

If all goes according to plan, from December next year Australia will be the first country in the world to have cigarettes appear in plain packaging. The logo-free packets will feature horror movie-style photos of toothless and blind people with slogans like such as 'Smoking Causes Blindness' (really? does it? I thought masturbation did. Do they mean smoke can get in your eyes? Alcohol seems more likely to cause blindness (blind drunk?). In fact, I know of someone who did temporarily go blind after drinking too much. Anyway, the man in the photo looks like he can actually see, or if he can't it's because there's a pair of forceps pulling his eyeballs out).

Australians are a funny bunch. I used to work with lots of them. One in particular always used to correct me whenever I used a 'branded' word instead of a generic one. So when I said 'Pritt Stick', she'd correct me and say 'glue stick'; when I said 'Biro' she'd say 'disposable ink pen'; when I said 'Hoover', she'd say 'vacuum cleaner'. I'm not kidding; this is what she did. Every day. Was she taking the piss? I've no idea, but she was adamant that all Australians use generic names for things rather than branded names, even/especially when they're household names, like Biro or Hoover. I have no idea if this says anything about the Australian character. Or if it has anything to do with the no logo cigarettes.

William Gibson's 2003 novel Pattern Recognition features a marketing consultant called Cayce Pollard whose hypersensitivity to corporate logos and brands makes her a valued commodity. The more effective the branding, the more allergic Pollard is to it. She only wears black and removes all logos and tags from her clothing. If she smoked, I'm sure she would approve of Australia's forthcoming legislation.

Previously on Barnflakes:
Surreal Silk Cut cigarette ads

Book Cover: Mother, Brother, Lover

2011-11-12T00:10:00.002Z

There used to be a time when I would devour lyrics of songs, either by listening to the words or reading them (or both). This is something I tend not to do any more, either because I can't understand what anyone's singing nowadays (yes, I'm getting old) or, mostly, because with the majority of music, lyrics don't seem to be important (ie they're trite) and the human voice can be listened to like a musical instrument, which is fine by me. (Bands like Radiohead or R.E.M. make out they're serious or intellectual until you actually listen to the lyrics of their songs and realise they're meaningless or banal, such as, say, Radiohead's House of Cards: ' I don't wanna be your friend / I just wanna be your lover / No matter how it ends'. Zzzzz.)

I'll always listen to the words of certain singer songwriters – 'like it was written in my soul from me to you' – such as Dylan, Cohen, Reed and (Paul) Simon. But of more recent and younger singers or bands, Pulp and Jarvis Cocker spring to mind. Pulp usually printed the lyrics to their songs in their CD booklets, but advised people against reading them whilst listening to the music.

To save having to find all those old Pulp CDs, Faber have recently published a collection of Jarvis Cocker's lyrics, entitled Mother, Brother, Lover. It seems funny, at first, seeing the cover looking like an old Faber classic anthology of a famous poet, until you realise that Cocker is a famous poet of sorts and should be celebrated as one. I love the look of the book. Come on, this is something you can't Kindle. You've got to hold it and leaf through the pages.

• What I'm ever-so-subtly doing here (and here) is giving any readers who know me some ideas on what to get for my birthday and/or Christmas. At under £8, Mother, Brother, Lover is certainly the cheaper option than the Saul Bass book.

• Have I mentioned I saw Jarvis and his (then) wife and baby strolling along – Oh, I have? Okay, fine.

Saul Bass book finally out

2011-11-11T00:12:00.001Z

In my review of the sublime Phase IV, I moaned about there not being a book on Saul Bass. Well, though years in the making, and with numerous legal setbacks along the way, the book Saul Bass: A Life in Film & Design is finally available. Designed by Saul's daughter, Jennifer, with over 1,400 illustrations and 440 pages long, it's amazing that it is the first book ever published about the design legend.

A graphic designer who was equally at home designing corporate identities, film title sequences and iconic film posters, Saul Bass (1926-1996) was also responsible for the visual look of the shower scene in Psycho (some saying he even directed it) and directed the cult science fiction film Phase IV.

He designed logos for companies including AT&T, United Airlines and Quaker Oates but is best remembered for his wide range of film posters and his title sequences for the Hitchcock films Vertigo, Psycho and North by Northwest, as well as a host of other films from Anatomy of a Murder to Goodfellas. Indeed, just as designer Peter Saville was 'rediscovered' in the 1980s by bands such as Pulp and Suede after being in the wilderness for some years, so it was with Bass. He produced comparatively few film sequences after the mid-60s until Martin Scorsese asked him to produce the titles for Goodfellas in 1990, followed by The Age of Innocence and Casino*.

Bass's film posters used bold, simple shapes to convey meaning visually. His title sequences came at a time, the 1950s, when titles were hardly thought about at all. Bass made them seem like short films in themselves and in some cases, most notably Walk on the Wild Side (1962), his title sequence was far better than anything else in the film.

There are several comments on the Lawrence King (the book's publisher) website about the book. One person remembers picking up a leaflet about the book over seven years ago at the Design Museum's retrospective of Saul Bass (which I also went to). Another commentator, who knew Bass, mentions the book was began in 1995 but had numerous copyright issues. Apparently when Bass was alive he was allowed to publish and promote any of his own work; when he died in 1996 this right ceased. One other person, echoing many (myself included), says how they've 'been waiting for this book for such a long time'. (My only complaint is the book should have a DVD of Saul Bass's title sequences to accompany it.)

Buy it for around £30 from Amazon.

*Though he also designed somewhat uninspired titles for the Michael J Fox film Doc Hollywood (a film I guiltily love, by the way) around this time. Similarly, Peter Saville designed numerous Wham! album and single covers; something you don't hear mentioned in the same breath as his iconic Joy Division covers. But hey, these guys have got to earn a living somehow.

The things Gary Glitter did to keep hold of Young Persons

2011-11-10T10:53:00.002Z

In hindsight, rather unfortunate use of a celebrity in British Rail advertising. From The Face magazine, 1988.

Pulp Poetry posthumously published

2011-11-09T00:05:00.005Z

Over fifteen years after Joy and I first started sending thigh poems to each other (don't ask), Pulp Poetry finally gets 'published' (by which I mean professionally printed. Previously, the only few existing copies were printed on home inkjet printers).

This is what it says on Barnflakes.com > Pulp Poetry about the book (where an earlier form of it can still be downloaded as a PDF):

Pulp Poetry started life as correspondence between Joy and Barnaby sometime in 1995. They can't remember who, what or why they started writing poems about thighs to each other. Some might have even called it bizarre. But the poems proved so popular that (three) other people joined in. These poems formed the basis of the anthology Pulp Poetry featured in Joy's now legendary art exhibition / happening, 'Much ado about nothing' in September 2000.  The poems and book lay dormant in their somewhat amateurish state until some years later when the creators thought it needed a redesign and reissue. This is it.

The book was specially printed in memory of Joy Bedford. She will be dearly missed by many.

I still have some copies left. If you would like one, please email me at barnflakes@gmail.com for details.

Hergé's favourite Tintin panels

2011-11-08T09:58:00.008Z

From The Crab with the Golden Claws (1941): 'An entire sequence in one'

From Red Rackham's Treasure* (1944): 'It has it all'

As mentioned by Hergé in Tintin and I, the documentary based on transcripts of interviews between Hergé and Numa Sadoul in 1975. Though both look like rather average Tintin images, they express Hergé's desire to tell a story as economically as possible.

Read Nicholas Lezard's opinion of the new Tintin film, How could they do this to Tintin? in the Guardian. It seems to tally with my own thoughts about it.

Previously on Barnflakes:
Lookalikes #10: Thomson and Thompson
Eponymous Heroes 'Largely Dull'

*Er, though Hergé seems to have forgotten about colouring in the lower part of Haddock's blue jersey!

Christopher Wood, English Painter

2011-11-07T09:30:00.005Z

The recent BBC film Page Eight, starring Bill Nighy, was a dismal, boring affair but it did introduce me to the work of Christopher Wood – Nighy's character, Johnny, gives Nancy (Rachel Weisz) one of his paintings before he disappears at the end.

It's a shame the BBC didn't make a biopic about Christopher Wood instead – it would have been far more interesting than Page Eight (though possibly couldn't have starred Bill Nighy). Born near Liverpool in 1901, Wood had an eventful yet tragically short life. He was educated at Marlbourough college in Wiltshire, whose previous alumni include great yet eccentric talents from William Morris to Bruce Chatwin.

Wood dabbled in architecture and medicine before settling on art, persuaded by the painter Augustus John whom he met whilst at Liverpool University. Wood studied painting in Paris, where he met important artists including Picasso and Cocteau, who introduced him to opium, before travelling in Europe and North Africa. Christopher Wood's colourful personal life at this time involved affairs with women and men, including a Chilean diplomat fourteen years older than him, Jean Cocteau and (a few years later) an heiress of the Guinness family.

Back in England he became associated with several art groups, befriending and exhibiting with married painters Ben and Winifred Nicholson. Wood briefly became attached to Cornwell's artistic community, and when in St Ives with Ben Nicholson met fisherman Alfred Wallis, whose 'primitive' paintings (nowadays he would be described as an outsider artist) influenced Wood.

Several successful exhibitions followed until one day in August 1930 when Wood went to meet his mother at Salisbury train station. Suffering from the effects of opium withdrawal, Wood, who had begun to carry a gun around with him, and possibly imagining himself being pursued, jumped underneath the London-bound train and was killed. He was 29.

Christopher Wood is buried in Broad Chalke, near Salisbury. His gravestone was carved by Eric Gill.

The excellent Pallant House Gallery (my new favourite place), currently showing the Edward Burra exhibition, has a number of Christopher Wood paintings, including the lovely Lemons in a Blue Basket (1922), above, which shows a Post-Impressionist influence, though his later paintings are more in the primitive style.

Who's that girl?

2011-11-06T11:13:00.003Z

Search on Google images for 'female student' and she appears at number six. But rather than being the epitome of a young, pretty student on her way to college, to most she is the face you see when the website you're looking for no longer exists. It's tough being a stock image, not knowing in what context your photo will be used.

In my case, she fronts my now-defunct website, gullible-travels.com, which I am quite happy about. The site was so ugly anyway, I actually prefer the design now, with her smug smile promising faraway delights. Where is she now? What is she doing? Has she got her PhD in Chemical Engineering? Is she married? Is she happy?

Anyway, I actually felt a bit sad deleting the website; almost like admitting a relationship wasn't working and terminating it. Happily, the book can still be bought from lulu.com. I will incorporate parts of the old Gullible Travels website into barnflakes.com at some point.

But you know what I saw the other day in a charity shop? Billy Connolly's Gullible's Travels, published in 1982. Gah. It's impossible to have an original pun these days.

Edward Burra: 20th century man

2011-11-04T00:07:00.004Z

The Snack Bar, 1930: Have you ever seen a more phallic-looking sandwich? asked George Melly.

I'm always in two minds when an obscure, favourite artist of mine finally gets the recognition they deserve. On the one hand I'm glad for them getting wider exposure, and on the other it's like a secret that only I know about has been exposed.

The painter Edward Burra (1905-1976), though popular during his lifetime, seemed to have been forgotten for a while, as if written out of the history of British 20th century art. Perhaps he is too quirky, too difficult to pigeon hole. He was also disabled and a bit camp (maybe gay) with an acerbic wit (and a reluctant interviewee). Worst of all, his preferred medium was watercolour rather than oil. It's all these supposed weaknesses that are his strengths. I can think of few other artists whose work so captured the 20th century's ups and downs as much as Burra, from the gay Paris of the twenties, to jazz clubs and black culture of Harlem in the 1930s, the Spanish Civil war in the 30s and then the Second World War, right up to England in the 1970s, with its new motorways destroying his beloved countryside.

But a reappraisal of the man has been coming for a couple of years now. Jane Stevenson's excellent biography of him, Twentieth-Century Eye, was published in 2007. In June this year, his picture Zoot Suits sold for over £2m, a record for a Burra. BBC4 recently had an hour long documentary about the artist, I Never Tell Anybody Anything: The Life and Art of Edward Burra. And finally, a major exhibition of his work , accompanied by a new monograph, has recently opened.

It's possible Edward Burra would have hated Chichester. After all, it's not so different to Rye, the town he grew up in and loathed, once describing it as 'ducky little Tinkerbell towne'. Still, it's Chichester that houses the first major survey of his work in twenty five years, so it can't be all that bad.

The wonderful Pallant House Gallery, tucked away in a side street, has grouped Burra's work into different-themed rooms, but whether it's a street scene, war scene, stage set, landscape or still life of flowers, all Burra's paintings have at least a hint of menace and mystery to them. Perhaps as a rebellion against his middle class upbringing, Burra was always fascinated by low-life, seediness and tawdry glamour, and his earliest paintings in his 20s depict street and dock scenes with sailors, wide boys and prostitutes. Watercolour on paper was his unusual choice of medium, used so densely saturated that some pictures look like they've been painted with oils. The surfaces are silky smooth. His colours are so vibrant and striking; Burra's blues are brilliant, his reds, ravishing.

Though he suffered ill health all his life, travel was one of Burra's many passions. His journeys to France and the USA inform his paintings of the 20s and 30s, depicting street and bar scenes, cabarets and nightclubs with exquisite detail and acute observation. But his pictures were in danger of becoming merely picturesque until he spent some time in Spain and witnessed the horrors of the Spanish Civil War. Then came the Second World War. Suddenly, Burra's pictures were full of war and death, soldiers wearing Venetian masks and, slightly later, mysterious, surreal bird men wearing robes.

Approaching old age in the 1960s and 70s, Burra turned more to landscape and still life. Unlike much English countryside painting, though, Burra's depicted it unflinchingly, with pylons, motorways and traffic, yet still infused with a sense of mystery and spirituality.

As a chronicler of the century's ups and downs, he has been compared to a modern day Hogarth; as a painter of low-life, bars, nightclubs and the grotesque, Toulouse-Lautrec, Dix and Grosz; depicting the horrors of war, Goya; but Burra's distinct style and his alternatively seedy, sinister, surreal, sensual and spiritual subject matter make him a unique figure in the history of British art.

If you're reading this in London, a cheap day return by train to Chichester can be booked online in advance for around £10. The Pallant House Gallery also has a fine collection of 20th century British art and a handful of European masters including Picasso, Modigliani and Leger, all housed in a beautiful building. There is a striking extension which was completed in 2006. The shop is pretty good, with lots of art books at reduced prices. Best of all, unlike most big exhibitions in London galleries, the Pallant was almost empty (though we did go midweek), allowing for leisurely viewing pleasure. We spent hours in there! Chichester has other stuff to recommend it, such as nearly a dozen charity shops and a fine cathedral, which has a Marc Chagall window, a Graham Sutherland painting and two magnificent 12th century Roman sculptures. Go on, treat yourself to a day out.

Dinosaurs & Zombies

2011-11-03T11:28:00.004Z

Though I've previously moaned about The Walking Dead and Terra Nova, I still find myself watching both series. Mainly, I suppose, to moan about them some more. I do occasionally enjoy them too.

The thing about them both is that their key selling points – the dinosaurs and the zombies – are actually just devices to enable the writers to explore the human relationships within both programmes. So, really, they're not about dinosaurs or zombies, they're about how people cope in extreme conditions, how relationships evolve or collapse under content stress, how people deal with new environments, etc.

But here's the thing. We don't give a damn about any of the characters. We want to see dinosaurs and we want to see zombies. And lots of them. Not some in the first episode, less in the next, then almost none in every subsequent episode. We want to see dinosaurs and zombies ripping apart as many two-dimensional, cliché-ridden characters as possible. And all the time. Not for a few minutes every 45 minute episode.

And when there's no humans left, I'm quite happy to see just dinosaurs and zombies roaming around the place. Heck, let's even put them in the same series together and call it Dinosaurs & Zombies.

Previously on Barnflakes:
Crappa Nova
The Walking Dead Recipe

Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow.

2011-11-02T09:30:00.004Z

– Steve Jobs' last words before he died. Was he seeing lots of Apples at the end of the tunnel? We'll never know, but Jobs once called death 'the single best invention of life'. Here's some other famous last words:

Get those fucking nuns away from me.
– Norman Douglas

Is somebody hurt?
– Robert F Kennedy

Drink to me!
– Pablo Picasso

The Sun is God.
– JWM Turner

I have not told half of what I saw.
– Marco Polo

It's very beautiful over there.
– Thomas Edison

Either those curtains go or I go.
– Oscar Wilde

I'm tired of fighting.
– Harry Houdini

Why not? Yeah.
– Timothy Leary

I'm bored with it all.
– Winston Churchill

Nothing, but death.
– Jane Austen

Does nobody understand?
– James Joyce

Et tu, Brute?
– Julius Ceasar

I should never have switched from Scotch to Martinis.
– Humprey Bogart

Nothing eases suffering like human touch.
– Bobby Fischer

I must go in, the fog is rising.
– Emily Dickinson. Well, it had to be a poet, didn't it?

Previously on Barnflakes:
Notable suicide notes

Notes on murders and sex crimes

2011-11-01T09:30:00.006Z

It very occasionally occurs to me that murder (or suicide) is a purely private and intimate affair, like the flipside of making love (making death?), almost, so subsequent murder investigations made by police, forensics, courts and reporting by the mass media mostly appear rather vulgar and intrusive.

The murder of Joanna Yeates by Vincent Tabak – obviously horrific and tragic (mainly, it seems, because it was around Christmas time) – has been examined in minute detail for the world to see. There has been an almost fetishistic obsession with detail, from the topping on the 'missing' pizza (tomato, mozzarella and basil) to which of Tabak's hands went on Yeates's throat, the reporting of which possibly reveals more about the nature of the mass media than about the murderer himself.

By all accounts Vincent Tabak seemed a happy and normal man, until a fateful five minutes around Christmas last year when he strangled the landscape architect in what, to me, seems possibly like a bizarre accident. The police, judge and media, however, looking for an angle, have gone for sex crime. The fact that Tabak also looked at porn and once or twice visited call girls (whilst abroad in Los Angeles) adds fuel to their fire.

Whilst I wouldn't say either porn or prostitution were necessarily healthy pursuits (though an ex-girlfriend's father used to say if prostitution was on the NHS there would be a lot less sex crime), just as doing drugs for the first time probably won't kill you, and watching horror films won't turn you into a serial killer, viewing porn or using call girls probably won't automatically turn you into a sex murderer. Otherwise half the population would be in prison.

No, the sex murder angle seems a desperate attempt to establish motive and looks to me like clutching at straws by employing cod-psychology (I'm surprised physiognomy hasn't been introduced to explain his narrow eyes). Not much is mentioned of the presumably happy three-year relationship with his girlfriend, though the Guardian mentions his 'only' having the one girlfriend, as if that in itself is a crime.

(And certain things don't gel. Like detectives finding a pornographic image on Tabak's computer of a woman wearing a pink top, and Yeates wearing a similar pink top when her body was discovered. If Tabak didn't put the top on Yeates after killing her – and no one seems to be saying he did [put the top on her] – then what are the chances of Yeates wearing the same pink top as the woman in the image Tabak had been looking at?)

The judge called Tabak a 'very dangerous man'; presumably just for the unfortunate five minutes in Joanna's flat and not the other 33 years of his life (he has been linked to no other crimes). He is called 'cold and calculating' when it seems he miscalculated a situation for a few minutes, which resulted in the unfortunate death of a young woman, then panicked and tried to cover it up.

Joanna's parents have understandably expressed never being to get over their loss. That's the thing about murder – it may be private, but has far wider repercussions.

In other news, a 25-year old woman has been charged with sexual assault after groping the male member of a, er, male member of the cabin crew of a Virgin flight from Johannesburg to Heathrow. Katherine Goldberg, of West London, made 'strong sexual advances' towards the steward and demanded sex after drinking a pint of whisky. It is assumed the steward, who cannot be name for legal reasons, is homosexual, because most stewards are and no heterosexual man in their right mind would object to a drunk woman groping their genitals. Miss Goldberg faces up to ten years in prison. Vincent Tabak will serve a minimum of twenty.

Happy Halloween

2011-10-31T09:49:00.002Z

(From a photo of my brother and father in Halloween costume, 1993)

Silver Apples and Contact

2011-10-26T14:41:00.004+01:00

If you thought Suicide and the Velvet Underground were ahead of their time, check out the Silver Apples, a late 1960s experimental psychedelic electronic band hailing from New York. Consisting of Simeon and Danny Taylor, the duo got their name from a WB Yeats poem, The song of the Wandering Aengus ('The silver apples of the moon'). Wikipedia think they anticipated not only experimental electronic music and krautrock, but also dance and indie rock music of the 1990s.

Their first self-titled album was released in 1968, followed a year later by Contact. The front cover depicted the band in a plane cockpit with a Pan Am sticker clearly visible. The back cover showed a plane crash with the band playing banjos in front of it. Pan Am were unhappy with the plane crash association and sued, causing the demise of the band and their record label.

The band were little heard of again until the late 1990s, when both albums were re-released, along with their third LP which was previously unissued. Silver Apples reformed, toured, released a few new albums and enjoyed some of the success they should had got first time round, until Simeon broke his neck in a road accident in 1998. Though he lived, he could never play quite the same again. Danny Taylor died in 2005.

Their first two albums can be bought collectively for under £3.

Margate's Shell Grotto

2011-10-24T21:32:00.003+01:00

4.6 million shells. 2000 square feet of mosaics. One hell of a mystery. Margate's Shell Grotto was discovered in 1835 and made open to the public in 1837 but its age and purpose remains unknown.

Margate has had a bit of a facelift in recent years. Though a tower block and boarded up pub still greet you upon exiting the train station, the town now boasts a cool art gallery, the Turner Contemporary (built on the same site the Margate-loving JMW Turner stayed), as well as a bunch of trendy new galleries, shops, bars and eateries in the Old Town, including a Michelin-starred restaurant.

But it's the old stuff which is the best, innit? Aside from the Shell Grotto – still only £3 to get in – there's the famous Mad Hatter's Tea Rooms, the Harbour Arm, the Nayland Rock Shelter, where TS Eliot wrote some of his poem the Wasteland, as well as the famous Arcades and of course Margate's golden sands – often voted one of England's top 5 beaches.

The theme park Dreamland, which closed in 2005 (and which I have very fond memories of going to as a child in the 1980s) is meant to be re-opening this year but still appears very much under construction. It won't have the Looping Star roller coaster (now in Budapest) but will have the Scenic Railway, the UK's oldest roller coaster which was recently upgraded from Grade II listed to Grade II* listed.

A few days ago, Thanet Disctrict Council surpringly rejected plans for a huge Tesco superstore on the seafront, saying it would be unlawful and have a negative effect on the town.

• I'm perplexed as to why there are huge piles of sand along Margate beach.

Previously on Barnflakes:
Art of the seaside

Perfect timing

2011-10-23T21:02:00.003+01:00

In watch advertising there is such a thing as the perfect time. Most analogue watch advertisements display the time ten past ten (or ten to two) to give a harmonious, balanced, happy looking face, with the two hands almost forming a smile. 10:10 also draws your eyes towards the maker's name and logo which is typically placed towards the top centre.

Other less believable explanations include 10:10 being the time Abraham Lincoln and/or John F Kennedy were shot and/or died; or V for Victory; or open legs.

Funky definitions

2011-10-20T09:30:00.002+01:00

'My body stunk but I kept my funk'
– Rod Stewart, Every Picture Tells a Story

'The men's toilet is, in at least two senses, funky'
– Restaurant review, Guardian weekend magazine, 15/10/11

The meaning of the word funk has always slightly confused me. The easiest definition is when applied to music: funk music is a style of dance music of US black origin, which would include artists such as James Brown and Funkadelic. But it can also mean a foul odour, a depressed state or a panic. Add a 'y' and you get funky, which may also apply to passionate or soulful music. It can also mean evil-smelling and foul; authentic and earthy; stylish and exciting in an unconventional way; frightened and panicky; or lacking courage and faint-hearted. There are also other slang and specific US or UK definitions.

One of the most difficult words in the English language to precisely define, its first recorded use was in 1784, referring to an old, mouldy cheese. Derived from the Flemish word fonck, meaning disturbed or agitated.

Thanks to the Free Dictionary for most of this. I don't feel much enlightened; more like funky.

Lookalikes #14: Famous Cinematic Eyes

2011-10-19T09:30:00.002+01:00

From top left: Un Chien Andalou; The Texas Chainsaw Massacre; Blade Runner; 2001: A Space Odyssey; 2001: A Space Odyssey; Psycho; Repulsion.

Random Film Review: Something Wicked This Way Comes

2011-10-18T14:27:00.007+01:00

Mr Dark, I presume?

Dir: Jack Clayton | 1983 | 95mins | USA

'First of all it was October… full of cold winds, long nights, dark promises. Days get short, the shadows lengthen…'

A perfect time, then, to (re)watch Something Wicked This Way Comes, an underrated 1983 Disney film starring Jason Robards and Jonathan Price in his first screen role. Based on the Ray Bradbury novel of the same name and written for the screen by him too, the film begins in a typical Disney whimsical and nostalgic manner as we are shown the Norman Rockwell town of Green Town, Illinois (actually – unsurprisingly – shot in New England), where everyone knows each other and life is swell.

Life becomes unsettled with the out-of-season arrival of a strange carnival owned by the sinister Mr Dark, played by Jonathan Price. The carnival is able to make the town folk's deepest desires come true, be it vanity, money, lust or lost youth. However, their fulfilled desires come at a price. We watch the proceedings through the eyes of two boys, Will and Jim, as they witness the bizarre goings on at the carnival and provoke the wrath of Mr Dark, who seems to be in league with the devil himself.

Jason Robards is excellent as Will's elderly* father, Charles Halloway, weak, regretful and feeling guilty about being old and knowing he'll never be able to play baseball with his son (the conversations between Will and his father are perhaps the most affecting in the film). Indeed, much of the film is elegiac in tone, the seemingly contented townsfolk being revealed as bitter and regretful at life having passed them by.

Highly atmospheric and creepy with terrific set pieces – including a carousel time machine and a hall of mirrors denouement à la Lady from Shanghai – and fine music by James Horner, the film is also lyrical and literary, and not just because Charles Halloway is a librarian. As critic Roger Ebert notes, it's 'one of the rare American films to savor the sound of words, and their rhythms. That's true in the writing, and it's also true in the acting'.

Its detractors say it's a muddled and uneasy blend of lightweight horror and fantasy. Although it is slightly uneven in places, it's a film that works on a lot of levels. It's a horror and fantasy film as well as a coming-of-age drama, morality tale and allegory.

The special effects are certainly 80s-style but all the better for it; like the effects in the Hong Kong kung fu comedy horror films of the 1980s (possibly my favourite genre mash up ever), they're somehow more believable and creepy than modern CGI effects (for me, anyway), perhaps because of their tacky, homemade, amateur feel.

Jack Clayton directed the incredibly creepy film the Innocents (one of Martin Scorsese's scariest horror films of all time), another literary adaptation, this one based on Henry James' The Turn of the Screw, in 1961. Along with Something Wicked in 1983, they form two fine horror bookends to his career, both films, in their own ways, exploring the impact of evil on children.

(*But was Jason Robards ever young? He was no spring chicken in Peckinpah's Ballad of Cable Hogue way back in 1970; by Something Wicked (1983) he was playing a man almost near death, with a dodgy ticker, but it wouldn't be until Magnolia (1999) when he was literally playing someone on his deathbed, dying of terminal lung cancer and actually died the following year of the same disease.)

Postmodern teapots

2011-10-17T09:30:00.003+01:00

If the official death of modernism (according to Charles Jencks) was 15th July 1972 at 3.32pm (Central Time), then postmodernism's official birth was at 3.33pm. The death of postmodernism, however, is more problematic, and while some believe it was 9/11 that bought a close to the movement, others believe it is alive and well in all of us, but particularly in Lady Gaga.

In the 1980s, postmodernism – a cut and paste mish mash of appropriated styles – seemed to be about going to work in a shoulder-padded suit, making loads of money, listening to Grace Jones and Talking Heads on a Sony Walkman, reading The Face magazine, returning home to a glossy designer flat full of bright, bold Memphis furniture and Alessi kitchenware with a Jeff Koons/Barbara Kruger print on the wall, and generally being flash, superficial and vacuous.

What it wasn't about was sitting around drinking cups of tea. That would be the impression one got, however, after visiting the V&A's exhibition Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970-1990, which consists of an inordinate amount of whacky designer teapots, none of which were actually made to be used. Which leads me to conclude, was postmodernism really just a storm in a teacup?

Teapots by Peter Shire and Memphis Group
Make your own Peter Shire teapot
The ultimate postmodern home

Top five naps

2011-10-15T09:30:00.004+01:00

The drunken nap When occasionally asked when I was happiest, I routinely describe a moment at the Brecon Jazz Festival almost twenty years ago. Invariably people don't believe that I can pinpoint an exact moment of pure happiness, but that's their problem. It was a beautiful sunny day, I was drunk, jazz music was wafting gently in the breeze and I had a little lie down on a lawn. I was woken up some time later by a beautiful woman.

The post-sex nap (also known as the naked nap) These are always good; impossible to name a best. For atmospherics, perhaps it helps if it's raining outside. Alternatively, if it's daytime and sunny, with the sun shining through the window onto naked bodies…

The travel nap This is a nap on any form of transport conducive to napping, such as plane, train, bus or car; so most forms of transport apart from a bike. As with the post-sex nap, the steady patter of rain usually helps to send me to napland. But then again the sun does likewise.

The bored nap This is one you probably shouldn't do, but can't help. Life gets so boring napping is sometimes the only temporary way out. You feel so drowsy it's like a drug. This may include during work sitting at your desk, at a meeting or a lecture, or at the cinema or theatre, say. Or just from having nothing else to do.

The exhausted nap (also known as the nap attack) This can be after work, after the gym, after a long walk or bike ride, perhaps after looking after a child all day. It usually happens in front of the TV, or after a large meal, maybe.

(But of course, whilst a nap doesn't really need a category, it does need the right elements. Yesterday afternoon, after a large lunch, feeling a little drowsy, I went for a little lie down. It was a glorious day, the sun was shining through the windows, and a little breeze blowing through a slightly open one. My neighbour, an opera singer, was practicing her scales. Children could be heard playing in the distance. Occasionally I'd hear a distant train or plane pass by; or a duck quacking – there were no other noises. There was no use fighting it; this was naptime.)

The only nap I really don't like is the bath nap – which usually involves waking up in a bath full of cold water. Mostly, though, naps are great and some of my best memories are of napping. Napping is said to be beneficial for both mind and body. In Spain and some Latin American countries a nap is called a siesta, which for some reason has a more exotic and less lazy ring to it than napping. Siestas are an accepted, common tradition in these countries where the temperature is hot and lunch consists of more than a sausage roll from Greggs. In England, unfortunately, there's always something more boring to do than nap.

Joe Orton's guerilla art

2011-10-14T12:51:00.004+01:00

In a naughty bit of guerilla art or culture jamming some twenty odd years before the terms actually existed, the then unknown gay playwright Joe Orton and his lover Kenneth Halliwell, unsatisfied with the 'rubbishy' and tasteless books in their local Islington library (some things never change), defaced the library books by modifying the covers with new pictures and text – with surreal and hilarious results. The two were eventually caught in 1962 and ended up spending six months in jail for their crimes, which actually proved a blessing in disguise for Orton's writing:

'I tried writing before I went into the nick… but it was no good. Being in the nick brought detachment to my writing. I wasn't involved anymore. And suddenly it worked.'

Joe Orton went on to write his most famous plays, including The Ruffian on the Stair, Entertaining Mr Sloane and Loot, before being murdered by his ex-lover Halliwell in 1967. Orton was 34.

More recently, in 2006 Banksy defaced the CD covers and inserts of 500 of Paris Hilton's debut album, returning them to HMVs across the UK. Dangermouse remixed the album and renamed the songs with titles such as Why Am I Famous? Copies are now probably worth hundreds, if not thousands of pounds. And before you ask, yes, I still look at every Paris Hilton CD I see in a charity shop, just in case.

The term culture jamming, the anti-capitalist art of subverting mainstream institutions, was coined in 1984 and is usually thought of as defacing things on a much larger scale than books and CDs, such as billboards. Artists including Ron English, perhaps most famous for his Marilyn Monroe with Mickey Mouse breasts, and the Billboard Libertion Front are two of the more prominent proponents of the art, which tends to be quite amusing but achieves nothing at all.

How things change. When once Orton and Halliwell were classified as criminals for their actions, now the Islington Museum are showing an exhibition of their defaced covers. Malicious Damage: The crimes of Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell in Islington runs from now until 12 January 2012 at Islington Museum, 245 St John Street, EC1. Admission free. Visitors are free to admire the defaced books but not emulate the technique.

I first heard about the exhibition at Feuilleton, who heard about it in the Guardian.

Crappa Nova

2011-10-12T09:30:00.003+01:00

Going at least one step further than Patti Smith's classic lines 'I don't fuck much with the past / But I fuck plenty with the future', the new Spielberg-produced TV sci-fi drama Terra Nova – meaning new land – aims to fuck up both the past and the future as much as possible.

The multi-million dollar series (also known as Terra Bull), starring one of the annoying women from Mistresses and a bunch of equally annoying unknowns, begins in the year 2149, when things look a bit like Blade Runner, which was set in November 2019 – now only eight years away. Funny how the future catches up with us, and most things are still the same. Anyway, to escape the depressing Blade Runner production design, a rift in space-time has been discovered, like the one in Stargate, to transport people back 85 million years to dinosaur times, and Spielberg-style mise-en-scéne. Yes, it's Jurassic Park meets Lost in the most derivative programme since… The Walking Dead? We follow the boring Shannon family through the rift and back to the late Cretaceous period to see them build their future from scratch, except they've also bought with them guns, jeeps and the various technology which will no doubt see mankind's fall once again. The big budget is impressive, but can't hide the corny dialogue, hackneyed scenes, ropey acting and Spielbergian saccharine sentimentality.

The series has naturally received great reviews Stateside, with the LA Times calling it 'Easily the most exciting show of the fall season'. I do pity the TV critic, surely one of the most difficult and frustrating jobs around. Seeing as the bar for quality TV has become so low, anything seeming even anywhere near average gets praised to the heavens. The TV critic with the easiest task was the acerbic Charlie Brooker, who just ripped the piss out of all TV, but where's the challenge in that, when everything's crap? (But even Brooker buckled when he realised he was biting the hand that fed him.)

Not really related, but anyway, far more engaging than Terra Nova is the film Melancholia, which I recently saw. For once, an original sci-fi disaster movie, and just beautiful. Bring on the apocalypse if it's going to happen like that.

Shoegazing vs. navel-gazing

2011-10-11T09:30:00.007+01:00

Shoegazing was an originally negative term to describe the indie rock sub genre that briefly came to prominence in the UK in the late 1980s and early 90s. Never hugely popular, though it still has a cult following, it was superseded by grunge and Britpop. Some recent bands in America (and other places), including Deerhunter, Atlas Sound, The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, Film School and Japandroids have kept the shoegazing banner flying by including elements of it in their music (also called nu gaze).

The term apparently originates from a 1980s Sounds magazine review of a Moose gig in which the singer had his song lyrics taped to the ground to read from. The name stuck and came to define a movement of bands who mostly came from the Thames Valley and whose guitarists performed whilst staring at the ground, either from shyness, being deep in concentration or trying to locate their effects pedals. Either way, the bands didn't like the term, and music journalists didn't like the bands.

Their sound is characterised by loud, distorted guitars with lots of feedback. Vocals are typically mute and droning (haunting if you're being charitable) but not essential. Music critics (nowadays) will use terms like textures, waves, cascades, walls and washes (even lasagnes) of sound to describe shoegazing.

If I'm not really selling you the concept, listen to My Bloody Valentine's Loveless really loud a dozen times. The first few times it'll sound like a painful noise; by the twelfth listen it'll be most beautiful thing you've ever heard. Maybe.

Key bands include My Bloody Valentine, Ride, Lush, Curve, Slowdive, the Boo Radleys and Chapterhouse. Key influences are the Cocteau Twins, The Jesus and Mary Chain, Dinosaur Jr and Sonic Youth. Retrospectively, bands including Galaxie 500, The Cure, Spacemen 3 and Husker Du have shoegazing elements in their music.

Filmmaker Gregg Araki*, a big fan of shoegazing, likes to include examples of the music in his films, including bands Ride, Lush, My Bloody Valentine and Slowdive, as well as lots of geeky shoegazing references only diehard fans will get. Similarly, Sophia Coppola used shoegazing bands for the soundtrack to her film Lost in Translation, even managing to coax Kevin Shields out of bed to write a few tunes.

Navel-gazing refers to excessive introspection and self-absorption. In music, this manifests itself in the work of Leonard Cohen.

*A recent Guardian interview with Gregg Araki discussing shoegazing was most interesting for the numerous comments by shoegazing fans reminiscing about the old days. I'm not sure anyone even mentioned Araki's films, though I personally think they're great.

Top 10 Gay Films and Filmmakers

2011-10-10T09:30:00.000+01:00

This is tricky – I'm basing these lists on the assumptions that, 1) gay filmmakers don't necessarily have to make gay films all the time, 2) but gay films probably have to be (at least partly) about gay people, 3) I'm sure lesbians make great films too – but I haven't seen them (except Desert Hearts), and, 4) Brokeback Mountain was rubbish.

Top 10 Gay Films
1. Edward II (Jarman, 1991)
2. Satyricon (Fellini, 1969)
3. Poison (Haynes, 1991)
4. Un Chant D'Amour (Genet, 1950)
5. Mysterious Skin (Araki, 2004)
6. Flaming Creatures (Smith, 1963)
7. Rope (Hitchcock, 1948)
8. Querelle (Fassbinder, 1982)
9. My Own Private Idaho (Van Sant, 1991)
10. Top Gun (Scott, 1986)

Top 10 Gay Filmmakers
1. Rainer Werner Fassbinder
2. Derek Jarman
3. Pedro Almodovar
4. Pier Pasolo Pasolini
5. Gus Van Sant
6. John Waters
7. Todd Hayes
8. Kenneth Anger
9. Gregg Araki
10. Isaac Julien

Red-eyed woman

2011-10-09T09:30:00.001+01:00

My red-eyed woman
She don't treat me bad.
She might look angry
But she's actually sad.

The books of Lambert M. Surhone

2011-10-08T09:30:00.002+01:00

Is Lambert M. Surhone the most prolific writer in the world? A search of his name on Amazon reveals 154, 428 results (though the amount seems to change daily), mostly in Books, but also eight in Clothing and one in Large Appliances (a book about washing machines). But he'd better watch out. Miriam T. Tennoe is catching up: she's written some 119, 525 titles and Susan F. Henssonow, coincidentally, also has 119, 525. Mostly, it seems, they write books together. Between them they write on an extraordinary diverse range of subjects, from Tandem Mass Spectrometry to One More Chance (Pet Shop Boys Song). Their catchy titles range from the short, such as Talacre, to the extremely long, such as U.S.District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia: Lewis F. Powell, Jr. United States Courthouse, United States District Court for the District of Virginia, Project Safe Neighborhoods. Or my personal favourite, Poi: Performing Arts, Mori, New Zealand, Juggling, Object Manipulation, Poi Tricks, Fire Dancing, Glowsticking, Circus Skills: Performing Arts. Some have great subtitles, like Patch Adams: Comedy-Drama, Patch Adams, Health Insurance, Myopia, Conformism, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Daniel London.

And these books are expensive. Tandem Mass Spectrometry, for example, is £30 yet less than 100 pages long. So what's going on? Well, closer examination reveals the 'authors', if they exist at all, are actually editors and all the content comes entirely from Wikipedia. Yes, that Wikipedia, the free online encyclopaedia. The books are printed on demand, and anyone can do so, if they want. It's quite legal under Creative Commons. Indeed, it can actually be done within Wikipedia: there's a Print/Edit button on the left hand side of Wikipedia, with a section called Create a Book. Other websites provide the same service, such as PediaPress.

There are also articles within Wikipedia all about Wikipedia content duplication, so in theory, though it may be pointless (yet surreal), you could create your book in Wikipedia about creating your book in Wikipedia.

But is anyone stupid enough to buy these books? It's possible they're not selling in their millions, but probably only a minimum amount needs to be sold to make a substantial profit. After all, print on demand means books are only printed when ordered, so there's no extra costs.

So, should we just dismiss it and figure Amazon sell all kinds of dodgy stuff and anyone can self-publish a book and put it on there? Perhaps, but other websites also sell the books, including 'reputable' bookseller sites AbeBooks and Waterstones, who admittedly only have 24,698 titles by Mr Surhone, a small percentage of his output to date.

Surhone may have out-written the original Wiki writer, Philip M Parker, who according to Wikipedia is the world's most prolific author and has the advantage of actually existing. Wikipedia say he has over 200,000 books on Amazon.com (though I could 'only' find just over 110,000, and a 'mere' 103,411 titles on Amazon.co.uk), including such titles as The 2007 Import and Export Market for Industrial Refrigerators, Freezers, and Other Refrigeration and Freezing Equipment and Parts in United States, which sells for a whopping £298.30 and has 158 pages.

London Toile

2011-10-07T09:30:00.001+01:00

I'd been after the Iain Sinclair-edited anthology London: City of Disappearances for some time. I finally got it the other day, secondhand but in good condition and hardback, for £5. I suspect I mainly wanted it for its cover (the book itself has had quite bad reviews), which at £5 is definitely the cheapest way of acquiring a Timorous Beasties artifact.

Timorous Beasties produce 'surreal and provocative textiles and wallpapers', cleverly subverting traditional forms with contemporary imagery. Once described as 'William Morris on acid', they've been a big influence in making fabrics and wallpaper hip and relevant once more.

Their London toile (above) wallpaper and fabric (as well as, inevitably, cushions, plates, and said book cover) is their most famous product. At first glance the imagery looks like the old-fashioned toiles produced in France in the 1700s, usually of pastoral scenes. Closer inspection reveals scenes from contemporary London, including a boy being mugged at gunpoint, teenagers drinking and smoking, dustmen and the homeless against backdrops of famous London landmarks including Tower Bridge, the London Eye, Trellick Tower and the Gherkin.

Their London toile actually looks quite cheery compared to their previous one, Glasgow toile, which features crack addicts, prostitutes and the homeless against dark backgrounds of graveyards and tower blocks.

In a similar vein, artist Rufus Willis gives a contemporary twist with his set of Illy coffee cups, produced in 2005. Instead of the Chinese gardens and landscapes typically found on Blue Willow ceramic ware, Rufus portrays modern life with factory chimneys billowing smoke, crumbling, war-torn buildings and shanty towns.

RIP Steve Jobs, 1955-2011

2011-10-06T11:01:00.004+01:00

This is very sad news. I remember first using Apple Macs at college in the early 1990s, but it wasn't until the late 1990s that I used them professionally. Since then I've owned numerous Macs, and currently have two, along with two iPods and an iPhone. For better or worse, I now can't imagine a world without Apple. I've never owned a PC and never willingly used one. Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple and its charismatic leader, will be sorely missed.

Notes on Portishead (the town)

2011-10-05T16:39:00.005+01:00

Back in the early days of Apple Mac, one of the first things a graphic designer learnt was never to use a font named after a city, of which there were many back then. So Monaco, San Francisco, Venice, New York, Geneva and Chicago were all out of bounds, due to the fact that they were extremely ugly (the only modern exception is a fictional city: Gotham, the Obama 'Hope' typeface).

The same rule goes with bands named after places: Alabama, America, Asia, Boston, Bush (after Shepherd's Bush), Chicago, Europe, Linkin Park and the Manhattan Transfer are all dreadful. But two bands are a notable exception to the rule: Saint Etienne, named after the French city, and Portishead, named after the coastal town situated north-west of Bristol.

I've been wanting to go to Portishead ever since first listening to Portishead and learning it was actually a place. Like their music, I always imagined it to be depressing, haunting, industrial and dark. If I had to visualise it, Portishead would look like the landscape of Eraserhead.

Actually finally visiting the place (and playing Portishead albums on the way there) was one of my 1001 Things To Do Before I Die, along with seeing the Star Wars locations in Tunisia (tick), going to Legoland (tick, twice), listening to Sheryl Crow's All I Wanna Do whilst driving along Santa Monica Boulevard (tick) and playing the soundtrack to The Good, the Bad and the Ugly whilst driving through Almeria, Spain (tick), where many spaghetti westerns were filmed.

Though the band themselves call the town 'dreary', I was rather surprised and disappointed to find Portishead, well, rather average, and even, dare I say it, nice. It was once, by the look of things, pretty industrial, having a working dock, two power stations and a chemical works up until the 1980s. The power stations were demolished and the docks redeveloped with a new marina, complete with virtually a whole new town attached, dwarfing the old town.

The nicest part is by the 'beach' (actually mud flats, being on an estuary), where there's a boating lake, park and one of the UK's last remaining outdoor swimming pools. The weather was amazing; we had a swim and an ice cream. Everywhere looks lovely in the sunshine.

The pool, which is run solely by volunteers, and re-opened especially for the scorching weather last weekend (can you imagine a council doing such a thing?), is on Battery Point, site of a gun battery and fort used during the English Civil War. Also of interest is an unusual black, rusty lighthouse. It was possibly the only thing in the whole town that made me think of Portishead (the band), so it's perhaps no coincidence an image of it appears etched into the 12" vinyl release of their 2008 song Machine Gun.

Top 10 Vampire Films

2011-10-01T09:30:00.001+01:00

1. Nosferatu (Murnau, 1922, Germany)
2. Vampyr (Dreyer, 1932, France)
3. Let the Right One In (Aldredson, 2008, Sweden)
4. Near Dark (Bigelow, 1987, USA)
5. Daughters of Darkness (Kumel, 1971, Belgium)
6. Martin (Romero, 1978, USA)
7. The Fearless Vampire Killers (Polanski, 1967, UK)
8. Mr. Vampire (Lau, 1985, Hong Kong)
9. Cronos (Del Toro, 1993, Mexico)
10. Night Watch (Lukyanenko, 2004, Russia)

Random Film Review: The Velvet Vampire

2011-09-30T09:30:00.000+01:00

Dir: Stephanie Rothman | 1971 | 80mins | USA

1971 was a good year for lesbian vampire films. Harry Kumel's sublime Daughters of Darkness, starring cult actress Delphine Seyrig (Pull my Daisy, Last Year at Marienbad) stood head and shoulders above the rest as a stylishly erotic take on the Elizabeth Bathory legend. Hammer films released Countess Dracula, also liberally based on Elizabeth Bathory, as well as Lust for a Vampire and Twins of Evil, both inspired by J. Sheridan Le Fanu's Camilla, a novella about a female vampire, published 25 years before Stoker's Dracula novel. Then there's Jess Franco's typically baffling and dreamlike Vampyros Lesbos, which needs no translation and was apparently inspired by the deleted first chapter of Stoker's Dracula, called Dracula's Guest.

Also dreamlike but not so much lesbian, though she swings both ways, is The Velvet Vampire, presumably also loosely based on Bathory and/or Camilla, in that it features a female vampire. Though low-budget and amateurish, its unique and unusual setting goes a long way. Much of the film takes place in the scorching heat of the Californian desert, creating a washed out and dreamlike ambiance (put a bed and a mirror in the desert and voilà, you've got instant Dali). Very much contemporary for its time, it features a cool yellow dune buggy, a groovy, atmospheric music score and a young, hip, free-spirited L.A. couple.

Lee and Susan Ritter meet glamorous but weird Diane LeFanu (gettit?) at an L.A. art gallery opening where within two minutes of talking they've accepted an invitation to stay at her desert villa for the weekend. Expecting a Palm Springs type get up, they're slightly disappointed to find Diane's place isolated in scrubland desert. Things don't improve when they're given a local sight-seeing tour of an abandoned mine (where Susan gets lost), a graveyard and an old western town (where bikini-clad Susan gets bitten by a snake on her thigh and has Diane suck the venom out). Amazingly, by this point Susan has actually settled in to things and quite likes the desert, whilst Lee, after sleeping with Diane, is keen to leave. Typical male. After having weird dreams (pictured, above) that seem to come true, and slowly piecing two and two together, the young couple work out that Diane is a vampire and try to get back to L.A. as soon as possible.

Like the film's unique setting, the sultry and alluring Diane is a unique vampire. She eats raw chicken liver and doesn't seem affected by the sun, so long as she wears her wide-brimmed black hat. Her reflection can be seen. And like Romero's Martin a few years later, Diane may not even technically be a vampire. Though in the end it's the crucifixes that get her.

Sex, Drugs and Reiko Ike Roll

2011-09-29T09:30:00.007+01:00

Reiko Ike (or Ike Reiko) was only seventeen when she released an album and starred in her first Japanese Pinky film. For most of the 1970s she was one of Japan's top sex stars but by the end of the decade her career was over; she was busted for drugs and gambling and never acted in a film after 1979. It seems her bad girl on screen persona had seeped into her real life.

Ike's cult following in the west has been growing in recent years, partly due to Pinky Violence films coming out on DVD and her album reissued on CD, and partly because she's virtually naked all the time, even on her record covers and especially when she's in a sword fight.

The immensely popular genre Pinky film flourished in 1970s Japan, just as Grindhouse movies did in the States at the same time. The two share a lot in common; both are low budget, exploitation films with oodles of sex, nudity and violence. Pinky films are distinguished – slightly – by being quite stylised and visually striking. And although they contained much nudity, due to strict Japanese censorship laws there wasn't allowed to be any penetration, genitals or pubic hair on view, leading some critics to applaud the films imaginative eroticism whilst seemingly overlooking the copious scenes of female rape and torture (the Japanese are a funny lot).

With the growing popularity of the films, the 1970s saw Pinky films with bigger budgets and even have studios such as Toei coin a sub-genre, called Pinky Violence. 1973's Sex and Fury (pictured above), directed by Noribumi Suzuki and starring Reiko Ike, is one of the most famous examples. A political revenge thriller set in turn of the (last) century Japan, it has Ike revenge the death of her detective father. Highlights include a bunch of switchblade-welding nuns on a train; a lesbian scene; the appearance of Christina Lindberg, apparently a well-known Swedish softcore actress; death by oral sex (don't ask) and best of all, Ike, naked (her bath had been rudely interrupted) with sword, massacring a gang of useless Yakuza, in the snow, in slow motion. Snow, blood, slow motion, female nudity: almost my recipe for the perfect scene, if it wasn't so ludicrous and self-conscious (and the sword fights aren't actually that good, and the acting, dreadful).

The whole film leaves a sour taste, really: it's all very well and good having a strong female lead in a film, but if said film is a softcore porno with torture, S&M and rape then it's slightly problematic. Anyway, for an exploitation film, it's visual flair can't be denied and presumably Quentin Tarentino studied the film frame by frame before making Kill Bill (and presumably Suzaki had watched Sergio Leone before making Sex and Fury).

It seems Reiko Ike has two types of fan: those who like her films and those who like her music (it goes without saying that all like her body). Her album Kokotsu no Sekai was released in 1971. Ostensibly a convention selection of standard cover versions, Ike transformed the record into a Serge Gainsbourg circa. Je t'aime... moi non plus (1969) and Histoire de Melody Nelson (released the same year as Kokotsu no Sekai) collection of erotic moans, groans, wails and shrieks, resulting in a classic of Japanese psychedelic porn music. If you don't believe me, read what Mutant Sounds has to say about it.

London through its charity shops #15: Battersea, SW11

2011-09-28T10:09:00.003+01:00

I've covered part of Battersea before in my 'round Clapham Junction charity shop post (an area I would actually call Clapham Junction, though residents would no doubt prefer to call it Battersea). This is a quick post to cover Battersea Park Road, about a 10-15 walk from Clapham Junction.

There are three charity shops along Battersea Park Road, all pretty close to each other and near to Battersea Park. If you're in the area early Sunday afternoon, the Battersea car boot sale is on at 1:30pm in Battersea Park school and worth a rummage.

Oasis Wandsworth, at No. 547 Battersea Park Road, is huge, with an abundance of jigsaws, videos, CDs, records, books and clothes. In other words, it has everything one needs. However, it has been under investigation – the Wandsworth Guardian revealed it might not actually be a charity shop at all, but rather a for-profit organisation masquerading as one. Some doors along is Paws, a modest but quite interesting shop with friendly staff. On the other side of the road, near the crossroads with Battersea Bridge Road, is an average FARA, with an uninspiring selection of books, CDs and bric-a-brac, and quite a few boxes of records. I've never got anything there. The clothes section looks quite good though.

Notable Suicide Notes

2011-09-27T09:30:00.003+01:00

George Eastman, founder of Eastman Kodak and inventor of roll film:
To my friends: My work is done. Why wait?

George Sanders, actor:
Dear World, I am leaving you because I am bored. I feel I have lived long enough. I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool – good luck.

James Whale, film director:
The future is just old age and illness and pain... I must have peace and this is the only way.

Tony Hancock, comedian:
Things seemed to go wrong too many times.

Virginia Woolf, author:
I feel certain that I'm going mad again. I feel we can't go thru another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices.

The Invisible Man, scientist:

The Adventures of Antoine Doinel

2011-09-26T00:10:00.000+01:00

From top to bottom: Love on the Run (L'amour en Fuite, 1979); Bed and Board (Domicile Conjugal, 1970); Stolen Kisses (Baisers Volés, 1968); Antoine and Colette (1962) and The 400 Blows (Les Quatre Cents Coups, 1959). A great series of films, with Jean-Pierre Léaud as Truffaut's alter ego, constantly running and falling in love.

Random Film Review: I Hired a Contract Killer

2011-09-25T00:13:00.019+01:00

Dir: Aki Kaurismaki | UK | 1990 | 79mins

London, England. 1990. The Conservative Party are still in power. Anti-Poll Tax riots spread throughout the country. The Docklands is being redeveloped. British film director Michael Powell dies. Somehow, these events all seem to inform Kaurismaki's low-key thriller I Hired a Contract Killer.

The film begins with lonely Frenchman Henri Boulanger being made redundant from his dull clerical job at Her Majesty's Waterworks: the company is being privatised and job cuts need to be made. Foreigners go first. Despairing, Boulanger tries to kill himself but fails. A newspaper article inspires him to hire a hit man on his own life. Then he falls in love with flower-seller Margaret (Margi Clarke, from Letter to Brezhnev) and has a change of heart.

As is usual for a Kaurismaki film, the plot is slight, the humour dark and the acting low-key. Boulonger is played deadpan by Jean-Pierre Léaud, an actor greatly admired by Kaurismaki. Darling of the French New Wave, Léaud's screen debut was Truffaut's Les Quatre Cents Coups (The Four Hundred Blows, 1959), aged fourteen. Léaud would go on to star in three more features (and a short) based on the same character, a series of films collectively called the Adventures of Antoine Doinel, spanning some twenty years of his actual life – a unique cinematic achievement. Léaud went on to work with such acclaimed directors as Godard, Rivette, Varda, Pasolini, Skolimowski and Bertolucci throughout the 60s and 70s; a veritable who's who of European arthouse filmmakers.

In I Hired a Contract Killer, Léaud fills the shoes of the – usually Finnish – Kaurismaki hero amiably, a typically marginal and alienated character in a dead-end job. Leaud's alienation isn't helped by his living in an alien city, London. Indeed, even native residents might not recognise their city, partly due to Kaurismaki's trademark film noir lighting and use of bold colours, but mainly because the city looks almost post-war with piles of rubble, empty shops and derelict buildings. Presumably filmed mostly around the Docklands of East London, it's the cranes dominating the skyline that give the game away: the film takes place during the massive redevelopment of the area. Stanley Kubrick had filmed Full Metal Jacket to replicate war-torn Vietnam in the same part of London several years previously. It's doubtful that many of the locations used in either film are still standing.

The sense of alienation is further enhanced by the soundtrack, consisting mainly of old American songs (including several by Billie Holiday) whose lyrics seem to echo the characters situations. Even a cameo by quintessential Londoner Joe Strummer, here performing a song in a pub, has lyrics full of American references, as well as a picture of Elvis hanging on the wall behind him.

Strummer's last film performance had been the previous year in Jim Jarmusch's Mystery Train, where he gets repeatedly called Elvis. Jarmusch and Kaurismaki have a lot in common: both make stylised yet low-key films with minimal dialogue, a dark sense of humour and eclectic use of music. Jarmusch himself has a cameo in Leningrad Cowboys Go America (his haircut alone must have got him the role) and in Night on Earth he uses regular Kaurismaki actors. Jarmusch's most recent film, The Limits of Control, has John Hurt's character reference a Finnish film based on the La Bohéme. It is of course Kaurismaki's La Vie de Bohème.

At almost two hours, I found The Limits of Control a struggle to sit through; the great thing about Kaurismaki's films is they're rarely over 80 minutes long.

'God was wrong!'

2011-09-23T15:21:00.003+01:00

James Mason, playing a teacher addicted to cortisone, delivers one of cinema's greatest lines in Nic Ray's fascinating 1956 CinemaScope production, Bigger Than Life.

For the record, I wasn't the only one doing the ironing and watching it on Channel 4 last Friday afternoon. The best films are always on TV during the day.

The films of George Kuchar, 1942-2011

2011-09-22T00:07:00.012+01:00

Color me lurid: a still from Kuchar's Hold Me While I'm Naked (1966), a film which struck a nerve in my early student film-making days

George Kuchar, along with his twin brother Mike, started making Super 8 films when they were twelve years old. By the time of George's death earlier this month (on the 6 September – the same day fellow experimental filmmaker Jordan Belson died… it sometimes happens like this: remember Antonioni and Bergman both dying on the same day in 2007?… as did Cocteau and Piaf in 1963), aged 69, he had made over two hundred shorts on Super 8, 16mm and, later, video. Low budget, melodramatic, lurid and camp, inspired by both Hollywood and B Movies, his films, along with the likes of Warhol, Brakage and Anger, defined the American underground cinema in the 1960s and for years to come, influencing the likes of David Lynch, Guy Maddin, Todd Solondz and John Waters, who has repeatedly called Kuchar his favourite filmmaker.

Though most of his short films weren't as homoerotically explicit as fellow gay filmmakers Jack Smith, whose Flaming Creatures caused a sensation in 1963, or Kenneth Anger, whose Scorpio Rising was likewise controversial for its time, a collaboration with his then-lover Curt McDowell resulted in Kuchar's (presumably) sole feature film credits: as actor and writer for the still-controversial McDowell-directed Thundercrack!, made in 1975. An almost three hour-long, black and white heady mix of Hollywood Gothic, comedy, hetero and gay hardcore porn featuring all manner of polymorphous perversities, it's as infamous today as it was then, with its hilarious, outrageously over the top dialogue and performances, in particular Marion Eaton as the melodramatic, crazy, cucumber loving and large eyebrow wearing madam of the house.

It takes as its premise the old dark house horror movie, with a group of young, good-looking strangers stranded together in a Gothic mansion during a thunderstorm. Being low budget, the mansion exterior is a painting; the interiors consist of a couple of sparse rooms. No matter; the lighting of the exteriors is pretty atmospheric, looking like a film noir. The interiors, more often than not, are bleached out and over-exposed, giving the raincoat brigade cause for frustration, perhaps, yet creating a unique look to the film. Mark Ellinger's silent movie-like piano score helps punctuate the relentless sex, sucking and masturbating which soon becomes as casual and natural as smoking a cigarette (or smoking a Sherlock Holmes-type meerschaum pipe, as one of the characters hilariously does).

George Kuchar shows up towards the end as a zookooper who's lost the love of his life... a female gorilla. With Kuchar donning a wedding dress, the pair are finally reunited and a happy ending is had by all.

As one of the comments on the YouTube Thundercrack! opening points out, Wikipedia's deadpan plot summary of the film is almost as funny as the film itself.

Along with Eraserhead, The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Pink Flamingos, Thundercrack was a Scala cinema midnight favourite. The Horse Hospital had a special showing of the film on Tuesday night as part of the Scala Forever season.

Not be confused with: George Cukor, director of The Philadelphia Story, Adam's Rib and A Star is Born.
Or: Thundercrack, a little heard, unusual Bruce Springsteen song.

Previously on Barnflakes:
Scala Forever!
Double Bill Me

Top 10 worst Owen Wilson films

2011-09-21T17:24:00.001+01:00

I know, I know, all you girls love Owen Wilson with his cute, shaggy dog look. But ask yourself, has he ever been in a really good film? What do you mean you don't care? What do you mean he doesn't care either?

1. Marmaduke
2. Marley and Me
3. How Do You Know?
4. You, Me and Dupree
5. I Spy
6. The Haunting
7. Shanghai Noon
8. Drillbit Taylor
9. The Big Bounce
10. The Wedding Crashers

You know what #1? I haven't even heard of half of these films, let alone seen them. I think I've seen Marmaduke and Marley and Me – both dog films – and some people actually think these are good but in my humble opinion they are among the worst films ever made. You know what #2? I could probably do a top twenty he's been in that many bad films, but I can't be bothered. You know what #3? Tears of a clown and all that… depressed Wilson tried to kill himself in 2007; maybe he does care after all.

Safe as Castles

2011-09-20T13:17:00.004+01:00

Stoke Newington's former Pumping Station, now a climbing centre

The Alhambra of Pumping Stations: Crossness

My boon companion and I walked along the Parkland Walk, the 4.5 mile path that follows the course of an abandoned railway track in North London. From Finsbury Park we found a canal to walk alongside (though actually a river called New River, though it's not new any more – it opened in 1613) where we didn't see a soul for at least an hour, rejoined the canal after crossing over Seven Sisters Road, then eventually stumbled across Stoke Newington's castle, pictured top.

From the grand Water Treatment buildings at Hampton to the opulent Pumping Stations at Abbey Mills in East London and Crossness in South East London (pictured above), both designed by Sir Joseph Bazalgette and Charles Henry Driver, only the Victorians made their ancillary buildings like palaces and castles, and indeed many are now Grade I and II listed buildings.

The Victorians sure loved their bricks and took as much pride in their service buildings as their public ones, but they weren't built as mere follies. The River Thames was an open sewer in Victorian times, resulting in numerous outbreaks of cholera and culminating in The Great Stink of summer 1858, when sweltering London smelt very bad indeed and even affected the fine gentlemen in the Houses of Parliament, causing them to appoint Joseph Bazalgette chief engineer of the Metropolitan Board of Works to commence work on the London sewerage system.

The sewerage system, along with its pump houses and treatment works, needed to symbolise strength, safety and health, so what better way than with these bold, beautiful buildings?

Open House: St Annes, Soho

2011-09-19T18:45:00.003+01:00

The Artshed

The Wall of Light

Usually architecture is about big, bold statements but I love it when it's quite humble and well-intentioned, such as the case of the Artshed in the grounds of St Annes church, Soho. Part of a three-stage programme which also consisted of a fence and garden shed, it's amazing that such a seemingly small and modest idea has actually been so positive and achieved a lot of good.

I remember years ago passing that part of Dean Street and there always being homeless people, alcoholics and drug dealers. The church grounds were always littered with needles and cans. It was dark, dingy and a bit dodgy.

In 2006, along with the charity Soho Green, St Annes Church and the City of Westminster, The Architecture Ensemble were commissioned to transform the garden, a plague burial ground. The fence, known as the Wall of Light, is the most obvious change. By day the steel fence is a semi-transparent 'wave', allowing open views of the church and grounds. At night it is lit up with different light patterns, revealing a wall of light. This has instantly stopped most anti-social behaviour in the area.

The Artshed, which I'd never noticed before but was open to the public as part of last weekend's Open House, is actually a children's public toilet. Installed in 2007, the timber boat-shape building has objects and prints built into the walls, functioning as a mini-museum and art gallery to reveal some of the history of the area. Taking a child into an adult public toilet is a hazardous operation at best, so a toilet designed for children is a delightful idea; especially if said toilet is beautiful, relaxing and interesting.

The final stages of the project were the Gardener's Shed (2010) and Big Table (with chairs). Though we tend to think of Soho as consisting only of shops, bars and restaurants, it does have a surprising amount of residents, as well as a lot of social housing and quite a few schools and nurseries. St Annes regularly organises events for local children.

We stumbled across the Artshed quite by accident whilst trying to find shelter from the rain after seeing the Museum of Everything #4 at Selfridges (some people have had reservations about putting art by disabled people on display; personally I found the gallery shop a lot more exploitative than the exhibition). By chance, my daughter did actually need the toilet but was too shy to use the Artshed at first, what with the door being open and two men standing outside. Well, one of them was the architect, Steven Johnson, who we had a nice chat with (whilst daughter finally used the toilet).

The Architecture Ensemble

Four of the best: Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. covers

2011-09-17T09:30:00.006+01:00

"Okay, how many 20th century art movements can we put onto these covers? Surrealism? Check. Pop art? Check. Op art? Check. What about a bit of psychedelia too? Check. Okay, that'll do. Keep up the good work, Steranko."

Top 10 graphic novels

2011-09-16T10:24:00.005+01:00

1. Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (Frank Miller, 1986)
2. Watchmen (Moore, Gibbons, 1986)
3. Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid On Earth (Chris Ware, 2000)
4. Maus (Art Spiegelman, 1986)
5. Batman: Arkham Asylum (Morrison, McKean, 1989) / The Killing Joke (Moore, Bolland, 1988)
6. Palestine (Joe Sacco, 1996)
7. Black Hole (Charles Burns, 2005)
8. Persepolis (Marjane Satrapi, 2000)
9. Epileptic (David B, 2002)
10. Alice in Sunderland (Bryan Talbot, 2007)

As a kid I devoured comics; the Beano was my favourite but I read most British comics from the Dandy and the Topper to Buster and Whizzer & Chips (though I preferred the publishers DC Thomson to IPC). This was the 1970s and early 80s, when the term 'graphic novel' didn't exist; or if it did, it certainly wasn't mainstream. I used to read some American comics but was never that into superheroes, except maybe Batman (and Captain Carrot and his Amazing Zoo Crew… but that's another story).

The graphic novel didn't become mainstream (ie marketable) until the mid-80s; indeed, three of my favourites – Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns and the first volume of Maus all came out in 1986. Ostensibly, a graphic novel can just be a collection of comics compiled into one volume but by the 1990s it was clear that comics were for kids but graphic novels were for adults, tackling adult themes such as war, sex, relationships and, well, anything at all really. However, as Wikipedia notes, a lot of comic books have been given the term graphic novel retrospectively to cash in on its popularity.

You may notice that all the graphic novels from my list come from the 1980s onwards. Yet my favourite comic book artists of all time don't feature at all. These would include Winsor McCay (Little Nemo in Slumberland), Will Eisner (The Spirit, A Contract with God; Eisner is often credited as the 'father of the graphic novel'), Robert Crumb, Hergé (Tintin), George Herriman (Krazy Kat) and Raymond Briggs (The Snowman, When the Wind Blows) – all of whom were drawing long before the 1980s graphic novel craze. Hence I wouldn't class their work as graphic novels, though perhaps they are (retrospectively… but at the time, they were comic strips in newspapers/children's books/comics). Of the younger generation of artists working today, Charles Burns, Chris Ware, Daniel Clowes and Joe Sacco are among my favourites.

Poor film adaptations have put me off reading most graphic novels (if I haven't already read them) such as Like Hell, V for Vendetta, the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, 30 Days of Night, 300, as well as the now never ending superhero franchises. The most successful adaptations, perhaps, are those which either disguise their source material entirely, such as A History of Violence and Road to Perdition, or draw attention to it, such as Sin City and Persepolis. So far, only Persepolis (the film) has made me want to read the graphic novel (which I am currently doing).

Biggest box set ever due out soon

2011-09-15T10:17:00.002+01:00

Music box sets have been getting more and more absurd in recent years, with Neil Young's 8 CD (and it's only volume one!) Archives set costing £99, coming out a few years ago, Pink Floyd's Discovery box set coming out later this month (16 CDs, £129.93) and the Quadrophenia box set coming out in November (£70.99; 'only' 5 discs). Other recent big box sets have included the Bob Dylan mono set (9 CDs, £45), the Beatles remastered box set (16 CDs, £157.97) and Apple records remastered box set (17 CDs, £99.99).

But nothing compares to the mammoth box set to be released in time for Christmas. Consisting of 18,470,283 CDs, 9 DVDs, 3 Blu-Rays, a limited edition vinyl 12" and a 48-page booklet, the set, simply titled 'Music', consists of every album ever produced on CD, ever, and will cost a whooping £9.5m, for which you also get a free, convenient warehouse (pictured) to store the music in. The CDs are helpfully stored in alphabetical order. Alternatively, you can download the collection for a 'mere' £5.5m (though you'll also need a warehouse for all the hard drives).

Whilst it is probably true that these aren't going to go flying off the shelves, for music fans rich enough to afford it, the box set is a dream come true, consisting of music from every genre and every band that's ever existed (assuming it's been issued on CD). 'Music' is the result of a unique joint venture between every record label in the world.

If money isn't the problem, time certainly will be. It is estimated that even if you play the CDs back to back, 24 hours a day, you will still need 1,674 years to play them all. Substantially less if you leave out Neil Young's output.

• Music is released on Nov 26.

Bands named after actors

2011-09-14T10:51:00.001+01:00

Dennis Hopper Choppers
Dananananaykroyd
Marilyn Manson
AndyDickTracyMorganFreeman
Rock of Travolta
Travoltas
Mr T Experience
The Real Tuesday Weld
The Wynona Riders
Gay for Johnny Depp
Orlando Boom
Jodie Foster's Army
Com Truise

Half of these names remind me of those pornos which take regular films and give them a porno twist (not that I've seen any of them), such as:

Star Whores
Forrest Hump
A Clockwork Orgy
The Da Vinci Load
The Hills Have Thighs
From Lust Till Dawn
Bareback Mountain
The XXXorcist
Edward Penishands
Butt Pirates of the Caribbean

Sort of. Maybe it's just me, but you could have Orlando Boom and Gay for Johnny Depp starring in Butt Pirates of the Caribbean. Say. Or Rock of Travolta starring in Saturday Night Beaver (I thought I just made this one up – but of course it's already an actual porno film, a tribute disco band, a women's night club and a hilarious and quirky birthday card, etc).

Notes on cycling

2011-09-13T10:52:00.000+01:00

Just as old people suddenly start wearing clothes in hues of beige and pastels, and usually calm people turn crazy once behind a car wheel, so cyclists once on their bikes dress like utter prats and cycle like kamikaze pilots. Me, I feel positively under dressed in jeans and a shirt, and no crash helmet. Well, I have just quit smoking so I need some kind of suicidal tendency. But at least I obey the general rules of the road whilst on my bike. Such as stopping at red lights and providing hand signals. Which no other cyclists seem to do. Indeed many of them look as if they intentionally cycle in front of moving vehicles. Fancy being run over like that: looking like a prat.

A recent survey to determine whether the government's recent scheme on encouraging cycling had succeeded resulted in a big 'no'. It seems the general public still think of cyclists in terms of either obsessives or weirdos.

Random Film Review: The Bed

2011-09-12T11:14:00.006+01:00

Dir: Derek Vanlint | UK | 1980 | 29mins

The Bed, made in 1980 but not released until 1982, is a low-budget short horror film made in England. I'm guessing, though I'm not sure, that it was made as a short for showing before the main feature in cinemas, something that used to happen in British cinemas up until the 1980s.

It starred my best friend at the time, Christian, and I was employed as a (uncredited) stunt double. I was paid £20 and could eat as much doughnuts and chocolate biscuits as I liked, which I certainly did. I think I was there more to keep Christian company than to be his stunt double but on the one bit of doubling I did do, lighting a match in a dark room, I distinctly remember burning my finger.

Though I wasn't allowed to watch the film once it was released (it was classified AA, which meant fourteen or over), I did see most of it being filmed, even the scary bits, and remember thinking it odd I couldn't watch the end result when I'd actually seen it being shot.

The film's director, Derek Vanlint, died last year. Previously to photographing and directing The Bed he was cinematographer for Ridley Scott's Alien (1979). After shooting Scott's moody masterpiece I would have expected Vanlint's CV to be full of high quality films he'd worked on – but it seems not. His only other role as cinematographer on a feature film was for Dragonslayer, two years after Alien. He worked a lot in commercials then his name crops up again for special effects on X-Men and as director and cinematography on horror film The Spreading Ground, starring Dennis Hopper (both 2000).

The Bed starts with Jamie as a young man looking round an old, deserted country house. Through flashback we see Jamie as a boy (played by Christian), scared out of his wits when his older sister and her boyfriend, left alone in the house to babysit Jamie for the evening, play cruel tricks on him. His sister makes believe she's been sucked under Jamie's bed by a monster and her boyfriend pretends he's been stabbed. Jamie has his revenge at the end when the couple, laughing at scaring Jamie half to death and frolicking on The Bed, are suffocated by its sheets and consumed by it. We come back to present day; Jamie looks at the empty room where the bed once stood then is called by someone outside: an ambulance driver beckons him down in a friendly voice. We assume it's Jamie's day out from the mental asylum. The final shot is of the lighter part of flooring where the bed once stood disappearing once Jamie has left the room.

For a low-budget (and very dated) short horror film, it has a surprising number of talented people working on it. Aside from Vanlint, the late Richard Bedford, who worked frequently with director Julian Temple, was the editor. The creepy, atmospheric electronic music is by John Foxx, former lead singer of Ultravox. He left Ultravox in 1979 to pursue a solo career, so The Bed must have been one of his first solo projects.

It was to be my first and last job as a stunt double. Over ten years after The Bed, Christian would act in and provide make up effects for my video Darker Than Night.

Crazy Richard and Jane

2011-09-11T20:26:00.007+01:00

Richard Dadd's Sketch of an idea for Crazy Jane, 1855

Twickenham's stunning Orleans House currently has an excellent Richard Dadd exhibition. Dadd, who famously killed his dad and spent the rest of the life in the mental asylums Bethlem and Broadmoor, painted exquisitely-detailed watercolour paintings of Oriental and religious scenes, portraits and landscapes, fairies and other supernatural beings. Though not containing his most famous fairy painting (The Fairy Fellers' Master-Stroke, which can be seen at the Tate), it does have much of his other work, including sketchbooks and letters.

Orleans House also has a nice cafe in their converted horse stables, but Orleans park, opposite the gallery and over-looking the Thames, has better views and cheaper coffee in their cafe. Nearby are Marble Hill House and Ham House, but best of all is a stroll or cycle along the Thames towpath on a beautiful autumn Sunday afternoon.

The Richard Dadd exhibition runs until 2 October 2011.

Previously on Barnflakes:
Bedlam: The Art of Madness

Top ten Paul McCartney albums

2011-09-08T18:30:00.009+01:00

Isn't it strange how the best albums also have the best artwork? Ram's gatefold cover has photos by Linda and artwork* by Paul, including a 'hidden' message: L.I.L.Y., halfway down the cover on the right hand side, apparently meaning 'Linda I Love You'.

1. Ram (1971)
2. McCartney (1970)
3. Band on the Run (Wings, 1973)
4. Venus and Mars (Wings, 1975)
5. Tug of War (1982)
6. McCartney II (1980)
7. London Town (Wings, 1978)
8. Flaming Pie (1997)
9. Chaos and Creation in the Backyard (2005)
10. Give my Regards to Broad Street** (1984)

Also quite good is Memory Almost Full (2007) and Electric Arguments (2008), recorded under his moniker The Fireman. If you're not a big fan you could probably make do with a Greatest Hits... Wingspan (2001) does the job over two discs.

Whilst Paul McCartney/Wings LPs aren't worth much at all, his CDs, many of which are out of print, are now fetching quite a lot on eBay (by quite a lot I mean £15 at the most). Band on the Run, McCartney and McCartney II have recently been given the full re-issue treatment with single CDs, deluxe editions and completely over the top box sets.

*In stark contrast to his dreadful 'artwork' forty years later on the Live in Los Angeles CD (also known as Amoeba's Secret) giveaway with the Mail on Sunday. For once, the Mail were pretty diplomatic in their choice of words: 'The distinctive sleeve artwork has been designed by Paul'.

**Let me explain! It's good! I remember getting this on cassette when it came out; it was my first Beatles-related album. I have fond memories of it. I hadn't had it or heard it for years until last week when I got it on CD in a charity shop. I've been playing it loads. Come on, it's got sentimental value for me.

Related: Paul and Faul
We've all heard the clichéd conspiracy theories that dead rock stars such as Elvis and Jim Morrison are actually alive and well, but have you heard the one about the alive rock star who is actually dead? There are thousands of websites and forums stating Paul McCartney actually died in 1966 and a replacement, called Faul, has been his lookalike ever since. I'm all for conspiracy theories, but this one seems completely pointless.

Album cover of the week: On the Wires of Our Nerves

2011-09-07T21:37:00.003+01:00

Believe it or not, it's meant to be quite a good album (Kraftwerk/Aphex Twinish). LP seen today in a charity shop (actually hanging on the wall!). £3 barngain.