And now a public service announcement…
Ah. I knew this imagery reminded me of something.
October 6, 2010 — 9:13 pm
Comments: 47
Long walk, meet short pier
Somebody torched Hastings Pier last night.
Bastards.
It was a great spindly thing with a ballroom at the end, like a Victorian lady hiking her skirts and wading out to sea. Designed by Eugenius Birch (who also designed Eastbourne Pier and West Pier in Brighton — which was itself torched a few years ago), it opened in 1872 on Britain’s first bank holiday.
Its fortunes — like those of all Britain’s pleasure piers — were up and down through the 20th C and into the 21st. In the Sixties and Seventies, Hastings Pier was a rock and roll venue, hosting concerts by The Rolling Stones, The Who, Jimi Hendrix and Pink Floyd.
They’ve already made arrests. I’m guessing it’s insurance money or something, but we may never get to the bottom of it.
There is no part of England that is farther than a hundred miles from the sea. When I was told this, I sat down with a map and a piece of string and worked it out. It’s true. The seaside holiday is deep down in the marrowbone of the Briton.
From the very beginning of the Nineteenth C — and really hotting up once railroads made travel easy — Brits built pleasure piers like this. Dozens of them. So they could visit the ocean even when the tide was out, without getting their pink satin slippers wet.
They’re like…long, thin state fairs stuck into the sea (the one at Southend-on-sea is almost a mile and a half long!). They had concerts and shows and shops and food running down the middle, railings on either side to look out over the water and at night they’re lit up like Rock City.
I love these things. I’m sure they make perfect sense to Brits.
October 5, 2010 — 7:03 pm
Comments: 17
Hm. No. Haven’t quite got him yet…
Here’s the weirdest ethnic stereotype you’ll hear all day: black men typically have very tiny ears. I guess black women do, too, but it’s particularly noticeable on men.
Not that I noticed this myself. My mother — who was a very talented portrait painter — pointed it out to me years ago. Check it out; it’s true.
Came to mind today when I saw a caricature of Obama that relied entirely on giving him HUGE ears. Just making stuff big is a lazy way to catch a likeness. The great caricaturist Al Hirschfeld captured likenesses with some spooky voodoo shit I don’t even understand. I never liked his work much, but he sure could do likenesses.
Anyhoo, dude’s ears are kinda big for a brother, but it’s really more that they stick out at a jaunty angle. Been playing with the president’s ears all evening. Haven’t quite got it yet.
October 4, 2010 — 10:32 pm
Comments: 19
A faceful of hot, wet ugly
I know, I know — all the cool kids have blogged this PSA already.
It’s an eco fantasy snuff film, where true believers calmly murder those not willing to cut energy consumption by ten percent. And it’s an extraordinarily ugly piece of work. That’s my favorite bit up there — right at the end, when they blow up Gillian Anderson and her eyeballs slowly squee down the glass.
The blowback was instant and HUGE and not all from the right. They’ve pulled it down already. Repeatedly. As of now this copy is still working and, if all else fails, I’ve downloaded the .flv (drop me a line if you want it — my blog uploader choked on it).
I think I can explain where this thing comes from, though. I mean, besides scary evil eco-psychosis. Raw, ugly and in your face is a very common style of charity and public service advertising in the UK.
There was that anti-smoking TV ad I found so hard to watch; dragging a guy down the steps and out the building by a giant fish-hook stuck in his face (“hooked” on cigarettes, uh-huh uh-huh). Or the man slumped bleeding in the driver’s seat while his wife screams his name down the phone (cell phones distract drivers, see?).
Because of my IP, I even get British adverts while surfing my good old true-blue American web sites. Most common are the tragic children; the perennial starving African babies, the tight close-up of an Asian child with cleft palate, the little girl with the stumps for legs. Picture of sad-eyed child with horrible parental insults superimposed in text. Scared teenager on the streets with shadowy figures closing in. Oh, and the animal charities — ye gods! All those filthy one-eyed puppies and mangy bears.
I’m sure the advertising agencies would say that shocking imagery is real and we should be forced to confront it — and that awful images get the desired response. But there are two huge disadvantages to this approach.
The first is for me, a consumer of media. It makes my world a relentlessly horrible place; a place of perpetual emergencies and nagging ugliness. It is, in a word, a downer.
And the second flows from the first: I get jaded. To shock me, agencies have to up the ante continually. Dream up more and more horrible imagery. This isn’t the first time green campaigns have evoked jihadi/September 11 imagery to sell the urgency of their cause. To the people who made the “No Pressure” video, this seemed like a perfectly natural next-step progression in the ratcheting up of edginess.
But to all of you who aren’t exposed to this ugly shit all day, it was like, WHAT THE FUCK IS THE MATTER WITH THOSE PEOPLE?!
October 1, 2010 — 8:35 pm
Comments: 52
Happy birthday, bucket o’ suck
The first episode of The Flintstones aired fifty years ago on this day. Also, that’s Stony Curtis! Who is dead! Plus, I saw a guy walking down the street today wearing a Quick Draw McGraw t-shirt, no lie.
That’s enough synchronicity to make your eyes bleed.
And speaking of things that make your eyes bleed — Hanna-Barbera Cartoons!
I once worked for a man who loved H-B cartoons for the same reason I hate them — they were forever finding new and innovative ways to be cheap-ass. Like, when Barney’s talking the camera’s on Fred and when Fred is talking the camera’s on Barney so they don’t have to pay for so much of that gosh-darned moving mouth animation.
The downside? Making your viewers stare at a big ugly drawing of a head that doesn’t do anything but blink occasionally.
These guys had hundreds of titles. I mentally divide Hanna-Barbera cartoons into the following categories:
The Early Suck: the three or so decades from Huckleberry Hound through to Josie and the Pussycats, inclusive of the whole Scooby Doo oeuvre.
The Doesn’t Actually Suck: which includes most of their adventure cartoons of the same era. Jonny Quest, Birdman and the Galaxy Trio, The Herculoids, the Fantastic Four. Character design by the excellent comic artist Alex Toth and non-comedy storylines make the difference.
The Later Suck: the Eighties were full of cartoons (from many studios) that had slick production values but still somehow managed to suck even harder than Magilla Gorilla. The Smurfs, Pac Man, Scrappy Doo, Snorks. There was a plague of “familiar cartoon characters as babies” shows, too. The Flintstone Kids, A Pup Named Scooby Doo. There’s something peculiarly horrible and soulless about this era.
The Aren’t Really H-B Cartoons cartoons: Turner bought the Hanna-Barbera studio and library in the early Nineties and launched the Cartoon Network to showcase them. H-B studios then encouraged in-house staff to pitch cartoon ideas, which were shown as World Premiere Toons. This gave rise to several excellent cartoons: Dexter’s Laboratory, Cow and Chicken, I Am Weasel, The Powerpuff Girls. You might think of them as HBINOs.
I must say, I’m awfully tempted to buy the Hanna-Barbera Cartoon Sound Efx collection, but I just can’t work out how to sync up life events with the appropriate sound effect.
September 30, 2010 — 10:33 pm
Comments: 55
Want that jacket!
Behold, Boy in a Bitching Distressed Jean Jacket Eating a Fruit Pie by the Master of Blue Jeans.
Not kidding. Okay, maybe I made up the name of the pitcher.
The Canesso Gallery thinks they have identified a previously unknown Seventeenth Century painter they’re calling the Master of Blue Jeans. It’s not that these paintings have just turned up after 400 years, of course. It’s just that somebody stared into the huge reservoir of anonymous paintings of the era noticed a similarity in style and subject matter in these few.
Namely, they’re pictures of poor people wearing denim.
The word “denim” comes from “serge de Nîmes” — which I assume you knew — and “blue jeans” comes from “Bleu de Genes” (aka Genoa) — which you may have known, Meester Smarty Britches, but I didn’t. Both cities claim to have made denim clothes for hundreds of years, but there hasn’t been much evidence of the early years. Until these pictures.
I was a bit dubious at first, but I had a squint at the catalogue and…yeah, the way the fabric is dark blue but the worn bits are white, that’s pretty much denim behavior right there. (That online catalogue is neat, by the way. I mean, you can turn pages and shit, just like a real exhibition catalogue).
The show is sponsored by fashion house Marithe + Francois Girbaud, who pioneered stonewashed jeans 40 years ago and are marketing their new thang, Wattwash jeans. Those are jeans aged with lasers rather than bleaching and washing. The hippies are raving and drooling about it because the process only takes 5 liters of water, as opposed to the 170 liters used by the acid process. Thereby saving the planet or some shit.
HEY HIPPIES! If you care that much, why not do what we used to do: buy them blue and wear them until they look like that.
Via Kottke by way of the History Blog.
September 29, 2010 — 10:11 pm
Comments: 33
DZZT!
I understand those hand-held bug-zapper thingies don’t work worth a damn. I watched a woman at the outdoor market the other day waving one around and — I dunno — hoping to slay flies with vicious air currents or something.
This one? This one fucking works.
I bought it for Uncle B as a bit of a joke; the Amazon reviews led me to think this one might not be so lame. He came zooming upstairs clutching The Executioner with his eyes all shiny and hissed, “this thing is eeeeevil!”
You wave it at a bug, there’s a CRACK and a burst of lightning, and the skeeter just…disintegrates. Hugely satisfying. Mucho recommendo.
Eh. Anyway. I’ve spent the evening swapping in my ‘new’ motherboard — surely the most pain-in-the-assical of all geek chores — only to find it might be the power supply, after all. Money to waste, I have none.
Why do I like computers again?
September 28, 2010 — 10:39 pm
Comments: 26
You’d have to have a heart of stone not to laugh…
I know, I know…going to hell. I’ll leave the light on for you.
Actually, it sounds like Jimi Heselden was a damn decent guy who gave millions to military charities.
But…honestly.
Drove his Segway off’n a cliff into the crick.
Okay, I’m still sore about the way they introduced this thing in 2001. Remember? For days (weeks?) leading up to the announcement, there was all this bullshit marketing blag about how the new whatever-it-is was going to change human civilization FOR-EV-ER.
Then they rolled out this expensive goofy-ass two-wheelie mong-scooter.
I admit it — I experienced a little rage bubble. You know, that brief, sudden snap that makes you hoot like a monkey and fling out-of-date food items at the teevee.
September 27, 2010 — 7:07 pm
Comments: 41
Okay, I’m in
I was really starting to sweat this; I wrote away for my absentee ballot weeks and weeks ago. I wanna be a part of the revolution, dammit!
Rhode Island politics — for once! — look interesting this year. I could almost wish I’d kept my registration there for one more cycle.
But no. I own property in Tennessee. I pay taxes in Tennessee. My family is in Tennessee. And, most importantly, Tennessee politics is nuttier’n a squirrel’s rectum in a circus tent.
Two words: Basil Marceaux. Treat yourself to a trip to his campaign website.
I must say, he makes a tempting offer: VOTE FOR ME AND IF I WIN I WILL IMMUNE YOU FROM ALL STATE CRIMES FOR THE REST OF YOU LIFE! Never know; could come in handy. It takes a serious man to make his campaign promises in all caps.
Then there’s Zach Wamp, who totally deserves to be governor for having the awesomest name since Buff Orpington.
Too bad I skipped the primary. George T. Erdel of District 6 assured me he was my “Tea Party Democrat.” I don’t know if his campaign website used to be a campaign website, but it’s now all about Islam = Sharia. Right nutty fringe, wrong party.
Man I’m going to need some help making a choice. Anybody know any good Tennessee political blogs?
At least I know how to vote on the proposed amendment to the state constitution:
The citizens of this state shall have the personal right to hunt and fish, subject to reasonable regulations and restrictions prescribed by law. The recognition of this right does not abrogate any private or public property rights, nor does it limit the state’s power to regulate commercial activity. Traditional manners and means may be used to take non-threatened species.
My choices are No, Yes or Yeeeeee-haaaaa!
Good weekend, everyone.
September 24, 2010 — 9:36 pm
Comments: 52
My hops. Let me show you them.
September is the time to harvest the hops. Next door in Kent is big hop-growing country, and has been since the 16th Century. Before then, lots of different herbs had been added to beer to make it bitter (to counteract the sweetness of the malt), but hops have a preservative, plus a slight antibiotic effect which makes conditions more favorable for brewer’s yeast.
Of course, they didn’t know shit about antibiotic effects in fifteen-hunnert-something. They just knew beer made with hops turned out better and lasted longer.
It took a quarter of a million workers to bring in the crop, about a third of whom were vacationing London families from the East End. A hell of a vacation that must have been, sleeping in crappy little hopper huts and working in the fields all day. But the money was good, it was out in the country, and it seems to have been pretty sociable work.
Fresh hops were then taken to oast houses, which are giant drying kilns. In the 19th C, oast houses took on a distinctive shape: round towers with conical roofs — usually in two or three in a cluster. The roofs have a little flange that catches the breeze and moves a vent to face the wind.
Or did. All the harvesting and drying is done industrially now, of course, and the oasts have been converted to housing. Tons of them around here.
I’ve been trying to get my hands on some hops for several years. In old houses and pubs with low beams, it’s traditional to hang strings (or “bines”) of hops along the beams like curb feelers, to warn people off smacking their noggins. They look and smell great. But you have to get them fresh, before they go brittle and dry, and they disappear into the beer trade very fast.
We stopped at a fruit stand for some plums and another customer pulled in, the back of his car full of freshly-picked hops. I mugged him. He’d picked them for some other middle-class pretend-farmer’s-wife country wannabe, but weasel got there first.
Somewhere in England tonight, a woman named Tallulah or Cassandra or Jemima is thinking of lost hops and crying bitter tears.
September 23, 2010 — 11:02 pm
Comments: 34