Saturday, 14 November 2009
Monday, 2 November 2009
Police Brutalism
It could be that The Sweeney is the most Brutalist TV programme ever made. Although in actual fact The Professionals - LWT's showbiz ying to the gritty, everyday yang of Thames & Euston Films - concentrated far more in the bomb-gutted, derelict and disused warehouse schtick that the The Sweeney has perhaps become more erroneously linked with, Regan & Carter hit their stride at a key moment in London's post-war overhaul. Alternate episodes are shot in either Victorian terraces and public houses, or amongst the kind of gleaming municipal developments such as those cast in two installments I've seen recently.
As if to perfectly illustrate the hard-hatted transition between decaying, smashed-to-fuck factory and modernist housing regeneration, the series 3 episode 'Down To You, Brother' (original transmission 22/11/76) bases its story around a slimy, somewhat old-school property villain in whose path Regan has previously crossed. The baddie, Raymond Meadows (played by Derek Francis, who also starred as the entirely unrelated Brother Martin, an exasperated monk in Carry On Abroad) attempts to cultivate a bent, bribe-laden relationship with Regan, with the shadowplay's setting occasioning visits to his latest development.
The Alexandra Road estate in NW8 takes this particular role, with Meadows in effect assuming the guise of site foreman to Neave Brown, the American-born architect. This swooping complex of stepped, Mediterranean-esque apartments has a real 'stadia' feel to it, owing to the tiered terracing, a ziggurat tilt redolent of the Brunswick Centre. Meadows hangs around a bit and points, and the production team plainly had limited - though fairly revealing - access to the site, for understandable reasons.
An episode from the previous series, 'Thou Shalt Not Kill' (original transmission 24/11/75), is afforded considerably more location time however for a good old-fashioned bank job. Two lunatic gunmen (one of which is called Monk - what is this monastic theme all about?) hold several staff and customers hostage in a university campus branch of the 'National Mercian Bank', whilst Regan & Carter plus an extended team of flying squad heavies including marksmen perch themselves around and about the network of adjacent buildings, poised to strike back.
Eventually, at the end of what seems like the entirety of a tense, balmy summer's day (during which a hapless George Carter delivers the requested sustenance of "champagne & tinned nosh" to the villains in his pants to prove he's not tooled up), even Haskins wades in for some uncharacteristic field work.
The heist eventually ends and our brace of nutjobs 'get theirs' off site, which in this instance is the grounds of Brunel University in Uxbridge, West London. These sapling-lined environs are exploited to the hilt, and our heroes gambol over the concrete like macaques, presenting via the stark geometry of the campus ample opportunity for dramatic, expansive angled shots. Alas the same site's extraordinary Ludovico Medical Facility is not featured, though it is of course the perfect companion to Thamesmead in A Clockwork Orange.
Everything else was puce & mint green.
As if to perfectly illustrate the hard-hatted transition between decaying, smashed-to-fuck factory and modernist housing regeneration, the series 3 episode 'Down To You, Brother' (original transmission 22/11/76) bases its story around a slimy, somewhat old-school property villain in whose path Regan has previously crossed. The baddie, Raymond Meadows (played by Derek Francis, who also starred as the entirely unrelated Brother Martin, an exasperated monk in Carry On Abroad) attempts to cultivate a bent, bribe-laden relationship with Regan, with the shadowplay's setting occasioning visits to his latest development.
The Alexandra Road estate in NW8 takes this particular role, with Meadows in effect assuming the guise of site foreman to Neave Brown, the American-born architect. This swooping complex of stepped, Mediterranean-esque apartments has a real 'stadia' feel to it, owing to the tiered terracing, a ziggurat tilt redolent of the Brunswick Centre. Meadows hangs around a bit and points, and the production team plainly had limited - though fairly revealing - access to the site, for understandable reasons.
An episode from the previous series, 'Thou Shalt Not Kill' (original transmission 24/11/75), is afforded considerably more location time however for a good old-fashioned bank job. Two lunatic gunmen (one of which is called Monk - what is this monastic theme all about?) hold several staff and customers hostage in a university campus branch of the 'National Mercian Bank', whilst Regan & Carter plus an extended team of flying squad heavies including marksmen perch themselves around and about the network of adjacent buildings, poised to strike back.
Eventually, at the end of what seems like the entirety of a tense, balmy summer's day (during which a hapless George Carter delivers the requested sustenance of "champagne & tinned nosh" to the villains in his pants to prove he's not tooled up), even Haskins wades in for some uncharacteristic field work.
The heist eventually ends and our brace of nutjobs 'get theirs' off site, which in this instance is the grounds of Brunel University in Uxbridge, West London. These sapling-lined environs are exploited to the hilt, and our heroes gambol over the concrete like macaques, presenting via the stark geometry of the campus ample opportunity for dramatic, expansive angled shots. Alas the same site's extraordinary Ludovico Medical Facility is not featured, though it is of course the perfect companion to Thamesmead in A Clockwork Orange.
Everything else was puce & mint green.
Wednesday, 7 October 2009
"Norfolk & Surrey Estuarial Slurry"
Now this is what you call hauntology. Back in 2002/2003 Baron Mordant expressed a wish to scatter his squalid East London environs with a spraycan Mordant 'M', and I fashioned the requisite stencil. He duly issued his nozzle, but alas the flimsy card frame didn't last too many repeat brandings owing to the font's linear properties (Cressida Swash Caps, initially taken from an old 1970's transfer where it was called Triline, and familiar to many via the Brown Watson publisher's logo seen on numerous kids tv/film tie-in annuals from the same era). Its deterioration thus led to a cessation of said guerrilla activity.
I'd not seen any evidence of MM's peppered urban ligatures until this summer, when out of nowhere a Mordant fan, one Graham Brown, snapped the following on the Hackney Road near a rehearsal studio called The Premises.
This week seems an apt time to mention it, as it sees the release of the brand new Mordant album, SyMptoMs. It's a curved through-ball of a record, classic MM in its singular gait yet a markedly more song-based departure from previous despatches, with smearings of pixelated folk, Krautrock & lunar synth hums gluing together the Baron's soaring 'Guildford Borough Council Planning Enforcement Team' vocal style.
Another surviving remnant from Mordant's past has continued to surprise and confound of late. This particular ghost being me. MM is still referred to as a duo, despite my having left the fold a full year ago; I've not had anything to do with any of the releases since the MM024 split Shackleton 10", and I'm beginning to wonder exactly how long this comedic misnomer will go on. Not that I'm complaining, in fact I quite enjoy it. The Baron has been expertly and seamlessly steering the ship alone through a glut of mercurial, mesmerising releases, and it's just odd that journalists and retailers alike can't seem to display the same agility by correctly defining who exactly is involved. A little unfair too to the Baron, the nebulous, skewed outfit of occasional Mordant artists (Shackleton, Vindicatrix, Dennis Greenidge among them), and a touch derisory in view of the lovely farewell MM site news page entry written by the Baron on the 9th October last year, which plainly hasn't been read by enough of those in the business.
So, slack yet amusing as it is, hauntology has its first true phantom artist. As the Baron rather chillingly told me last week, "you'll never leave".
Should anyone find an 'M' on their property (or indeed on their person) and is now considering pressing charges having read this, please note that Baron Mordant "doesn't remember doing it". Ok?
I'd not seen any evidence of MM's peppered urban ligatures until this summer, when out of nowhere a Mordant fan, one Graham Brown, snapped the following on the Hackney Road near a rehearsal studio called The Premises.
This week seems an apt time to mention it, as it sees the release of the brand new Mordant album, SyMptoMs. It's a curved through-ball of a record, classic MM in its singular gait yet a markedly more song-based departure from previous despatches, with smearings of pixelated folk, Krautrock & lunar synth hums gluing together the Baron's soaring 'Guildford Borough Council Planning Enforcement Team' vocal style.
Another surviving remnant from Mordant's past has continued to surprise and confound of late. This particular ghost being me. MM is still referred to as a duo, despite my having left the fold a full year ago; I've not had anything to do with any of the releases since the MM024 split Shackleton 10", and I'm beginning to wonder exactly how long this comedic misnomer will go on. Not that I'm complaining, in fact I quite enjoy it. The Baron has been expertly and seamlessly steering the ship alone through a glut of mercurial, mesmerising releases, and it's just odd that journalists and retailers alike can't seem to display the same agility by correctly defining who exactly is involved. A little unfair too to the Baron, the nebulous, skewed outfit of occasional Mordant artists (Shackleton, Vindicatrix, Dennis Greenidge among them), and a touch derisory in view of the lovely farewell MM site news page entry written by the Baron on the 9th October last year, which plainly hasn't been read by enough of those in the business.
So, slack yet amusing as it is, hauntology has its first true phantom artist. As the Baron rather chillingly told me last week, "you'll never leave".
Should anyone find an 'M' on their property (or indeed on their person) and is now considering pressing charges having read this, please note that Baron Mordant "doesn't remember doing it". Ok?
Saturday, 3 October 2009
Mass Participation
As anybody who has ever met me will know, I do not take to taking part. I don't get stuck in, and I don't get involved. Therefore, my competing (a word not used strictly correctly) in the Great North Run the other weekend was something of a bizarre experience, lent a febrile edge by the unseasonal heat and chaotic nature of the occasion.
'The world's biggest mass participation running programme' - a blanket subtitle given to the full gamut of Bupa-sponsored 'Great Run' events - offered in this instance a place among some 54,000 numbered & singlet-decked entrants. We squeezed onto the gas chamber Metro into the city, got whipped into a whooping frenzy of a group warm-up at the start, burst the banks of the course throughout with torrents of piss (evidence that medical advice suggesting a mere 250ml of water was all that was needed in the hour before the race was not generally heeded - correct hydration should have kept urine a pale straw colour), and warmed down afterwards by clambering through the crowds for our family & friends and then shuffling for a good hour in the Metro queue home again.
Some 28 minutes passed between the firing of Sting's starting gun - sadly pointing the right way - and yours truly getting to actually start the race, such was the depth of the staggered herds stretched along the A167 central motorway. Scores of runners thusly found the time to jump the barriers and siphon themselves into the embankment before exertions began. The event MC saw us off with a salutatory cheer for each charity as respective fundraising participants sped by in an oblique, ecstatic hollering of myriad debilitation - "Muscular dystrophy!! Cystic fibrosis!! Children with autism!!!" - and we were off. Early upward gazes on a blindingly bright cloudless day afforded views of the Gateshead Trinity Square multi-storey (still standing but unlikely to see another summer) in and out of the spectator-thronged flyovers, before the course wound into sundry council estates.
Here, elderly grandmothers manned enormous soundsystems on parched driveways and mums & daughters weaved neatly among the runners to cross the road to the shops. Scores of volunteers were on hand to dole out the sponsored booster refreshments of Powerade and Aqua Pura in biblical quantities, whilst the good burghers of Jarrow and Hebburn offered the unauthorised repast of sausage rolls and cheese & biscuits via Tupperware. Prone oxygen-masked bodies lined the final strait, surrounded by cheering onlookers and their fanning high-five palms. I knew I could've done better.
So yes, it was surreal, exhausting in more ways than one, and for the most part complete fucking chaos, but I don't know how else a curmudgeonly sod like me would've ever been moved to raise money for charity. For this I have to thank my running partner Kelly, a fiercely motivated athlete who roared home nearly an hour in front of me, and of course my Rebecca Jane, for industrial stacks of Jaffa Cakes and unwavering support (not to mention her own reserves of endurance, in evidence over the 6 hour drive there and back again). A uniquely odd experience all told; I've never done anything quite so virtuous. Therefore, it was certainly worth it, and if you want to add to the JustGiving sum blinking beneath the banner on this page, then you can do so for another few weeks yet. Sincere thanks to all those who have already donated.
We came, we ran, we weed. There is, on the greatrun.org site, a facility which allows you to compare your time with that of any other runner on the day via name search, so it's possible to find out which celebrities beat you. If I ever do it again, my aim will be to beat my own risible time, and that of this woman, my newfound nemesis.
'The world's biggest mass participation running programme' - a blanket subtitle given to the full gamut of Bupa-sponsored 'Great Run' events - offered in this instance a place among some 54,000 numbered & singlet-decked entrants. We squeezed onto the gas chamber Metro into the city, got whipped into a whooping frenzy of a group warm-up at the start, burst the banks of the course throughout with torrents of piss (evidence that medical advice suggesting a mere 250ml of water was all that was needed in the hour before the race was not generally heeded - correct hydration should have kept urine a pale straw colour), and warmed down afterwards by clambering through the crowds for our family & friends and then shuffling for a good hour in the Metro queue home again.
Some 28 minutes passed between the firing of Sting's starting gun - sadly pointing the right way - and yours truly getting to actually start the race, such was the depth of the staggered herds stretched along the A167 central motorway. Scores of runners thusly found the time to jump the barriers and siphon themselves into the embankment before exertions began. The event MC saw us off with a salutatory cheer for each charity as respective fundraising participants sped by in an oblique, ecstatic hollering of myriad debilitation - "Muscular dystrophy!! Cystic fibrosis!! Children with autism!!!" - and we were off. Early upward gazes on a blindingly bright cloudless day afforded views of the Gateshead Trinity Square multi-storey (still standing but unlikely to see another summer) in and out of the spectator-thronged flyovers, before the course wound into sundry council estates.
Here, elderly grandmothers manned enormous soundsystems on parched driveways and mums & daughters weaved neatly among the runners to cross the road to the shops. Scores of volunteers were on hand to dole out the sponsored booster refreshments of Powerade and Aqua Pura in biblical quantities, whilst the good burghers of Jarrow and Hebburn offered the unauthorised repast of sausage rolls and cheese & biscuits via Tupperware. Prone oxygen-masked bodies lined the final strait, surrounded by cheering onlookers and their fanning high-five palms. I knew I could've done better.
So yes, it was surreal, exhausting in more ways than one, and for the most part complete fucking chaos, but I don't know how else a curmudgeonly sod like me would've ever been moved to raise money for charity. For this I have to thank my running partner Kelly, a fiercely motivated athlete who roared home nearly an hour in front of me, and of course my Rebecca Jane, for industrial stacks of Jaffa Cakes and unwavering support (not to mention her own reserves of endurance, in evidence over the 6 hour drive there and back again). A uniquely odd experience all told; I've never done anything quite so virtuous. Therefore, it was certainly worth it, and if you want to add to the JustGiving sum blinking beneath the banner on this page, then you can do so for another few weeks yet. Sincere thanks to all those who have already donated.
We came, we ran, we weed. There is, on the greatrun.org site, a facility which allows you to compare your time with that of any other runner on the day via name search, so it's possible to find out which celebrities beat you. If I ever do it again, my aim will be to beat my own risible time, and that of this woman, my newfound nemesis.
Saturday, 25 July 2009
Wheezing For Coins
Finally, as you can see by that slightly cumbersome little widget to the top-right of this page, I've sorted out my Great North Run '09 sponsorship. By clicking on the 'donate' button you can access my JustGiving page and allocate funds directly to my charity of choice, The Stroke Association.
It was, if you excuse the phrase, a no-brainer to go for The Stroke Association. Late last year, my beloved Nan died after suffering two strokes, the last of my grandparents to go. Her first such episode was seemingly surmounted very successfully with no obvious lasting damage, but by the time the second more debilitating stroke occurred she was sadly too frail to recover. I feel bad about only visiting her the once after the second stroke, but to be honest I was too upset by seeing her on that occasion to want to go again. And anyway, the Nan I knew, to whom I owe the joys of many childhood summer holidays via late night rummy, sherbet lemons, tinned peaches and visits to Kew Gardens had pretty much gone.
The sheer frustration she must have experienced in her final months and the accompanying deterioration in quality of life I can only imagine. If you'd like to aid research into strokes, how they can be prevented and their sufferers rehabilitated, then please give generously. And have you seen that F.A.S.T. (Facial weakness, Arm weakness, Speech problems, Time to call 999) TV ad campaign, with the Sue Johnston voice-over? Pretty hard-hitting, as close to the 1970's PIF style as I've seen for years.
So while it seems a bit flippant to talk of struggle in light of what my Nan withstood in her last months, not to mention her entire lifetime, training has been bloody hard. March was blighted by knee injury, then extraneous work-related strife impeded on motivation, and now it's got really warm. No-one told me it'd get this hard when it got warm.
But after the refreshing camping pod escapade of last week (and after re-assessing my withering drive on seeing a peloton of middle-aged fell runners scaling the Cumbrian crags), training vigour has been stepped up. Clear the way.
Here's to you Nan. You may not want to raise a glass of sweet Budgens sherry in tribute (understandable), but do click on the link.
It was, if you excuse the phrase, a no-brainer to go for The Stroke Association. Late last year, my beloved Nan died after suffering two strokes, the last of my grandparents to go. Her first such episode was seemingly surmounted very successfully with no obvious lasting damage, but by the time the second more debilitating stroke occurred she was sadly too frail to recover. I feel bad about only visiting her the once after the second stroke, but to be honest I was too upset by seeing her on that occasion to want to go again. And anyway, the Nan I knew, to whom I owe the joys of many childhood summer holidays via late night rummy, sherbet lemons, tinned peaches and visits to Kew Gardens had pretty much gone.
The sheer frustration she must have experienced in her final months and the accompanying deterioration in quality of life I can only imagine. If you'd like to aid research into strokes, how they can be prevented and their sufferers rehabilitated, then please give generously. And have you seen that F.A.S.T. (Facial weakness, Arm weakness, Speech problems, Time to call 999) TV ad campaign, with the Sue Johnston voice-over? Pretty hard-hitting, as close to the 1970's PIF style as I've seen for years.
So while it seems a bit flippant to talk of struggle in light of what my Nan withstood in her last months, not to mention her entire lifetime, training has been bloody hard. March was blighted by knee injury, then extraneous work-related strife impeded on motivation, and now it's got really warm. No-one told me it'd get this hard when it got warm.
But after the refreshing camping pod escapade of last week (and after re-assessing my withering drive on seeing a peloton of middle-aged fell runners scaling the Cumbrian crags), training vigour has been stepped up. Clear the way.
Here's to you Nan. You may not want to raise a glass of sweet Budgens sherry in tribute (understandable), but do click on the link.
Pod Life
After a few wind whipped & rain lashed nights in a tent in the Derbyshire peaks last week, my girlfriend and I shifted our hols onwards and upwards into the Lake District, and a camping pod wedged between the Langdale Pikes. These lovely little Tolkien-esque huts, which resemble a cross between an upturned boat hull and a hollowed tree stump, offer the camper the same rudimentary back-to-nature experience as the tent, only from within a carpeted, insulated, locked & bolted (and safely moored) interior. The tent was fine, but did at times feel a touch like a placcy Tesco bag in comparison with the pod.
I'm sure we could sense the sneers from the weather-beaten real campers inhabiting the rest of the site, but we were still 'roughing it' enough to be woken at 5am by sheep chewing on the tiled outer shell. It was their manor after all. Keep in mind also that pods don't constitute the very top-end of no-frills camping: you can hire yurts which in truth are more like hotel suites - king-sized beds, Cath Kidston furnishings and everything.
Anyway, we had a smashing time, despite the sadly too late arrival of my Carry On Camping tea tray, bought specially for the trip.
I'm sure we could sense the sneers from the weather-beaten real campers inhabiting the rest of the site, but we were still 'roughing it' enough to be woken at 5am by sheep chewing on the tiled outer shell. It was their manor after all. Keep in mind also that pods don't constitute the very top-end of no-frills camping: you can hire yurts which in truth are more like hotel suites - king-sized beds, Cath Kidston furnishings and everything.
Anyway, we had a smashing time, despite the sadly too late arrival of my Carry On Camping tea tray, bought specially for the trip.
Sunday, 19 July 2009
Sell Me A Lung
It's possible to find some superb stuff when thumbing through old '60's/'70's issues of the Architectural Design journal. Fine design & illustration, excellent articles, and loads of period advertising. This however is a little chilling. Wonder just how 'detailed' that information service was.
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