Matthew Ingram has been on a bit of a tear of blogging recently at his several active blogs.
At Woebot, there's been thoughts about Eno's own thoughts on technology and politics, and about music and AI, and a sweet photo blog about a trip to Margate by bicycle.
At Sick Veg, he enthuses about a particularly nutritious grain and flour.
And best of all at Hollow Earth - which I didn't even know was a blog - he has a lovely recollection of favorite animation from his childhood. This is prefaced by a run-through of some of his own work as animator (most of which I was completely unaware of, with the major exception of his Vitamin C film).
Fascinating stuff about the raw techniques used by Bob Godfrey for Roobarb and Custard.
Surprised by his abreactive feelings about Bagpuss: Smallfilms's Firmin and Postgate are celebrated instead for Ivor the Engine.
Because of our age difference, I only have vague recollections of some of the other ones Matthew rates, like Paddington.
Matt closes with some good thoughts about how this relatively crude analogue-era animation leads to outcomes far more magical than the slick seamlessness afforded by digital technology:
"What unites all the British animation of this period and my own scruffy work could be summarised as: everyday settings, whole films made by a few people (in my case one person), handmade models or hand-drawn imagery, animation breathing life into the inanimate, and fundamentally a demand being placed on the viewer's imagination."
The old skool animators understood "the gratification of labouring on something, and through that labour literally bringing things to life."
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More notable bits of recent reading:
Matos at Beat Connection has a cool post on the New Romantics (which I blog about here)
Mark Richardson at Beauty Blew A Fuse has some sweet thoughts about Erik Satie, Harold Budd and Aphex Twin.
Geeta Dayal gives the Adele Bertei book No New York an interesting mixed review at 4Columns.
Me own flesh-and-blood, Kieran Press-Reynolds the Remorseless Writin' Machine has written about twenty things since I last posted about their output.... But their most recent effort is this Rabbit Holed column on a genre that rejoices in the name Hardtekk and is all bound up with looksmaxxing and edits on TikTok etc.
Over at The Quietus, Tim Burrows has a nice piece about the film he and Simon Poulter have made about Mark Fisher, titled We Are Making A Film About Mark Fisher (in which I appear briefly as a disembodied voice)
Promising new blogger Mister Magpie with a bunch of essays worth checking out, especially the one on Grouper.
Neat post by musicologist Ethan Hein on The Band's "The Weight" - a song I loved as a child, somehow recognised as different from everything else on the radio (it was a medium-sized hit single in the UK, would you believe).
Talking about Canadians... as already noted at the Retromania blog, Split Infinities has a very interesting and evocative piece about the "Corduroy Psychedelia" and "PBS unconscious" of Boards of Canada - written and posted shortly before, but now uncannily in synch with, the "are they returning or not" hoo-ha of recent days...
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Good lord, talking about nostalgia, as BoC inevitably involves... this post is itself some kind of flashback to the olden golden days of blogging, when people linked each other and commented and kept the whole thing bubbling onwards in synergistic-symbiotic incestuous group-mind fashion...
Well, not quite: I haven't coughed up much in the way of substantive commentary on most of these blogposts, but.... it's the thought that counts, eh?