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. Oh and I almost forgot: a cool post about Mike Oldfield and Virgin Records, triggered by an old (well 2014) Mike O doc on YouTube that Matt recommends.
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 - Matt 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 cartoons-for-kids that Matt rates, such as Paddington.
Matt closes with some good thoughts about how this relatively crude analogue-era animation lead 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."
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
And here's some more notable bits of recent reading:
Michaelangelo 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.
Doubling back to animation, John Coulthart at { feuilleton } has a nice post about an animator I love, Piotr Kamler
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)
Torpedo the Ark's Stephen Alexander has a post amusingly titled You Are Reading a Post About Making A Film About Mark Fisher - although at the time of writing he had yet to see the film, it's triggered by an article on Fisher and the doc at The Guardian.
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, oh-so-precociously recognised as different in atmosphere and gait 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 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... which deploys concepts like "Corduroy Psychedelia" and "PBS unconscious".
Great mix by DJ Food aka Kevin Foakes weaving together BoC and their source material + lodestar coordinates
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
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 collective enterprise 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?
Love the Woebot cartoons piece. Especially the explanation of Roobarb and Custard. Seeing the first episode remains one of the peak TV experiences of my life. I laughed until I thought I was going to die. Up there in my personal TV pantheon with the Smiths on the Oxford Road Show, Keith Allen’s 1983 election show on Channel 4, and the finale of Our Friends in the North.
ReplyDeleteYes Bagpuss was a bit creepy, but that was what I loved about it. The soundtrack was fantastic English freak folk, sung IIRC by a rag doll and a frog who played the banjo. Some real Old Weird England / Lark Ascending business, up there with their contemporaries Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span. The soundtrack CD was a fixture in our house and car for many years.
Yes I love Bagpuss too - I suppose if you were very small, as Matt when it was aired, it might have seemed a little eldritch.
DeleteI did finally earlier this year watch Our Friends in the North and loved it. But the other two things you mention, I never saw. Much of the Eighties I didn't own a TV or have ready access to one. During the academic year, I think only ever watched the occasional Top of the Pops in the student common room.
This is the glory of YouTube and especially the BBC Archive - I can watch all these things I never saw. I have been meaning post about an amazing program on the great British freeze of early 1963 - just before I was born. I had no idea the country was brought to a standstill repeatedly. Not only rivers but bits of the sea around the coast froze! Amazing images of frozen waterfalls and streams and brooks, cryogenized in mid-babble.