Eclectic Trains

Okay, I'll come clean, I never got to see the Damien Hirst exhibition inspite of all my best intentions. In fact this blog has laid dormant since November 2009 and it is a source of much guilt. Shouldn't be, but it is. My only excuse is that I've been extremely busy with work and other stuff. Which is, all in all, a good thing. But don't you find that it is the uplifiting, cultural excursions in life that get squeezed (plus properly catching up with your friends)? So it was a very pleasant surprise to be asked by the Southbank Centre to take part in their Ed Ruscha Film Challenge. (Slightly weirdly, days before my invite I had tweeted a picture of this exhibition poster (right) and asked my very few Twitter followers whether anyone had been to the exhibition, or knew much about Ruscha. No one replied and I never did find out whether my tweet had created a ripple in SocialMediaTwittersphere which led to my invitation but I like to think it might have. Otherwise, why tweet?).

The deal was to choose a 45 minute slot from a selection of dates provided by the gallery and make a 30 second film about any one, or combination, of 7 of Ed Ruscha's paintings. I was allowed to take some video equipment in but no lights. The winning filmmaker would win a prize of a camera and the film would be used in the promotion of the exhibition. This was a great fun invite that I couldn't turn down. I swotted up on his work (being only vaguely familiar with a few iconic pieces) and made sure I had some grasp of Ruscha's role and influence in the US 50s-60s pop art scene and off I went to the Southbank.

One of the curators re-explained the rules to the competition (she had already emailed them to me) and then firmly, but politely, showed me which paintings I could film and which I could not. "You definitely cannot film "Oof". Ed has not given permission for that one to be included." I didn't want to film "Oof" anyway. I had my sights on Oof's companion piece "Noise" (1963).

Here is my film. It didn't win. Too noisy I reckon.



The bold yellow letters on a blue canvas are utterly impenetrable. The painting baffles me and entertains me. What could I possibly bring to this pure piece of 1960's pop art skullduggerry? Well, I could certainly bring a lot of noise. So that's what I did. I also filmed the busy black and white mountainside from Ruscha's later work "Me" (1999). The texture of the mountains reminded me of the television fuzz that you used to get when programmes finished late in the evening. My friend, Jo Herlihy, kindly let me record a telephone call we had one evening where we discussed politics, Ruscha's work and other stuff. I recorded some sounds and words that caught my attention from the exhibition, in particular a quote from Hamlet that features in another Ruscha painting: "words without thoughts never to heaven go". The words stuck in my head all day. Great words. Noisy words. Ruscha, a playful artist, might have been suggesting in his use of Shakespeare that many of his word paintings like "OOF" and "NOISE" were simply "words without thoughts" with no exalted ambition. Just abstract words.

My editor friend, Ben Hooton, jumped on board and kindly edited the film, supplied the "right-back-at-you-Ruscha" idea "NOISE IS NO NOISE" and donated some of his double-bass playing. I hoped to create a small visual and audio cacophony. Ruscha's direct painting is so "unnoisy" that by filming my film on an iPhone and a consumer digital stills camera with "video capabilities" I could break the painting up into noisy pixels. As a video producer most of the time you want to light shots sufficiently so that you can eliminate artefacts and pixel noise. It was liberating to use no lights and work with very noisy images.

At one point I stepped over the low wire cordon separating me from the painting and got both my cameras to within an inch of canvas and just filmed the edges of the big yellow letters. Gallery security kept a close eye on me but let me get on with it. I am very pleased they did. What a privilege.

Here is Fiona Skinner's winning film with a great voiceover from Johnny Marr.




Some useful Ruscha links:

http://www.edruscha.com/site/chronology.cfm
Ed Ruscha’s great subject by Jackie Wullschlager
Ed Ruscha: A man of his words by Tom Lubbock
Ed Ruscha: Fifty Years of Painting by Laura Cumming

Twitter has been such headline news over the past month that even the BBC's Moral Maze couldn't keep away from it's incessant, pecking beak. You'll be glad to know I was dutifully listening to the show whilst trying to tweet a few off-beat, eclectic responses (as I am prone to do). At one point the kids came downstairs with their mother (my wife) wanting my opinion on which school photos were the best. I tried to stay focused on the Sky+ box's radio output, but it was clearly time to retire to the kitchen with the trusted Robert's radio (below).

Well, go listen to the show if you want to know how it all went. It'll be here for a week:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00nkcfk/Moral_Maze_04_11_2009/

The discussion was pretty free flowing with the cogent writer and Twitterer, Kenan Malik, probing thoughtfully... and then at the eleventh hour, as Michael Buerk wrapped up the show, he read from 2 tweets and the rest is a Twitterer's, little, slither of semi-narcissistic, tweet-style vanity publishing, history:

Kenan Malik: "...it's pointless pretending that Twitter in and of itself is the problem. It's not the moral agent. It's just the tool used by moral agents and that is what we need to discuss."

Michael Buerk: "Just a few things off Twitter, before we go. 'Lynch mob mentality', this is somebody called elec- eclectictrains, 'Lynch mob mentality' says Melanie Phillips*. I think I like this mob'. And somebody called dogtrouser says that he is worried to find himself agreeing with a Roman Catholic."

[Laughter in the studio]

There you go an eclectic quip gets onto the big airwaves. New media piggybacking on the old.



*****

*Unfortunately yours truly spelt MP's surname with the one "l". Where is the Twitterproofer when you need him?

The Twitter revolution continues. Each week something new is exposed through the twittersphere; a "campaign" emerges, grabs a quick victory and dies away. Real-time search has so arrived. Directly responsible for the dropping away of blogging (I don't think I can use that excuse only being a light twitterer), Twitter has become the newest communication technology to swivel our collective heads (think Meryl Streep in Death Becomes Her). And why is that? I'm still working that one out but it has something to do with a few usual suspects in this naughties witches' online brew and some new ingredients too. The Twitter cauldron contains a spooky cocktail promise of:

- instant communication to the world
- an open networking opportunity
- powerful information leverage
- a rage outlet
- celebrity access for all...
- ...and celebrity status for some

Like video virals before (which almost seem quaint and tame in comparison to a Twitter outbreak), advertising minds are seeing the commercial potential of tweeting and their interest is also having a ratcheting-up effect. But perhaps it is even more profound than that? Perhaps all of us are now small-time, advertising execs digital door-knocking en masse and getting a hat load of tricks and thimble full of treats?

An article online in The Guardian explores how books are being tweeted up the Amazon sales chart and leary journalists (#janmoir) are being tweeted, drawn and quartered. Read it here: http://bit.ly/tweeteroo.

Happy Hallowtweet!

I promise myself to exercise more...
I promise myself to eat less red meat...
I promise myself to go easy on the Full English...
I promise myself to go to bed earlier and
post a few blogs before 11pm...

Brain activity is quite high - largely focused around work matters. Going to be very busy up to Christmas (green shoots? I never mentioned the phrase - just good old grafting). So my summer has been busy in the office finishing projects and setting up new ones for the Autumn. Did I get away? Nope. Did I have a nice summer? Functional but scattered with the odd lovely weekend and a special wedding.

That's probably as "transparent" as I want to get right now and as I see this blog as partly for you and partly for me, then I am quite cool with that (as some might say). I regularly follow Jeff Jarvis and he takes a militant stance on transparency which feels principled but at the same time muddle-headed. His recent article Transparency benefits us all - even when it hurts is an explanation as to why he twitter-blogged the news he had prostrate cancer. Why? Because "we are entering an age of publicness when we need to live, do business and govern in the open". Wow! So we are not already there yet but we are about to enter this new age? As a famous rock goes I thought we were at least "half way there"! Jarvis's writing is cogent and arresting. He truly believes that transparency "is a necessary ethic of the age". I'm not so sure. I wonder if Jarvis is meshing a contemporary political mantra "we must all be more transparent" with a more publicly accepted offline/online confessional culture and labelling it with "good thing" tag. Of course we can build "greater value" by sharing but all the emails, advice and good will that Jarvis has received could have been achieved in a more scaled-down and private disclosure. Couldn't it?

Anyway, I'll go back to the offline world have more of a think about that one. Yes, I joined Twitter about 2 months ago. I am not aiming to be part of the twitterati and have posted a meagre 30 tweets. I follow 13 and am followed by 8 - not really entering the spirit of it, I suppose, but I can't help but find it fascinating. "Real-time search" - who thought that an upstart operation such as Twitter could rock Google's boat with such an simple concept. What have I learnt from Twitter so far? That many people take it very seriously and must be spending up to and beyond an hour a day twittering and that Michael Jackson died on June 25, 2009 at the age of 50. (Yes, I heard it there first!). Okay, okay, I've found out a little more than that but I'm not hanging out in that virtual space long enough to suck in the more interesting dialogues that must be happening.

Please excuse the splodginess of this blog and if you fancy a flitter on my twitter please visit:

http://twitter.com/eclectictrains