Eclectic Trains

Hope Augustus live at PJ's, Covent Garden from eclectictrains on Vimeo.

In June this year I had the opportunity to film jazz singer Hope Augustus at PJ's in Covent Garden.  It was great to get out with a video camera and capture a flavour of the atmosphere at Hope's gig.  The performing space at PJ's is intimate, for those of you that don't know it, and therefore a challenge to film in.  So I plonked myself at the back of an eating area and didn't take the camera off the tripod until the punters had had a few drinks.

It was a fun night.  There were certain moments when the audience were completely captivated which is hard to achieve when everyone is eating and imbibing.  Look out for the audience reaction to Hope singing "The First Time I Ever Saw Your Face".  Before the show I filmed a short interview with Hope.  This was a family show, so to speak, as Hope is my sister-in-law.  I hope (every pun intended) you enjoy this short film of the night.

[For those of you interested in the technical stuff: the film was shot on a Sony Z1 (HDV mode);  I recorded extra sound from the PA feed into a Zoom H4n (utterly crucial); I edited on Final Cut Pro and my colleagues at Xube graded my footage using Magic Bullets].

I'm not sure I can't answer that question yet because we have only just started experimenting with DSLR camera technology but we had great fun making this little film at Xube last week.  Filmed on a cold winter's day in Wanstead Park, East London.  Here is The Chocolate Lab Test:


The Chocolate Lab Test from xubetv on Vimeo.

I'm really enjoying the HDR app on my iPhone. Pro HDR "lets you capture an image exposed for the highlights and another exposed for the shadows", as it says in the marketing blurb. High Dynamic Range (HDR) photography has been around for a while but now smartphone apps are giving people instant access to HDR imaging through a combination of the onboard camera and dedicated software. The HDR effect often gives images a dream-like quality because areas where you expect to see shadows become vibrant and full of saturated colour. If you have any links to great HDR images please let me know by just posting a comment on this blog.

I took this shot in Newcastle-upon-Tyne on a stunning autumn day in October.

I had great fun yesterday playing around with the Canon 7D camera. We hired it for its video capabilities but I couldn't resist a few still shots. Here is one taken with the aperture wide open (f2.8). This is the outer wall of my office in Bethnal Green, East London. The shallow depth of field (sdf) means that only a 20cm slither of the wall is sharp whilst the rest of the image - foreground and background - is satisfyingly soft (out of focus). SDF is also known as bokeh.

A photo from my trip to the Bogside, Derry (Feb 2010).

Kindle on tube

Well, this is clearly a claim that I cannot substantiate. Anyone (is there anyone?) who has read my previous postings (http://bit.ly/9MOJq6 and http://bit.ly/9f7Aig) will know that I like observing people and especially if they are on the London Underground parading the newest techie product that we are all talking about. So, I have just seen a middle aged man perched on a carriage-end 'seat' (you know, the uncomfortable types) with a Kindle on his knee. My iPhone photos do it no justice (train wobble and lack-of-flash saw to that) but I can tell you this: the quality of the "electronic ink" is amazing. I did a double take because I thought he was reading a book with some oddly placed plastic buttons at the bottom of his page. The e-reader revolution continues! I hope he didn't notice the surreptitious pics I took of him.

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Wallace & Gromit "jumped the shark" tonight with their World of Invention show tonight on BBC1 (7:30pm). The kids were confused because they wanted Wallace & Gromit doing their normal stuff (as did I). Instead they were the comic anchor for a highly random series of "serious" invention news items stuck together with some ropey video footage*. I am quite surprised that the BBC polluted their W&G brand to this extent. What of course they are trying to do is create a contemporary twist on the old BBC classic, Tomorrow's World. Why bother? Just bring it back and leave W&G re-inventing our plasticine, flat-capped past.

*They also made the mistake of trying to mix a film aesthetic (W&G has the high production values we associate with feature films) with the, often lesser, production values of a magazine style doc shot on video for TV.

It just didn't work for me although I am always interested in anything with the "invention tag" attached to it. The chap with the lifetime project of creating robots without electronics, propelled by wind and made out of electricians' plastic tubing was pure Heath Robinson.

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I am still in a webby place where having "designed" and tinkered, more like, with my company's Wordpress (Thesis theme) driven website, I am seriously frustrated by the non-standard way that various browsers (okay IE7 and IE8) interpret my design. I can hear the wall of sound that says "hire a specialist" - and I probably will - but getting out simple, standardised content should be easier than this. Yes, there has been a learning curve. Yes, I've been on a journey. Yes, I still like Wordpress. But why can't the experience be slightly more straightforward?

Stupid question really. Anything good is worth struggling for, so people say. I'm 70% there and will call in expertise to help with tweaking, finishing and error removal.

Please visit when you have a moment:

Video Production services from Xube. We make videos.


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In September 2008 I wrote a blog about my frustrations with Wordpress (PHP, CSS and the rest) and I gave up! Yep, I thought Blogger would do for now. Wordpress (the open source Wordpress.org variety) was just too damn fiddly. If you want to blog why not get something that works straight out of the box like Blogger. I didn't see the point of Wordpress.com (the hosted service that Blogger is similar to) it was either Blogger the ready-made package or host-it-yourself Wordpress "purity". A rather silly dichotomy that resulted in dumping the pure option rather quickly. Well, something changed and I have had a more successful second go at Wordpress.  Hurrah!

Over the last 2 years I have seen, read and explored many highly-customised, slick and SEO-friendly Wordpress blogs and thought that my company needed to head in that direction. Our new website is still in its infancy but it has been launched.  Please go and take a look: Xube - High Quality Video Production.  It's a first attempt, admittedly, but I'm pleased with how it shows off some of our most recent work and has blogging as a core feature of the site.

It's very early days with the new website but our plans are to use the blog to deepen and enrich the content published there.  If you have a basic knowledge of HTML and are willing to learn a few CSS tricks then Wordpress is worth exploring.  It has now matured into an CMS (Content Management System) which means you publish what you like, when you like and Wordpress will handle the rest (such as archiving).  It has taken the best part of 2 months to get the features working the way I want them too and there will inevitably more changes over the next 2 months.

Any tips?  I have found the Thesis theme a good investment.  The SEO-friendly theme holds your hand around Wordpress and makes customisation slightly less daunting.  This is a paid-for theme but you don't have to go down that route.  You could try free themes, make your own or just adapt what Wordpress gives you.

I am now inspired to learn a little more about PHP, the coding language behind Wordpress, but am going to take one step at a time.

"Welcome to the world of the magnificent Tudors" the not right poster beckons. At first it appears as though the design agency may have left the intern on his own in the office one Friday afternoon and he has subsequently pushed the crazy colours button in Photoshop and sent it to the printers. The red bricks (Wikipedia calls them pink) of Hampton Court Palace are overwrought and shout at you. The Central Casting Henry VIII is ruddy-faced and welcomes you to his gaff with a menacing look in his eye. As your eye is drawn into the centre of the picture (through the Palace's wonderful arches) you notice a young man, coyly smirking, in a doublet and hose who reminds me of the tennis player Andy Murray (it must be the south west London link). And further in the distance is a woman of unknown identity (in posh Tudor garb) who is being looked at by a group of cut-out tourists. Yes, literally cut-out with scissors and stuck on! The visual incongruities that first repelled me now create an air of mystery that make me want to walk into the poster. What initially appeared to be a design faux pas is perhaps a small work of genius. The appeal to explore Hampton Court Palace's rich history is captured not with standard issue beauty shots but with an off-beat visual over-saturation of colour and curious characters.

"Welcome to the world of the magnificently intriguing tourist poster!"

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[It's been a while: real world events, micro blogging and social media can take some of the blame...]. There's a poster that has distracted me from my SPDS (Semi-Permanent Distracted State) and it's the one on the London tube for Hampton Court Palace; an advert for a Tudor-themed experience with a buxom princess and H8 himself. There is something not right about this poster! 'Not right' is, I appreciate, a pretty appalling excuse for a critical description, but take a look at the poster and you will, I hope, start to see what I mean. But I have to admit the 'not rightness' of this poster has cast a spell on me. It's got me. I always stop and stare. Perhaps the poster is very right! More detail, and a picture, in my next post.

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European Public Policy Blog: The UK’s public data tsunami gathers speed: "And there should be as few ‘strings’ attached as possible so developers can easily reuse it, mash"

I sometimes feel I live in a constant data tsunami with noughts and ones crashing around my head but it is great to know that Tim Berners-Lee involvement with the previous administration is leading to further releases of government data.

 Let's get crunching...

I am tickled by a few "coalition government" anagrams:

Team Recoil Nonvoting (CamClegg face up to their true minority status).

Team Convening Oil Rot (CamClegg go and help BP clear up the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico as first international green gesture and get to see Obama's pad).

Team Cringe Onion Volt (CamClegg have just opened the books and looked in the treasury coffers to find a tear-jerking legacy from Gordon Brown - onions! [Yes, I know volt should be spelt vault]. So they close the door of the vault, giggle and tell George Osbourne to go take a look for himself).

Team Connive Lingo Rot (CamClegg plan a new way of communicating to the nation).

I got some help with this great website: http://wordsmith.org/anagram/

Have you got any favourites?  Then please send them my way via comments.

I enjoyed listening to Malcolm Rifkind on R4 and BBC Breakfast this morning. He brushed aside any quick fixes on PR as democratically impossible. His understanding that Cameron will have to win arguments with the Conservative MPs appeared almost quaint but the present situation has at least thrown the "dated" concept of winning an argument into the foreground.

A fantasy scenario (but not that fantastic in these fluid times) is a temporary LD agreement with a Tory minority government. The ensuing crisis of credibility for the LDs, the lack of confidence the Tory's have in governing (without ideology) and the arrival of a new Labour Party leader forces another general election where PR is on the agenda but, crucially for people who believe in the power of debate, a small but significant gap opens up for the contestation of radical ideas.

I'll vote for that!

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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

Adrian Searle's reviews of two Damien Hirst exhibitions of new paintings are a must-read:

http://bit.ly/hirst1

http://bit.ly/hirst2

For someone who enjoys "art", eg the fine arts, but doesn't go to see new work enough, Adrian Searle's reviews are a real eye-opener to Hirst's most recent work: his self-brushed paintings. When we lose touch with a discipline (I studied art and drama at Poly) it is easy, and lazy, to adopt the "Marmite Position": you either like it or you hate it. I rarely find I "like" or "hate" contemporary art works passionately because I feel out of the loop; I haven't done the groundwork to be able to fully appreciate the work. Sure, I have buckets of prejudices. I can rant against Tracy Emin's bed or tent as good as the next ranter but it can feel cheap. You have to make the effort to see the work live. You need to read about it. You should try and place it in the context of the history of art before you make a Marmite decision.

Adrian Searle comes down quite heavily on Hirst's paintings. A sculptor friend on Facebook would seem to concur with Searle as his status updates and postings read like the crowds who mock the Emperor's new clothes: "Pah! See he can't paint! Useless!" This may well be the case. However, Searle's reviews are a brilliant balancing of harsh words and sympathy for an artist who is, apparently, exposing a lack of talent. In the October review of No Love Lost, Blue Paintings - The Wallace Collection (http://bit.ly/hirst1), Searle describes Hirst's blue gloomy skull paintings as suffering from "the old mortality shtick". Whilst at the end of the article he is almost reaching out to Hirst with his skeletal art critic's arm (if you will) and an admission of personal failure in the pursuit of painting:

I want to be encouraging. It's tough, trying to out-paint your influences, tougher still to keep failing at it so publicly. As a painter, I too tried and failed. Whatever his borrowings, Hirst did all this himself, unaided by his armies of assistants. He fills up his art with dead things: even the iguanas look stuffed. But these paintings are a memento mori for a reputation.

Searle goes even further in his November review of Nothing Matters - White Cube (http://bit.ly/hirst2) and tries to break down what is missing and problematic about the new paintings. Hirst is criticised for being too hurried, too eager to be on display. These words dig deep into the problem, the universal problem of application. In moments of self-doubt we all have to face up to the question: have I done the work? If the answer is an honest "yes" then it is the job of your peers to judge the worth of your work. The following criticism reads like an important lesson for all producers of art, young and old, but is a more general observation about commitment. Even when we work hard we may not be inspired but inspiration has to be the corollary of self-discipline and hard work. Doesn't it?

Hirst's scenes of destruction and misery haven't undergone the reworkings or journeys they need to go on in order to arrive somewhere new. They are too artful, and his current shows are premature – however much he needed to go through the process of making the works themselves. In the end, what it comes down to is Hirst's touch, or lack of it. It lacks conviction. His paintings are filled with approximations.

One would have to say this is quite damning, if it were true. I am going to make a stirling effort to find out for myself.

No Love Lost, Blue Paintings
14 Oct-24 Jan 2010
http://www.wallacecollection.org/collections/exhibition/77

Nothing Matters
25 Nov—30 Jan 2010
http://www.whitecube.com/exhibitions/nothing-matters/

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