THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT...

A nice sketch, just a scratchy pen and ink drawing with watercolour, no technical aids, not even any under drawing as far as I can see and reproduced here pretty much life size. An illustration, one of a series recording the day to day life of a boy scout troop... an age of innocence long gone.

And no, they are not by me. Those of you who follow this blog on a regular basis might by now have picked up the occasional references to Jonathan @ Artistic Type and may have realised - by dint of the fact that we both share the same surname - that we are related; he is my son. The sketches on this post are however by another member of the family and I have only just realised, when I was writing this post that my father, whose sketches they are, was only 15 when he did them. I had assumed he was at least 18 or 19. In a perfect world he would have loved to have gone on probably to train as a commercial artist, as you did in those days - we are talking of the mid 1930's here. Life however is not that perfect; his parents couldn't afford to send him off to be apprenticed to a studio so he started life as a wages clerk. Conscripted into the RAF he spent the war in a spitfire squadron; postwar he went on to qualify as an accountant and ended up as a financial director.

He never lost his appreciation of art though, and it was through him that I came to appreciate Rembrandt, who was his favorite artist. I never really had the chance to talk to him about these sketches and how he did them, and he would no doubt be highly amused to know that after all this time some of them are now seeing the light of day for the first time, out in the public domain. The sketches are from an exercise book that he kept as a log-book over a period of some six months or so in 1934 -35 and I suppose it's a minor miracle that they survived at all. The sketches are shown here as they appear on the pages - click in the images to increase their size.

They are here now anyway; enjoy them... and just to show that the artistic skills of the family are in safe hands, the final sketch is by Jonathan's daughter Edie Mae, age 4 - my granddaughter. Hey, Dad, its ok - the kids are alright...

1, 2, 3... AS EASY AS... A, B, C...

In a world and media dominated by electronic communication, the ability to write clearly and concisely is still of prime importance - the ability to communicate without being misunderstood is paramount. I want to discuss this week two specific areas of written communication that, if done properly, pass by unnoticed, un-celebrated (as they should), but if done badly drive me up the fucking wall. Both unheralded, there is an undeniable art to both skills - the Art of compiling an Index, and the Art of writing an Instruction Manual.

The Index first, then. A good, well written index is a godsend - instant access to the piece of information you want, its location identified. Happy Days... and not just with books; the success of a good search engine depends on both you and the engine agreeing on the singularity of the 'Key' word or phrase that allows you to focus your search - a hierarchy of importance is established... Main category, Sub category. So if you and the Index disagree - confusion and frustration reign.

Lets look at a good example here; Jamie Oliver - I like him as a chef/cook whose great skill is to de-mystify the cooking process - "There, it's easy". I cook his recipes, like his books - so lets see... ' Happy Days with the Naked Chef '... a nice book and there is a recipe in there that we like: 'Sicilian Roasted Brill with Lemon, Anchovies, Capers and Rosemary' - a nice fish dish, key components Brill or Halibut with Sicilian Lemons. I go to the index, go to 'Fish' (main category), then brill or halibut as its sub category... uh uh... nothing under Fish ; ok, lets try Lemons... again, nothing. Dammit, I know it's in this book somewhere - I think... I try everything, and eventually the recipe turns up under 'Rosemary...' Whaaat? This is not good. This seriously pisses me off. Who is going to look under  'Rosemary' for a fish recipe? I then find it under 'Sicilian Lemons' etc - but not 'Fish' and the rest of the Indexing isn't brilliant, either. A major failure of the ability to follow a logical procedure - a communication breakdown.

Lets look then at Instruction Manuals - a fundamental part of modern society. We buy an electric blanket, we get a six page instruction booklet  - and I just thought that you had to plug it in. I buy a new camera (I remember when they were just point and click) and it arrives complete with a 40-odd page manual AND an instruction disc to download onto my laptop - which I will do as soon as I can find the page in the laptop manual that tells me how to download the disc and where to store the information. Ok, I know I am getting old and this is second nature to most of you - so lets look at a specific example again.

I get a new mobile phone; I'm not too fussed about seeing it as the hub of my entire universe, I just want to be able to make calls with it, and preferably hands-free when I am driving. So lets see. It comes with not one but TWO instruction books, the first a 'quick introduction' booklet, the second an all-singing all-dancing 64 page book. 64 pages?  So, hands-free... hhmmm... the words 'hands-free' appear precisely twice as far as I can see, once on page 4 as a safety announcement for when driving - excellent - and once in the Index, referring you to page 19. I turn to page 19 - and look in vain - the phrase 'hands free' does not appear on p19, nor does anything appertaining to it... there is nothing in the manual that explains how I can use it hands-free.

Yes, this is another example of an Index being badly written, in this case leading you to the wrong page... or indeed any page. I do however have a greater issue with Instruction manuals. They need to be very clearly written,  that is a given;  they all however make an assumption as to the amount of pre-knowledge that the recipient already has - and in my case this can be quite a lot less than you, or someone else reading the manual brings to the table. Lets return to the camera instructions: they start off being fairly straightforward, as in I can follow them, but soon segue into a series of acronyms and commands that loose me completely... AE mode, AF mode, A/S/M... and no key to help me out. Where do I go from here ?

We have a television and a dvd player/recorder; the combined total number of pages of the instructions weighs in at a hefty 232.... 232 pages is medium size novel; all I want to do is switch on the t.v., find a programme and be able to record it. And don't even start me on miniaturisation... failing vision and arthritic fingers are not just the preserve of the old.

It seems to me, apart from a communication problem, we have a problem of access here. We live in a technologically based society. Technology advances seemingly on a monthly basis, the amount of information available globally doubles every five years or so, all allegedly helping to advance society. Yet unless instructions are written clearly and can communicate rather than confuse, we run the risk of increasingly dis-enfranchising large swathes of society, certainly the older ones amongst us. Technological advances = increasing complexity. .But let's please start with simplifying the access.

The mobile phone and hands free - after much searching, on page 29 I came across 'Enabling a bluetooth device' ...Ahh... I was looking for the wrong key words... ok... I follow the instructions. Exactly. Twice. The mobile phone responds with 'device not recognised'.

What do I do now ?.......................and it's not just me............................

What always frustrates you about technology in general ?........
" Instruction booklets. I cannot believe how abstruse and unintelligible they are. They drive me up the wall "
  Bill Oddie, The Observer, November 2010

REMEMBER - WHAT THE DORMOUSE SAID...

I think what is nice about running a small design practise is that it allows you the freedom to be creative, to work for those one-off clients who allow you to indulge yourself, who don't want the corporate branded look but something with a degree more individuality, more flair. One of the projects I have most enjoyed recently was working on the hotel for Velvet, on Canal Street in Manchester - 19 bedrooms, all different, for a client who wanted that little extra . If you haven't seen it on the RCA Interiors website, have a look at the hotel gallery at http://www.velvetmanchester.com/

The couple of sketches shown here, firstly as a line drawing and then fully coloured , are for another one-off scheme set in the Gay Village in Manchester - this time a tea-room. The brief from the client was simply to be over the top , be as camp as we like, with possibly a background reference to the Mad-Hatters Tea Party in Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland.....' Eat me.......Drink me '...........a nice brief and a quick sketch, good fun.....whether it will be built like this I don't know, but we can hope.

The tea-room is to be set on the ground floor of Richmond House on Bloom Street , of particular interest to me as I know the building well and have identified it as ' The House for a Book-Lover ' , to be developed as an idealised scheme on my upcoming M.A. course. A literary tea room fits in rather neatly with a book-lover's house......

...and remember what the dormouse said....' Feed your head, Feed your head '....

HOW COME...

Those of you who have been following these blogs on a regular basis will have picked up a common theme over the last two or three postings - carnivals, traveling fairs and end-of-the-pier shows. I couldn't let that thread go without posting a blog on one of my favorite musicians of all time - that traveling gypsy, the late, great, Ronnie Lane. Having achieved prominence with firstly the Small Faces and then the Faces, at the point where Rod Stewart and Ronnie Wood were off buying their fast cars and living the fast life, Ronnie Lane bought a land rover and a sheep farm on the Welsh Borders and set off to follow his dream.

Lacking any sort of business acumen (now why does that appeal?) he set off in pure troubadour fashion to realise his vision of an essentially English, pastoral music. Packing everything into a motley collection of old vans and caravans, the ' Passing Show', essentially a large touring circus featuring jugglers, fire eaters, dancing girls and the musicians, set off to tour the countryside, pitching up with little advance publicity on town commons and cricket grounds to bring their particular music to whoever turned up - often no more than a dozen or so. Lack of finance, local bureaucracy and a group of vehicles increasingly impossible to keep on the road soon brought the tour and the idea to a halt, and he was forced to retreat to the college circuit and the occasional television spot. Diagnosed with M.S. in 1977 he still managed to tour, occasionally supported by Eric Clapton and Pete Townshend, but having moved to Austin in the mid-eighties (still losing money from charity gigs held in his support and with no royalties forthcoming from the Small Faces catalogue) he eventually re-located to Arizona and succumbed to pneumonia in 1997.

There is no decent biography of him apart from the occasional article in music magazines, and his 'official web-site' has the slightly forlorn air of a garden that hasn't been tended too well for the last eighteen months or so, but he left an excellent body of work and seems to be remembered with great affection by those in the music business who care.

His time was never long enough.

Ronnie Lane 1946-1997 R.I.P.

OH, WHAT A LOVELY WAR...

November 11th - Armistice Day... not quite the day perhaps to be thinking of end-of-the-pier shows and the English music hall. This is, however, precisely how the film 'Oh What a Lovely War' is presented, an interpretation of the Great War as it turns from carnival to tragedy, the greatest loss of life in a single conflict that this country has ever experienced. Rarely shown on T.V. it has only been made available on DVD for the last three years or so... although, much to my surprise, there are now a number of clips on YouTube.



The producer Joan Littlewood's left wing credentials were never in doubt; a member in the 1930's of the communist party and an associate of Ewan MColl, she was central to the establishment of the Theatre Workshop in the late forties ( the foundation of modern theatre in the UK) and apart from her collaboration with Cedric Price on the 'Fun Palace' in the early sixties, went on to produce stage productions of 'A Taste of Honey' and - more importantly here - 'Oh What a Lovely War', filmed in the late sixties with Richard Attenborough as director.

I have no idea what today's - or even yesterday's - generation would make of the film, in a culture where war and ersatz violence seem to be the mainstay of the burgeoning gaming industry; a charming period piece? I can only see it in social context... I was at art college in the late 60's, and the film seems to me to capture perfectly the zeitgeist of the times; the swinging sixties, the explosion of pop-art (particularly via its exponent of 'Englishness' - Peter Blake) the growth of satire and an irreverence for authority, all set against the rise of the CND movement, the rumblings of Vietnam from across the water, and the continuing cold-war stand-off between the US and Russia. The music hall / end of the pier settings for the initial jubilation certainly act as a counterpoint to the final scenes, increasing the feeling of waste and despair as the cameras pan back and back to reveal the increasing enormity and futility of it all. I have never really seen any other film like it; very much of its time, yet managing to show its subject matter in an absurdist light that few other anti-war films manage to achieve. An almost exact contemporary though , is the following clip of Country Joe and ' Fixin to Die Rag '-  filmed within a few months of the release of ' Oh What a lovely war ', certainly in the same year - 1969. The immediacy of Vietnam is again dealt with with the same joyous sense of absurdity - the bouncing ball says it all. Music Hall as protest.



The last word should remain with the film however -  it finally leaves us with one of the most enduring images, signs, symbols of the 20th century; not a sign of peace but - more importantly - a sign of remembrance... " for those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it "

THE PASSING SHOW...

One of the more memorable things to me about the film 'The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassuss' was the collision of cultures, the idea of this wonderfully baroque horse-drawn carnival show pitching up in contemporary London, a world of cyber-technology and instant messaging, a world slowly drowning in an ocean of information. Would the show find an audience? Would people relate to it? Could it even happen in this day and age other than on film?

The couple of characters in the pictures above, along with their traveling side-show, walked slowly into our little town in South West France the day before the circus that is 'Le Tour' rolled through (more of that later), much as I imagine mummers or traveling players would appear in towns and hamlets throughout Europe in days gone by. Pitching up in front of the Hotel De Ville they soon attracted an audience, ranging in age from the young to the very old, all of whom welcomed them enthusiastically. Their good-natured banter with the crowd slowly evolved into a 'performance' on the lines of an old-time medicine show, the doctor proceeding to extol at great lengths the strength and potency of the potions he was selling. The crowd quite happily engaged with this, one young lady being selected to act as the 'foil' for the doctor and his servant, and they all seemed both familiar with the story and aware of what their roles and responses should be. The whole event had a timeless charm to it, nothing forced, certainly nothing artificial about it, and you felt that it could have occurred here at any time over the last two hundred years or so. How the medicine show arrived with us, unheralded, and how and where they disappeared on to, I have no idea and I really don't want to know; I would much rather just think of them slowly traveling through the little towns and hamlets amongst the foothills of the Pyrenees, selling their potions as they go.


It did cross my mind what sort of response they would have got on the U.K. - the side-show either set fire to or upended in the nearest car-park, I suppose, or am i just being cynical? The nearest thing that we would have, i would think, in terms of populist street theatre, would be the traditional 'Punch and Judy' show, although even that would seem much diminished in its present form. The graphic novel 'The Comical Tragedy or the Tragical Comedy of Mr Punch' by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean seems to me to capture exactly that melancholic, slightly scary air of damp, end-of-the-season seasides towns where both the colour and the life seem to be draining away, accompanied by the cries of the gulls. Visually stunning, both surreal and realistic with its sense of subdued violence.

And finally, the carnival and the fairground have always seemed to me to have something of the night about them - Ray Bradburys 'Something Wicked This Way Comes' perfectly captures that sense of un-ease, that age-old forces are at work here...