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Originally posted by the church puddle:
Just finished "Psychoville"
...apparently there is a new episode due for Halloween. not long to go now hopefully   Originally posted by Scott:
This afternoon I watched [b]Jean-Michel Jarre: Music And Lyrics
...A good insight into his career [/b] Yes, probably nothing new for diehard fans I'd imagine, but I also thought it was quite a good concise doc about him and his career, left me with twinges of regret at not going to see him, but alas. He came across as a really okay and well balanced guy, it was interesting what he said about his father, being able to count the number of times he'd met him throughout life, and I loved the story about his mother, her bravery and her tolerance, what an amazing young woman she must have been.
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Waiting For Hockney, (documentary on DVD).
Waiting for Hockney is the story of Billy Pappas who worked on an art project for many years in the belief that he could achieve recognition and reward for himself through just a single endeavour. His conviction that his purpose would be fully justified at its end can perhaps be read as a cautionary tale about the way in which focusing and narrowing our vision down to our objective can not only ensure that our aim is straight and true for our target, but that it can also blinker us to other realities about our goal, whether its about making a work of art, or about pursuing any kind of dream that’s supposedly going to be ‘the one’ that will change our life forever.
Billy was an illustration graduate who lived at home with his family in the suburbs of Baltimore, and he worked as a waiter and dreamt about achieving something special for himself. A regular customer at his place of work struck up a friendship with him, and this new friend agreed to sponsor him in the undertaking of an artwork. This led to an astonishing 8 year retreat for Billy, during which time he would spend up to ten hours a day in his bedroom working on a hyper detailed graphite drawing. He immersed himself in his monumental project. Like an alchemist labouring away in solitude he attempted to create gold from out of the lead of a pencil, for this was a task of salvation, and he believed that complete and utter dedication to this work would become the key to opening the door to success and would establish him triumphantly as an artist.
The documentary takes place in 2004 when Billy has completed his drawing, and we join him on the quest to show the work, and his objective is to take it to his hero David Hockney. A quote by Hockney in a book struck a chord for Billy, and during those 8 long years of working he built up this idea in his mind that Hockney will ‘understand him’ and will hail him as a new voice in the portrayal of realism in art and guide him towards the next step. There's almost a fairytale element to his expectations, and it's not unlike Billy and his supporters are journeying to see the Wizard Of Oz.
After some correspondence has changed hands between an intermediary, Hockney responds positively to a proposed meeting, and so the trip to Los Angeles begins with Billy’s mum baking a cake for him to take along, she read that Hockney was close to his mother, so she reckons he’d probably appreciate a home-cooked gift.
Up until the point of this meeting the film has rather cunningly refrained from showing us Billy’s drawing, all we know is that its subject matter is based on a widely known photograph of Marilyn Monroe. Billy wanted an easily recognisable icon, but as we are later to discover this choice has fatally undermined the foundation of the idea. The execution of the work has involved Billy spending months, and sometimes years working on a few square inches at a time of the 14 x 17 inch sized drawing. Each square inch of the picture is built up from many hundreds of tiny pencil marks, and the wearing of high magnification glasses was essential for Billy in the construction of the miniscule lines and strokes on paper. This subsequently becomes another major flaw in the idea, with the very nature of the work necessitating that any viewer must acquire a magnifying glass to genuinely appreciate the scope of the drawing.
Just before the meeting with Hockney we get to see the artwork, it is presented in an isolated sequence without commentary, inviting us to make up our own minds. Putting aside for the moment that we see it through the medium of film and not for real or on its own terms, I found it hard not to be disappointed by it. At long last, two-thirds of the way through the film, and here it was, a very crisp, slightly surreal, and admittedly well executed portrait, but nothing as revolutionary as we were hoping for, nothing to make you say, wow, 8 years in the making. No epic War and Peace novel, no over-budget but technically successful James Cameron movie, but just a black and white drawn reproduction of a black and white photograph of Marilyn Monroe. At that moment my heart sank, and I knew that Billy was fucked.
Filming was not permitted during the meeting, only a few still photographs were allowed. Afterwards, and now back at home, Billy shows a photo to his mum of Hockney holding a magnifying glass and looking at the drawing, his mum reassures him that Hockney’s body language is very positive. For Billy the meeting went exactly as he’d hoped it would, Hockney was charming and friendly, and he spent five hours with him. Billy muses at this, five hours of Hockney’s time, how much is that in dollars lost that Hockney could have earned doing art.
Four months pass with no further contact from Hockney, and no ticket through the saintly gates of the art world has materialised. Billy muses again, he’s 37 years old, he’s got no job or career, and he’s in debt to his sponsor to the tune of 300,000 dollars.
An associate of Hockney, a wheeler-dealer in a suit, underlines for us the insignificance of the day they saw Billy’s work, revealing that he and Hockney were under-whelmed. But worse, he goes on to damn forever Billy’s drawing on several counts, worst choice subject matter, (with Warhol having long ago popularised the now overused image of Marilyn), and failing as a drawing to convey what is special (or not) about it without the use of a clumsy prop, a magnifying glass.
The film ends poignantly with Billy now working again as a waiter, he’s really happy, he’s just earned 40 dollars for his shift, he’s overjoyed to actually be paid for something that he has done.
You really warm to Billy in this film, he’s just an ordinary guy with a caring family. Isolated from any conscious art scene, he’s an inspired person who believes in his craft and is phenomenally dedicated to his goal. It is a shocking moment to hear the verdict given on his work, which is in effect 8 years of his life dismissed in a heartbeat. His art failed, and you’re left to think that it was all such a folly, but he’s not off the beam, or even someone who’s been working through any mental health issue, so he can’t be easily labelled for apparently misjudging 8 years of his life.
He just believed that if you chose the right move then you could kick that ball from that seemingly impossible position, and in one great action get it straight into that seemingly unreachable net.
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The Man Behind The Masquerade, (documentary on DVD).
Kit Williams a self-taught artist was a former seaman who quit the navy to devote himself to painting. After a decade of existing with next to nothing and living in his van on the coastline, fate stepped into his life in a poetic manner via a response to a message that he had pinned to one of the many little wooden boats he carved and sent out to sea. A young man found one of these seaborne message’s, and he started a correspondence that led him to visit Kit with an application form for the Liverpool John Moores art competition. One of Kit’s works was selected for the show and later ended up in a London gallery where it was spotted by a publisher, Tom Maschler, who felt that Kit’s style would lend itself to the illustrating of a children’s book.
Kit wasn’t at all keen on this idea, as in his words ‘it meant repeating the same picture over and over again’. So he bid the publisher farewell, and the story might have ended there with Kit continuing on in obscurity and poverty, but he typically had a bee in his bonnet, and he set about engineering a method that satisfied his own criteria. After spending three years working on several paintings he turned up very unexpectedly at the publishers office one day with the result of his labour. He had created a lavishly illustrated book where each page contained a riddle. Solving the riddles provided a clue for the reader to the location of a treasure buried in the ground, a Golden Hare, hand-made by Kit. The book instantly became a worldwide success when published in 1979 and propelled him reluctantly into the limelight. Subsequently he disappeared for the next 30 years, living in his country cottage where his friendly neighbours occasionally posed for him and bought his work. His many paintings have never had a public showing until he agreed to the making of this documentary.
I vaguely remember the events around the book Masquerade back in ’79, and in the immediate years afterwards I mistakenly confused the book as being the product of another English fantasy and whimsical artist, Patrick Woodroffe.
Does anyone remember The Pentateuch Of The Cosmogony? As a teenager I saw an advert in a sci-fi magazine for this decorative musical extravaganza that was the Pentateuch, an Alien Book of Genesis. I loved the obscure strangeness about it, and really desired to know its secrets. Sadly though, I couldn’t afford it from out of my paper round money. The Pentateuch was in fact a symphonic rock concept album by Dave Greenslade - (which I think would have been something of a body shock to me musically if I’d actually got to hear it, and I'd cringe at the dippy hippy artwork today) - it was a collaboration with Woodroffe who created its fantasmagorical visions. I think the promise of its mystery and my later confusion with Masquerade must have collided in my brain, together with my reading of the first three Dune books in a row, and with the beautifully illustrated Jon Anderson Olias Of Sunhillow album, all lending me to blur the edges of where these things seemingly overlapped.
With Kit Williams, I can’t say that I’m a fan of his work of the last 30 years in isolation, but he is a really interesting person, innately skilled and prolific in his art, and his strength of purpose is hugely inspirational, particularly when considering those long dark early years of obscurity.
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Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives
Is about the relationship, or rather, the non-relationship between Mark Everett the singer and songwriter for the American band eels, and his father Hugh Everett who died of a heart attack in 1982.
In 2007 Mark took part in a mental road trip of sorts where he set out to learn whatever he could about Hugh the genius physicist who as a father had been a virtual stranger to him for nearly 20 years while growing up in the family home.
Talking to former colleagues and workmates who’d known the eccentric Hugh during his days as a student, and then later as a tutor, little came across about the character of Hugh other than the fact that he had an unquenchable zeal for physics and the exploration of the hidden workings that underpin the visible world. As a young man Hugh wrote a dissertation within the field of Quantum Mechanics which proposed a theory of Parallel Universes, (it was to be a few decades later that this idea would take hold in the public consciousness and appear in popular culture) at the time it was a radical idea that should have brought him great recognition, but unfortunately he was spectacularly rebuffed by an eminent physicist. Eventually ignored, he ultimately became bitter and left academia to pursue a quiet career working as a Defense adviser for the military.
I didn’t find this documentary as emotionally wrenching as it seemed likely to be, particularly if you consider some of the painful facts about the Everett family and just how much death played a part in Mark’s family. Hugh was a heavy smoker and drinker who most likely suffered from depression throughout his life, and his daughter Elizabeth, Mark’s sister, was troubled by schizophrenia, and she committed suicide in 1996, and just a few years later in 1998 Nancy Everett, Hugh’s wife, (who was also rumoured to have mental health problems) died of cancer. Also, on September 11th, 2001, Mark’s cousin Jennifer was a stewardess aboard the plane that crashed into the Pentagon.
When the 19 year-old Mark went into his fathers room one day he found the 51 year-old Hugh lying on the bed, his father was fully clothed in a suit and tie exactly as he had dressed every day, and as Mark touched the prone figure of his father - and astonishingly this was the very first time in his life that he’d ever physically done so - he knew his father had died.
There were some good moments of explanation about the theories relevant to the understanding of Hugh’s physicists view of the world, and the accepted concepts that were either in conflict or in support of him, however, the director choose to use what I felt were borderline naff sequences of animation to do this.
It must undeniably have been a difficult thing for Mark to finally decide to confront this past, it’s clearly taken him a long time, but there was too much of an overall air of casual storytelling in the portrayal of the facts on the part of the director, and I wish there had been more feeling of depth, it left me feeling a bit numb. On the other hand though, its given me more insight into what the eels are about, and where the whole core in the body of Mark’s work springs from, I’ve never been a fan of the eels, but I’ve now got an understanding, and a real appreciation for the excellent song ‘Beautiful Freak’.
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Just finished "The Trip" on BBC2. Maybe it was just the sentimental piano tacked on at the end of each episode but I found this pretty moving. As well as very funny and with breathtaking scenery. Ok, time to catch up with the Partridge.
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Original film had great effects look, but the story was just forgettable. I'm looking forward to seeing Tron Legacy - though I'm really not sure why - maybe its the cool black and neon suits they wear - dream on Mr Gary Numan
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More illuminated buildings with electronic music in the background: Yota Space (Benge is going there) ...um, Battersea Power Station anyone?
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