BOYS ALWAYS WORK IT OUT [469]

“Oblique Strategies” is a set of cards, introduced in 1975 by artists Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt, designed to promote lateral thinking when breaking creative blocks. I knew about them from Eno’s collaboration with David Bowie, sparking and informing decisions made on Bowie’s albums “Heroes” (1977) and “Lodger” (1979).

My sister Layla Spence, writer and artist of the online comic “Ill Fame”, owns a pack of these cards, saying she has used them when a second opinion might be needed, and thought I could use them in my writing. 

You don’t reach the four hundred and sixty-ninth article in a series without having deployed some lateral thinking along the way, but I didn’t know if I should use the cards to spur an idea, or to apply them to something I had already prepared. Upon cutting the cards, the first one read “What wouldn’t you do?”, so my answer was to be led by the cards this time around, forcing me to be creative about my creativity.

“What mistakes did you make last time?” I think my last article about Toys “R” Us opening concessions in branches of WHSmith was a little overblown. Visiting a local branch that stated it was “now open” amounted to a further statue of Geoffrey the Giraffe, and shelves of toys to one side. No space for traditional WHSmith product lines stationery was really lost – if anything, it looked tidier than usual. I always visit that branch when I am in town, and I was facing the prospect of losing some of the reason I go there – as it turned out, I needn’t have worried.

“Do nothing for as long as possible.” Your baseline may vary - living authentically as yourself is politically charged in the sight of the wrong people. Meanwhile, I don’t write to intervene - I don’t need the hassle. I observe, I write, I continue looking. “Nothing” is subjective.

“Abandon normal instruments.” I will switch to making videos someday.

“Who should be doing this job? How would they do it?” There is no vacancy here, but if you can honour your obligation to explore your intrigue every week, while trying to articulate that in an approachable way while never having a set formula for how that will be done each time, then you may be in with a chance... to do it for yourself on your own site.

“Trust in the you of now.” Don’t give yourself enough time to decipher or question your methods. Ritual leads the way. Deadline is style. You are in there somewhere.

“Don’t break the silence.” I drew this card just after watching a YouTube video about a Nintendo GameBoy clone that I want to buy, which I watched to give myself a rest for a moment – I am purposefully thinking of buying myself a worthwhile distraction that forces concentration. I listen to the music or have a TV on in the background all the time. I only do “silence” when I am asleep, and even then, my TV must remain on as I fall asleep. I can be “still”, but not “silent”.

“Do we need holes?” What did you have in mind?

“Abandon normal instruments.” I just drew the card that inspired David Bowie’s song “Boys Keep Swinging”. The plan was already to emulate a garage band by having Bowie’s band playing each other’s instruments – the simple drums are by guitarist Carlos Alomar – and the card seems to imply they were on the right track. Also, “abandon normal instruments” for a song about gender identity? [Yes, I was thinking so hard I didn’t realise I drew the same card twice.]

“Distorting time.” This may have been my plan all along – whatever that is, I’ll never tell, because I don’t actually know.

ALL UNDER ONE ROOF [468]

I remember the feeling of “I beg your pardon?” upon seeing, in March 2024, a poster in the window of WHSmith in Oxford of Geoffrey the Giraffe, proclaiming “Toys “R” Us In Store Now”. 

I knew the toy store brand was re-establishing itself following its bankruptcy in 2018, and its concessions in Macy’s department stores in the United States, alongside slowly opening smaller retail stores, was a formula that could work in the UK – their higher-end FAO Schwarz brand, they of the giant piano keyboard, is already found in Selfridges here.

But making a deal to open Toys “R” Us concessions exclusively in WHSmith, in 76 stores by the end of 2024, was perplexing. Known as a combined newsagent, bookseller and stationers – a conglomeration that my sister, when buying magazines and art supplies, described as being both too specific and too generic to be useful – over two hundred branches have already incorporated Post Offices into them, franchises replacing former “Crown” Post Offices closed by the Government-owned group. It wasn’t an obvious choice for a toy shop to open, even if WHSmith did sell some board games along with children’s art and stationery supplies.

Entering the Oxford WHSmith required me to walk past the regular store, making sure you saw what they had to offer first, to reach the mezzanine hosted by, or guarded by, a fibreglass model of Geoffrey on a park bench. I didn’t look through it – I think I just needed to know it existed.

WHSmith has chopped and changed its product range over the years: the 1980s saw it as a major seller of microcomputers and games from Sinclair, Acorn, Amstrad and so on, and it regularly sold music and films too. During the 1980s and 90s, it owned Do-It-All, a chain of DIY stores, and ran the cable TV channels Lifestyle and Screensport. 

But today, its current image is either as a convenience store in airports, train stations and hospitals, once found selling toothpaste for £10, or as a network of tired and cluttered High Street stores. Giving up floor space to Post Offices and Toys “R” Us, then dual- and triple-branding the signs above the front door, suggests WHSmith is diminishing its own presence to adapt to changing tastes. It may operate Smiths News, the largest wholesale supplier of newspapers and magazines, but print sales of both have been in decline for years, and while its reputation as a bookseller caused its inventory system to be adopted worldwide as the ISBN number, stores rarely offer more than a narrow selection of books in comparison to Waterstones or other independent bookshops.

I still make a point of visiting WHSmith: my family’s birthdays and Christmas are punctuated by their greeting cards; it is the only place I have bought “The New Yorker” magazine outside of New York itself; and it is very good if you want one of something particular: one pen, one pencil, one notebook. Supermarkets may offer multipacks of these for less per unit, but only if you are willing to compromise on exactly what you wanted. It has already sold toys and games under their own brands like The Gadget Shop and Past Times, and giving over that part of the store, like in Selfridges and in Tesco (with rival toy shop The Entertainer) makes some business sense.

What is WHSmith meant to be? Whatever it needs to be to keep going.

PRESS YOUR FACE UP AGAINST THE SCREEN [467]

Well, my television broke again, losing power to the screen for the second time in four years, in the same way it happened last time. With the memory of the previous two-week wait for it to be fixed rising to the surface, I threw up my hands and bought a replacement. Provided this one lasts for a few more years, I have realised this may be the last regular television I will buy.

My first personal TV was a fourteen-inch cathode ray tube TV bought for £139 in 1996, weighed seven kilograms (15.4 lbs), had two one-watt speakers, no subtitles or teletext ability, and used approximately 150 watts an hour, CRT screens holding high voltages even after turn-off. The back of it was riven with ventilation holes, because they were surely needed.

My new TV, a Sharp 32FH8KA, weighs half as much, has a thirty-two-inch LED screen like my previous Toshiba model, but this time with high dynamic range so effective that the backlight can be turned down to save power. Along with two twelve-watt speakers that have some bass, the unit is only a few inches thick – the circuit board and connectors stick out from the back of the TV, and is the only part that remains ventilated, because the screen hardly produces any heat, and because so little energy is lost through heat, it only uses twenty-six watts an hour. It is also fully Android compatible, making it pretty much a computer, into which other computers can be connected. With inflation, £139 in 1996 is now £271 – this new TV cost only £199.

Aside from the minimum expectations of a TV’s ability having greatly expanded over time, connectivity has also greatly changed. I only ever connected a VHS video recorder to the old portable TV in the 1990s, via the single SCART connector, but I now have an Apple TV box – “Android” is something that other people do – a Blu-ray player, a separate DVD player that accepts region 1 DVDs from North America, and an Atari Flashback console, all connected at once, covering all possibilities. 

While I am happy with the speakers on my new TV, a sound bar is usually the first add-on others would buy nowadays, especially if streaming services like Netflix, Amazon Prime and the BBC iPlayer are accessible through the TV itself – apart from the Sky Glass TV, made for subscribers to that service, TVs with built-in soundbars have not appeared, as if better sound is expected to be something that needs to be added to a TV. I could easily have bought a large computer monitor with enough connectors for what I require, but these doesn’t really exist either.

The ability to just buy an all-purpose screen may arrive if no unified decision is made on the future of broadcasting. It is not clear if “5G Broadcast”, using the mobile phone network to deliver TV signals, is the ultimate choice if more of the current TV signals are repurposed for mobile use, while satellite TV, my main source for “regular” broadcasts on my new TV, may only remain if Sky commits to continuing with it beyond the end of the 2020s – if not, why should SES build more Astra satellites? If then, my TV will become that all-purpose screen, but I should never fear, for the box and manual states it supports the H.265 video codec, should any UK broadcaster decide to start using it – that’s good, I suppose.

DID I TELL YOU EVERYTHING IS FINE [466]

I came very late to Al Jarreau’s song “Mornin’”, a quite irrepressibly positive piece of smooth jazz with electric piano and strings, and a hybrid animated and live action video to match. It is very easy on the ear.

On my first listen, my first thought was, “this is a bit Pages from Ceefax, isn’t it?”, which is not as obscure a thought as it sounds. Certainly, David Foster’s original instrumental version of “Mornin’” fits that description completely.

Ceefax, the BBC’s teletext service that began in 1974, was initially only seen by owners of sets capable of decoding that part of the TV signal. Meanwhile, with BBC One and Two only broadcasting a few daytime shows outside of the Open University, schools programmes and live events, a test card and music was played to fill the gaps. From 1980, a rotating series of news, weather and information named “Ceefax in Vision”, later “Pages from Ceefax”, began replacing the test card, while continuing to play music. This arrangement was still seen during the day on BBC television as late as 1990, later relegated to early morning and at the end of the day until the end of analogue TV transmissions closed Ceefax in 2012. 

Being of an age where I would have seen “Pages from Ceefax” during the day, I recognised that the music being played was not often heard elsewhere. Without exception, instrumental tracks were played, i.e. no singing, and they were often light or easy listening in nature, or bland an inoffensive at worst. Until 1988, there were still restrictions on the amount of recorded music being broadcasted in the UK, known as “needletime”, so this music would come from sources either exempt from these rules, like foreign recordings, or by licensing cheaper library and production music.

 

The “foreign recordings” element was often literal: VHS recordings of “Pages from Ceefax” posted to YouTube don’t often have the music picked up by their content ID system, although I found one 1995 example that used the 1981 album “Flashing” by the Japanese jazz pianist Himiko Kikuchi, or another from 1983 using the 1971 album “Sentimentálna trúbka” by the Slovak American trumpeter Laco Déczi.  However, British musicians and composers would also travel to Germany to record, with renowned library music names like Neil Richardson, Alan Moorhouse, Johnny Pearson and Keith Mansfield appearing under pseudonyms like “The Oscar Brandenburg Orchestra”.

 

Even at the end of Ceefax in 2012, the BBC were still using library music, this time more recent recordings licensed from Funtastik Music, which to me sounded more stereotypically like the “elevator music” under which the earlier tracks could be classified. Notably, the final song played was “B.A.R.T.”  a commercially-released song by Ruby, a rock band that featured Tom Fogerty of Creedence Clearwater Revival, and better known from being played between gaps in BBC schools programmes. This was more a nod to the end of laid-back presentation that could no longer take place in a time when TV channels need to continuously hold the viewer’s attention – no longer can BBC Two casually open up at 9.30am, warn viewers that coverage of the TUC Conference begins in two minutes, then play “Nifty Digits” by Richard Harvey, as they did on 9^th September 1982, according to the YouTube channel that put up the recording.

 

But the earlier popularity of light music under big bands and jazz performers like Bert Kempfaert and Oscar Peterson, and the later existence of groups like The Test Card Circle point to the continued popularity of music of this type on its own terms, even down to CD reissues of production music albums made by labels like Bruton Music and KPM originally not meant for general sale. In this case, my brain has labelled it by where I heard that kind of music most, therefore as “Pages from Ceefax”.

FROM A WHISPER TO A SCREAM [465]

(2016)

I know the room in which I write these articles is messy, but at least I can still see the floor. For me, the archetypal definition of a messy room was the one I caught a plane to see. 

Francis Bacon was the Dublin-born British painter of visceral, violent intensity and twisted limbs, often in series of diptychs and triptychs, which remain unsettling and captivating. For me, the knowledge they were created in a studio setting of chaos and debris could not be separated from the finished works. Pictures of Bacon in his studio show him amongst various piles of paint pots and boxes, ripped-up books and newspapers lining the floor, paint mixed into the door and walls, but oddly nothing that could be mistaken as trash.

I am sure Bacon would have approved of my itinerary on 1st March 2016: the Guinness factory; St Patrick’s Cathedral, the Anglican cathedral where Jonathan Swift was once Dean; Trinity College library and the Book of Kells; and the Hugh Lane Gallery in Parnell Square, where Bacon’s studio was reconstructed and opened for public view in 2001. 

Virtually untouched since Bacon’s death in 1992, the studio was bought in its entirety by the gallery in 1998, shipping its entire contents from London, from the walls, windows and doors to even the remaining dust, with around seven thousand individual items digitised and recorded before being slotted back, like a jigsaw puzzle, into its original strewn form. You can look through the windows, then review the database on screens surrounded by the last six canvasses that remained unfinished after Bacon died.

(2016)

During the week I was in Dublin, I visited the studio twice, and overwhelmed both times. Framed by its windows, I could only take in the tableau as a whole – I never thought to look through the database, because I had no idea where to start. Only now looking back through the pictures I took through the window, using an iPhone 6 with a good-for-the-time 8-megapixel camera, I was immediately drawn to the numerous tins of white Dulux Trade Vinyl Matt Emulsion paint – it was mentioned that Bacon used acrylic paint in addition to oils, and these appeared to be it. I tried to find what use it would have in an artistic context, but I was being pointed back to its suitability for “low traffic rooms” like hallways.

Boxes that previously contained VAT 69, a blended scotch whisky, and Krug champagne litter the floor, but like the door and walls, may have been used to blend colours. I read later that pairs of corduroy trousers were also kept in the room, which I couldn’t quite see, that had paint applied to them and used to add texture. Bottle caps are as often used to apply paint to canvas as much as the numerous paintbrushes. Reference books, prints and photographs are scattered – I can only assume that Bacon’s filing system was just knowing where everything this, but seeing a book on Velázquez being near the surface was appropriate, his portrait of Pope Innocent X informing many Bacon studies and portraits.

I am not sure about needing to retain the many cans of varnish and fixative, but in looking at the positioning of the main H-frame easel in the room, with a skylight looking down on it, and in front of a window, Bacon had his back to most of the room, with everything having the potential to be some sort of a tool at any point. That can be the only reason there was no need to clean up the room: everything was where it needed to be.

(2016)

AND I DON’T THINK I’LL BE COMING BACK AGAIN [464]

Detail from "Dare to Be Stupid"

On Tuesday 27th August 2024, the following message was sent out across social media by the brilliant parody singer and songwriter “Weird Al” Yankovic: “About a year ago, my old record label replaced all my old music videos with upscaled HD/4K versions. Some folks really liked it, and some folks really didn't. Well, I hate for anybody to be disappointed, so now BOTH versions are available on YouTube - take your pick!”

I wasn’t aware that the original versions of some songs had been removed from view. I love the videos for “Living with a Hernia”, Weird Al’s take on James Brown’s “Living in America”, and the note-perfect Devo pastiche “Dare to Be Stupid”, as much as the songs themselves, and the artistry in matching the spirit of their targets both audibly and visually means they have to be taken together. 

MTV came along at the perfect time for Weird Al, and just as changes in consuming music means he now puts out songs as and when they are ready, rather than waiting to compile an album’s worth of material, it is natural that YouTube would present the perfect opportunity to lay out your life’s work as accessibly as possible.

However, I made the mistake of looking at the upscaled videos on my phone first – the pictures seemed a little sharper, and the colours more vibrant, which led me to think that they have gone to the original source, whether that be film, or a tape format like U-Matic or Betacam, and made a new scan. 

"I Lost on Jeopardy" - what happened to the categories?

This is clearly not what has happened, seen most clearly on the video for “I Lost on Jeopardy”. The film was originally uploaded in 2009, and while the picture quality is listed as “480p”, the picture itself is soft, like it came from a standard format VHS cassette, which can only achieve half this resolution. The upscaling, listed as 1080p HD format, appears to have been made from this version, using an A.I. upscaling program: outlines are suddenly sharp, and surfaces smoothed out, with text suddenly coming into focus the nearer the camera gets, particularly detrimental with the video’s need to show you a standard “Jeopardy” question board.

A.I. has been used in film preservation for years, helping in the more menial correction tasks like picture stabilisation, and removing scratches and dust that weren’t already caught by photochemical and other cleaning processes. Even then, this requires close examination of what has been done – I remember watching an explanation of the restoration of Fritz Lang’s 1927 film “Metropolis”, showing that the interpolation performed between individual frames that removed scratches and excessive film grain also removed the bottom of someone’s leg, which had to be manually corrected.

It is important to note that, like some people may refuse to watch a film or television programme because it is in black and white instead of colour, it is feasible that rejecting a work because it is not in “standard definition” is possible, which may have prompted the original A.I. transfer of Weird Al’s videos. The ephemeral nature of music videos may mean that master tapes are harder to find, but the care and attention could have been used to ensure the highest-possible quality of these videos simply costs more money than running them through an A.I. scanner program. Perhaps running a previous DVD of Weird Al’s work through an upscaling Blu-ray player, interpolating the picture to HD quality as it goes, would have produced a better effect.

THIS TRAIN DON’T STOP HERE ANYMORE [463]

Among the most notorious flops in American television history, “Supertrain” is a 1979 science fiction adventure series I have known about for years, but only tried to watch recently, the details of its misconception being more interesting than the final show itself.

The “Supertrain” itself is a high-speed, pullman-style luxury train driven by no less than nuclear power and a steam turbine. This is not as wild as it sounds: the English Electric GT3 was a prototype steam turbine train, instead powered by gas, but didn’t move beyond test runs in the early 1960s, never carrying any passengers.

“Supertrain” carried more than a dining car: its double-decker carriages had hotel-like cabins, a gym, restaurant, infirmary, gift shop, dance floor and swimming pool. The opening scene of the first episode implies this is the future of train travel, not long after Amtrak had been formed to save US passenger routes in real life.

The sets were gargantuan, in both size and cost. Built at the MGM studio lot (now Sony Pictures Studios), a reported $6 million was spent constructing a full-size, non-moving train and interior sets, rising to $10 million with the completion of two scale-model trains for use in exterior shots. It is usually accepted that "Supertrain" was so expensive, its failure nearly bankrupted NBC, but failures of other shows, and lost advertising revenue after its scaling back of its coverage of the 1980 Moscow Olympic Games following the United States' boycott, makes the show only one part of a larger-scale problem.

The full-size set had hydraulics to aid chase scenes on the train’s roof, pushing people back if the train accelerated, while a further copy of the roof was fixed to top of real train carriages, for stunts that needed a real moving train. Meanwhile, the interior is very 1970s in design, looking not unlike a cruise ship of the time, with velour carpeting, lots of lights and plenty of opportunity to wander the corridors with an alcoholic drink in your hand.

I have not mentioned the premise of the show so far because it is hardly worth the point. What initially captured me about the show were the opening titles, with Bob Cobert’s aggressively disco theme laid over various shots of the train and of its crew, forming the main cast. Watching the opening episode reveals a set of interweaving storylines featuring the passengers and their romances, a set-up relying on a parade of guest performers, and the crew interacting with them.

“Supertrain” is essentially “The Love Boat” but set on a train, a fact recognised at the time, but the show’s producer Dan Curtis, creator of the seminal gothic soap opera “Dark Shadows”, seemed to be more interested in photographing the train. Curtis was replaced after five episodes, and “Supertrain” was steered into being more comedic, adding a laugh track to its ninth episode before the show was cancelled.

“Supertrain” lasted for only nine episodes from February to May 1979. Creator credit went to crime and mystery writer Donald E. Westlake, and to Earl W. Wallace, former head writer of the Western TV series “Gunsmoke”, and later scriptwriter of the Harrison Ford-starring crime thriller “Witness”. Their only writing credit for “Supertrain” was the opening double-length episode, retitled to “Express to Terror” when released later as a standalone film to try recouping its costs – with Keenan Wynn, Steve Lawrence, Fred Williamson and Vicki Lawrence as guest stars, they become a solid cast for a 1970s TV drama. The following episode starred Dick Van Dyke as a hitman.