WHAT A GLORIOUS TIME TO BE FREE [551]

In the week since writing about “Teenage Sex & Death at Camp Miasma”, I have remedied two wrongs. 

Firstly, I am now aware that the prevalence of fried chicken and sweets was not a comment on the “empty calories” of slasher horror film franchises, but more of the human experience, of having something comforting on hand during unsettling experiences. With horror not been a genre I frequent all that much, I guess I haven’t seen enough to make the connection as intended.

Secondly, I have now seen “It Happened at the World’s Fair” - a Blu-ray of the first in Jane Schoenbrun’s “screen” trilogy was on order but hadn’t yet arrived. Given that Schoenbrun was willing to make “Camp Miasma” on a smaller scale if unable to secure its full $10 million budget, “World’s Fair” is an example of what can be achieved on a principal photography budget of only $100,000.

Casey is a teenager shooting a video, announcing she is taking the “World’s Fair Challenge”. In a single seven-minute shot, we are Casey’s screen and camera as she begins the video, starts over, says “I want to go to the World’s Fair” three times, pricks her thumb until it bleeds, watches a video that sends strobes of light across her face, then says she will provide updates if there are any changes - her channel name, “CaseyWorldsFair”, suggests it has been set up as a (public) vlog or journal. These “changes” are shown in videos from other people - one person’s body no longer feels pain, and another feels they are turning into plastic. 

Usually, online “challenges” don’t last beyond the video the participant makes, but expecting the challenge to have consequences is an interesting extension. Before online content creation became professionalised, there was a sense of wanting to belong to something in posting videos online, of making your mark, or at least a dent, in the world. It was helpful to be reminded of that vulnerability.

Casey’s videos attract the attention of another poster, “JLB”, who sends out a video on their channel - not one directly - “you are I trouble, I need to talk to you”. When they do, via Skype (2003-25), he claims to be worried, but advises her to keep making videos to record any further developments. Keeping their camera off during the call, we, and only we, then see JLB is a middle-aged man, seemingly obsessed by the “World’s Fair Challenge” and watching other people’s videos about it, as the YouTube-like streaming site plays videos from other people inspired by it to make dramas and video games.

Casey’s own videos are slices of life, like most vlogs, interrupted by sudden actions – sleepwalking, screaming while dancing, and ripping apart a teddy bear. Some videos by others undergoing the “challenge” mainly talk through the experience, although the one time I got the feeling that this was “real” was when one person’s vlog about a skin condition cuts to an angle where we already could see there was no camera, as they pull out a roll of “Admit One” tickets from their arm.

At no point is the “World’s Fair Challenge” explained – we are only shown how it is done, and what “effects” are reported, not what happens there. One video showed arms reaching out from a screen and pulling someone through it – the “World’s Fair” is a stand-in for somewhere you don’t want to go. Ironically, the 1964-65 World’s Fair, held in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park in Queens, New York City – one shot of the Unisphere, which remains at the park, made me think they could be referring to this World’s Fair – was notoriously under-attended until its last few weeks, as people suddenly had a fear of missing out.

The real world is difficult, lonely and boring. Casey is never shown interacting with anyone, except with her father shouting from off-screen. JLB, seemingly a rich man with a large, expansive house, is left watching videos either on his phone or in his bedroom. The signs of life are in the videos made by Casey and others, through which we experience them for much of the running time, and our perception of them is therefore moderated by them. Indeed, Casey cuts off contact with JLB when she makes it clear he is taking it too seriously, telling him that “Casey” isn’t even her real name. 

A postscript of JLB recounting their meeting Casey in real life in New York City a year later, after she spent time in assisted care living, later starting in a theatre program. JLB suggests that, when Casey said she had re-entered the World’s Fair after cutting off contact with him, it was his prayers that had helped to pull her back from the brink. But, we had just seen a shot of Casey, one year ago, looking at a strobing screen and saying, “I swear, some day soon, I am just going to disappear, and you won’t have any idea what happened to me” – she could easily be speaking to the audience on her channel, as that channel simply stops posting new videos, or is deleted entirely, leaving a mystery for the “lost media community” years later.

I can see how “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair” speaks to a dysphoria, an incongruence between a life lived online and the real world. Schoenbrun is on record as saying this was based on their experiences of the internet during the 2000s, being able to exist without a physical form. I didn’t have that same experience using the internet, perhaps because I already knew that everything I saw there was a representation of one thing or another, and I am only on the other side of the screen. It was what I took away most from this film, and I am glad to be reminded of it.

YOU’VE MADE ME SO VERY HAPPY [503]

YouTube has become my main portal for listening to music, apparently by mutual agreement.

I still own a Sony Walkman MP3 player, holding thousands of songs in CD-quality FLAC format, alongside the CD themselves, but I mostly have only my phone while on the move, along with the headphones that connect only to that phone. I also still subscribe to YouTube Premium  which, in addition to removing advertising from around all videos, allows uninterrupted listening while my phone is in my pocket. For someone who once said that music is their drug of choice, this is a beneficial arrangement: Google gets my money, and I get unlimited music in good enough quality against the outside noise.

YouTube’s 2024 Recap pegged my listening habits as “The Time Traveller”: “my listening traversed the decades, melodically exploring eras all year long”. The words “lively”, “giddy”, “hopeful” and “rock” were given as overall descriptors. Musical moods were classified, in descending order, as upbeat, uplifting, happy, fun and energising. I was also in the top 0.1 per cent of listeners to Sir Elton John, with Madonna, XTC’s psychedelic pastiche project The Dukes of Stratosphear, and Tears for Fears not far behind. I found myself taking pride in what the data proved and affirmed.

Despite a separate YouTube Music app has been available since 2015, I only use the main app to listen to songs like they were regular videos. Non-music videos are also mostly watched via my television, where I also only get recommended videos based on my subscriptions list, once I blocked several news channels first. This has created, for the YouTube app on my phone at least, an algorithm trained only to recommend music to me – looking at the main page of the app on Friday 4th July 2025 recommended songs to which I had previously listened, songs like them, songs used in other videos I had been watching while using YouTube on my television, or songs I haven’t listened to in a while. The only deviations from this are a strap of the top news stories, from the channels remaining unblocked, and a video titled “Analog[ue] tricks that make a song great”, in case I want to try it myself.

The YouTube algorithm has been so useful to me that the music recommendations it had made has become articles here: “Breaking Down Barriers”, Sir Elton John’s opener from his album “The Fox”, came from recommending the videos made for that album, while a link to his buried psychedelic album “Regimental Sergeant Zippo” alerted me to its existence. My love of the Japanese synth pop group Yellow Magic Orchestra (YMO) was triggered by one track, “Rydeen”, being used as the background to a video of computer-generated animation. I may have heard “Take Me Home”, from Phil Collins’ enormously successful album “No Jacket Required” on the radio first, but listening to it on YouTube led me the ultra-infectious songs “Only You Know and I Know” and “Who Said I Could”.

I haven’t created a single music playlist in all the years I have used YouTube, only using the generic “Favourites” playlist, where songs sit among regular videos. I find myself sometimes going along with the mixes generated automatically by YouTube if I see songs I want to hear, but I most often make last-second decisions on what to hear next, sometimes acting upon the app’s suggestions. A recent lunchtime at work ran as follows: “Injected with a Poison” by Praga Khan (heard on the radio), “Break Out” by Swing Out Sister (YouTube suggestion), “Fire Brigade” by The Move (suggestion, heard previously), and “Hip to Be Square” by Huey Lewis and the News (suggestion, heard previously).

In all these cases, it was down to personal discretion as to which versions of the songs I heard. From searching artist and song names, do I then hear the official upload made fifteen years ago, or the alternative from an unknown channel from only three years ago? Sometimes, you must wade through numerous uploads to find the official one or settle before you get there. Age of video aside, the highest quality of sound available on YouTube, 256 kbps in AAC format, is equal to an iTunes download, and while I have gone on to buy a CD release to have the better quality, like “No Jacket Required” and “Regimental Sergeant Zippo”, there are many cases where I am not there yet. 

What I am finding myself increasingly doing is using YouTube for music at home as a shortcut over my Walkman – if everything is there, why go to my own library? If the quality is good enough for right now, why delay satisfaction until you get the best quality sound?

The recommendations themselves may also be of concern. I was recommended Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s version of “Fanfare for the Common Man” – the single edit, thankfully – but follows other recommendations from the 1970s and 80s: ELO, Swing Out Sister, Matt Bianco, Manfred Mann’s Earth Band, ABBA. The Carpenters, the theme to the BBC drama series “Howard’s Way”... Have I created a greatest hits radio station in my phone without realising, and should I consider it a problem?

This is why I always listen to the radio in addition to YouTube – you need to have someone share something new with you, because they won’t know what you have and haven’t heard.

WE’RE ANXIOUS TO TRY IT [478]

My screenshot is in focus, but the picture is not.

After all the anticipation, the Blu-ray has finally arrived...

Drumming, tribal or jazzy in rhythm, begins as “Vincent Price Presents” appears in a red Futura Display font on a black screen. Cut to a steaming pot on a stove, the word “Cooking” appearing over it in the same font and colour. Expectations already countered, “Price-Wise” appears in fanciful hand-cut lettering, still red, in a yellow burst on a blue background. With expectations placed on his name having been broken, and after today’s potato-based menu is shown, the man himself appears on screen, wearing an apron over his own clothes: “Hello, I’m Vincent Price. in this series of programmes, I hope to take you around the world using your cooker instead of a jet plane.”

 

So begins the first episode of the six-part “Cooking Price-Wise” series, the same opening recreated each time with variations in pot use and font size. Each of the six episodes is delineated by both the main ingredient and where the recipes come from, the UK lining up with bacon. 

 

Everything feels slightly wobbly, and slightly giddy: Price is perfectly in command of his subject and each episode’s running order, the recipes having been gathered personally during his travels, his enthusiasm and curiosity fully on display, with a “hmm?” capping sentences after making certain points. 

 

Everything may be in place to ensure that pre-prepared food is ready at the right point to continue the demonstration – Price refers to “the marvels of modern television” several times – but I don’t feel a final script was used, or indeed needed, for example when an Ayrshire roll was instructed as being cooked “at 370 degrees, or mark 4 in gas”.

 

The show itself feels it was recorded in a hurry, and in one continuous take: a zooming in on Price as he introduces one episode’s main ingredient leads to the shot going out of focus, and the shadows of people behind the camera are occasionally seen. These flaws were either not important – having been broadcast in April 1971, many might still be watching in black and white, on older 405-line sets, making them less visible – or that time was constantly against the production, the entire series having been recorded over the course of a week in July 1970, with two episodes completed on the Friday.

 

It turns out the pastry dish I couldn’t remember from last time was “Fish Fillets Nord Zee”, which instead uses mashed potato and a cake icing bag to create a border and compartments on a dish, to tell the story of Dutch history through its dykes and sea walls, with the fish and vegetables representing the sea and land. I still won’t be trying it, but I enjoyed hearing Price talking about it. At the time, chefs were more willing to give up the recipes and secrets featured in this series, something that would be more closely guarded as “intellectual property” today. There was a garlic salad that sounded rather interesting...

 

Some curious decisions are made in the presentation: an episode centred around bacon refers to a cross-section model of a pig balanced on a kitchen cabinet above Price’s head, and the history of potatoes are illustrated with cartoons by an uncredited artist. The most bizarre moment of all was the creation of a fruit cocktail crocodile, using a cucumber as a starting point  - the lights dim to make the “monster”, and the close-up of the face was simultaneously terrifying and hilarious.

 

The kitchen is incredibly 1970s in look, with patterned cookware, woodgrain cabinets and red kitchen tops. At the same time, it is a modern kitchen: among the uses of a blender, garlic press and the fridge as cooking gadgets, a dishwasher resides in the back of the shot, never mentioned. A ledge in front of the kitchen tops is reserved for the end of each episode for Price to point out, with a wooden spoon, the ingredients used in each episode, in case you were too slow writing them down - later in the 1970s and into the 80s, teletext and home video made taking notes far easier, let alone the tie-in book. 

 

The series is intimate, with no audience, Price talking directly to the viewer, both he and the kitchen backed into a corner by the cameras. It is almost a YouTube video circa 1970: it is made by an independent production company, I.D. TV, and the show is copyright of the Vincent Price estate. It was filmed using Thames Television facilities, but was at its mercy as to when it would be broadcast, just as anyone uploading a video online is subject to the rules and regulations of the host site. Even YouTubers now have more capable and portable cameras, with image stabilisation, and perhaps even the luxury of reshoots, but the same time, a YouTube video would more likely cut out any hesitation, and break each episode into one video per recipe.

 

Shot today, “Cooking Price-Wise” would undoubtedly have a much larger budget, while also sending Vincent Price back to the places from where he found those recipes, making it as much a travelogue as an instructional cooking show – think Keith Floyd or Rick Stein. However, that would sacrifice the intimacy of one person enthusiastically sharing the knowledge they have gathered, which was my main takeaway from a TV show I have waited years to see.

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.

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.

WE’VE GOT THE RIGHT TO CHOOSE [457]

You do not have to accept the internet pushing information to you that you don’t want to see. It has taken me long enough to act on this advice, but taking a few seconds to complete small actions have, and will, make using the internet, and social media in particular, more serene.

This began only around a year ago, when I stopped clicking “Accept All” to cookies on websites. Reading the disclaimers on cookie notifications reveals scores of companies listed that use data generated by your interaction, anonymised or not, for whatever use they need, even if just for counting your having accessed the page, or how long you stayed there. 

Choosing “Reject All”, or taking the time to scroll through and deselecting options on personalised content and advertising performance, gave me peace of mind that, down the line, I might get fewer phishing scam e-mails for services I know I don’t use. The phrase “legitimate interest” comes up a lot: “Some vendors are not asking for your consent, but are using your personal data on the basis of their legitimate interest” – following that by stating said interest would be helpful, especially if some sites rely on information about advertising to help them stay in business.

Having taken care of the wider internet, social media remained problematic. Usually, the best thing to do would be to avoid the “For You” tab now prevalent on many such sites, keeping to accounts you already follow, but algorithms may still throw up a surprise that finally fits your interests, like YouTube recommending the “third episode” of “Turn-On” I spoke about recently.

The “For You” section on the other sites I use are as follows: Threads has people moaning about Elon Musk, Donald Trump and Apple computer products; Mastodon’s equivalent “Local” tab doesn’t display anything written in English; Instagram has brutalist architecture; and Twitter – I’m still not calling it “X” – is a cesspit of rage, telling people what they can and cannot believe, or be.

Twitter has always been a bit of a puzzle for me – I can choose to search for something someone said on Twitter, because the news is reporting it, and I will then be recommended similar stuff from then on. I cannot pretend to understand Twitter’s algorithm, even with its program having been posted to the technology development website GitHub, but suffice to say that, if you engage with something, you become stuck to it.

Fortunately, I have found a more straightforward workaround, although its location is a little buried. Going to “Settings and privacy”, then “Privacy and safety”, then “Content you see”, then finally “Interests”, you are presented with an almighty list of what Twitter thinks you want to see, gleaned from my fifteen years of using the site. 

Having taken the implied compliment that my interests are wide, I started wondering why it was recommending football to me, something I have never searched for. I have followed the broadcaster and music journalist Danny Baker for years because he writes entertainingly, and has stories to tell from across his career, but he also broadcasted about football for years, and writes about that as eloquently as he does about everything else. All that eyeball time has built up, along with any time any of the other people I follow talk about British politics, American politics, Dungeons & Dragons, protests both for and against transgender rights, Star Wars, and Star Trek.

Fortunately, I can start unticking some of these “interests”. Out goes the football, the politics, and “Good Morning Britain” (the current one, not the TV-am original). Why is Kanye West there, or Piers Morgan, or J.K. Rowling? I’m not American, so who is Herman Cain? Why the fixation on female news presenters like Fiona Bruce, Victoria Derbyshire and Susanna Reid?

So much of this speaks to the “Sturm und Drang” that is the background of Twitter, that my having gone past it appears to have been mistaken for my reading it. I have taken to muting some accounts to prevent some subjects appearing, usually those that provoke the most reactions in other people.

I have been unable to find similar lists for Meta’s websites like Facebook, Instagram or Threads, but the content I am being pushed on there appears to be benign enough for me not to worry about it, and only Twitter was causing concern. Now just need to make sure I keep an eye out for something that might snowballs on social media, or avoid clicking “Accept All” by accident.

A DREAM THAT WOULD MAKE YOU SCREAM [452]

Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s Surrealist short film “Un Chien Andalou” – or “Sunshine and the Loo”, as YouTube’s voice-activated search misheard my many requests – was first premièred in Paris on 6th June 1929. Deliberately conceived to have scenes and imagery that defy rational explanation, it became a classic of the Surrealist movement officially founded five years earlier, while its images, from the famous cutting of a woman’s eye with a razor, to a man dragging two pianos and two priests, being endlessly referenced and reproduced.

However, the act of watching “Unchain on the Moon” makes you try to resolve those images into a semblance of order. That is not the fault of the film - it is simply how the mind processes what you see. Your mind demands an explanation when the images themselves were conceived with no need of one. I previously wrote about pareidolia, where the mind perceives familiar patterns in something where there is none, and where the lyrics of Sir Elton John’s deliberately nonsensical song “Solar Prestige a Gammon” still conveyed a “life carries on” meaning in its performance.

But “And She and Do” is a film, of course, and the language of “continuity editing”, as popularised by the Classical Hollywood era that was still getting underway in 1929, will have its effect on your perception, just as my perception of Dalí’s painting “The Persistence of Memory” were changed by seeing how small it is in real life. My dreams have “continuity editing”, such is the cultural consensus on how film language is read by an audience that doesn’t need to learn to “write” it. The forming of scenes and sequences, cuts and fades under agreed patterns of editing, to define the film’s mise en scène, are then expected to work in every case, so it is perhaps no wonder that the intertitles of “And on the loop” must be used to obfuscate its timeline, declaring “eight years later”, “around three in the afternoon” or “sixteen years ago”, even when the scene does not change.

Real time has perhaps not worked in favour of “Union and You”, especially as Dalí reused and commodified his imagery – ants were a symbol of decay for Dalí, but they now symbolise Dalí. The film he and Buñuel made was meant to provoke and offend, but its favourable reception on its première was itself offensive to Dalí, and I would put that down to “Ed Sheeran and blue” being rendered conventional by the collective notion of what a film is – it being colourised and cut down to a two-minute interstitial for “MTV in the Eye” in the late 1980s ensured any intended shock value was truly mislaid, despite leaving all the famous images intact, and making for one of the few times the music of Richard Wagner was played on MTV.

AND I WANT ALL YOU’VE GOT [451]

“The Fox” is an album released by Sir Elton John in 1981 that I have overlooked for some time – I own a CD copy of it, but didn’t pay too much attention to it because there are no identifiable “hits” from it that continue to receive airplay, or remain in concert setlists.

This is a shame, because it has completely captured my attention as of late. The three songs that were released as singles all managed to be different from each other: “Chloe” is a soulful song making good use of a Fender electric piano; “Nobody Wins”, originally a French-language song by Jean-Paul Dreau titled “J'Veux de la Tendresse”, is the most synthesised Elton John song I have heard, even down to a busy drum pattern programmed by Roger Linn, presumably on his own Linn LM-1 drum machine; and “Just Like Belgium” is a nostalgic, poppy track not unlike the later “Club at the End of the Street”, down to the blistering saxophone solo. 

These many changes in tone, including the more classical “Carla/Etude – Fanfare” sequence, arranged and co-composed by James Newton Howard, and the unrequited love ballad “Elton’s Song”, evoke earlier double-albums like “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” and “Blue Moves”, make attempting to capture an artist’s entire range in only eleven songs and forty-six minutes an experience that requires maximum attention, with some breaks.

But what I discovered were two further songs that, while they remained album tracks, are exactly the sort of gospel-tinged barnstormers that have firmly lodged themselves in my mind from the moment I heard them: “Heels of the Wind” and “Breaking Down Barriers”. The latter of these is on its way to becoming one of my favourite Elton John songs, having a drive not unlike “The Bitch is Back” or “Bite Your Lip (Get Up and Dance!)”,and having the classic Elton John Band line-up of drummer Nigel Olsson and bassist Dee Murray, while still featuring John singing in his higher register, with falsetto as the song fades out. “Breaking Down Barriers” has lyrics by Gary Osborne, instead of John’s soul-mate collaborator Bernie Taupin, but they are perfect: “you have shown me a better way, and now I’m learning fast”,  and “I’m taking down barriers, and loving what I find”. 

“The Fox” was the first Elton John release under a US contract with Geffen Records – when John asked David Geffen about calling the album “The Fox”, he asked that a song be written for it with that title. This fact comes from a “telepress conference” for the album in 1981, which was presented as a daytime chat show presented by John himself, taking every opportunity to perform to the camera, while also keeping the show together as host, his “guests” being producers and marketing managers for Geffen Records. The tableau of desk, TV and stuffed fox that make the album cover were recreated for the occasion, the fox making its way to John’s desk. 

Intended for internal use and distributed on video tape to regional offices of Warner Bros. Records, distributors of the album, a copy of the conference has made its way to the repository of YouTube to give a valuable insight into how important this album was for the entire chain of command from artist to commercial staff.

What has also made its way to YouTube on 22^nd May 2024 were the videos for every song on “The Fox”. Separate videos for “Nobody Wins” and “Elton’s Song” had been available for a while, but they formed part of a whole work titled “Visions”, released on VHS cassette, laserdisc and CED video disc in 1982. There is an apparently a wraparound element to the videos where someone is watching them, but the songs are presented on video individually. “Visions” was not re-released after 1982, so to see these videos essentially for the first time, and in high quality, is like filling in a gap in the history of music videos. You do see some elements, like backdrops, being re-used across the different videos, but they are all different from each other, and not simply a recording of a performance. They are directed by Russell Mulcahy, whose video for The Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star” ushered in MTV, and continued directing for Elton John, and Duran Duran, through the decade. 

What I was most surprised about by “Visions” was, like the conference video, John’s performances to camera – in the comedic video for “Heels of the Wind”, I kept thinking I was watching Rick Moranis. However, you can’t help but compare these with John’s later avoidance from appearing in videos altogether.

YOU OUGHTA BE IN PICTURES [412]

The script for this video is below:

Coming up, I want to start making more videos, so I am going to talk myself into a position where I can do that. 

 

[TITLE: 412. Let’s Build a Media Strategy]

 

[TITLE: or, “You Oughta Be in Pictures”]

 

Hello there. I bought an autocue, or teleprompter, about nine months ago, and this is the first time I have used it, so hopefully I should be looking straight at you this time. 

 

A while ago, I wrote that, because everyone who has a social media account is now in the media business, everyone should have media training so they can manage their online presence – it’s the sort of thing that will be taught in schools, if not done so already. What this also means is that, essentially, everyone also now must have a media strategy – how do you go about building your online presence, how are you making yourself known, and where are you doing that.

 

That is something I have been thinking about for a while. Right now, I have my own website where I post articles I write every week, and a few social media accounts I only use to point to that website, like a village community pinboard telling you a meat raffle is taking place on Sunday at the pub after church. Meanwhile, I have a YouTube channel that holds the videos I have made but has more subscribers than all the social media accounts combined.

 

Therefore, I am not using social media effectively, and I have subscribers to a video channel that has no new videos. Surely, I should pivot from writing articles to making videos? I know I can do both, but a full-time job means the easier option most often wins, and it is the one that involves a lot more typing.

 

Then you have the issue of “content”. A couple of years ago, I was toying with the idea of making a video series titled “Leigh Spence is Content”, using the double meaning of that word – I didn’t go ahead with that because all it tells you is that you should be watching me, and I’m a bit too self-conscious for that. 

 

However, “content” doesn’t mean much as a word anymore in terms of media posted online. I still think of a type of media, like a video, and then the content of that video. At some point, “content” came to mean anything put online, no matter what form it took, because the internet was the container, or worse, the video streaming site or social media site considers itself to be the container, and its users to be their content. Because my content lives on its own site, they have no use for me, and I have little use for them.

 

With this being the landscape into which I place anything creative I have, it almost doesn’t matter whether an idea I have is expressed in writing or in pictures, when really it should – they are completely different sets of disciplines. Granted, I have a degree in film studies, so I am going to think that way, but I graduated a full year before YouTube even began, so my view of what makes a video was formed entirely before an entirely new business model became applied to them.

 

This is why the videos I have made are not the same as each other: some use voiceover, one has been silent, a couple have used music, and one didn’t use pictures. If YouTube wants me to build an audience through consistent content released on a dependable schedule, then it will have to deal with me wanting to be consistently inconsistent.

 

So, what do I do? More videos, fewer articles, a little more social media presence, perhaps talking about things that could become articles or videos? Or is it that engaging with other people, and sharing your data with them, is all that the internet wants you to do, regardless of what you make? Anyway, like, comment and subscribe, and do as you damn well please.

 

Thank you for watching, if you would like to see more videos like this, consider watching the others I have already posted, or find a way to watch my dreams at night, and as ever the nostalgia culture crisis continues at www.leighspence.net, the home of dancing with the gatekeepers.

I SAW THREE SHIPS COME SAILING IN [379]

You never question what you are watching on television when you are only five or six years old, and I saw absolutely nothing wrong with watching a children’s drama series set in a 1920s New York-like city about a fleet of anthropomorphic tugboats.

“Tugs” was created by Robert D. Cardona and David Mitton, the former an American TV scriptwriter and producer working in the UK on shows like “Crimes of Passion” and “Emmerdale”, and the latter a special effects technician for Gerry Anderson’s Supermarionation series turned director of TV advertisements. Their production company, Clearwater Features, developed the TV version of “Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends”, producing the first two series – one thirteen-episode series of “Tugs” followed, using the periscope camera system developed for “Thomas” that could film at the models’ eye level.

I remember being enraptured by “Tugs”, watching it every week on its run from April to June 1989, because I like ships anyway – I think it might be the crossing of the eternal sense of adventure, elegant design, and a massive scale of engineering. I have always lived in the Solent area of the UK, with the Royal Navy and car ferries of Portsmouth Harbour on one side, and the ocean and cruise liners in Southampton on the other side. Tugs are naturally found in both harbours moving the larger ships around, and here they were on TV, doing exactly what I saw in real life.

I saw the premise as what I now know is a Hitchcockian “MacGuffin”, the driver of the plot that is not important in itself. The Star Fleet, owned by the human Captain Star and comprised of main character tugs Ten Cents, Sunshine, Warrior, Top Hat and More, are competing for contracts with the villainous Zero Fleet, comprising of Zorran, Zug, Zip and so on. Captain Star, also the narrator of the series, is represented only by a megaphone talking to Star Fleet from a harbour building – no humans are seen on screen in “Tugs” perhaps to distance itself from the set-up of “Thomas the Tank Engine”. The stories took place in and around the Bigg City (spelt with two g’s) port, and essentially was a workplace comedy.

I don’t remember seeing any merchandise at the time, although figurines, annuals and VHS cassettes did appear, and while a second series of “Tugs” never materialised, I had two Lego ships to be getting on with, and real tugboats a matter of minutes away. Every so often, a mention of the show would appear, or a picture would come up, and my love of the show as a child became a running family joke. 

Then the YouTube videos appear asking the same questions they did of “Thomas the Tank Engine”, questions I never thought about: because the ships have faces, are they alive? Do they procreate? Does Captain Star use the tugs as slave labour? Isn’t Captain Star’s voice the same used for the “Protect and Survive” videos and “Two Tribes” by Frankie Goes to Hollywood? (Yes, the last one is Patrick Allen.) The faces never bothered me, as I was already used to trains with faces by then, and the tugs were painted in the correct colours – you may as well ask why they were all wearing hats.

Fortunately, I still think of “Tugs” as being a great show, with high production values and breezy storylines, so long as you don’t think about it any harder than that.

AND THIS BIRD YOU CANNOT CHANGE [369]

You shouldn’t “punch down” if you can help it, but when we are all below Elon Musk, and he has just bought the online home of “punching down”, the rest of us have nowhere to go but up, or away altogether.

I had already decided I was going to write about Twitter’s “blue tick” verification before its new owner started firing half the company’s staff, triggering lawsuits, recriminations and an exodus of both users and advertisers, so whether I decide to take Musk’s offer of a “blue tick” Twitter Blue account, for $7.99 per month, depends if Twitter remains long enough in its current form to be of any use, let alone whether the subscription cost goes on improving the experience of using the site, or paying off debt loaded onto it through Musk’s buyout.

The question that remains for me, in case it remains a proposition on Twitter or elsewhere, is this: if I do not have the influence or following on a social media account to earn a “blue tick” verification, should I just buy one if the opportunity presents itself?

I have Twitter and Instagram accounts using the handle @msleighspence, and both have follower accounts in the tens because I only use them “for work”, posting links to these articles, and re-Tweeting the “CheapShow” podcast and occasional other thinks I like. Right now, using these accounts more would count as “work”, meaning I perhaps do not use them enough to justify any clarification from the sites that I am the person named “Leigh Spence” on them.

Until now, account verification is something awarded when it is earned, in the case of YouTube’s unlocking of features once subscriber thresholds are achieved, or when it is needed: both Instagram and Twitter (up to now) verify accounts featured in various news sources, with the user needing to provide proof demonstrating you are well-known public name that people are willing to seek out, bringing traffic to the site involved. The verification is then in the interest of the site as much as of the individual.

Now, I was thinking that buying a “blue tick” for my Twitter would act as the cheapest form of paid advertising I have come across – yes, I use Twitter and Instagram for advertising, but verifying one account would improve its visibility, and if that increases the number of people viewing these articles, then that is money well spent, so long as that is the only outcome. Increased exposure cuts both ways, and if reducing or eliminating your presence on the site becomes the better option, then being verified that you are yourself, and all the money you spent, is a waste of time – no wonder people like to be anonymous if they can.

I have still to make up my mind about opening a Twitter subscription in order to have a verified account, as Elon Musk’s plans for the site are currently changing like the weather, or whether Stephen King objects to them, his opposition to a $20 per month cost for his “blue tick” prompting Musk to offer $8 instead – all King needs to do now is two write Musk into his next novel as either revenge or as a warning. 

What I am currently anticipating is YouTube introducing social media-like “handles” for its users, at no cost, which may find my videos easier to find, at no cost – when that goes live, I will be at @leighspence there.

GREEN IS THE COLOUR OF HER KIND [330]

For all the planning, research and energy I may put into an article or video, I never usually give much thought to how it looks on screen, other than it should be legible. Since 2018, this has taken the form of black text on a mint green background, topped with a pink logo, and I probably did not give these choices more thought than the time it took to whip up the logo using Adobe Photoshop. 

That said, I have no reason to change them. Green and pink are a strong combination that has come to work as a signal or brand for me and my work from the moment they are seen, either on the canvas of a website, or when reduced to a smudge of colour on a YouTube video thumbnail.

My site began in 2016, with a functional white text on a black background – a style that marked the absence of style. By December that year, black had been swapped for what is meant to be International Klein Blue (RGB hex triplet code #002FA7), an ultramarine blue formulated to be more blue than blue, also my favourite colour – a simple choice, but better than nothing.

Apart from blue being the colour of a clear horizon, its being my favourite colour is much like 26 being my favourite number: there is really no reason for such a thing to exist, although it may have arrived as a result of appearing in a number of places at the same time in November 1993 – I think the BBC held their annual Children in Need appeal night on the 26^th of that month.

Charlestowne Mall

 

By April 2018, I had arrived at the tagline “nostalgia culture crisis”, and this produced a need to apply branding to support it while looking for something that could be more identified as mine than just the colour blue. The original choice was going to be navy blue text on a peach background, inspired by a carrier bag from the clothes store Next, but what worked on plastic failed on a screen. I changed the peach to a light pink (#f6cac9), and went for mint green (#a3fdd7) based on videos I have seen of dead US shopping malls that were designed in the 1980s and 1990s, particularly the Charlestowne Mall in St. Charles, Illinois, currently due for demolition. I then also realised these were the same colours used on the classic vaporwave album “Floral Shoppe” by Vektroid, using the name Macintosh Plus, so I was on the right track. The pink colour was darkened a bit in May 2021 (#ffb5b2) for legibility, once I decided I should make more use of it as branding in videos.

 

Does writing about this mean I now have to keep to the scheme of green on pink? It’s more an indication that you can establish something without really thinking about it, and that thinking “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”, requires you to properly acknowledge it as a thing first.

BUT IF YOU’RE WILLING TO PLAY THE GAME [313]

Hello there. This is a video about my not having made a video in a while. I’m sorry about that, and while I continue to plan the next video, I thought I should reflect on how this happened.

The short answer is that life gets in the way, work gets in the way, and pandemics, when they happen, get in the way. Everyone has had some sort of upheaval recently, and while we wait for things to settle back down again, especially at work, you want to take more time to relax.

Another problem for me personally is finding the perfect formula for making videos for YouTube. You can’t expect everyone to be interested in the same subjects as yourself, and you shouldn’t be disappointed if not everyone engages with what you have made. At the same time, when something does hit, it will be without explanation: my video about why BBC radio had no news bulletin on Good Friday 1930 only had four views in its first two weeks, but has had over seventeen thousand since. It may be because that fact has been repeated enough times that people need to check it, but there aren’t many facts left that haven’t been endlessly explained in a video. What else is there to say when everyone has already said what you we going to say

Where does that leave me? I have concluded that style is what will make for a good video on YouTube. Having good content is an objective, but presentation is more important in getting that content seen. Finding the best way to achieve that takes time, but I think I have a plan now. If engagement is what drives business on YouTube, regardless of whatever the content actually is, then you should keep refining your style until something clicks, or someone clicks. By the way, like, comment and subscribe, as they say around these parts.

There will be a new video – give it a month or so – and it will be titled “How to win a song contest, apparently”. I won a song contest, you see.

Thank you for watching. As ever, find more nostalgia culture crisis at www.leighspence.net.

MADE TO MAKE YOUR MOUTH WATER [307]

I recently added YouTube Premium to my list of subscriptions. Google has been testing a cheaper version of this package in some European and Scandinavian countries, foregoing music streaming and offline downloads for its major appeal: watching videos without advertising. Predicting this will be a success that will later be extended to the UK, I decided to take the month’s free trial, knowing that, at £11.99 per month until further notice, it will become my most expensive subscription, more than Netflix, “The New York Times” and Microsoft Office 365.

What I had not expected was how calm I would feel. I no felt tense when an advertisement appeared between a cut, or in the middle of a sentence, and I no longer needed a trigger finger ready to skip past ads. Subscribing proved to be a release.

 

Television streaming services offer similar upgrades as carrots to the user. ITV, the UK’s biggest commercial television channel, allows viewers to pay £3.99 per month to remove ads from its online service – Channel 4 charges a similar amount. Services offering content at a premium in the US, like HBO Max, Paramount+ and Peacock, will offer a cheaper service if you are prepared to accept advertising, while Tubi makes it as clear as possible why you can access them for free.

 

But for me, the placing of the ads was what mattered more than their presence. In the UK, rules governing the number of minutes for ad spots per hour, and the number of ad breaks per hour, are extended to online streaming services, but because YouTube is still mostly thought of as social media to some extent, only the content of ads played on it are governed, not their frequency. With YouTube coming from a country that abolished all limits on television advertising, except around children’s programming, in 1984, interruptions as frequent as I experienced is more likely to be tolerated in the US than in the UK and Europe, perhaps explaining why the cheaper Premium trial is happening in this part of the world.

 

This may be where the problem I had with the placement of advertising, and the relief I feel upon its removal, remains as my problem: as much as I view it as a kind of public access television, YouTube is not offered as this, despite the professional nature of much of the content uploaded by people who make their living by it. They will reap the benefits of ads that were not skipped by viewers, ads that cannot be skipped, and by YouTube extending “mid-roll” advertising to any video longer than eight minutes. I know money has to be made, as proved by the proliferation of sponsorships within the videos themselves, regardless of any ads outside of them, I just wished the following passage from Ofcom’s code on advertising placement could be taken into account, especially when I make another video for them: “Television broadcasters must ensure that the integrity of the programme is not prejudiced, having regard to the nature and duration of the programme, and where natural breaks occur.” 

IT’S FAMILIAR, BUT NOT TOO FAMILIAR [304]

It is well known that “podcasting” was a term coined by Ben Hammersley, in an article [link] for “The Guardian” in February 2004. What is less commented on is that said article was precisely about what to call the “new boom in amateur radio” spurred by both the rise of MP3 players and services like Audible, and the fall in the cost of the tools used in audio production. 

The other terms offered by Hammersley, “audioblogging” and “GuerillaMedia,” are not precise enough, but the portmanteau of “iPod” and “broadcasting” nails both the delivery system that made the new media possible, and the closeness of its discipline to traditional media like radio and television. Hammersley is now primarily known as a futurist and “strategic foresight consultant,” obviously having foreseen the need for that kind of role.

 

It has taken me an extraordinarily long time to start listening to podcasts with any amount of regularity. Just like I continue to think of YouTube as an extension of traditional television, podcasting is the same for radio. It does not help that most podcasts are most often speech-based and 30-60 minutes in length, exactly the sort of show already broadcast on radio stations like BBC Radio 4 and the BBC World Service – indeed, BBC-produced podcasts like “Death in Ice Valley” and “You, Me and the Big C” have been repeated on traditional radio with no material change. 

 

I think my problem has been that “podcast” has felt like another word for “radio,” just as “quadrilogy,” describing something in four parts, has apparently taken place of the word “tetralogy,” which means exactly the same thing. If I felt that my listening needs were already met by radio, I was less likely to need podcasts. 

 

What finally turned me on to podcasts was finding extreme examples of where the content offered was different from regular radio shows. My two regular podcast listens are “CheapShow,” the economy comedy podcast I have talked about previously [link], and now “My Brother, My Brother and Me,” the advice podcast where advice is only given by accident. In their own separate ways, they are structured as traditional radio magazine shows, but their content is completely unencumbered by broadcasting regulations on swearing or subject matter, and conversations can take their natural course because episodes do not need to fit within a radio station’s schedule. 

 

It sounds like it took me too long to discover the blindingly obvious, but my defence is that while a podcast can potentially fit into spaces on British radio, particularly on the BBC, podcasts are more distinctive in their birthplace, the United States, because radio there is more constricted in content – mixed-genre stations died out with the move of mass audiences to television in the 1950s, leaving live DJ-driven music radio, and phone-in talk shows, as the dominant formats through their being easier and cheaper to produce. Outside of National Public Radio, the need to create a form in which more different types of shows could be produced was greater in the United States, and its similarity to radio made it easier to adopt.

 

Having said all of this, I am not planning to launch a podcast despite the low barrier to entry. All I have is a title, “Let’s Find Yes,” and nothing further than that.

I WANT MY MTV [289]

Sunday 1^st August 2021 marks forty years since MTV launched with an opening sequence comparing its innovation, playing musical promo videos around the clock, with the Apollo 11 moon landings.  

But that innovation has long since evaporated, just as the words “Music Television” has from under its logo: MTV is now a parade of reality shows, a genre admittedly pioneered by them with 1992’s “The Real World,” its original programming shunted off to automated sister channels which, in the UK, includes names like “MTV Hits,” “MTV Base,” and the infuriatingly tautological “MTV Music.”

 

The usual explanation given for this shift was the advent of online streaming of video content from around the 2000s, initially with MySpace, and especially with YouTube. This fits with personal experience: I only had a direct subscription to MTV from 1999 to 2002, and what non-musical shows there were numbered few: there was “Jackass” and “The Real World,” but “The Osbournes,” the show that precipitated the shift away from the music, had not launched yet. Whenever I saw MTV after then, the character of the channel had moved away, although watered-down substitutes like TMF and Viva existed for a while.

 

However, it was when watching “I Want My MTV,” a September 2020 entry in the A&E Network’s “Biography” series of documentaries, that I began to realise why this shift has happened, and why MTV is no longer a part of it. Towards the end of a feature-length look at how young TV executives attempted to start a revolution in television on a miniscule budget, and how it struggled to convince record companies to make videos for their songs, the documentary concluded that the channel’s audience wanted to see itself on television, not just have somewhere that catered to them – this is perfectly reflected in the reality shows that followed like “Jersey Shore,” “My Super Sweet 16,” “The Hills” and “Catfish.”

 

What became clearer to me is that MTV had begun as a creative outlet of one, which has now been supplanted by a multitude of outlets. The initial videos shown on the channel were often by bands that were proactive in creating their own videos, adding individual style to a genre sprouting from the necessity of providing a stand-in if the artists could not appear on a TV show in person: I knew that The Police shot their video for “Message in a Bottle” in a dressing room between engagements, but I did not know that Devo turned down stand-up ads of themselves in shops to use that money to shoot the “Whip It” video. The most surprising of these was REO Speedwagon noticing the potential of MTV before their record company, readying videos of four songs in time for its launch. 

 

Add in to this the ever-changing stream of channel idents, left to the freedom of animators and designers to create as they wished, and the message was clear: if you had what MTV was looking for, you stood a very good chance of appearing on it. The sense of ownership generated by the slogan “I Want My MTV,” created as a campaign to get cable providers to sign up to the channel, was only needed for those wanting to sit back to watch the results. 

 

One genre of songs that has disappeared from the UK charts has been the comedy record, which I argue is because the impetus to create something like this is more easily completed through the mechanics of placing the song, or the video of the song, onto social media or YouTube, instead of submitting it through the traditional route of record companies and record pressing plants – the faster you can get something out, the better, especially while the joke’s still funny. 

 

If that immediacy can now be applied to anything creative, so why wait for it to funnel through the established structures of network television before it can be seen? No wonder we went elsewhere.