Feeling the pinch

"Don't fall in, son, you'll be poisoned."

More here.

JungFOs

Bats

'Oh...Rosalinda!!' is a very odd film. The last high fantasy from the legendary pairing of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, it's a filmic operetta based on 'Die Fledermaus' and set post WW2 in allied forces occupied Vienna.

It has an all star cast, great production, an amazing look and is a lot of fun, but was a total box office flop, hastening P & P into a couple of uninspired war films and, in 1957, the dissolution of their incredible partnership.

It's also weird and slightly disquieting, as this short extract should confirm. It was originally filmed in Technicolor Cinemascope, hence the unusual angles of the clip, but the strange perspectives are all Powell, as seen through the bloodshot eyes of Dennis Price (who is not so much acting as just re-enacting his notoriously boozy waking hours on film).

The Ghost Telephone

Bernard Jones, inventor of "The Perceptor" and a telephone to call the "other side". A video about this here.

Dutch Weirdness

These very curious and unexplained slides were found in Amsterdam by my pal Frits Jonker. It's well worth a visit to his site.

The House of Birds

The players in Kenneth MacMillan's ballet House of Birds. (From: Mary Clarke - Presenting People Who Dance, Paul Hamlyn Ltd. 1961, p.23).

The Penmon 'Rabbit'

I photographed this around 2000. It was embedded in the footpath at the ruins of the Benedictine Priory at Penmon on the Isle of Anglesey. This is exactly as it was found, unaltered - some strange creature attempting to birth itself from the surrounding elements?

Childhood Door

'Devil in the Sky' by a Boy aged 9 years. Print and paint and chalk. 375×500mm

The Holborn Working

Where do I sign up?

Horse Skullduggery & UFO TV

Here we observe that horse skulls have been carefully placed underneath the floorboards of an old mansion in Norfolk, England, supposedly to "improve the sound acoustics of the room", OR perhaps as part of some ritual connected to the British Horse Cult, which dates back to least the Old Stone Age, and whose emblem is carved into the very hills of our country.

From the classified section of the March 1971 issue of the British Practical Wireless magazine. Has anyone out there tried contacting UFOs through the home television set?

From the General Report:

"The standard of entry was not high."

A corporate video shot by aliens

Well worth checking out if you're in or near Bristol: showing at Spike Island at the moment are Charlie Tweed's genuinely unsettling, unheimlich films, the images for which were salvagepunk-scavenged from found footage from YouTube and the like. The effect is like a corporate video made by aliens. As Marie-Anne McQuay explains:

The voices that narrate each episode are computer generated, calm, authoritative, and accompanied by melodic music. Even though they stutter and glitch in places, repeating or mispronouncing words as if struggling to process information, the effect is still hypnotic. In a world at the edge of an unknown civil and environmental disaster, ‘they’, or rather, ‘we’ have a plan and the seductions of a certainty of purpose override any concerns about the logic of these actions.

The scripts, which are the origins of each of the Notes episodes, resonate with the present moment, in part because of their non-fictional origins. Tweed, for example, incorporates the contemporary phenomenon of 'rewilding'[4], taking its theories to extremes and the end of civilisation, whilst also hypothesising on the outcomes of the predicted scenarios in which we arrive at the moment of ultimate technological advancement (Singularity). The final transmission, (Zappisale), in which all networks are to be “disrupted”, is guided by the writings of a real-world, anonymous collective ‘The Invisible Committee’ who predicted the imminent collapse of neoliberal capitalism in their anarchist handbook The Coming Insurrection[5]. This video ends in abstraction, with broken down, overexposed images, identifiable only as colours and shapes, as if following the logic of a narrative bent on disruption, by destroying itself frame by frame.

The collaging of real world schemas into scripts is mirrored by the montaging of clips from freely circulating digital sources to form the visuals of Tweed’s ‘worst of all possible worlds’. Extracts from broadcast documentaries, YouTube clips, instructional videos and amateur news footage are stripped of what remains of their original context. These contemporary ‘poor images’, a term coined by Hito Steyerl to describe the particular quality and status of the low saturation by-products of digital distribution[6], are generically but not specifically recognisable as mountains and sea, power stations and mobile homes, climbing walls and medical procedures, floods and storms. Further distorted with effects, such as additional pixelation or analogue noise, they are almost impossible to place in terms of a specific time or geographical location, other than being ‘of the world’.

Milk on the go

About Britain - East Anglia

One of a series published to coincide with The Festival of Britain.

Never Too Young To Rock

So begins what could have been the greatest music film of all time, a quest of epic proportions set against the grinding uniformity of a dystopian Britain of the near future.

Sadly, 'NTYTR' was made in 1975 and only Mud, The Glitter Band, Slik and The Rubettes were available. Even Sir Freddie Jones can't save this crock of rock.

Spectres of Olde Britain

The Rubettes.

Learning can be fun

Birth, Life and Death on a Sunday morning...

In a bizarre quirk of scheduling on a Sunday morning, the controllers at Grampian TV would run these two programmes back to back. Shows about birth and sex education, followed by the destruction of the world in cartoon form....

Baby, it's cold outside

Entropy Fiction

Famous People

Benjamin Britten

Monty

Augustus John

Found Objects Podcast: Volume 1

Due to unprecedented download volume the podcast has exceeded its download limit and therefore will be off-line while technical issues can be resolved. I don’t think any of us anticipated the popularity. Thank you to everyone for their support.

Every street needs a spooky house...

...and every spooky house needs a spooky shed.

Zorki Ghost-Cam

The Zone

A few photos from the Shambles Zone.