Halloween in the 1920s

For more images see the tagged photographs at the F*ckYeah! 1920s tumblog.

1993/1980

English Scheme Revisited

 

Ian Nairn was an ex RAF pilot, architectural writer & topographer who came to fame in 1955 with "Outrage", a special edition of the Architectural Review in which he waxed angrily about the state of the built environment.  He believed that Britain was well on the way to becoming a homogenous sprawl, with city, town, village and countryside all but indistinguishable from one another.  He called this state Subtopia.

"Outrage" was followed by "Counter Attack" (1957), which restated the problems and proposed ways of tackling them (which amounted to a call for greater vigilance and a refusal to put up with things as they were).

"Your England Revisited" (1964) was his third stab at subtopia, and while not exactly a weary sigh of resignation, it does have an air of "Okay, let's go over this one more time, shall we?" to it.

All three books are heavily illustrated with photographic examples of what Nairn considered good and bad practice (mostly bad).

What makes them especially GRATE is Nairn's concern for details, which means lots of straightforward photos of ordinary things: lamp posts, fences, paths, roundabouts, hedges, pylons etc.

Nice wee biog by Jonathan Glancey here: Ian Nairn

Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?

Mind Alive

Mind Alive is a new kind of encyclopedia that is published in 120 weekly Parts and builds week by week into a complete eight-volume work of reference.
Text in italics taken from  the inside sleeve of the 1968 Marshall Cavendish Publication Mind Alive. A friend of mine recently came across a large number of these and very kindly passed a few of them on to me. 3'6 which if I remember right is seventeen and a half pence. Bargain!

A to Z

Introducing Finger Painting

Boys Fighting and Girls Cheering

More Colin Ward.

Workers' Control

I wonder how often they get prominent anarchist writers in to do books for schools these days?

Personal Attention

Way Of The Morris

More here.

It's all true - Doreen said so.

The Kramford Look

The Kramford Look have, apparently, released an album which sounds like a 'score to an unreleased late  60s / early 70s avant garde European movie, directed by Tim Burton'. Wow. Tim Burton. How weird is that?

Perhaps its the relative poverty of the contemporary music scene, or perhaps just poor journalism, but every new group these days seems to be defined not by the sounds they make, but the sounds they listen to. So forget all that, it's irrelevant.
The Kramford Look have released an LP which, yes, is infused with the best sort of library and soundtrack music, but goes way beyond mindless pastiche to present an unironic set of intriguing and brilliantly played instrumental music. Some of it's creepy, some of it's jazzy, it even goes a bit fusion-y at one stage but all of it is interesting and superbly realised. That professional pet weirdo Tim Burton would shit himself to have a soundtrack this good.

You can get it here, so get it there.

Books for your Children.

Here are some books (and a periodical) that I rescued last week from a skip outside a university Educational Studies department. There were a lot more old textbooks, teaching manuals and the like too - I just grabbed the ones with eye-catching cover art. I would have made an effort to alert enthusiasts of vintage educational literature to this haul, but by the following afternoon it was all buried under smashed up plywood and paint tins, and a day later it was all gone. Quite a shame.

Sadly ‘Marianne Dreams’ and ‘The Owl Service’ (the two of these I’d actually have most liked to read) are all torn up with lots of missing pages, but I like the artwork enough to want to keep them around. I also saved a few other curious volumes that I might do individual posts on in future.

Marianne Dreams

Escape into Night was a 6 part adaption of the wonderful Catherine Storr story Marianne Dreams. It was produced by ATV in 

1972. The story is basically this. A Girl (Marianne) discovers and old pencil in a workbox. When Marianne draws a house with 

this pencil, the house appears in her dreams. She then draws a boy (Mark) in the house and he to appears in her dreams. In a 

rage one day Marianne draws some strange rocks with eyes 

outside the house, but then these rocks also start to appear in her dreams. As the line between the dreams and reality get 

blurred Marianne and Mark realise that the rocks are moving 

closer to the house and they decide it is time to leave/escape 

from the house. A film version of Marianne Dreams was made 

in 1988. The film was called Paperhouse. The basic storyline of the book was used, but there where quite a few plot changes in the film. The moving Spooky Stones are replaced by an angry 

blind Ogre who is the Girls Father, Not so spooky.

Please wait