Made with the Brushes app on my iPad. In case you thought it was Hockney’s.
Archive for the ‘Visuals’ Category
Squirrels, Boxing Day 2011
Posted 29 Dec 2011 — by Jonathan
Category Observations, Photos
Category Observations, Photos
Squirrel watching in the local park is probably something I do frequently enough to legitimately describe it as a hobby – but if it’s not that it’s certainly a holiday tradition; there’s nothing nicer than wandering over to St Anne’s Well Gardens at lunchtime on Boxing Day and mooching around spying on wildlife. Accordingly – the latest dispatch from the animal kingdom:
Show off
action shot
Catkin christmas
Posted 12 Dec 2011 — by Jonathan
Category Observations, Photos
Category Observations, Photos
I’m limbering up towards feelings of Christmassyness; this weekend Lynds and I trotted up to Cambridge to see my folks, and were given gifts of hats, scarves, socks and gloves. As always, my parents’ were liberal in their provision of alcohol. Over a long boozy lunch on Saturday, we managed to sample delicious ale, Italian wine, sloe gin, amaretto and spiced rum – bravely fighting off the offer of prosecco to finish. A long afternoon nap followed.
Best bit of the weekend was a lovely walk around a lake near their house – it was a beautiful winter morning, crisp and crunchy with frost but the sky was a clear and brilliant blue. Lyndsey picked some lovely purple catkins.
They’re now our christmas tree, following an aborted attempt to construct one out of cardboard.
Danger
Posted 11 Sep 2011 — by Jonathan
Category Photos
Category Photos
Not many people flying red flags in rural Cambridgeshire, but I take your point. This sign actually denoted a little archery change in the village of Offord Darcy, just up the road from where my parents live. The archery looked fun, but I didn’t like the look of the ultra-modern bows. These sorts of things shouldn’t, I don’t think, be allowed to move with the times.
First video from the Amina set
Posted 18 Aug 2011 — by Jonathan
Category Observations, Video
Category Observations, Video
Here we all are, on set – this video was created by Dan, who when he wasn’t helping set up, or making coffee, or doing sound, could reliably be found hovering in a corner with his camera in hand. Every time he put it down, I scampered over, switched from video to stills, and took a photo or two. When he returned he’d look at the settings, tut loudly, switch back to video and resume filming. Then some important audio check would prove necessary and I’d switch back to stills. In this small way I chipped away at his all-pervading good humour.
Annoyingly, his video turned out much better than the photographs I took.
This little collage of activity shows us on days 1 and 2 of the Amina shoot. Thanks Dan!
Making Amina
Posted 17 Aug 2011 — by Jonathan
Category Observations, Video
Category Observations, Video
So, two months ago my friend Sam emailed me and mentioned that he was planning on spending a couple of weeks in Brighton in August, and he suggested that we grab a bit of time while he was over to make a short film. This wasn’t totally unexpected. Sam and I spent some time with our friend Dan in the spring, working on a few projects around Brighton, and Sam has since worked on some terrific videos for Depaul International, a homeless charity who do some amazing work. And he’s weighing up film school later this year. Nevertheless, for reasons of time, expense and logistics, a big project was never on the cards.
But it happened anyway. Following a series of excitable Skype conversations, I completed a first draft of a screenplay on the 29th June, which was repeatedly revised until we had a complete script, a little over a week ago. Sam set about assembling the crew, casting actors, securing locations and planning the look and feel of the picture. Ten days ago he arrived in the UK and we sat down with our cast – two Richards and a Kate – for the first time and began rehearsing, chipping away and sculpting the script along the way. I’ve never written a screenplay before, and the insight and improvisations of the actors – plus amazing ideas from Sam, Lyndsey and Vic – helped immeasurably in creating something I was proud of.
And then, aided and abetted by the most good-humoured, enthusiastic, patient and talented group of people imaginable (particularly Eva, who from behind the camera provided some stunning shots and filthy Greek phrases), we made ‘Amina’. We started filming on Saturday morning and worked four consecutive 12 hour days, shooting and re-shooting, concentrating, laughing and joking, half-falling asleep – until at around 8.45pm last night we hauled our lead actor, Richard, out of a cold bath and shouted ‘It’s a wrap’.
Along the way we were helped out enormously by people who gave a very generous amount of their time – Eva, Dan, Jackie, Lyndsey, Victoria, Louise, Marina, our fabulous cast – and lots of tolerant by-standers who allowed us to film outside their homes and on their high streets and resisted the urge to wander into frame, rebuke us or interrupt. (Although a lot did stop to tell us about the history of Shoreham’s Norman churches.)
So – will probably describe the process in more detail; but in the meantime here are a few snaps taken on set…
Left v Right redux
I’m a big fan of the Information is Beautiful blog, and increasingly coming round to the value of infographics as a pedagogic or communicative tool. But even by that blog’s high standards, this is terrific – created by its author, David McCandless, in association with London-based designer Stefanie Posavec – it’s a map of left and right in the world of politics, taking into account beliefs, instincts and ideals. One can probably tell it comes from an author of the left, but I’d like to know what right-wing readers think of it – it may not be particularly fair and balanced to me, but it’s a decent effort at itemizing something intrinsically complex and hard to prove. And of course, it’s very nice to look at.
Click to enlarge – or rush out and get a copy of today’s paper to get a nice print out of it.
Brighton timelapse
This timelapse was done on my phone, so quality is not amazing – but it’s still quite nice I think. Brighton darkening out of my back window. There goes Brighton. I can sit and look out of my window for ages, provided I have a beer. It’s sort of more interesting in the flesh. But imagine you’re me for a moment.
A song a week #25 (The Necklace)
Posted 27 Jun 2011 — by Jonathan
Category 52songs, Assistant, Music, Video, Weekly Song
Category 52songs, Assistant, Music, Video, Weekly Song
Instead of just saying, here is my latest song, it’s about… I thought I’d use this week’s post to describe something, if I can, about my experience of writing lyrics. Specifically about the way that songwriting in this way is very different to any song writing I’ve done previously. I’m writing a song every single week of this year, and doing so, with all the time limitations that come with it, means adapting my technique according to circumstance. Previously, it would have been quite normal for me to occasionally get my phone, or a notebook, out, and jot down lyrics on the train, with the knowledge that, one Saturday in the future, I could sit down with my guitar and spend a few hours cycling through chords and looking for ways to hang the words on interesting melodies. In that scenario, there’s no urgency at all in the equation; you think through, abstractly, a few ideas, until the opportunity presents itself to do something with all that unguided preparation.
Having a deadline, naturally, changes everything. It’s unavoidably true that while, in the greater scheme of things, I regard lyrics as being unarguably more important than music, I can do less at the end of a week with a complete set of words and no tune at all than I can with a chord progression, a melody and no words to use. For that reason I sometimes idly fantasise about spending *next year* writing no music at all, and concentrating exclusively on writing words which I can come back to the year after. But this is planning gone mad. Either way, the fact remains, I’m now having to write chord progressions, bass lines and drum patterns on the train, and until Sunday afternoon, lyrics are forgotten. (Thank heavens for my iPad, which enables me to do this stuff – otherwise it’d be pretty impossible).
So I’ve had to approach words in a different way, and the whole song-writing process has changed as a result. For example, imagine that I had started off with the notion of writing a song about, say, being haunted by ghosts. Starting with the idea, it’s deeply unlikely I’d have opted for a bunch of cheerful major chords, and would instead have opted for eerie minor chords and a stilted, atmospheric rhythm. But writing the other way around, the scenario is reversed. I create something bouncy and optimistic sounding? There go lyrics about the First World War.
What happens more and more is a kind of free association, and it’s an oddly accurate way of working. I’ll record the bare bones of a song, with a few suggested melodies picked out on my guitar or in garageband, and from then on it’s the case of looping the recording and singing nonsense over the top, repeatedly, looking for harmonic clues that get me nearer to having a finished song. On almost every occasion, in doing so, I find a phrase that seems somehow apt, and it’s from there that the lyric springs. (Sometimes I leaf through a book of poetry while I’m searching for vocal melodies, so quite often the turn of phrase which sparks my imagination is not my own at all).
Anyway, this week’s song worked in the following way. I wrote the chord progression on the train between Kings Cross and St Neots on Wednesday, embellished it in the kitchen of my parents’ house in Cambridge on Thursday, added guitar at home in Brighton on Sunday morning, and worked out some lyrics that afternoon. The free association here came from finding something in the music which had that kind of mournful, country rock grief which centres on a failed relationship. There’s a wonderful lyric on the (terrific) Caitin Rose album which goes:
“remember the day that the whole thing started / and the little black box in the glove compartment”.
I found myself forming a mental picture of a couple sat in a restaurant, with the guy opening up a jewellery box to reveal… not a ring but a necklace. That was all really. But from that sudden image, summoned up through sheer free association, I present this:
Week 25 of 52; hope you like it.
Great Escape: Holy Ghost
Hot new musical trends so fast fade, so fast feel nostalgic. Me and most of my friends spent much of the middle part of the 2000s listening to the rash of bands that blossomed around LCD Soundsystem; The Rapture, Radio 4, !!!, The Juan McLean. This was artful, muscular, American music which had echoes of the forceful angularity of post-punk and hardcore, but which drew most of it’s energy from club music – funk, disco, electro and house.
It was brilliant; and it soon felt passé.
Holy Ghost are signed to LCD Soundsystem’s label, DFA, and ludicrously, their sound – which draws heavily from 1980′s italo-house – somehow feels more nostalgic for 2005 than 1985. No criticism implied though. Having heard their name vaguely, but not knowing what to expect, I caught them at The Great Escape last month and they were absolutely terrific – all the more so because events conspired thoroughly against them. Big technical problems at the start left them facing an unusually hostile audience, and the frustration on their part was only too apparent. At first I misread their body language as anger at the audience’s impatience, but once they got started it quickly became apparent how keen they were to play a good show, and what looked like anger was mortification at the thought it wasn’t going to happen. They came to party, not to fight. And once things got going, their set was awash with relief; consequently sweat-drenched and delirious – one of the best live shows I’ve seen in ages.
Considering the incredible volume of the PA that night, it’s kind of incredible that I ended up with any audio at all, given that I thoughtlessly lobbed my sound recorder up on top of the speaker stacks, but despite the throbbing bass, this came out kind of well.
The Holy Ghost website is here. Their LP is bloody great.
The peaceful Vosges
Posted 02 Jun 2011 — by Jonathan
Category Observations, Photos, Travel
Category Observations, Photos, Travel
While we were in Alsace earlier this month, Anne-Sophie took us up into the Vosges mountains, where we spent a few hours clambering through a series of impeccably preserved, incredibly interesting, World War One trenches. It was quite an experience, although one that seemed to spark in all of us – except perhaps Anne So – a vague feeling that there was something important missing from our individual knowledge about the events of the Great War, or just a dissonance so huge between our lives and those lost then that punctured a hole in our capacity to imagine what it must have been like to have been living and fighting on the Front. We tend, here in Great Britain, to see the wars from a very British perspective, and unless my lack of awareness is atypical, we have a far more realistic sense of the travails of the Second World War than we do the first. We speculated, walking around, that much of people our age’s visualization of war in that environment comes not from books, nor even films, but rather from video games – although I’ve never played a war video game in my life, so I guess that’s not the case for me.
What did I feel? Mostly I think I just felt a sense of serenity, inspired by the stunning views and pin-perfect temperature, and a kind of placid fascination, which manifested itself in the kind of self-indulgent over-intellectualization you’ll find in these paragraphs. We talked a lot about how it must have felt, without really understanding. But once or twice, down in the cool dark chamber of a trench, I felt a glimmer of panic, a sense of the immensity of what was faced in that place. I need to read more about it. At times we stood at points where the French and German trenches were a matter of 20, 30 metres apart – a stunning contraction of distance in a vast landscape. Then, seeing a branch shiver in the wind or hearing the snapping of undergrowth, you could get something of that claustrophobic closeness – the notion of your enemy appearing suddenly before you.
Mostly we talked, paradoxically, about the near-century that has passed since. We speculated – in an uninformed kind of way – about how the forest would have slowly been repopulated with trees, about wildlife timidly returning to a landscape pockmarked with the echoes of gunfire. The incredible thought of a century of near-peace in a mostly unchanging landscape is quite something. It made us wonder, actually, if there might not be some potential in a book which was called something like ‘A Natural History of War in the Twentieth Century’ – a study of the impact of conflict on the natural world, on flora and fauna. Oddly I can’t find anything online that does that. We spent a lot of the weekend, actually, talking about bats, frogs, butterflies, the sound of cicadas. On the way down the mountain we passed a stationary deer, and it was – unsurprisingly – quite magical. We drove past and it stood alert in a pose which was simultaneously full of movement and perfectly still. Unmoving, and yet taut with the expectation of flight.
Here are a few photos from the afternoon.
Drinking in Strasbourg
Posted 25 May 2011 — by Jonathan
Category Observations, Photos, Travel
Category Observations, Photos, Travel
This Sunday afternoon, I sat outside the lovely Berthom bar, in central Strasbourg, with my friends Vic, Alec, Ant, Anne-Sophie and Rich. We actually stumbled upon the bar about eight months ago and immediately fell in love with it; the stylish font on the sign, the dazzling menu of beers, the dark alcoves and friendly waiting staff. This time, barely recovered from clambering breathlessly up hundreds of steps (and 66 metres) to the viewing platform of Strasbourg Cathedral, we collapsed gratefully into our seats and ordered:
A Maredsous 6 Blonde and a Bel Pils, for me. The former a very refreshing Belgian beer, slightly sweet and dry, with a nice, burnt, orange colour, the latter a plain but hugely drinkable pilsener from the Duvel stable.
A Faro Lindemans and another Maredsous 6 Blonde for Vic, who (rightly) found the former – a Belgian Lambic beer – unbearably syrupy, although it also had a counterbalancing (but not very pleasant) sourness, too. The latter, as mentioned above, made up for the ordering faux-pas.
A couple of strong beers for Ant; I forget what the first was, but it was a heavy, dark, bitter concoction (and very nice for it). The second was the dark variety of the first beer I had – a Maredsous 8 Brune which was lovely – malty, thick, and laced with something spicy. Both these beers were 8% ABV and upwards. Brills.
A very sweet, light, fruity Pêcheresse for Anne-Sophie, which came – like all the beers at Berthom – with a really beautiful label. And I can’t recall exactly which beers Alec and Rich had, but I recall a very pale Vedett Extra White sat on the table, and also another brune, so thick and dry it was essentially stout. There may have been more.
Given false confidence by all this booze, we took these (very transparent) photographs of a guy we liked the look of. He totally knew.
Bank holiday frolics
Posted 03 May 2011 — by Dan
Category Observations, Photos
Category Observations, Photos
It’s been a really lovely bank holiday down here in Sussex; Dan came to stay from distant Reading and we had lots of fun street partying, buying records, talking to environmentalists, listening to talks on radical dandyism, drinking flat whites, watching our friends play us songs in the park, playing bar-billiards and, of course, knocking back lots of Doom Bar.
Here are some photographic highlights – click to enlarge.
Thanks to Martha Rose, Do You Feel What I Feel Deer and Laura Hocking for the weekend’s musical accompaniment.
Fish market, Marseille
Posted 26 Mar 2011 — by Jonathan
Category Observations, Photos, Travel
Category Observations, Photos, Travel
Nothing in Marseille was a disappointment, in that the city was everything I expected and a bit more – a bit more relaxed, a bit friendlier, a bit hipper, a bit more beautiful. But I did expect something from the daily market – held down at Vieux Port each morning – which it didn’t quite deliver. But it was nothing more than size; and the fact that it was smaller than anticipated – just a row of perhaps ten stalls set against the waterside – didn’t in any way reduce the amount of colour or life. Indeed, with most stalls stocking a still-wriggling haul, life was in no shortage.
The fish themselves were a wonderful variety of colours, and magnificently ugly. We seem to be obsessed with eating beautiful fish in the UK – Waitrose’s fish counter is a measured display of smooth, silver scaled treats. Here in Marseille, I discovered, they draw little distinction between the perfect, shimmering form of a sardine and a wonderful series of red, blotchy, lumpy, out of proportion little fellers – heads bigger than their bodies, fins apparently replaced with malformed little wings, twisted at the edges like loose leaves of lollo rosso.
The nicest sight of all was the fisherman, unloading fresh catches and untangling nets. The most compelling the fish surgery; heads getting roughly seperated from bodies on blood-stained plastic trays. Seagulls – lacking the rude manners of Brighton’s flock – waited patiently for the remains to be discarded into the water.
Rapping, Cours Julien
Posted 21 Mar 2011 — by Jonathan
Category Observations, Travel, Video
Category Observations, Travel, Video
Cours Julien is a wonderful artisan quarter in the 6th arrondissement of Marseilles; a bustling square full of cafes, bars and boutiques backed by a series of graffiti-covered streets which boast a treasure trove of bric-a-brac shops, record stores, and a sequence of restaurants specializing in just about cuisine you could name. I’ve tons of photos to share, but in the meantime this video speaks volumes for the spirit of the place. Set up in the middle of the square, on Saturday afternoon, amidst dozens of happy hipsters, trendy dads and insouciant teens, was a guy with portable piano. At one point, two kids stepped up and shyly took a microphone each – and summoned up the following collaboration.
First day in Marseilles
Posted 21 Mar 2011 — by Jonathan
Category Observations, Photos, Travel
Category Observations, Photos, Travel
“You know”, I said to Lyndsey on Saturday afternoon, sat on the beach at Catalans, just along the coast from central Marseilles, “if I miraculously earn myself a decent pay rise at some point in the next few years, I’m not going to spend a penny of it on improving my day-to-day life. No upscaling the flat and paying more rent. No wardrobe renovation. No splurges at Resident Records. I’m not going to change a thing EXCEPT that I’ll use whatever the raise brings in to fund a sequence of citybreaks through the year”.
Could there be a better way of spending that money, after all? I think we all spend far too much of our time weighed down by domestic concerns, and where once I could put emotional distance between a week and a weekend, too often now I find one bleeding into another. A weekend away does wonders. Not just geographical distance but pyschological space.
We decided to go away for two nights quite late last week, and I’m very glad we did.
And glad we chose Marseilles, too. One doesn’t automatically equate the month of March with Mediterranean sun, so although the forecast was good I hesitated before plumping for a weekend in France’s southernmost city. But actually the weather was great, and Marseilles – so often characterised as Paris’s unruly, chaotic little brother – was simultaneously sumptuously beautiful and thrillingly edgy.
Our plane touched down around midday on Friday; and Marseilles airport is a funny little place. It’s not exactly tinpot, for it’s a major hub, but it’s all exposed wires and undecorated walls; steel barriers and customs sheds. The bus into the city immediately demonstrated that for all that Marseilles is a Mediterranean city, Southern France is a great deal more verdant than Spain or Portugal.
Yet the city itself is resplendently decked out in the colours of the Med; eggshell white, olive, mustard, cornflower and terracotta. It is immediately rather scruffier than Paris, and walking down from the Gare Saint-Charles it was hard not to notice – with not the least bit of discomfort – how few pink-white faces there were. Outside coffee shops and tea-houses groups of men sat pulling at cigarettes and tiny coffees, dressed in the uniforms of arab Marseilles; a moustache and a Fez for those over 40, a tracksuit for younger generations.
Turning down to Vieux-Port, all begins to change – the buildings smarten up and more and more white faces appear – but the general feel of Marseilles is integrated rather than segregated; it’s a lively city, ethnically, with huge numbers of Italians, Armenians, Algerians and Tunisians. Like most ports, it feels like a working city (despite the fact that it boasts the country’s highest unemployment), and we spent three days pretty much without hearing another English accent. The odd surly waitor aside – of course – I found the whole place exceptionally welcoming; blunter, warmer and a great deal more laidback than Paris.
Having traversed the Port, with its fleet of lovely white-sailed fishing boats, and wandered up into the stunningly picturesque streets of Le Panier – the historic district North of the harbour which Hitler dynamited, having declared it “a mass of criminals, under-humans and saboteurs” – we sat out on the balcony at La Caravelle (34 Quai du Port, 13002 Marseilles), a small bar at Hôtel de Ville: one of the few buildings in the area which – happily – Hitler spared. I knocked back a couple of small, strong lagers and nibbled on delicious olives while Lyndsey merrily embarked on a run of mohitos which would eventually take us from bar to bar and decimate our plans for an early start to our Saturday.
In Bar Marengo (21 Rue Saint Saëns, 13001 Marseille), an unadorned bar where little distraction is provided from the serious business of drinking, we topped up our glasses and tried out our French on the incredibly friendly barman. Lyndsey started each sentence hesitantly (“Bonsoir. Je voudrais une pression et un mohito”) before transitioning seamlessly into flirtatious Spanish.
Around the corner, in Polikarpov (24 Cours Honoré d’Estienne d’Orves, 13001 Marseilles) the bar-staff forgot to charge us for cocktails and danced heedlessly around to the Talking Heads (“realisant mon espoir / je me lance, vers la gloire”) while we held our empty glasses out towards them, pleadingly. Somewhere along the way we had decided it was too late to eat and simply resolved to order more cocktails.
Je suis retourné
I’m back in Brighton after a couple of pretty wonderful days in Marseilles; me and my girlfriend decided a last minute city break was in order, both as a celebration of my having resolved a precarious job situation, and in order to recharge our batteries with a bit of sun. Sun in March is, of course, hard to secure – but Marseilles, a fantastically vibrant city on the edge on France’s Mediterranean coast, provided it in spades; so we spent two days walking, eating, drinking, and basking as the Mistral – a cool wind which rushes down from the Southern Alps – met the heat at Vieux Port, a gloriously serene harbour which is right at the centre of the city.
There was plenty more than just the port, of course – but for now here it is; as nice a focal point for a city as any I’ve yet encountered.
Wool animal
This first image was taken just off Chichester canal at lunch time – moments after I pressed the shutter I was rocking back on my heels, attempting to prevent my camera from a comprehensive slobbering. Luckily the animal diverted his attention to my face at the last minute. The second image – the ducks laid off. Luckily.
By Chichester coach station
It’s a grey, drizzly day in Chichester. If I understood white balance better I could do something with that sky.
Beach volleyball, Brighton
Last Sunday was perhaps the first real sunny day of 2011; and not just bright – in pockets of calm when the wind fell, it was warm and faintly blissful sat down on the beach, scuffing my shoes through sand watching four Italian men play volleyball in the artificial beach outside The World Famous Pump Room. Warm enough to enjoy an ice cream, warm enough to sit basking watching the ball fly back and forth while dogs, restrained on leashes, looked on eagerly.
