>>The Renaissance Monkey

Hyde Park on the way to a Prom

2010-08-06T10:30:00.001+01:00

Hyde Park on the way to a Prom, originally uploaded by Mr Atrocity.

Middlesex vs Yorkshire at Lord's

2010-08-05T09:25:00.001+01:00

Middlesex vs Yorkshire at Lord's, originally uploaded by Mr Atrocity.

William Beckford's Tower

2010-07-26T18:55:00.001+01:00

William Beckford's Tower, originally uploaded by Mr Atrocity.

The Royal Crescent, Bath

2010-07-24T10:30:00.001+01:00

The Royal Crescent, Bath, originally uploaded by Mr Atrocity.

Tate Britain

2010-07-22T23:40:00.001+01:00

Tate Britain, originally uploaded by Mr Atrocity.

Tate Britain

2010-07-22T11:12:00.001+01:00

Tate Britain, originally uploaded by Mr Atrocity.

British Museum

2010-07-20T20:42:00.001+01:00

British Museum, originally uploaded by Mr Atrocity.

A Polaroid I found in the pocket of a shirt I bought in a second hand clothing shop.

2010-07-18T10:22:00.001+01:00

A Polaroid I found in the pocket of a shirt I bought in a second hand clothing shop., originally uploaded by Mr Atrocity.

And the guy is wearing the shirt I bought.

Baby-foot

2010-07-15T20:15:00.001+01:00

Baby-foot, originally uploaded by Mr Atrocity.

Pineapples in Heavy Disguise.

2010-07-08T20:51:00.001+01:00

Pineapples in Heavy Disguise., originally uploaded by Mr Atrocity.

The best way to read Siggraph papers is with a dry martini.

2010-07-07T22:38:00.001+01:00

The best way to read Siggraph papers is with a dry martini., originally uploaded by Mr Atrocity.

Sir John Soane's House

2010-07-05T13:30:00.001+01:00

Sir John Soane's House, originally uploaded by Mr Atrocity.

Shadow

2010-07-03T16:34:00.001+01:00

Shadow, originally uploaded by Mr Atrocity.

Screen Printing Workshop

2010-07-02T09:05:00.001+01:00

Screen Printing Workshop, originally uploaded by Mr Atrocity.

Face in the Window

2010-06-28T08:57:00.001+01:00

Face in the Window, originally uploaded by Mr Atrocity.

Accidental Self Portrait

2010-06-26T10:23:00.001+01:00

Accidental Self Portrait, originally uploaded by Mr Atrocity.

Watching the Game

2010-06-25T08:52:00.001+01:00

Watching the Game, originally uploaded by Mr Atrocity.

The British Museum in the Sunshine

2010-06-24T08:39:00.001+01:00

The British Museum in the Sunshine, originally uploaded by Mr Atrocity.

Debris of a Bygone Era

2010-06-21T19:49:00.001+01:00

Debris of a Bygone Era, originally uploaded by Mr Atrocity.

I'm starting to take a few more photos again as respite from the madness of work. I think I'll try and post them here in lieu of writing which I'm finding I have little time to do these days.

Gerald Maltravers-Bathysphere, retired accountant and county cricket fan

2009-12-01T20:53:00.002Z

Gerald Maltravers-Bathysphere, retired accountant and county cricket fan, originally uploaded by Mr Atrocity.

Burlesque Beauty

2009-11-22T18:46:00.002Z

Burlesque Beauty, originally uploaded by Mr Atrocity.

Drew this today. I think she needs a name, possibly Glenda.

Telecaster Project

2009-09-11T08:53:00.003+01:00

What can I say? I've been busy, so very, very busy but mostly working on things I'm not allowed to discuss hence the radio silence. Both of those projects are still ongoing so I will be infrequent here. This is something I can share though. To give myself something to do, alongside the amp project, I obtained a non-working Fender Telecaster off eBay for a very good price. I had some parts already looking for a home and so, having bought the remaining bits I needed, I began the process of dismantling the guitar, fixing what was broken, upgrading components and then rebuilding the whole thing from the smallest screw and solder joint, upwards. I've never dismantled and rebuilt a guitar this much before and it was quite a learning experience but I'm really happy with how it turned out.

The Noisy Cricket

2009-06-03T22:47:00.003+01:00

Whilst trawling on the internet I came across the enticingly named "Beavis Audio Research". It's a website run by a couple of guys who like to mess around with electronics and design effects pedals and so on. One of their projects was a 1/2 watt transistor based guitar amplifier called "The Noisy Cricket" that runs off a 9v battery. It only had about 30 components in it and I could get all the parts from Radio Shack for about twenty pounds. So I thought I'd have a go. Electronics is not my strong suit but looking at the schematic for the design I could begin to get a feeling for what was going on. I like the idea of building something and learning at the same time. Because I'm so sure that I'll cock it up I have actually ordered twice as many of the super cheap components so I'll have spares to hand when I short things out or solder them to death.

If it does ever actually work I felt that I'd like to design some kind of enclosure for it. As it's a transistor amp that set me thinking about 1960s transistor radios and so I've been playing around with designs influence by that aesthetic. The amp has three knobs but other than that I felt I could do as I pleased. The casing will be small, i.e. about ten inches wide. These are my three designs. I think I like the last one best. I'm still waiting for the actual parts to arrive before I can begin the build but I'll try and post some pictures as I go. Wish me luck, I shall need it.

HCB Pastiche 2

2009-05-08T15:00:00.000+01:00

Here's an even more direct pastiche. You can't see the view, know the original and not take the photo.

My horrid copy:

The master's original:

It is interesting to see how much Paris has and hasn't changed though.

HCB Pastiche 1

2009-05-06T15:00:00.001+01:00

You can't spend time in Paris with a camera and not pay tribute to (insult the memory of) the great Henri Cartier-Bresson. Here's T re-enacting HCB's famous portrait of Jean-Paul Sartre on Le Ponte des Artes:

And here's the original. I love T's recreation of Sartre's wonky eye. Oh and we didn't have a pipe so a pen had to substitute.

I Love Paris in the Springtime

2009-05-04T17:38:00.004+01:00

T and I have just got back from a brief holiday in Paris. I've only ever stopped in Paris on my way somewhere else so this was a good opportunity to get to know the place a bit. It's a fabulous city and we enjoyed the art and architecture very much.

The only major let-down, and this may come as a shock, was the food. T is a vegetarian which does complicate matters where French cuisine is concerned but in this day and age if your kitchen can't cook something interesting without meat then it's not a very good kitchen; all it proves is that you're lazy and not creative. We ate in a variety of places, with friends of ours who live in Paris, at places highly recommended by guide books and had two dinners out at restaurants recommended by the hotel so I think there was plenty of opportunity to impress. Nothing I ate, and I didn't eat any vegetarian options, was beyond average and considering that last night's meal cost a small fortune whilst featuring limp overcooked asparagus and over cooked fish was not really acceptable. I get the impression that city has rested on its laurels for far too long.

After five meals at several price brackets from multiple recommendations I can only conclude that Paris falls well behind New York and London in culinary big cities. A real shame. The rest of the trip was great though and here are the inevitable photos:

Weekend of Excellence

2009-04-30T09:00:00.002+01:00

I had a pretty amazing weekend. T was away with friends so I was free to play all the guitar I wanted. I did sate my guitar needs but I also managed to see my first cricket match of the new season which was a lovely day out on Saturday even if the game itself ended up coasting to a dull draw. The added bonus was that despite apocalyptic weather forecasts it remained dry all day so sitting outside was very pleasant. I treated myself to fish and chips on my way home and managed to time my arrival at the chippy to perfection as a fresh batch of both fish and chips were just coming out of the fryer as I entered the door.

In the evening I watched a lot of Bob Dylan footage and the Dylan documentary "Don't Look Back" before settling down to watch another documentary,this time a surf one, called "Crystal Voyager". I'd found out about this movie through a CD purchase I'd made earlier in the week. I love surf music and I love stoner psychedelia rock too. For this reason "Chairman of the Board - Surf Soundtracks '64 to '74" leapt out at me and I had to have it. Having loved the music I found that one of the films featured was available on DVD and one Amazon visit later "Crystal Voyager" was winging its way to me.

The film is great, the first two thirds are a reasonable matter of fact documentary about surfer and film-maker George Greenough and his attempt to build a yacht for sailing to places too remote for others to try and surf. That was fascinating enough but the last third of the film, which is separate from the rest of the movie is a 23 minute short of abstract footage shot from within the tube of waves and under water. Greenough made a camera mount he could wear on his back whilst surfing and it was using this that he got the footage. The music for that last sequence is "Echoes" by Pink Floyd and the sound and picture complement one another perfectly. Awesome movie, I completely recommend it.

On Sunday I cleaned and tidied the flat and then in the evening I walked up to Camden to see Bob Dylan play the Roundhouse. I'd never seen him before and apparently this was the smallest gig he'd played in about a decade. The music was great although the more successful songs were the more modern ones that played to the Tom Waits style growling delivery which is all his voice is capable of these days. His band is a rootsy, rock and roll, bluesy type outfit and on the newer tracks the whole sound, including Bob, were amazing. He played "All Along the Watchtower" as an encore which was extra special because Hendrix played a really noted gig at The Roundhouse so there was a real sense of history to it. It's a bit bizarre to me that songs like that were written. They seem so much part of our culture that must surely have always been. The idea that this little old geezer on stage in front of me created those things out of nothing is a bit magical. It was a great end to a great weekend.

Magazine Title FAIL

2009-04-18T15:13:00.002+01:00

Magazine title FAIL, originally uploaded by Mr Atrocity.

Nothing to add. Amused me no end.

Little Frangipane Tarts

2009-04-15T18:14:00.002+01:00

Little Frangipane Tarts, originally uploaded by Mr Atrocity.

These little tarts were made from a recipe by James Martin. I used my own sweet short-crust pastry methods though. I used the 4 silicone baby flan tins I got for my birthday for the first time and they worked a treat when it came to turning the tarts out. The filling is frangipane with prunes; a really tasty combination. The other good thing about using the silicone was that I could turn them out earlier than I could with a traditional metal tin meaning that they could cool in the air thus preventing a soggy pastry which sometimes happens if the tarts spend too much time in the tins once they're out of the oven.

The Future is Awesome and Now

2009-04-14T13:31:00.002+01:00

I have a confession to make. It's not a bad one but here goes. I bought an iPhone. Before anyone gets all judgemental I should point out that the 'phone it replaces is eight years old and was finally really beginning to show its age by refusing to hold much of a battery charge, switching itself off every now and again and generally just getting a little eccentric in its dotage. I have searched for 'phones for a long time now but none of them were smart enough to justify the extra expense or space that they take up to justify getting one. Finally my elderly Nokia became too senile and had to be retired. Enter the iPhone. I have to say I am incredibly impressed. Here is a device I can watch TV on, stream radio on, listen to my podcasts on, catch up with T.V episodes, keep tabs on the news, my e-mail, my calendar and and and. I was, and indeed am, slightly overwhelmed by it all and have been struggling to find some frame of reference for how exciting the ownership experience has been but Saturday finally provided it.

Having had lunch with T's family I was due to jump on a 'bus and head south of the river to Camberwell for a friend's birthday. I stopped off at Fortnum and Mason to get a cake as a gift and during the time I was in the shop a huge protest march of 100,000 angry Tamils had started past the front of the shop cutting off my route back. I had, at that time, no idea how big the march was, where it had started from nor where it was headed so I couldn't work out which way to walk and which 'bus to try and catch.

Enter the iPhone, or Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy as I'm now calling it. From the BBC website I was able to find out how big the march was going to be: answer - Huge. Damn. I was then able to find a map of the route the march was to take and from that using the mapping tools on the 'phone plan a route I could take to circumvent the protesters as efficiently as possible. Next I was able to look up which 'bus routes were affected and thus to plan the rest of my walk to get me to the one open bridge across the Thames that had a bus service of use to me. I reckon the iPhone saved me a good hour of aimless wandering and it meant I was only a few minutes late. Sometimes I really feel like I'm living in the future and it's amazing to me.

A Great Way to Spend a Weekend

2009-04-01T20:03:00.002+01:00

I had an absolutely fantastic weekend but only now have I the time to tell you about it. Due to varies diary conflicts T and I have not had a whole weekend together in an absolute age so merely to have time with my little buddy would have been plenty but there was much extra to enjoy. We got up a little late on Saturday and had a leisurely breakfast in a little local café. After that we went for a stroll, I bought a cheap vintage Cuban shirt and T got some pretty summer shoes. Once we got home we the weather took a turn fr the worse and became incredibly cold with occasional downpours of rain. Unfortunately we had to go out again though there was an excellent reason: we had tickets to see Metallica in the evening. T had never seen the band and the last time I saw them was 17 years ago, a fact that makes me feel very old. So we bundled ourselves up in our warmest coats and headed out into the late afternoon rain. Thanks to the usual foresight and planning that makes London Underground legendary, the Jubilee Line, the one with the gig venue's station on it, was closed and so we had a half hour walk followed by a 20 minute train ride to get us to the right area of town. Once we'd got to Greenwich we had to cross the semi-industrial wasteland that is the Greenwich peninsula to get the the O2 Arena. It's a strange place. Following the Millennium festivities there was a concerted effort to try and keep the area thriving and many new blocks of houses were built. As we walked through only a few seemed occupied and all of the local shops that had also been recently built were deserted. T commented it was a bit like walking through a disused Soviet holiday camp and I think that sums the place up.

Eventually, cold and soaked we got to the gig venue and once inside found our way to our seats. There were two support acts, The Sword, whom I adore, and Machine Head of whom I am not so fond. The Sword were on first and I thought played a great set to a scarcely quarter full hall. It's a 20 000 seat arena and yet, because the stage was in the centre and the bands played in the round, it felt really quite intimate: no need for giant TV screens here. After a short gap Machine Head came on stage and made a horrid racket for about 40 minutes. Thankfully they eventually finished up and off they went.

And then came Metallica. The lights dimmed and the strains of Ennio Morricone's "The Ecstasy of Gold" came over the P.A. Everyone went nuts and then the gig started the stage criss-crossed with beams of laser light from the ceiling. Metallica were just awesome, I cannot think of a better live band. They played for two hours and had every member of the audience in the palms of their mighty metallic hands. They played "Master of Puppets", my favourite song by them and entertained the crowd royally. T thinks it was the best gig she's ever seen. I don't know about that but I struggle to think of better.

We left the venue, grinning from ear to ear but determined not to return in the way we'd arrived. Fortunately we were able to get tickets for one of the Thames Clippers, a river-boat ferry service that runs from Greenwich to Westminster. It was a lovely end to an amazing evening to be whisked along the Thames seeing the city by night as we glided past.

On Sunday we got up late, ate a small breakfast and then took ourselves off to Andrew Edmunds, my favourite restaurant, for lunch. We managed to eat and drink for two hours and finally made it home in the middle of the afternoon. After a nap and some pottering around the flat we walked over to Shoreditch for a friend's birthday drinks. A great end to a perfect weekend.

What I Did Today

2009-03-22T16:38:00.001Z

In The Beginning...

The End.

Bletchley Park

2009-03-14T10:30:00.000Z

Last Monday I did a day trip I've been meaning to do for ages. After breakfast I took a train from Euston up to the nondescript small town of Bletchley, just south of Milton Keynes. Bletchley itself has little to recommend it but about five minutes walk from the station is a site of massive historical importance in modern history and in cryptanalysis as a whole.

Bletchley Park is an estate with a manor house built in around 1880 by the Leon family who lived in it. When the family sold up the site was bought by the UK government. It was convenient to them as it was close to the main rail and road routes to London. The reason for the purchase was that the government wanted to move their cryptanalysts out of London and expand the cipher-breaking operations at the outbreak of World War 2. The operation took over not only the manor house but a myriad huts, and brick office blocks built on the site to provide work space for the up to 10 000 people who worked there at the height of the efforts to break the Enigma cipher that the Germans were using to encrypt their communications.

The site is now a museum, many of the huts have displays about the Enigma machine, the bombes used to break its cipher and the minds who enabled this to happen, especially Alan Turing. The site also has a rebuilt Colossus, arguably the world's first electronic computer, which was constructed to break the even tougher Lorenz cipher that Hitler used to communicate with his chiefs of staff.

It's a fascinating place and I will probably go back at some point. Here are a few photos I took of the place:

Holidays, Part 2

2009-03-12T20:45:00.002Z

So, last week I did my final date on my current UK tour of universities with a trip up to Sheffield. I seem to be specialising in Northern unis at the moment, what with Teeside a wee while ago. The train journey was quick and uneventful; a little over two hours from London. I spoke to the students at Sheffield last year and their lecturer essentially wanted the same talk again to get the students thinking in the right way for the course work. I also updated the video clips to make them more current for the section of the talk where I take a shot we've worked on apart and explain how all the elements were created and put together. So out with Harry Potter and in with "Hellboy 2". I actually had better "making of" resources for Hellboy anyway so I think it made the talk snappier. After a quick glass of water, I delivered the talk to about 50 students and staff. That seems to be the usual number. It's always hard to tell how things are going across because kids these days seem very reticent to ask questions, but they didn't talk amongst themselves and laughed at the jokes so I'm claiming it as a win. I have to say, the more I do these talks the easier they become. I've never been one for much in the way of stage fright but I don't even have notes anymore and yet I think I managed to talk fairly lucidly for an hour.

After lunch I lurked around in the college's workshops so that the students could get some one on one advice for their films and so I could do careers advice where it was wanted. I always try to do something like this and wherever I go I only ever get a tiny handful of students who take me up on the offer of advice. It's never more than 10% of the folks who show up for the lecture. I find this really odd. When I was a student I remember trying to drain any visiting lecturers of any advice they could offer, it always seemed like a "must do" thing. Well, not any more. Once it was clear that on-one else wanted to talk to me, I made my way back to the station and returned to London.

I spent the rest of my second week of holiday going to as many exhibitions as I could manage. I saw shows on Le Corbusier, Rodchenko, Popova, millinery, ancient Greece and a show of paintings in South London that a buddy of mine had a picture in. I also started doing some formal planning on my short film idea, doing story boards and so on. I had a pretty quiet weekend and then last Monday, the one just gone, I went to Bletchley Park where I took lots of photos and I'll do a post all about them hopefully tomorrow...

Holiday Update: Part 1

2009-03-07T18:08:00.002Z

It's been a awhile since I wrote anything so I owe you and update on what's happening. The main thing that I have not been doing is working. I have now had two weeks off and I have a third to go before I must reapply my nose to the grindstone. Last week I spent a couple of days in Cornwall, the same hotel I stayed in last year. I arrived at about half past five on the Wednesday and had a leisurely dinner and an early night. I had two full days in St. Ives and I'd decided, even before I travelled, that I would spend one day pottering around the town and one doing a major walk. So Thursday was spent in the Tate art gallery which had an exhibition of Ben Nicholson paintings which, for me, got better the more abstract they became. On Friday I walked to Zennor, as I did last year. It's a good solid 7 miles of serious hill walking and very rocky underfoot. Here's one of the few photos I took: me on Zennor Head:

I took a little over three hours to make it to the village centre and spent a happy hour and half having a couple of ales and a ham sandwich before getting the bus back to St. Ives. I did a few sketches instead of taking photos. Here's my view of the Tinner's Arms bar in Zennor:

Having returned to my hotel room at around half past three I took a shower and changed out of my muddy clothing. My walking boots and trousers seemed to have accumulated quite a quantity of rural Cornwall on them by the time I was done walking. Once I was clean and changed I ordered a cream tea from room service, put the commentary for the cricket test match on the radio (actually through the TV, but it was just sound) and relaxed with my view of St. Ives' through my room window.

Friday night's dinner was the gastronomic highlight of the trip. The Porthminster Café gets very good write-ups and T's mum, who had visited St.Ives last year, also recommended it. My starter was a very tasty fish soup but the main course was the highlight. Pan cooked local pollock was served with a tomato salsa, chorizo and beautiful, big prawns. The combination of flavours was superb, really interesting and all the ingredients were of top quality as was the cooking. I finished my last evening in Cornwall with a wander along the beach followed by watching a great game of rugby on the TV in my room.

On Saturday, after a leisurely breakfast, I had another uneventful five and half hour train journey back to London. I arrived feeling relaxed and ready to do a day's lecturing in Sheffield on the Monday. I'll write about that tomorrow if I get time.

I'm Free!

2009-02-23T18:35:00.001Z

I am now officially on holiday. Wow, for a while there I didn’t think it would happen and in fact Wolf Man isn’t completely done yet but apart from minimal tweaks here and there my involvement is at an end. And so, for the next three weeks, my time is my own. Poor T had to work the weekend (seems when I don’t have to work weekends, she does) so I’ve had about three days almost to myself already.

On Saturday I went and got a hair cut which was needed as I was on the cusp of a proto mullet and that is not a good thing. Once I got home I tidied the flat and cooked up the veggie faux-cassoulet thing I invented and described way back when. Yesterday was mostly spent cooking and lounging about until about six when we had friends come over for dinner and cocktails. Had a lovely time chatting and getting merry. I felt incredibly fat by the time I waddled to bed. In fact I ate so much that I didn’t need breakfast this morning and with me, that almost never happens. I spent the rest of today making a few more guitar tweaks, all of which were accomplished without incident this time. After that I went for a thirty minute back massage for which I am currently feeling no benefit. After half an hour, much of it in pain, I feel no looser than I did before but my back and shoulders are sore. Perhaps I’ll feel amazing in the morning. If not, I’ll know not to go there again.

I’m off out for dinner in a few minutes. I’m meeting T and our friend Z from work and together we’re going to walk to New Tayyabs, an amazing and incredibly cheap Pakistani restaurant near Brick Lane. I suspect there will be orders of jugs of mango lassi and copious amounts of tandoori chicken. All in all, not a bad start to my time off.

Another Scribble - This time a blind poet

2009-02-16T19:00:00.000Z

Weekend at Last

2009-02-15T18:46:00.002Z

I can scarcely believe it. I have actually spent two whole days without setting foot in the studio for either of them. In fact this is the first time in forty days straight that I haven’t been in the office. Of course my body had to remind me that I should rest by making sure I had a rotten cold by Friday afternoon which only got worse on Saturday. Tinseltroos was away for the weekend with buddies in Wales so I got to potter about by myself reading and watching rugby.

I also decided to fit the new tuners I’d got for my Stratocaster and was doing very nicely up until I grossly miscalculated how hard maple wood is and managed to split the heads of some of the screws that hold the tuners into the headstock of the guitar. That will teach me to do guitar repairs when I have a head full of cold and not too much in the way of concentration. I shall have to go to the guitar repairman on Denmark Street tomorrow looking suitably penitent and hope that he can help me out.

So aside from blowing my nose a lot, buggering up a guitar, watching England lose in the rugby and moping what else have I done with my precious time off? Well not a lot. I have cleaned the flat today so T will come back to a shiny abode tomorrow. I’ve also made a ginger cake, most of which I’ll take into work.

Having watched three games of rugby on the TV this weekend I think I’ll finish the evening off with some football. Apparently the BBC is showing the Milan derby match, I guess because David Beckham is playing for AC Milan at present and I shan’t miss the opportunity to watch some football as most games are exclusively on satellite TV which we don’t have.

I had my holiday confirmed so I have five more days of work to survive before I take three weeks off. I have a train ticket to Cornwall and hotel room booked for three nights of the first week and after that I have no plans. I might try to do some painting, I’ll probably take some photographs and I have a couple of short film ideas I’d wouldn’t mind dabbling with. None of these are definite plans you understand, they’re just tantalizing possibilities which is how I’d like them to remain. The most important thing I need is some rest before I get going on the next movie.

More Sketches on the Nintendo DS

2009-02-11T19:00:00.000Z

Sorry Excuse for an Update

2009-02-09T18:13:00.001Z

It's brief apologetic update time. So I haven't had a day off in thirty something days and my brain, or rather what's left of it, has turned to mush. I have, theoretically, five more days left on Wolf Man but we'll see if I manage to escape scot free or whether I get pulled back from time to time to help out until it actually wraps. After that I have a week to get the next show I'm moving onto up and running and then I have three weeks holiday. I can scarcely believe it. Three whole weeks. I shall probably go to Cornwall for a few days, I want to read some books and I plan on doing some painting but aside from that I'm open to suggestions.

So I haven't posted anything because I haven't done anything other than work. Keep your fingers crossed for the end of the week and the weekend that I've been dreaming of for a month...

Scribbles

2009-02-02T21:39:00.002Z

I've been playing with the Colors! painting package thing on the Nintendo DS. Here's a doodle.

We Come From the Land of the Ice and Snow

2009-02-02T21:30:00.003Z

So winter returned with a vengeance today. It doesn't really snow here much at all and I've certainly never seen anything like it in the ten years I've lived in the city. So it took a little longer to do my morning walk in but I did take a few photos as I wandered:

Guitar Gets a New Home

2009-01-31T20:20:00.003Z

It's been another work dominated week. I'm heading toward my deadline now and, as tends to be the case, I'm now doing 7 day weeks to get it all done. As I mentioned last time, I went up to my mother's last Friday night and cleared out all of my old stuff that she'd been storing as she's moving to a smaller house next month. One of the very few things I brought back was the second guitar I ever owned. I bought it nearly twenty years ago and as I graduated onto better instruments a few years later it has sat in its case at my mum's for about sixteen years. My plan was to bring it back, fettle it up into playing order again and give it to someone who was wanting to learn the guitar.

When I actually got the case open I found that two of the strings were missing, not a problem as I was planning to swap them all anyway, but it made me wonder what I'd been doing to the poor thing all those years ago. It was also fairly filthy, had creaky machine heads and trem plus when I plugged it in to see if it still functioned electrically the horrid hum and buzzing told me something was wrong somewhere. When I had got the remaining strings off and opened up the guitar the source of the hum became clear: my dreadful soldering at age 15. I had feared this might be the case and so I dutifully went through the guitars' innards and resoldered any of the dodgy connections afresh. I am still not good at soldering but I'm a damn sight better than I was back then clearly. After that I cleaned up the front, oiled all the mechanical parts and restrung the beast. This is how it looked after some surgery, a clean and a fresh set of strings:

Once the strings were on I fixed the intonation which was so far off I wondered how I'd managed to think anything I'd played back then was in tune and then plugged it back in. This time all was good. It's actually a really decent guitar. I had a play for a few minutes as a last goodbye and then put in into a gig bag ready to take into work.

Once it was safely stored in the studio I sent a message to the company news group to the effect that I had a guitar to give away and wanted to give it to someone who'd always wanted to play but never had - I wasn't going to give it to someone who already had an instrument. I got twelve responses and randomly picked the name of the receptionist. I was a bit surprised she'd asked to go into the draw as she didn't strike me as the guitar type. When I gave it to her she explained that she had two sons who desperately wanted a guitar and that made me feel very good. It had done me proud in my early teenage years and now it was going to get the chance to do the same again.

Long live rock and roll.

Goodbye to all that.

2009-01-24T22:42:00.001Z

After a busy week failing to get shots finalled for Wolf Man (and hence why I'll be working on Sunday) I left work yesterday, walked up to Euston Station and headed north to my mum's. The last time I did this the journey took 5 hours thanks to engineering work. They must have finished as yesterday the feat was achieve in an hour and a half: much more respectable.

The reason for the whistle stop visit is that my ma has decided to move house to a smaller cottage and therefore she had decided that she could no longer store some items that I'd left at her current and previous houses over the years. So after a quick bite of supper I set to work. There were many things which I had forgotten about and some which I never knew were technically mine in the first place. Elderly relatives of mine had a habit of leaving things to me in their wills but I was never explicitly told that they were now mine. Then there were the things such as my "birth spoon". Until yesterday I had no idea that such things as "birth spoons" existed let alone that I was the proud owner of one. This is what I have discovered: If you have parents who are keen on the whole antiques schtick (big yes for my folks) then to celebrate the birth of their offspring they have all the details of the happy event etched into an ornate silver spoon. And I have one, well had one; I told my mother I had no use nor for desire to keep it (never having known of it before) and so ownership has reverted to my mum who couldn't bear to see it got rid of.

Having sorted through the stuff that came as a surprise to me I set to throwing away reams of letters from friends and ex-girlfriends that for some reason I'd stuffed into an enormous jiffy bag. Whilst I'm a big soppy romantic, I'm not very sentimental about stuff and so the letters went into the trash along with years of old photographs and all the artwork I made at school and college. I don't have the space to keep it in London nor frankly the desire. By midnight I had several distinct piles: items to go into the recycling bin, items to go to the local tip, items to go to the charity shop and a tiny pile of items I actually wanted to keep and bring back to London on the train with me.

After breakfast this morning we loaded my mum's car and took the load destined for the charity shop. Having delighted the lady in the store with her haul of very decent china we returned to my mum's and loaded up for the tip. Upon our return from there all that was left for me was to load up my rucksack with my keepsies and get the train back. The items I kept were mostly out of print books, a couple of comics and 4 Victorian cartoons by Rowlandson that my dad bought and gave to me when he ran out of wall space. The final item to carry was my second guitar, bought nearly twenty years ago by a long-haired pimply 14 year old Mr Atrocity. I shall write a piece about that guitar and its destiny in a follow-up post soon. By 2 o'clock this afternoon I was back home in London, exhausted but relieved that I'd finally sorted through the last vestiges of my formative years that had been in storage for so long.

Busy Weekend

2009-01-18T18:04:00.000Z

It's been a bit of a frantic weekend up until today, hence the lack of posting. It all began on Friday night with a Visual Effects Society meeting to help decide the nominations for this year's awards. It's the first time that the UK chapter has got to have a say so we were all on our best behaviour. It was actually quite stressful. After work those of us who'd volunteered to vote turned up at one of the London VFX houses where we were given an extensive briefing on what we were and were not allowed to do. I'd been allocated to the group selecting the shortlist for "Outstanding Supporting Visual Effects in a Motion Picture" and so having had a coffee and a Coke to keep me awake off we went to our screening room.

It was all incredibly strict. We weren't allowed to discuss any of the entries until after the voting process had concluded so we all sat in silence watching presentations from the long-list of nominees and taking notes. It was almost exactly like taking an exam. The hardest part came at the halfway point where we went and had a little dinner still under instruction not to talk about what we'd seen. This, as you might imagine, was incredibly difficult as it was the only thing on our mind and had had our undivided attention for an hour half. After eating our pizza and talking about the weather, what our plans for the weekend were and anything to keep us from discussing the work we went back to the hot, airless screening room for part two. After the screenings had finished we had to place our votes and then sign the envelope in which they were placed. Once the ballots had been checked were we free to talk. The relief was palpable, partially because we wanted to talk but also because we had so much caffeine and sugary drinks by this point to keep us alert that were all wired.

After this it was about 9 p.m. and I went home had a shower and felt really, really awake. At that moment I decided to install the new pick ups that had just been delivered for my guitar. I am not the neatest solderer on Earth but after an hour of careful work the deed was done reasonably tidily and most importantly it all still worked.

Saturday I worked until late afternoon when I wandered down to Waterloo and took a train to Twickenham to watch London Wasps play Leinster in the Heineken Cup. It was not a classic game of rugby union but I did see Josh Lewsey make an incredible run to set up the only try of the game scored, eventually, by veteran French player Serge Betsen. The game outing was organised through work so I met up with lots of work chums and that made the whole experience more fun. I did manage to lose them all in the walk back to the station after the game so I travelled home alone and did a little recording with my newly fettled guitar, the fruits of which I may post in due course once I've fiddled with them bit.

Today T and I did pretty much nothing. T made us a spiced toasted bread covered in mushrooms in cream thingy for breakfast and then we we took a mooch in the West End to get a couple of odds and ends for the kitchen, I for one can't wait to cook with baking sheets that don't warp at the first opportunity in the oven, tipping your food over the bottom of the oven. And that is it. I think an evening of reading and listening to music is in store. Yay.

Deja Vu

2009-01-14T09:28:00.002Z

Right, that's it. T is no longer allowed in bathrooms. I know it's going to be difficult but that's how it's got to be; she's jinxed you see. You may recall back in September she became trapped in a bathroom in our hotel in Florence? Well it happened again yesterday at home. That's right, in the safe, comfortable bosom of Schossadlerflug another saboteur bathroom door lay in wait waiting to pounce. And yesterday morning it pounced. Poor T, trapped in our tiny windowless bathroom with nothing but a collection of lady washing, conditioning, moisturising, cleansing and toning products to keep her company. I was dozing when I realised that she's been gone a little while and then came the little wail of distress. The door opening mechanism had just failed with her trapped inside. You turned the handle and the magic did not occur. The lock worked perfectly but the actual latch? Not so much. In fairness T was much calmer than I, though I am going to put that down to her enforced passivity in the circumstances.

I intend to track down the architect of our flat and give him or her a piece of my mind. Though I hadn't realised until yesterday, because I'd never had cause to look before, the bathroom door in our flat essentially seals itself into the door frame. The old dodge of pushing a credit card over the latch to disengage it doesn't work because you can't get at the edge of the door. I also was unable to pass any cards, tiny screwdrivers or such under the door to T as that too was sealed against the door jamb. It seems to be less of a regular bathroom door and more of an airlock.

A couple of shoves with my shoulder failed to jar anything into working again so I set to work prising the front of the handle cover off and then unscrewing as much of the mechanism as I could get at. Eventually I got the handle off and was able to use a pair of pliers to turn the latch spindle much further round than you could just with handle. This, just, did the trick and we were able to pop the door open, a relief for a freed T and a relief for me as I really needed the little boys' room quite urgently. Needs must when the devil drives as they say.

The Cold

2009-01-11T22:32:00.002Z

Icy Fountains, The Regent's Park, originally uploaded by Mr Atrocity.

Well it's new year and we finally have a proper winter in London. For the last three or four years it's been overcast, not very cold and mostly rainy for months, and spring and autumn seemed so similar to winter. This year however we have an actual discernible winter. Now I know by the standards of those of you living in colder and more varied climes our winter here is nothing to write home about but to me it's been a delight. I

like a proper British Winter, where the weather hovers around the zero degrees Celsius mark for days on end. We have even had a few of my favourite sort of winter days, those where the sky is cloudless and the air crisp. The views over London Bridge as I do my long walk to work have often quite taken my breath. The photo above was taken in The Regent's Park. It had been below freezing for a few days by that point and it was possible to see the dominant wind direction as one side of the fountain urn was covered in ice whilst the far side was clear. The energy of the flowing fountain water was enough to keep it liquid but as it got blown about drops stuck to the sides of the fountain and froze. It was quite beautiful. The icicles dropping down from the lip were merely the icing on the cake.

Thank you all for the kind comments on the previous two posts, it was very sweet of you all. I'm going to try more regular blogging again as my real-world web site is up to date, though there is still work to be done, and I have negotiated my frantic last few weeks of 2008. Hope you all managed some kind of holiday and I'll try to write at least one a week for now. I'm working long hours and six days a week on The Wolf Man for now so I may be a little short on bloggable material. I'll transcribe it as it comes to me.

Christmas Crackers

2008-12-24T13:38:00.002Z

Lonely Christmas Crackers, originally uploaded by Mr Atrocity.

I saw these slightly lonely looking crackers whilst going for a walk and thought they were a little incongruous but interesting so I took a photo.

I am about half way through the work I want to do on my other "real world" web site and I'm hoping to have the rest done by early January. Then I should be able to spend some time here again.

If you're celebrating anything over the coming days I hope you're able to do it in style and I'll see you all in 2009 with luck.

Mr A.

Closed - For Now

2008-12-01T19:14:00.002Z

Closed - HDR, originally uploaded by idg.

Well, I've been putting this off for quite a while but push has now come to shove and I'm going to have to spend some time updating my "real life" website as well as work-related issues that must be dealt with. That means that for the time being I shan't be around here much and posts will be very thin on the ground. I'll try to get back into the habit of blogging come the New Year and if I can't help myself ,I'll write, just don't hold your breath for it.

If you have an RSS reader, and if you have Gmail account you already do, then perhaps you might subscribe to the blog? That way if and when anything gets posted it will come to you rather than you having to stop by here and be disappointed by the lack of updates. Thanks for reading and I'll see you soon, I hope.

Fiddling with my Highway One Stratocaster

2008-11-27T14:03:00.003Z

I spent Monday night making some tweaks and modifications to my Stratocaster. As it arrived, it had 9 gauge strings which are a little to spongy for me on a non locking guitar and it also had the standard floating trem, something else I'm not a fan of. There were a few cosmetic tweaks I wanted to make also. So I dug out the house tool-kit, found the Phillips screwdrivers and set to work. The guitar started out like this:

After a couple of hours I had flattened the trem against the body, added two extra springs to the trem block and screwed the trem claw further in so that the trem doesn't pull up even when I bend notes. Having done this and put a set of 10s on I needed to adjust the action and intonation accordingly. Whilst I had the strings off I took the opportunity to swap out the stock white knobs and covers for some after-market black ones which I think complement the big 70s style headstock and make it a little more individual. Once all this was done and the guitar was tuned up it was too late to give it good session through the amp so I had to wait until last night when I got home from work at a reasonable time and T was out having dinner with friends. This is what it looks like now:

I poured myself a whisky and played for a good two hours. I declare myself more than satisfied; I'm really chuffed with the sound and way it plays now. The extra mass in the trem and the fact it doesn't float anymore have really improved the sustain and beefed up the tone, something which the heavier strings have also helped with. The feel is much better with the guitar offering a little fight now in both the strings and the trem - just how I think a Strat should be. The extra benefit, which I hadn't counted on, was how good the guitar sounded with the volume backed almost all the way off through the Cornell amp. The tone cleans up really nicely, something which humbucker-laden guitars just don't do, and I was able to twang away once my overdriven Trower/Hendrix/Beck urges had been satisfied. It's really an absolutely super guitar now and I'm so pleased I made the effort to make those tweaks to make it "just so".

T is off to a big industry conference in a couple of weeks so I intend to use those evenings to maximum effect. I might even try and record something. Have mercy.

Fiat Lux

2008-11-25T09:28:00.003Z

Holy crap but I've been busy. It's not all been work work work, but even the fun bits eat up time. The main things occupying my time are getting our shots ready for a temp screening next week (just as well we don't celebrate Thanksgiving as we're going need all the time we can get) and also preparing two talks I'm giving one in a week or so to a big industry shindig in London and I'm delivering another one this Friday at a university whose computer graphics course is regarded by many as the best in the UK. I'm much more excited about the latter as I get more of a sense of fulfillment talking to students than I do talking to industry people since the former might be appreciative of some inside knowledge.

I spent all Sunday preparing notes and slides for the lecture, which wasn't my intention. I'd planned to spend about 4 hours putting it together but as these things tend to, time ran away with me and I finished at about midnight. The lecture I'm doing is on creative lighting in computer graphics, something which a lot of CG courses are none too good at. I'm lucky because I started out as a fine artist and went through all the training that comes with that. These days, it seems, students are encouraged to specialise much sooner and so they miss out on the broad brush strokes of visual learning and frankly I see that in their work. My plan is to give them 40 minutes potted art theory and history focusing on light and then colour and round it out with looking at a specific example. It was making the slides for the "specific example" that took the time.

The idea was to set up a scene and try and light it in a few ways to show what emotions and moods can be created with lights alone including some not so successful ideas and explanations about why they don't work. I decided to use a model of the goddess Athena I have and set her in an alcove as this makes the lighting challenge more difficult as you don't have much free freedom to place your lights as if she were freestanding. To complicate matters further, she's holding a spear which can cast nasty shadows reducing the freedom of light placement further.

Anyway here's how it would look if you lit it with just a camera flash mounted right on top of the camera:

Yuck.

And here are a few different takes on lighting her:

I'm pleased with the last one. I hope the students get what I'm trying to tell them. The talk's on Friday afternoon so I'm bolting out of work at 12, heading to the station, travelling for two hours, getting a cab to the college, delivering my talk, getting back in a cab, another two hours in a train and then back into work at about 7 if we have another conference call to L.A. And then I shall rest.

Angry Otto

2008-11-16T20:12:00.002Z

Angry Otto
Originally uploaded by Mr Atrocity

I made this little fellow in Processing, a graphics programming language this afternoon. I was inspired by all the little monsters made using Processing on this page. In the video, the moving dot represents the location of the mouse pointer and Otto really hates mouse pointers. It's fun to make him chase the pointer in the actual application and to see his cross little face snap at it when he gets close enough makes me giggle every time. It's surprising how much life and fun you can impart in just 200 lines of code.

VFX T-shirt

2008-11-13T17:18:00.001Z

I now have my VFX Artist t-shirt, it's no longer just a design in Photoshop. I'm quite pleased with the quality of the shirt, the print has easily withstood a couple of washes and the few other people who bought one also seem pleased. Bountee seem like a good site though they screwed my order up the first time. I get the impression that the outfit is run by a bunch of slightly stoned but well-meaning latter day hippies. Their hearts are in the right place but they can't necessarily remember what they were supposed to be doing, like sending me my shirts in the correct size. It's all good now and I have my shirt in medium as ordered. If you want to do t-shirts yourself and don't want the hassle of organising someone to screen-print them (and believe me, you don't) this seems like a good alternative. This is the link to my shirt so you can see how it all works at Bountee and what their site has to offer. I might even do a few more, non-cynical VFX artist, designs now.

The Last Laugh

2008-11-11T16:51:00.001Z

On Saturday evening I met up with two buddies at the Tate Modern for a wander around the Rothko show followed by meeting up with two of their friends and dinner at a really lovely Malaysian restaurant near London Bridge. As the weather here has been filthy for the last few weeks with frequent, heavy downpours I took the precaution of donning my outfit as you see above. Many of my friends mock my Drizabone and oilskin hat as old fashioned and I must admit it was in part my general tweediness that led me to get them. There was a practical concern too and that was you can't get men's full-length waterproof coats in more modern fabrics and styling.

The last laugh came as I walked home from the restaurant. The heavens opened and I saw many folks diving for cover, even those in fancy Berghaus all-weather jackets as their jeans got soaked. I, clad in my old-school garb, down to my solid, no-nonsense English heavy leather shoes was able to carry on, warm and dry, until I got home. Sometimes I am accused of being a recalcitrant, old-fashioned git. I'm not sure that's entirely fair. I tend to think it's also a matter of quality. To those who accuse me thus, I might point out that I embraced digital cameras and CDs early as they are in most practical respects superior to the formats that preceded them. On the other hand I have stuck with tube guitar and hi-fi amps because I have yet to hear a transistor amp that gives me the sound I want, and the same considerations come to the fore with clothes. I like the older styles partly because they are generally better made and will last a lot longer than fashionable high-street stuff. In the case of the Drizabone, for example, it is a design that has been refined over many years from practical experience and from Saturday's sojourn I'll take well-made and thought out old-fashioned duds every day.

Genius Playlist

2008-11-09T15:00:00.000Z

Here is a Genius playlist, by which I mean one generated by the new "Genius" feature in iTunes rather than a particularly good playlist. That said, I'm quite intrigued by it:

The Count Of Monte Cristo The Noisettes
Horse and I Bat For Lashes
Serotonin Simple Kid
Your Kisses Are Wasted On Me The Pipettes
Sleep On the Left Side Cornershop
Come Follow Me The Answer
Miss Modular Stereolab
Mojo Box Southern Culture On The Skids
Heroes And Villains Brian Wilson
Tangled Up In Plaid Queens Of The Stone Age
Black Cherry Goldfrapp
Rumble Link Wray
Darlene Led Zeppelin
I'm Free The Soup Dragons
High School MC5
May This Be Love Jimi Hendrix

More Pinhole

2008-11-07T17:23:00.001Z

In lieu of words, which seem to be failing me at the moment, here are another couple of pinhole experiments:

Digital Pinhole Camera

2008-11-05T18:00:00.000Z

Sisoftroos very kindly got me a cardboard pinhole camera kit for my birthday. I am putting a roll of aged 35mm colour film through it now and I shall be intrigued to see what, if anything, comes out from it. But this set me thinking about making a digital pinhole camera. At first I was over-complicating the issue by planning to make a pinhole camera that was focused onto a ground glass and then using a macro lens on the digicam to take a photo of the image projected onto the ground glass. This is, of course, way too fussy. A quick Google search showed a far more sensible approach:

Take a body cap for your type of camera.
Punch a hole in the centre of it.
Using a needle, make a tiny hole in a piece of adhesive aluminium foil.
Stick that over the hole in the body cap.
Put the body cap onto the camera and...
Voilà, you have a made a pinhole camera.

Here's what I've ended up with at the moment:

And this is from my first test at taking a photo with it:

I'm really quite pleased. It's very soft; I think a slightly smaller, more carefully punched hole ,will produce better results but it's not bad. The pleasing pin-hole quality of infinite depth of field is there and these days with Photoshop and such we can add some contrast into the otherwise rather flat images the pinhole produces. I'll try and improve the quality of my pin hole and take some more photos over the coming weeks. I might even try and shoot some time-lapse video.

We drink and then we drink

2008-11-02T17:59:00.003Z

It's been a fairly boozy weekend. On Friday my pal Dr H hosted a Halloween party at her flat. She left it rather late to tell us it was to be fancy dress and I'd been pretty busy with work and hadn't had time to plan (or write blog posts. Sorry.) On Friday morning I had a tiny brain wave. I have a yellow t-shirt with a 70's style print of a woman sunbathing on a each and "Amity Island" written underneath. All I needed was the shark to make it complete. And so it was that I bought a large sheet of grey cardboard from an art shop and after work charged home ready to do some papercraft. I was sensible and did a maquette first on a sheet of paper. It was just as well as my first idea of how to fold and stick it didn't work and had gone straight for the proper version I'd have been screwed. I figured out what I needed to change and then when my little paper maquette looked sharky enough I transferred the pattern to the full-size card and cut it out. The idea was to have the shark around my left leg so that the jaws were around my knee and the shark body wrapped around my calf so it appeared to be biting me. It actually worked pretty well. After about a bottle of red wine I decided, and it seemed sensible at the time, that the shark should now have fully devoured me and therefore I should take it off my leg and wear it as a hat with my happy, tipsy little face peeping out from the maw. Here is me, looking very sober having been eaten by the fish:

On Saturday I had arranged to meet up with friends in a local pub. I always make it a very relaxed affair telling everyone which pub I'll be in and from what time and then leave it up to them when and if they show up and for how long they stay. The first pub started out well and we were comfortable and a couple of pints in when we saw a large P.A. being brought in and installed followed by a load of disco lights. This pub is normally an extremely quiet Victorian boozer and this did not bode well. The bar staff then went around putting printed notices on every table to the effect that the pub had been booked out that evening for a party and we were welcome to stay until 7.30 after which time we could all piss off. This came as a shock. I have walked past the pub every weekend since T and I moved to Holborn and it never has more than about three people in it on a Saturday. It was for this reason I didn't try to book it myself, I didn't think that there'd be any need. The tipping point arrived when the P.A. was cranked up and a super tinny sounding "Red Red Wine" by UB40 came blasting out. Enough was enough. We all decamped across the road to The Dolphin where we spent the rest of the evening.

We left after eight and a half hours solid drinking and T and I came home where, as an unexpected treat to round off the day, I found that my football team, Stoke City, had beaten Arsenal 2-1. TO put that in context, it was about as likely to happen as an under-9s side is to beat Brazil. Amazing. And so I went to bed feeling very happy and a little wobbly.

Back in Black

2008-10-28T19:43:00.002Z

I think Blogger has been fixed. I seem to be able to post comments again which is a relief. In my absense you haven't missed much in my life. Over the last week or so I have:

1) Got my trailer shots for my current film done.
2) Been to a leaving do for a friend who's moving to Canada.
3) Been to a leaving do for friends who are moving to New York.
4) Got tickets for Metallica next spring.
5) Failed to get tickets for AC/DC next spring.
6) Baked ginger cake.
7) Made a massive quantity of beef stew.
8) Became 33 years old today.

Normal service should resume now.

Nasty Comments

2008-10-23T14:21:00.003+01:00

So Blogger has compulsorily "improved" Blogger by adding these comment boxes at the bottom of everyone's posts. Whether it's because I'm using Linux and Firefox or something else I don't know but I can't post comments on anyone else's blog (sorry Churlita and Booda Baby I did try today - again) and nor can I post comments on my own blog.

As commenting is one of the principle things that sets a blog apart from any other online publishing I feel this blog is a bit redundant until comments work again - without comments it just feels like screaming into the wind. If you are able to post comments please could leave one on this post saying what operating system and browser you're using as it might help me work out what's going on and how I might get some functionality back. Thanks all and sorry for the outage of intercourse (no sniggering at the back).

When Too Much Choice is a Bad Thing

2008-10-20T22:06:00.005+01:00

On Saturday morning, as T was curled up in bed grumbling with a headache brought on by one too many glasses of fizzy pop the previous night, I decided to take myself off for breakfast. As is my wont I ended up at The Breakfast Club, a cafe with trendy pretensions in Soho. It may be faux scruffy chic but it does do the best fry-up in those parts and reliably so. I was delighted to see, upon my arrival, that only one couple stood between me and the counter. It did however take me ten minutes to get served. The reason for this was that said couple, well half of the couple at any rate, were ordering by the following method, "We'd like a Full Monty breakfast but can I have a bagel not bread and can I have poached eggs and can I swap the sausage for another piece of bacon and don't make the eggs too runny and can I have this yogurt smoothie but can I have banana rather than yogurt?" and on and on. The poor guy entering the order on the gizmo that tells the kitchen what to cook seemed almost at the end of his tether by the time they finished up. "She's so particular" said the, until this moment, silent party in the couple. Particular? Ye gods and little fishes that's not particular that's insane.

We are all aware, I imagine, of the idea that the customer should get what he or she wants, that the customer is right and that the role of the server and establishment is merely to serve. The idea above all that more choice is always better. But is it I ask myself? I had much opportunity to ponder this question and asked it of myself many times as I stood in line behind this prattling half-wit. No, I decided, sometimes more choice is not better.

It is not always better for several reasons. Firstly it is rude. If it takes you ten minutes to order breakfast how long must it take you to do anything important and how many hungry people must you make wait whilst you do? This is the same rudeness as those who like to order eight coffees in tiny coffee shops at rush hour, just as the queue is already stretching out of the door. It shows an astonishing level of arrogance and a total inability to behave sociably to those around you. "Do unto others" and so on.

The second reason why choice isn't always better is because you probably don't know best. When I see someone in, say an award-winning coffee shop, telling the barista that they'd like "An extra hot cappuccino with extra foam" I think ill of them. Are they seriously doing this because they know how to create a better tasting cup of coffee than someone who makes coffee for a living and who has carved out, through hard work, a serious reputation for them self? No. They do it because they are a pseud and they think it shows they are sophisticated. This is not the case. The sophisticate is the person who takes the trouble to find the best people at any given task and goes to them and allows them to work their magic. To return to Saturday's example, I appreciate that a basic fry-up is not an extravagant work of gastronomic sophistication but it is easy to screw up, it is a dish that requires balance to work well, and some pimply trustafarian with a whole host of imagined allergies and intolerances which are actually just fey fickleness does not know better than a battle hardened short order cook how best this might be achieved. In short it is insulting to crafts-people. In even shorter short, why do these people keep finding the few remaining places where there are people who care about how things should be done and then mock these good people with their imbecility?

If you want to choose from 87000 possible coffee combinations to make your soya moccha frappuccino individual then Starbucks would seem to be ideal and their billboards now advertise this feature of their operation. If, on the other hand, you would rather have a good cup of coffee then ask a barista in a proper coffee shop to make you a cappuccino or latte or flat white and let them do their magic.

And don't, for Christ's sake, take ten minutes over it.

Painting

2008-10-12T19:23:00.003+01:00

I've decided that I want to do some painting again. I haven't used a brush in anger for far too long and I've been thinking of a methodology I could use to generate some composition with which I can then allocate some colour and texture. It's all very rough but here are some sketches I did this afternoon and a page of colour swatches culled from my stash of magazine pages collected over the years. I think this is going to be fun.

I Get Mail

2008-10-04T20:00:00.000+01:00

Most of the time my job isn't anywhere near as show-businessy as people tend to assume. Most of my days are spent in front of computer or wandering around the studio briefing other artists or in meetings with our clients. There's no red carpet, no limo and no fancy frocks. I do love it though in spite of what I may think about going on set.

Every once in a while I get reminded that films still have something magical about them. At the end of last week a letter landed on my desk at work. It was addressed to me at the right company but had been addressed to Pinewood Studios. Some kind soul at Pinewood had obviously looked up the company I work for's address and forwarded it on. It's a miracle it got to me at all, I would have thought that they'd be very intolerant of incorrectly addressed mail at Pinewood but apparently not.

I opened the envelope and another envelope, two plain postcards and a letter fell out. The letter was incredibly sweet. It was from a guy who had visited the location shoot of Wolf Man (the film I'm currently working on) and he'd got the autographs of the director and most of the cast whilst there. Whether he had won some sort of competition to visit the set I don't know. He'd subsequently decided that he was going to try and gather as many signatures of people who had worked on the film as possible and hence the letter to me. I am amazed he went as low down the credits as me and he must have written dozens of these letters. The letter was very individual and hand-written; it must have taken hours, probably days, to write to everyone involved.

So I broke out my fountain pen and scrawled my signature on one of the cards and wrote a little note back answering a couple of the questions he'd asked. It felt really bizarre. I understand the completist urge that some people have, particularly when it comes to collecting something but this was a level of commitment I hadn't banked upon. I did feel a little bit famous just for a moment too, even though I'm clearly nothing of the sort. It was rather nice actually.

Photographing Florence

2008-10-02T19:50:00.002+01:00

Sorry for the absence of posts this week. I've had a horrible cold from which I'm only just emerging. My eyes are still very sore but at least I'm not pouring snot everywhere. The whole thing rather knocked me for six I'm afraid. As a child I was quite asthmatic, a condition that I fortunately grew out of in adolescence. The only time it rears its ugly head these days is when I get a cold and it goes straight for my chest and I start wheezing like someone who's just climbed twenty flights of stairs. So I've spent most of this week very out of breath and consequently too light headed and dizzy for anything requiring concentration. OK apologies over.

So the photos. I noticed that Booda Baby wanted photos from Santa Croce and there were none. What can I say? Well there are a couple of things, one a circumstance of the day and the other an arbitrary decision I made before we travelled. The on the day problem was that half of Santa Croce's interior was under tarpaulin so we couldn't see any of the Donatello sculpture in there. It wasn't tarped in a way that would have made for an interesting photo either unfortunately. The other reason I didn't take any pictures of that, or of most of the other well-known landmarks, was because I decided to look around me as we mooched around and if I could count 10 people shooting the same photo I was about to take then I stopped. This is partly snobby daftness on my own part but there is a rationale too.

As we were looking through our photos T told me about her grandfather who took countless slides whenever the family went on holiday. He would then show them to anyone who would sit still for long enough to be subjected to them. In the 70s, 80s and early 90s when he was taking them it made sense to really document things. If there was a sculpture or a building that was especially beautiful then recording it for yourself seems sensible, there may be no book featuring it. Today I think that the situation is rather different. If you look on Flickr, Google Images or any of the other repositories of online images there will be countless shots of any famous monument you can think of. Many will be taken by professional photographers who could clear a space or are willing to get up early enough that their pictures will capture the object in the best manner possible. I didn't think it was worth my while trying to compete with them. Florence must be amongst the most documented places on earth: a search on Flickr for "Santa Croce Florence Firenze" yields nearly 3,300 images and I felt that if I were to take a picture it should only be when I really felt I saw something differently rather than just to document something because it was there and beautiful. I hope this makes sense?

Looking back through my pictures I think these 5 are my favourites, they're the ones that speak most to me about our experience of being in the city rather than recording what we saw.

Part Seven: The Return and Classical musicians vs Italian baggage handlers

2008-09-28T18:00:00.001+01:00

Neither of us could sleep. here is something about travelling clearly as it was a repeat of the night before we flew out of London. At about 3 a.m. we decided to open the curtains so we could at least watch the stars and the dawn. The main balcony doors were in the bedroom so the view was amazing. At 6, bleary eyed we got up, put our last items into the cases and checked out.

We walked through the deserted streets up to the station and purchased our tickets in more confident Italian than we had bought the tickets that had brought us to Florence. Once again Trenitalia were great and the train arrived on time and got us to Pisa on time too. A last look at the Tuscan countryside through the train window was a fine end to our time in the country. We checked in our luggage and went off in search of something to eat. Our options were limited and the only place that had anything that looked OK was heaving and, has been mentioned before, has an area for payment a good distance from the place where the food resides. The novelty in this case was that you had to pay up front, when you couldn't see the food and then take your receipt over to collect what you'd ordered. After this we sat and watched the world go by.

The world on this particular Sunday morning consisted of rather more classical musicians than is usual. I have never seen so many varied instrument cases before. Finally our flight was called, already 30 minutes late. The cases and their owners came too. Clearly the orchestra was to fly with us. I remember thinking to myself how they were going to stow the instruments as I couldn't believe that any self-respecting musucian would allow the precious tools of their trade to be checked in as regular luggage. The answer to my question was to keep us on the ground and sat in the aircraft for another hour. It turns out that all airports have special ropes and fastenings for securing large collections of valuable instruments in the flight cabin. The senior engineer at the airport is the person who is responsible for the kit and on this Sunday morning not only could the fastenings not be found anywhere, nor could the engineer. After an hour both had finally been located and we were strapped in, ready to fly. The journey home was uneventful and we pushed open the door to Schossadlerflug at a little after 4.30 p.m. The immediate task was to have my first cup of tea in a week. I don't think I've ever gone so long without tea and by god I needed this one. After that we began the tedious process of unpacking and washing our week's worth of clothes. At about 10 o'clock we curled up, very happy to be back in our own bed even though we'd had a fascinating time and a good holiday.

Part Six: The Hotel Bathroom Incident

2008-09-27T18:00:00.002+01:00

I didn't eat breakfast on Saturday. You'd ideally want your first night in (a highly discounted) hotel suite to be a pleasant affair allowing you to enjoy the creature comforts to hand. I spent it with a really bad stomach and a cold sweat. Ho hum. Though neither of us felt we could face breakfast we decided to see if a wander and a little shopping mightn't cheer us up. I had managed to buy a cardigan on the Friday, an item for which I've been looking for "just the right one" for ages now. I had also decided I wanted a new pair of shoes some while back and had thought that Florence, noted as it is for its leather working, would be the perfect place to get some. I'd seen a pair of lovely correspondent brown shoes in a shop near our first hotel on our first morning in the city. I'd been back a few times to refresh my memory as I tried to decide whether they were right for me. By Saturday I had decided that they were. I was very conscientious. I checked Google language tools for how to say my shoe size in Italian and the word for shoes. With this information I strolled into the shop. I was greeted by a very surly individual who snorted when I asked if he had a pair of the shoes I liked in my size. Not only did he not, he didn't in the two sizes smaller than that. They did make them any larger than two sizes smaller than my feet. I was shocked. I had prepared myself for the possibility that they may not have my size in stock but the possibility that they wouldn't even make them that size had not entered my head. T had to take me, now inconsolable and finally hungry out for a lunch to cheer me up. No fricken' shoes for Mr A.

The afternoon provided an opportunity to sample some really poor engineering. The doors in our hotel rooms had what at first glance looked like a regular door knob. They did not turn like a normal door though, oh no, they had a button on top which you pressed to release the mechanism. Things like this baffle me. What's wrong with a normal door knob? It's a technology that's proved itself time and time again. At Schossadlerflug we have the dumbest bath plug ever. It's a spring-loaded thing that has never worked since we move in and can only be opened by jamming a Virgin Airlines teaspoon under the seal to jemmy it open. Our hotel had the door equivalent. I was happily reading my book when I heard a plaintive little cry from the bathroom. "The door's stuck", said T from within. I had a go at opening it from the outside and stuck it was. There was also no screw to remove to take the handle off and open it that way. I went down to reception and in pidgin Italian accompanied by a lot of hand waving explained to the guys on the desk what the situation was. Someone would come a deal with it they said. I went back up to the room and I waited on one side of the door whilst T waited, increasingly testily on the other.

After 15 minutes I pushed a copy of Private Eye under the gap in the bottom of the door so she could have something to read as I stormed back down to reception to see what was going on. "Is coming." I was told. Another 10 minutes pass during which T and I work out what food I'd be able to pass under the door when she got peckish. Pizza seemed the best bet. We were on the verge of trying to break the door down when the engineer arrived. He prodded the door and fiddled with his screwdrivers for a while before looking up, surprised, and said "No open". Smart fellow. He then went off to get a more senior engineer and they both set to work. Eventually they levered the knob off and found that the door frame was splintering and some had got into the door mechanism and jammed it. With this removed a very disgruntled T emerged. The engineers assured us that the door would now work perfectly but we treated it with suspicion for the rest of our stay and refused to shut it for fear of a repeat performance.

After an afternoon sitting on the balcony reading our books we set out for our final dinner in Florence. My buddy Miss W who had recently visited had given us a recommendation and after much debate with the concierge we had got it booked (we suspect the concierge was in the pay of rival restaurants as he seemed very reluctant). We arrived at 8 and were greeted with glasses of prosecco to sip whilst we perused the menu. My friend had insisted that I should have the gnocchi with truffle oil sauce and who was I to refuse? For the main course I couldn't resist another of those amazing, and vast, Florentine steaks. By about 10 o'clock we had finished the main course and were completely stuffed. Though they looked great there was no way we could face a pudding and so we paid a fond farewell to the south side of the Arno and went back to finish our packing as we had an early start for our journey home.

Part Five: From the Sublime to the Sublimely Ridiculous

2008-09-26T18:00:00.000+01:00

We had initially planned to stay for four nights in Florence. However a couple of weeks before we were due to fly British Airways sent a confirmation e-mail to T which also had a little button labelled "Click here to extend your holiday by two nights". She went giddy and an then involuntary spasm later and she'd clicked the button. We were now flying back on the Sunday. Our hotel booking ran out on Friday morning. Having tried in vain to extend our stay at the Hotel Davanzati (I guess you don't become the number one hotel in Florence on TripAdvisor without being popular) we started a search for alternative sleeping arrangements. As it was pretty close to the date of our holiday there were quite a few last minute offers available at some pretty swanky looking hotels. We eventually plumped for the Grand Hotel Villa Medici in which we booked a junior suite (I'd never been in a suite before let alone stayed in one) for a hugely reduced rate. It wasn't in any way cheap but we felt we'd earned it with all the overtime we'd been doing.

We checked out of the Davanzati just as it began to rain. Well I say rain, there was a hint of moisture in the air and the odd spot of water. Nevertheless as we headed westward, dragging our bags, we witnessed the crowds of tour groups covered in waterproof ponchos, rain coats and all sporting enormous golfing umbrellas. I was wearing a light linen suit and scarcely got damp the whole half hour it took us to walk to the new place. Mind you, the locals were no better at dealing with a touch of drizzle with unforeseen hazards for me. I am a little over six feet tall. When I walk around in London the pointy metal spoke ends of the average height Londoner's umbrella are roughly level with my eyes which would make walking around in a rain storm rather dangerous if I didn't wear glasses. I've had nasty scratches along my neanderthal eyebrows before though. Italians are, as a rule, smaller putting their brollies at throat height. This was really frightening and I was dodging and weaving like a out punched prize-fighter as I dragged by suitcase up to the hotel.

When we tried to check in our designated room was unavailable. The receptionist asked if it would be alright if we could be put in a full suite as there was one available at no extra charge. We considered it for a femto-second before agreeing. Our rooms were ridiculous. The walls were covered in heavily patterned fabric and slightly squishy to the touch, the carpet was patterned and comfortable and the walls were painted a rich yellow apart from the pattern created by wood panelling. It was quite a strain on the eyes and certainly not somewhere I'd want to wake up with a thumping hangover: a time when one yearns for simpler, more austere design sensibilities.

We had a(nother) lazy lunch on the Porta Rossa at a restaurant owned by the Frescobaldi wine company. As well as delicious food they also offer wine "flights". A "flight" consists of three generous half glasses of a wine connected by a common theme, usually the grape variety. We picked the Sangiovese "flight" and it did not disappoint.

We were very disappointed in the evening when the restaurant that the guide book had recommended half poisoned me and T. The alarm bells rang when the caprese salad consisted of tomatoes that tasted of water and mozzarella that seemed made from inner tube. The wine was vinegary and I poured most of it into a flowerpot next to our table. Judging by the condition of the plant it contained I don't think was the first to do this. We had half a plate of really filthy pasta before calling it quits. Sadly I don't know anywhere near enough Italian to kick up a fuss so I'll just mention it here: don't eat at the restaurant called Napo Leone in Florence. I spent a mostly sleepless night feeling pretty sick and not looking forward to our last full day in the city at all.

Part Four: The Prettiest Prison and Torture Dungeon in the World

2008-09-25T18:00:00.001+01:00

Day Four was the first day where we had nothing pre-planned or booked. Since we were totally in control of our own destinies we decided to visit another museum. We had walked past the Barghello several times on our various journeys around Florence and had marvelled at its imposing facade rising vertically with little in the way of ornament save a few iron hoops and the occasional solid, studded wooden door. It shouldn't really surprise you to learn that the lack of standard Italianate architectural frippery has much to do with the fact that the Barghello started out out as a prison, police station, magistrates and torture chamber. Delightful. I actually rather like the building, if for no other reason than it made a change from the relentless fancy window grilled, shuttered, cloistered, terracotta-tiled standard that makes up much of the rest of the city. I am a simple soul and Italian architecture and I don't really get along. It's not that I'm anti-pattern but I do believe that there is such a thing as moderation and that it can be a virtue. After the opulence of the Uffizi, the Barghello was a refreshing, though not exactly spartan change.

Once you've paid to enter you go through the wall you find that the whole structure is very much like a castle. There is a central courtyard with a large, deep well at the centre. Some kind and public spirited individuals had entertained themselves by throwing plastic bottles down it so the bottom isn't as medieval looking as it might be but the rest of the building seems to have remained unscathed. These days the Barghello's primary draw for tourists is that it houses much of the Uffizi's sculpture collection, featuring many works by Mr Atrocity's current favourite Ninja Turtle, Dontello. There are also pieces by Michelangelo, Danti, Giambolgna and Cellini. Of the bunch Michelangelo disappointed most for me with stand out works by Cellini, the base for his statue of Perseus being particularly good and Danti's triple sculpture of the beheading of John The Baptist.

All of these works were arrayed around this spectacular armoured palace. In addition to the sculpture there was also a great deal of ceramic, textile and metal work. In a few rooms items of furniture from the Renaissance were also on display. Though the Barghello was very quiet compared to the Uffizi and the Accademia there were still a few coach tours of retards who somehow found it. My jaw actually dropped open involuntarily when I saw a small party of obese, late middle-age philistines loudly stamp into a room and then dump all their bags on a fifteenth century table. The table was roped off but that clearly wasn't enough of a clue that it was an exhibit not a cloakroom. Unbelievable. I know I too was a tourist and I am sounding like snob because I am one but it really beggars belief when someone would take the effort to travel all the way to Florence and then not show any respect for the art it contains.

After another three course lunch we walked off some of the pasta course at least by pottering around Santa Croce which is a beautiful building in its own right but also has the tombs of Michelangelo (against his wishes apparently; he wanted to be buried in Rome), Machiavelli, Rossini and Galileo. There is also a monument to Dante though he isn't buried there as the city kicked him out in 1315 and then later regretted it when he became the founding father of Italian literature.

The evening saw us eat at another recommendation of the hotel, The Quattro Lione and though it was not as good as Natalino on Tuesday it did have some fantastic grilled chicken served with delicious local lemons. Once again we rolled ourselves back over the Arno and back to our digs to sleep it off.

Florence Part Three: The Office

2008-09-24T18:00:00.001+01:00

Wednesday began with a walk to The Uffizi, the largest art gallery in Florence, formerly an administrative government building hence its name Uffizi - "offices". As with The Accademia we had been able to pre-book our tickets through the hotel weeks in advance. We had been strongly advised to do this by the hotel staff and the reason for this became abundantly clear as we approached. There were two queues. One had about thirty people in it and was for those with pre-booked tickets and the other queue stretched, as far as I could tell, over the curvature of the earth and was for those without a reservation. It had been pretty much the same story on the Tuesday at the Accademia. In classic Italian retailing style one had to collect ones tickets, using a reservation form from a completely different building than the actual entrance to the gallery and in further typical manner the notice that informed you of this was only visible once you'd reached the head of the queue and you had to lose your place as you scoot off to track down the reserved ticket collection office. Anyway, once all that had been sorted out we were allowed in.

I'm not going to write a review of The Uffizi as it would be a) impossible and b) redundant. The Uffizi is huge, absolutely massive and every wall is covered with masterpieces from the renaissance (Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael) and onwards, Titian, Caravaggio, Botticelli, and on and on. There are even representations from those outside Italy with a couple of beautiful Rembrandts and Dürers mixing in a Flemish influence. T and I had agreed that the only way, realistically, to get round the gallery is to take it a quite a speed and only really stop and look at something if it really grabbed us. If you tried to give every painting five or ten minutes you'd die in the attempt. The highlights for me was The Leonardo and the rooms of Raphael and Titian, both of which were extraordinary.

We retreated with our heads buzzing from a severe case of Sterndahl Syndrome to a trattoria for lunch where I had Crespelle alla Fiorentina, something I intend to have a go at making myself. The dish consists of a pancake (as in a crêpe style pancake) covered with a mixture of spinach and ricotta, rolled up, cut into three sections, arranged in a dish and then covered in a bechamel sauce. Sometimes some tomato would be added on top of that. Come winter I think this classic will prove a winner at dinner time.

In the afternoon we felt we'd recovered enough to take on another gallery and so we made our way to the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo which had been recommended by my chum S who is an art historian and whose opinion is to be trusted in matters such as these. The gallery itself is a modern spacious building with a clever arrangement of the rooms to allow daylight to illuminate most of the exhibits. The gallery features most of the works considered to important to remain outdoors on the exterior of the cathedral itself. These masterpieces have been replaced by copies, if we're being polite, fakes if we're being honest in their original locations and these are what the tourists wandering past are taking photos with their camera phones and probably know no different.

The range and quality of work in the gallery is quite staggering. There is a large number of statues by Donatello who is the Ninja Turtle whose work I knew least about before arriving in Florence. He is rapidly rising up the list of my favourite artists. While much renaissance sculpture is beautifully executed, it can often seem to be lacking in human spark, the figures seem too perfect, the poses too contrived. Donatello really manages to capture humanity, even in his more allegorical pieces. The faces seem to have lived a life and to have a story etched into them. He seems to do in sculpture what Rembrandt does in paint, that is capture the human experience and distill it to a powerful form. Really quite incredible stuff.

After this we really were cultured out and spent a quiet day mooching around the city and being astonished by the numbers of tourists barging around in huge groups like migrating wildebeest on the veldt. This, we felt, was too much so we retreated to our hotel room and read.

Florence Part Two: The Classics

2008-09-23T18:00:00.000+01:00

The first thing I experienced on the Tuesday morning was precisely how much the Italians do not do breakfast. The breakfast room had a few slices of bread, some fruit, yogurts and a couple of pastries. None of it felt very Italian and I rather get the impression that this melange came about as a result of hotel management realising that the majority of the clientele come from heavily breakfasting nations and so would require the meal but at the same time being unsure of what exactly it should consist. I had a good cappuccino, an apple and a bowl of yogurt with some prunes in it. None of it was spectacular but it was enough to keep body and soul together until lunch.

Tuesday's main attraction on our, for want of a better word I will call our itinerary though it wasn't really organised enough to justify the term, was The Accademia whose star attraction is, of course, Michelangelo's David. The whole gallery is pretty much centred around the statue and it has hard to curb your enthusiasm and not rush down the corridor which leads up to it. It is worth taking your time though as there are a group of four, unfinished statues by Michelangelo which line the way. I've never tried to carve anything out of stone but I'd always assumed that the general technique would be to carve the stone into roughly the right shape and then refine it down to its finished form. This does not seem to be how Michelangelo did things. Each of the four statues had areas that were finished, the surface work to a smooth, detailed finish, others had not been worked on at all. The overall effect was of a figure trying to drag itself out of the rock, quite eerie in its way.

Eventually you cave and go and see the big fella. It's a cliché to even say it but that makes it no less true: you don't really realise how big the statue is until you are next to it. When you are in the same space there are few things you begin to notice. It is an amazingly good piece of work and a tremendous achievement just in terms of its scale. It's also best viewed from the front angle we're all familiar with from photographs; from the side it's kinda, well I hate to say this, but ugly. The more you walk around it, the more you feel it's a sculpture executed by someone who is a painter foremost. It has a composition that works best in one direction, from a single viewpoint like a painting. I was amazed but perhaps not as much as I was expecting.

For Lunch we were planning on trying one of the small eateries on the Porta Rossa but that turned out to be unnecessary after we'd eaten two of the biggest ice-creams I've ever seen. We had popped into a gelaterie en route to lunch for a little appetizer as we walked. We pointed at a cone and asked for a couple of flavours. The guy began to pile ice-cream into our cones. And he continued to pile ice-cream for what seemed like a few minutes. What he eventually handed to us were a couple of medium sized cones surmounted by carefully sculpted lumps of ice-ream which probably displaced roughly the same volume as my head. I have a large head. Having sat and eaten our "appetizers" in the only quiet square we could find in the city (San Firenze) we felt we weren't quite as hungry as we had previously thought and so instead of more lunch we wandered around a little more.

In the evening we went to a restaurant recommended by one of the guys who ran the hotel. It is called Natalino and it does not disappoint. We had a fantastic bottle of a Sangiovese based local wine and some excellent pasta to start. For my main course I had a Florentine Steak which turned out to be more like a half-cow than just a steak. It was juicy and delicious. Despite being stuffed it seemed rude not to have pudding and we forced down some wonderful tiramisu before rolling ourselves back to our hotel to sleep it all off.

Mr Atrocity's Grand Tour. Part One: The Getting There

2008-09-22T17:06:00.003+01:00

I am returned safe and sound from Florence. T and I have had six nights there and it's been a really lovely holiday, principally because we got to spend a week together, without work interruption, for the first time since May last year. I obviously had preconceived ideas of what Florence would be like but in quite I few of them I turned out to be mistaken, in some ways good and in others, bad. This week I'll write up the holiday in exciting (hem hem) daily installments and I'll post up some of the pictures I took too, like this one:

T is of the opinion that one should arrive in one's holiday destination as early as possible so that a day is not, as she puts it, "wasted". The result was a booking on a nine o'clock flight from London Gatwick. The practical upshot of that was that we had to awaken at three in the morning, get a cab to London Victoria railway station, take the Gatwick Express from there to the airport. Ouch.

As is my natural inclination I spent most of the Sunday night unable to sleep and fretting about everything that could go wrong en route. My chum ZF had tried to assuage my worries earlier in the week explaining that the worst that could possibly happen would be being med-evaced out of Italy. This didn't reassure me much. I was just about getting drowsy enough to properly sleep when the alarm went off and I fell out of bed. T, who had far too excited for her own good about the trip hadn't slept either but had got out of bed at one o'clock and had been checking she had remembered to pack everything she needed every ten minutes between that time and the time we left.

I'd booked us a cab to take us to the station and I have to say I love Addison Lee taxis. I booked online a few days in advance. Half an hour before the taxi was due to arrive I received a text message informing me that the car was on its way. This is perfect because that is just the time when you're wondering to yourself whether you booked the car for the right day or whether you mistakenly booked it for four in the afternoon. A few minutes later another text arrived. This one told me the car was outside, what make of car it was and gave me the driver's mobile phone number in case we needed his assistance. We decided we didn't and hauled our cases down and into the car which was exactly as described.

Ten minutes later we at the station. Three minutes after that we were on the Gatwick Express, a train with a single aim in life: to be the fastest thing between central London and Gatwick Airport seven days a week.

Once at the airport we went through the usual nonsense of checking our bags in, having our crevices searched and putting our shoes on a conveyor belt. Three hours later we were in the air on a beautiful clear day over Europe. We flew over the white cliffs of Dover and over the Alps which were utterly spectacular from the air. An hour and half after take-off we touched down in Pisa. Having found the station we discovered a delightful trait of Italian retailing that of putting the location of payment facilities for a thing nowhere near the thing itself. We trudged, with our cases, all the way back to the terminal, all the way through the terminal, back past where we had collected our bags until we found the enormous queue at the the Trenitalia ticket office. When it was our turn we shuffled forward and looking very embarrassed at out language skills asked for "Due biglietti a Firenze per favore". These we duly got and then we made our way back to the platform again. The train journey was uneventful. The train was perfectly on time and we stepped off at Florence Santa Maria Novella station and dragged our bags to our first hotel.

The Hotel Davanzati is a lovely, small, family run place with modern-ish styling and an unfussy but highly conscientious manner. We checked in and crashed in our room for an hour or so before finding the energy to venture out for dinner. We ate in a diner on the first night. What we both needed after a long day travelling was something simple and a beer to accompany it. My pizza (not a classic Florentine dish but I didn't care) was fine but anything after 12 hours without food was welcome and so with that we went to bed ready to explore properly in the morning.

Slack Blogging Behaviour

2008-09-13T16:54:00.002+01:00

Again almost a whole week without posting. Sorry folks but it's been hectic. On Monday, T and I are off to Florence for a week. This cannot come soon enough for either of us. Our last proper holiday away together was last May to New York and we really needed this one. In order to ensure peace of mind for me there was a whole bunch of work/briefing I had to get done at the studio before I could leave. I managed most of it but it meant that there wasn't much time for anything else (like writing here for example).

It's one of the frustrations of supervising a whole project is that I am suddenly directly responsible for a lot things directly and I am directly responsible to our clients so if I screw up I get the angry e-mails. It's been the angry e-mail prevention tactics that have consumed the time.

I did manage to see my last Prom concert of the summer on Tuesday though, and I thought it one of the best. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Bernard Haitink played Shostakovich's 4th Symphony. I always like the 4th more than I remember. It's the first of his symphonies where I think I see the style that categorises the later, more famous works (7th and 8th symphonies especially). In the 4th I really get the impression that Shostakovich has thought, "Wow, I have a whole orchestra here, what can I do with them?" and then proceeds to try out a whole host of ideas, some of which come to fruition in the later works. There's the haunting oboe solos, the incessant percussion, the dissonance followed by more sweeping romantic passges and there's a gorgeous part where a solo violin is accompanied by two harps playing chords in the lower part of their register: unique and beguiling. Having had a fairly rough week at work it really lifted my spirits and cleansed my soul to hear such magical music. I love Haitink's conducting of Shostakovich. Apart from an elderly Fritz Reiner recording I have, all my Shostakovich CDs are the Haitink versions.

On Thursday I went out, rather briefly, to say "Hi" and then "Bye" to TR, who is now off back to Seattle and from there to become a citizen of the world. It is always sad when friends leave but the industry I work in is highly cosmopolitan and so there is a constant coming and going of friends to and from the City. In happier news as TR leaves my buddy ZF flies in from California so we're swapping one super smart American woman for another. There must be some sort of quota system in operation of which I am not aware.

Right, well I'm going to start tidying the flat and beginning to pack for Florence. I have purchased a fistful of memory cards for my camera so expect pictures upon my return. I'll try to avoid cliché if I can but there'll probably be some - I suspect it's unavoidable. Happy weekends everybody and I'll write more in a week upon my return.

A Quick Update

2008-09-08T14:56:00.001+01:00

I had a pretty good weekend all told. Saturday was spent mooching around town and then cooking veggie lasagne and chocolate and chestnut mousse for our pal ZF who has just moved from California. She came over to Schossadlerflug in the evening and we ate drank and were merry until about 2 a.m. where she went for her first experience of the London night buses and all the adventures that they can provide.

On Sunday we played Spore, which is amazing. I think hard-core gamers aren't going to like it much because it's very much a journey rather than destination type game. Winning (if that's the term) isn't really the heart of what makes it great. If you don't get a small tingle of joy at seeing your own 6 legged and 4 armed monster hatch from an egg and stomp about the landscape in search of something to eat then it's probably not going to really appeal to you as a game.

I also spent the afternoon finishing off this biography of John Dee, mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, mystic, alchemist, scientist, probably spy and advisor to Queen Elizabeth 1st. I'd been wanting to read something of him for a while that went further than the angel summoning and mysticism with which he is most famously associated these days and this book was it. He was a fascinating man with a wide-ranging mind at a time when religion, the occult and science were all so enmeshed as to be almost inseparable. A good read. I received the book nine days previously and for me to read 350 pages in that time is unusual so it must have been good.

Tonight I shall be playing more Spore I think; these planets don't get conquered by themselves you know.

Courgettezilla (or Zucchini Kong)

2008-09-02T21:10:00.002+01:00

My work chum WCC has a garden. In this garden he grows vegetables of astonishing size. I ilke to imagine it's like the garden in Woody Allen's Sleeper. When he is sick of eating his own produce he brings some into work for us. Today he gave me the monster you see above. He assures me it's a courgette. I think it's a marrow but he says not. Anyway I have just spent a good while hacking it into tiny pieces and making courgette soup. I have made enough to feed a hundred people for a week, or a hungry me and T for at least three nights. Ah, nature's bounty is a wondrous (and occasionally vast) thing.

Strangeness: From the Mail

2008-09-01T22:47:00.002+01:00

Here's a weird one for you. I received the above in the mail the other day. On the flip side is my address, nothing more. I don't recognise the art and I can't think of anyone I know, who has my postal address, who would send such a thing. It was posted from Leeds, which again is strange because I can't think of anyone who lives, or even visits, there. Perhaps there is some dark portent hidden within the wiggly lines? Or perhaps someone I know went there for the day and decided to play silly buggers with me. Anyway, it is my mini Voynich Manuscript and there is a reward for the first person to decipher its meaning.

The Omnivore's Hundred

2008-08-29T13:33:00.003+01:00

It seems like a scarcely disguised attempt to raise interest in their site but the Very Good Taste blog has a list of one hundred items every omnivore should at least try. It's an odd list to say the least, for example there's no raw tuna or Iberian cured ham and wine is entirely absent. Anyways, it's a Friday, why not spend a few minutes seeing how many you've had.

Here's the cut and pasted blurb and then my answers:

1) Copy this list into your blog or journal, including these instructions.
2) Bold all the items you've eaten.
3) Cross out any items that you would never consider eating.
4) Optional extra: Post a comment here at www.verygoodtaste.co.uk linking to your results.

The VGT Omnivore's Hundred:

1. Venison
2. Nettle tea
3. Huevos rancheros
4. Steak tartare
5. Crocodile
6. Black pudding
7. Cheese fondue
8. Carp
9. Borscht
10. Baba ghanoush
11. Calamari
12. Pho
13. PB&J sandwich
14. Aloo gobi
15. Hot dog from a street cart
16. Epoisses
17. Black truffle
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes
19. Steamed pork buns
20. Pistachio ice cream
21. Heirloom tomatoes
22. Fresh wild berries
23. Foie gras
24. Rice and beans
25. Brawn, or head cheese
26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper
27. Dulce de leche
28. Oysters
29. Baklava
30. Bagna cauda
31. Wasabi peas
32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl
33. Salted lassi
34. Sauerkraut
35. Root beer float
36. Cognac with a fat cigar
37. Clotted cream tea
38. Vodka jelly/Jell-O
39. Gumbo
40. Oxtail
41. Curried goat
42. Whole insects
43. Phaal
44. Goat's milk
45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth £60/$120 or more
46. Fugu
47. Chicken tikka masala
48. Eel
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut
50. Sea urchin
51. Prickly pear
52. Umeboshi
53. Abalone
54. Paneer
55. McDonald's Big Mac Meal
56. Spaetzle
57. Dirty gin martini
58. Beer above 8% ABV
59. Poutine
60. Carob chips
61. S'mores
62. Sweetbreads
63. Kaolin
64. Currywurst
65. Durian
66. Frogs' legs
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake
68. Haggis
69. Fried plantain
70. Chitterlings, or andouillette
71. Gazpacho
72. Caviar and blini
73. Louche absinthe
74. Gjetost, or brunost <- is filthy
75. Roadkill
76. Baijiu
77. Hostess Fruit Pie
78. Snail
79. Lapsang souchong
80. Bellini
81. Tom yum
82. Eggs Benedict
83. Pocky
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant.
85. Kobe beef
86. Hare
87. Goulash
88. Flowers
89. Horse
90. Criollo chocolate
91. Spam
92. Soft shell crab
93. Rose harissa
94. Catfish
95. Mole poblano
96. Bagel and lox
97. Lobster Thermidor
98. Polenta
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
100. Snake

More Processing Doodles

2008-08-27T19:44:00.002+01:00

Here are three new algorithmically generated pictures using code I wrote in Processing. I'm quite fond of them, they seem to have a slightly ethereal Rothko quality.

Ten Years On

2008-08-26T09:03:00.002+01:00

I almost forgot until yesterday afternoon but on the 25th August I celebrated (if that's the right word) working full-time for ten years. Aside from a month unemployed when a studio I worked for went bankrupt leaving us owed a couple of months pay and no opportunity for redress I've been working solidly for all that time. I'm really thankful for it too; the film industry is a fickle beast and it's not unknown for work to dry up and for good people to find it nigh on impossible to get jobs so I've definitely had much good fortune along the way.

Ten years ago I was a callow youth, working as a runner, making tea and getting abused by the rich-kid offspring of millionaires who'd decided it would be fun to work for an advertising agency and had daddies who could arrange that sort of thing. Those were not great days, I shall always fondly remember the happy mornings cleaning the tramp piss out of the company garage so that the MD could bear to drive his top of the line BMW into it (apparently tramp piss must be very corrosive on the those expensive Goodyears his motor was sporting). Sigh, it's a glamourous industry being in the movies.

I'll also remember the happy day when having worked for less than minimum wage for well over a year I was promoted to a junior designer role where I worked for at minimum ten hours a day and made almost as much money as the receptionist - who did nine till five only.

I cannot really complain though, ten years has seen a lot of companies come and go and I'm not the same person I was then, partly I suspect because my outlook has changed with the work I've done. I am much more confident now, I am probably also more curmudgeonly though I think that's also tempered by a greater understanding of how other people think and feel - I wasn't the most socially adept person straight out of college. All that said I do still recognise myself looking back, I wonder whether the ten years ago me would recognise today's Mr Atrocity though.

Olympics 2012

2008-08-25T19:30:00.003+01:00

So, just because I'd heard a little about it I watched the closing ceremony of the Olympic Games. Having lived in London for over a decade I found most of it pretty awful, lots of stage school leaping around with umbrellas and bowler hats interpreting the commuting experience through the medium of dance. It wasn't a pretty sight. Then a red 'bus entered the Beijing arena. "Oh law" I cried, can it get worse and any more stereotypical? After the drama students had mimed trying to crush onto a rush hour 'bus in slow motion, gurning for the cameras as they did it, a most welcome and unexpected thing happened, the top of the 'bus folded down and two figures emerged on a platform from within. One was Leona Lewis of whom I know little but she seems good. The other was Jimmy Page. Some genius had the foresight to pick Jimmy Fucking Page as the musical emblem for the UK. And then they launched into Whole Lotta Love. Jimmy Page looked in his element and was loving it, Leona Lewis looked terrified but gave it a good sing. The sight of a stadium full of Chinese fans going nuts to a Led Zeppelin song was truly a sight to behold and was actually something that made me feel a sense of pride. The 'buses and faux commuters may have been embarrassing but the music was spot on.

Crystal Palace

2008-08-23T20:35:00.002+01:00

Today, after making myself blueberry pancakes and bacon for breakfast, I hopped on a 'bus to Crystal Palace Park. Back when I used to live at Shenley Mansions, Crystal Palace was much closer and so I visited more often. I don't think I've been in about a year so it was fun to revisit old haunts. There are two main features of the park I like. One is the site and foundations of The Crystal Palace itself and the other is the Dinosaur Lake. Having had my fill of Victoriana I walked up to Herne Hill for a late lunch at one of my favourite cafés, Café Prov. Refreshed and refilled I took another 'bus back to Schossadlerflug.

Here's a few photos from today:

And....Stop.

2008-08-22T20:52:00.004+01:00

What a week. I have shifted a huge amount of work this week, I scarcely feel like I've had time to stop and catch my breath. For the next three days, however, I shall be master of my own destiny. This weekend is a bank holiday so we all have Monday off work. Tinseltroos is off to Wales for the weekend with some buddies and I have a few items on my agenda but not enough to make me feel like I'm not going to have time to relax. Tomorrow I have absolutely no plans whatsoever; I may go to Brighton or I may go to Crystal Palace. We'll see. On Sunday I'm off to Lord's again and then Monday will see me off for lunch with Tommy Dog at a Thames-side pub. It should be good. This evening I've had a couple of beers with the stone giant from Hellboy 2 guys and now I'm sat at home with toast and honey with the cricket on the radio. Life has just got a lot better and less stressful.

Casting Call

2008-08-19T15:00:00.000+01:00

For one of the projects I'm doing at work an in depth analysis of human facial skin qualities is needed. One of the things I thought would really help would be a good plaster cast of a human face and since I'd feel bad about bullying someone else into doing it, and I wouldn't want to ask anyone to do something I wouldn't do myself, I spent most of Sunday morning in a variety of very sexy outfits. First off is this skin tight, see-through polythene top. Note the handles at the bottom and its distinct resemblance to a bin bag with arm and neck holes cut in it.

Next up, once I had my skin-tight (spotting the theme?) rubber hat on, my glamourous assistant poured dental alginate all over my my face and made sure it was massaged into all the cracks and crannies. My world went dark and strange smelling for a while.

The next item was several layers of plaster bandage, applied to support the mould. The next photo is taken at the moment when the plaster is drying and becoming quite hot, as it does, whilst I listen to Rammstein. My world is now very dark and smells of algae and hot plaster.

After waiting for ten minutes for the plaster to harden I was finally able to start wriggling my face and after a few minutes of this the mould came loose and I emerged back into the light following a very strange a calustrophobic half hour. The mould, when angled to the light in a certain way looked like a positive image which was odder yet:

Here's the mould filled with good ol' plaster of paris:

After another couple of hours to allow the plaster to really set hard I carefuly lifted the plaster bandage support off the mould and then began peeling the mould itself away from the cast. This is quite nerve-wracking. iI you screw it up you have to start again because you destroy the mould pulling it away from the cast. Fortunately this worked out OK:

A bit of a clean up to remove any loose lumps of plaster or alginate that stuck to the mould:

And here's the finished article.

I find it very odd to look at. Because I'm more used to seeing my face in a mirror I find it weird to see it the "right way round" and although I recognise the face I don't think it looks much like me. Tinseltroos on the other hand is equally freaked out because, she feels, it looks exactly like me. She wasn't too freaked out though as she now wants me to cast her face. That'll have to wait for another Sunday though.

All Off To Lord's

2008-08-17T22:25:00.003+01:00

It was the Friends Provident Final on Saturday and this event saw myself, Papa Atrocity and my chum Tommy Dog meeting up at St John's Wood tube station at the unpleasantly early for a Saturday hour of half past nine. I left Schossadlerflug at 8.20 so that I could pick up supplies for lunch en route through Marylebone. Once we'd collected ourselves together we pottered up to the ground where we endured the usual security bag-poking and leg-patting that the Lord's marshalls seem to like indulging themselves in. We took our seats and Kent got us underway in a pretty lacklustre fashion with both openers falling cheaply.

Tommy Dog invented a new photographic technique which invloved stuffing the lens of a small compact digicam into the eyepiece of his binoculars to get a super telephoto image albeit with lots of vignetting and chromatic aberation. I had a go too:

During the lunch interval Tommy was able to indulge in two of his other hobbies beside cricket, those of beer drinking and reading books with pictures of tanks in them.

I stuck to the beer part.

Here is a snap of Papa Atrocity looking perplexed at Number One Son. He does that a lot.

After a few splutters, Essex did what they ought to given the target they had been set and won the game with a little to spare. Here the Essex dressing room celebrates, They are in the red sweaters on the first floor of the pavilion.

All in all a very good day with a game that had more excitement that it at first appeared it would plus I got to sit outside with my dad and a buddy for a whole without a single drop of rain spoiling procedings in spite of the weather forecast. All in all, a happy time was had by all, apart from Kent and their fans.

Going On And On And On...

2008-08-15T16:27:00.002+01:00

It's been a crazy busy week. I've been organising and running a complicated photo shoot for the studio in between doing more design work for Universal. This week I also started delivering my one hour introduction lecture on art history and theory. I've been feeling pretty sick all week with a nasty chesty cough and headaches. I think I really picked the wrong week to agree to do these talks. Today's was the second session and I felt it went better than the first as I'd learned how to pace the talk a bit better. It also went better because I remembered to take two glasses of water and a cup of tea in with me to sip as I talked. Speaking continuously for an hour to a room of thirty to forty people is really hard when your throat is sore.

It's been quite fun trying to compress as much information about lighting, colour and composition as I can into an hour. Working what to include and what to leave out has proved highly perplexing. I have sixty slides to show which I whittled down from over two hundred candidates which gives you an idea of the speed of delivery I'm aiming for. I'm always nervous that I don't have enough material prepared to fill an hour but so far I've managed to do the talk both times in a hour exactly. I have no idea where the time goes when I'm speaking, I get a third of the way through my notes, panic because I'm sure I've only been talking for ten minutes, look down at my watch and discover that it is in fact forty minutes since I began. I've done that twice now, perhaps next week when I do it all again a couple more times I'll have accumulated the confidence not to look at my watch for reassurance.

As is always the case, once the talk is over and I ask if anyone has question no-one asks any or gives any impression of having had a good time but I don't think they fell asleep so I'm still claiming it as a win.

Tomorrow I'm off to Lord's with my dad and my pal Tommy Dog to watch the county cricket final. I suspect we may not actually get to watch much as the weather forecast is pretty bad, so we may in fact be spending a day grumbling under an umbrella. Oh well, I keep my fingers crossed.

I don't have much else to say right now, I'm all tired and spacey so I think a quiet evening and an early night are in order.

VFX Artist T Shirt

2008-08-13T22:18:00.002+01:00

VFX Artist T Shirt, originally uploaded by Mr Atrocity.

After having a grumble with other VFX people today I decided to do us a T-shirt that sums up how we collectively as a group feel. Having read yet another review of Hellboy 2 today where the film is praised for using "real" men-in-suit effects rather than CGI and then goes on to praise scenes that are nothing other than CGI I felt the time was right for a graphic complaint. The optional tag-line I might add on the back of the shirt would read, "Ruining cinema one pixel at a time."

T Party

2008-08-10T17:01:00.003+01:00

This weekend has been Tinsetroos Birthday Festival. She began the celebration on Thursday with dinner with her folks whilst I was at home with the flat to myself wrapping her presents. The main social event was karaoke on Friday night. Everyone knows that T likes to sing and so twelve of us packed into a wee room at Cousin Jills to belt out a few standards.

In a slight break with tradition I opted to sing Money for Nothing rather than my usual Johnny Cash numbers as I felt me and Mr Knopfler have similar vocal range (not a lot). I didn't manage the Sting parts though as they well beyond my limited range. I was quite pleased with my "Hoola moola that's the way you do, money for nothing and your chicks for free" complete with hint of geordie accent. As is traditional there was also a rendition of Guns Don't Kill People, Rappers Do with highly exaggerated welsh accents later on. T and her school-chum KG put everyone else to shame by actually being able to sing really well. It took a collective chorus of Europe's The Final Countdown to takes us back to the ridiculous from the sublime. This part of the evening is immortalised on video though I don't think it's really suitable for public consumption. It does prove that we'd all drunk a lot more than I remember though. Further evidence for this may be viewed below:

Yesterday T opened her presents from me which included some crazy Japanese socks, a T-shirt I designed and printed for her, Guitar Hero - Aerosmith, and a few other treats. The weather was filthy all day so we only went out for brunch and then scuttled back to Schossadlerflug until the evening when we got all dressed up and went out for dinner to Rasoi Vineet Bhatia which is a superb Indian restaurant in Mayfair. It was astonishingly good, certainly in my top ten meals I've had. Amongst the delights I had included tandoori salmon, minted chicken, duck confit with a coconut sauce and a, and this is no lie, fois gras crême brulée which was barmy but brilliant. Two and half happy hours later we rolled out back into the night and made our way home holding our contented fat bellies.

Today we've bummed around the flat as, once again, the weather has been shitty all day. As I write this T is shredding on Guitar Hero and showing Joe Perry and Brad Whitford how it's done. Metaaaaaaal!

Guitar Design Part 2

2008-08-06T14:36:00.003+01:00

Guitar Design 2, originally uploaded by Mr Atrocity.

I've been tweaking the design for my imaginary guitar a bit. I saw that Fender have brought out a tribute to David Gilmour's signature black strat from the 60s-70s and I rather fell in love with the dark maple neck, black paint and white pickups and knobs look so I applied it to my design. I've changed the body shape subtley too by making the top bout a wee bit wider and shifting it back a little to give a more slanted shape. I think it's an improvement but I'll keep playing to see if anything else pops into my head.

And Two Downers

2008-08-04T13:41:00.003+01:00

Following on from the three lovely things of the last post, Sunday brought two not so good ones. Firstly Michael Vaughan resigned as England cricket captain following the series loss to South Africa. I have always thought he was a first rate captain even when dealing with a sub-par side and he is one of the most elegant batsmen I've seen. England will miss him and I worry that they will appoint Kevin Pietersen as the new captain which could spell disaster. Great players don't necessarily make great captains and I fear that will prove to be so should Pietersen get the nod. Boo.

Yesterday afternoon Tinseltroos and I finally went to see the insanely hyped and well-reviewed The Dark Knight. To say it didn't live up to expectation doesn't even begin to cover it. You may expect a more detailed critique when I have few spare minutes. At present I'm a bit too busy on next summer's blockbuster fodder. Boo some more.

Three Good Things

2008-08-02T21:18:00.003+01:00

I've had a culturally very pleasing week. On Monday, Tinseltroos and I went to The Empire cinema in Leicester Square to see WALL-E, the latest film from Pixar. The last Pixar movie I'd seen was The Incredibles which hadn't excited me much. Up to that point I'd seen every film from the studio as a matter of faith the moment it opened in the cinema and I hadn't missed one since Toy Story. So I'd had a few years off, Cars and Ratatouille came and went and I have yet to see either. I felt rather differently about WALL-E. I'd been careful not to spoil myself too much but I had seen a teaser trailer and a few stills, both of which convinced me I had to see the film. The beauty of the imagery quite took my breath away and I found the notion of a story the romantic leads of which cannot talk beguiling. So I was pretty excited to be seeing the film. On the other hand I didn't want to fall into the trap of having unreasonable expectations either so I'd consciously tried to temper my enthusiasm. I needn't have worried, the film is a master piece. The story is a clever fairy tale with all the allegory that implies, managing to be both intelligent but not cynical as I find many animated films to be these days. The characters were a delight and credit must be given not only to the animators but also to Ben Burtt who crafted the audio. Though they don't talk, WALL-E and EVE can make sound and you can rely on the man who created R2-D2's vocal performance in the Star Wars films to come up with goods. There is real emotion even without dialogue. The film was, of course, absolutely stunning to look at. Th level of detail in everything, the design and the lighting set a new standard for animation and every frame was a delight to behold. The last film I cried in was Mulholland Drive which I finally saw about three years ago, I don't mind admitting there was a tear in my eye at the end of WALL-E.

On Thursday night I went to my first Prom concert of 2008 with my buddy Hegl.It was a semi staged production of L'incoronazione di Poppea by Monteverdi. The music was performed by a small period orchestra, the same one I saw accompany Purcell's The Faerie Queen a couple of years ago I fancy. The music and singing was first rate throughout and you could quite see why Nero fell for the charms of Poppea: it was a very sexy production. Although I knew the rough plot before I went I made sure to buy one of the librettos that The BBC makes available for such productions so that none of the subtlety was lost. I was really glad I did this as it revealed the more subtle ebbing and flowing of the plot and the relationships between the characters. The show was three hours not including the interval so it was gone eleven when we stepped out back into the London streets having spent three hours transported back to the Roman Empire via seventeenth century Venice.

Today I acted upon a recommendation I'd been given to see the Vilhelm Hamershøi show at the Royal Academy. I was almost completely unaware of his work before visiting but I am very glad I went. The pictures, painted toward the end of the nineteenth century feel like a mixture of Vermeer and Edward Hopper, with a distinctly Whistler edge to the colour. The paintings are often of empty rooms or if there is a figure he or she often has their back to us and is seemingly lost in their own thoughts. The muted hues and enigmatic characters led many of today's patrons to grumble about the pictures being "miserable". I think they missed the point; they aren't sombre, but they are quiet paintings, ones that revel in silent contemplation and as such I found them very moving. The sense of atmosphere and stillness is not something often associated with modernish painting and it was all the more refreshing for that.

Too Much Too Young Too Fast

2008-07-31T19:00:00.000+01:00

Talking to Vivswindy about music and film, as we inevitably do, got me thinking that it's been a while since I put a compilation tape (playlist really) together. This will be winging its way to Vivswindy soon:

Aces High : Iron Maiden
Sister Rosetta (Capture the Spirit) : The Noisettes
I Am You : Nightmares On Wax
Too Much, Too Young, Too Fast : Airbourne
Don't Know What to Do With You : The Mentalists
How Heavy This Axe : The Sword
Bultca Saturno : Paul Gilbert
Bendix 2: The Tomorrow People : Raymond Scott
Stick Pit : Buckethead
Flashlight Fight (feat. Chuck D) : The Go! Team
Be Easy : Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings
Exercise 7 : Bent
Cradle Me : Tina Grace
The Wizard : Bat For Lashes
When the Levee Breaks : Yat Kha
Dark As A Dungeon : Ramblin' Jack Elliott
Day Of The Eagle : Robin Trower

And this is what I shall be listening to for the next few days

The Worst Pies in London

2008-07-29T21:32:00.003+01:00

Over the last three months or so, T and I have been putting together costumes for my pal Vivswindy's annual fancy dress party. Long-time readers may remember that two years ago I went as R J MacReady from The Thing and T went as the dead Laura Palmer from Twin Peaks. Last year's barbecue was cancelled so that the host could marry his beloved, though he did arrive at the wedding in a Back to the Future equipped Delorean so all was not lost.

This year T and I decided to couple up on the costumes and it was decided that Sweeney Todd and Mrs Lovett would offer us an opportunity to get creative. I bought a vintage style shirt as this was beyond our tailoring skills but we made my waistcoat, razor, razor holster, wig and gloves from scratch. T went to Camden's finest goth emporia for items for her outfit but made the top herself and we made the pie from scratch too. Those fingers we made a while back? Those were for the pie. Here I am, blind as a bat as I decided to go without glasses for as long as possible to improve the look of the costume. T also made me up to look suitably ghoulish:

Here's the two of us hamming it up for the camera

And this is the inevitable "someone pretends to eat the papier mâché pie" picture:

Vivswindy, the host, always has a meticulously researched and sourced costume, this year The Rocketeer from Joe Johnston's film of the same name. Here he is talking to the Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz. Where could his comrades be?

Oh here they are. Dorothy, The Cowardly Lion, The Scarecrow and The Tin Man are clearly being shown something extremely filthy on that digital camera by the nun. For shame.

There were a great many supervillains present also. Here Two Face poses with his fiancee Poison Ivy. I do like Ivy's wellington boots.

Vivswindy's brother did a marvelous turn as Jareth from Labyrinth complete with a pair of Darth Maul socks stuffed down his tights for extra, err, presence. Here he is dancing with HW who came as Sarah, also from Labyrinth. She is trying not to stare down.

At some point in the following morning, I wasn't wearing a watch for authenticity reasons, we all crawled off to bed. I took this snap of Tinseltroos to show off her magnificent back-combed hair. She normally has very straight hair and this is the most volume I've ever seen:

I simply gave my hair to Keanu for safe keeping.

Summer Pasta

2008-07-23T22:35:00.003+01:00

Here's a quick, quite hearty but fresh and summery pasta recipe I concocted last week. My work chum CT has a garden in which she and her beloved grow courgettes amongst other things. They have a surfeit of them at the moment so in a fit of aggressive hospitality I suddenly found I had three courgettes all of a sudden. This is what I did:

Slice the courgettes into disks and fry them in olive oil and a little butter.
Cook the pasta.
Whilst the two main ingredients are cooking, chop some mint and grate some parmesan.
Squeeze the juice of half a lemon over the courgettes and chuck in a fistful of mint.
When the pasta's done, drain it, return it to the pan off the heat and stir in some crême fraiche and half the parmesan.
Dish out this mixture into pasta bowls and pour the cougettes on top.
Sprinkle mint and the rest of the parmesan over the courgettes. Season to taste.
Eat.

This one took very little time and was mighty tasty. All the better for home grown courgettes of course.

Hellboy 2 Cast and Crew

2008-07-20T14:18:00.003+01:00

I was up bright and early today for the cast and crew screening of Hellboy 2. I know it's been out for over a week in The States but it doesn't open for a month here so it was still a sneak peak by UK standards.

It's always a mixed bag of emotions seeing a film you've devoted so much time and energy to for the first time. One part is relief that the film definitely must, finally, be done since you are attending a screening of it and the other is wondering whether all the hard work was worth it. I have only really loved one film that I've done, that being Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I've liked others and most have been ho-hum, but that's pretty much how any statistical breakdown of film quality would pan out; you're only going to get the odd gem. Hellboy 2 certainly isn't the worst film I've worked on but it definitely ends up in the ho-hum category for me. My personal moment of happiness was that during the scene I did, Danny Elfman saw fit to put some walloping good music over the top which helped immensely. I've done quite badly with the scoring over the sequences I've worked on in the past. The big fleet reveal shot in Troy always makes me wince because it had such sweeping epic music in the trailers and then nothing so robust in the film itself resulting, I felt, in a rather lacklustre experience. Today though, Danny Elfman did us proud and though he has no clue who we are we thank him anyway.

Hellboy 2 also felt a little odd compared to other shows I've done because of the sheer amount of it I'd seen before the screening. Usually a studio will award chunks of work to several VFX houses so if you work in one of those houses you'll only see the bits that you're working on and the rest of the film will be a mystery. The company I work for did pretty much all of the VFX work for Hellboy 2 and so there was very little of it that was unfamiliar. I don't think that helped my appreciation of the finished film much. A film that's about magical spectacle is hindered if you've seen all the magical spectacle a hundred times before. On the other hand it was nice to se it with the soundtrack - we tend to work just to picture so we may not hear the sound at all unless you're animating a character. I know people who worked for months on Sweeney Todd who were very surprised to find out that it was a musical, though they did admit that "Johnny Depp had looked like he was talking a bit funny".

It's now a couple of hours after the screening and I'm glad I saw the film with the people I worked with. The film may not have been great but the people who worked on it are and I think it's them and the actual craft of making this stuff that floats my boat rather than simply how good or well-received the end product is. That said I do hope that one day I'm lucky enough to work on a truly great film.

My quick, capsule review of Hellboy 2 for anyone who hasn't already been would be that if you liked the first one, you might like this, it's OK for a B picture but don't go in expecting greatness. 5/10

500th Post

2008-07-17T14:00:00.002+01:00

For my 500th post, here's a few photos of the social odds and sods I have been engaged in over the last week, it's not all that exciting but it's all I got:

Saturday was a 30th birthday party full of chums and sunshine.

Some of the guests expressed their true feelings for me.

Formation dancing occurred.

People thought deeply about the issues of the day.

And, inevitably, everybody had a go at wearing my glasses.

On Sunday at Lord's for the test match.

This was neither my first, nor last beer.

The crowd celebrates the sole wicket to fall in the day.

The Gaucho Grill or An Object Lesson in How Not to Do It

2008-07-16T10:19:00.004+01:00

Last night, as part of the ongoing "T-fest", a series of drinks and dinners my chum T is having to commemorate her imminent departure from this Sceptred Isle back across the Atlantic to the Land of the Brave, a group of us went to The Gaucho Grill, an upmarket Argentinian steak house in Piccadilly. I had been twice before, both at lunchtimes with a buddy, and both times I had eaten in the bar on the ground floor which still has pretensions to grandeur. The walls are covered in large gilt framed cow hides, the wall paper is very dark as are the floors, furnishings and tables. I think the desired effect is to make city banking types feel like they're somewhere special and perhaps a little naughty.

Last night we had a table in the main restaurant which makes the bar look tawdry. In addition to all the paraphernalia mentioned above there were large glass chandeliers and brass candle holders rounding out the overall effect of the apartment of a 1980s stockbroker who made his money trading in cattle and wished to celebrate this fact wherever possible. We were escorted to our table in a polite if not very friendly manner by one of a number of identikit generically pretty waitresses who seemed to hover in profusion without actually doing anything. They, however, would have been vastly preferable, due their bland inoffensiveness, to our actual waiter who I shall call Simon.

Simon would be difficult to age as he has spent so much time on the sunbeds that his skin has the quality of parched vellum. I will guess late 20s and leave it at that. Simon is possibly Spanish, possibly Argentinian and clearly thought, ten years ago, that he was going to make it big as a model when he came to London. He has that toned body that serves no practical use and is merely designed to serve as a fleshy coat hanger when prancing down a cat-walk. Unfortunately for Simon there are many, many much prettier, and these days far younger boys around who also want to make it big as a model, so Simon was not prancing down a runway, he was serving us dinner, in as rude and condescending a manner as he could muster. The permanently fixed rictus smile was ghastly enough but behind the eyes burned a cold loathing of everyone else that was frankly a little disturbing to behold. Had he been good at his job none of this would have mattered. Good service is an art-form. I have the utmost respect for waiting staff who are good at their job as it's bloody hard work and there is real skill to it. Sadly, whatever the knack, Simon doesn't have it.

He began by showing us the cuts of steak and telling us how we may have them cooked. This kind of thing annoys me. It is wonderful when waiters are knowledgeable and helpful if asked but I know what fillet, sirloin and rib-eye steaks look like thank you and I don't need some preening twit talking down to me as if I were five. In fairness to Simon all the staff do this, I assume it is company policy which perhaps begins to give you some idea of what kind of place The Gaucho Grill is. After this Simon really began to irritate. Firstly he insulted my friend AJ who had been chosen to pick the wine. Simon felt that the wine she had chosen wasn't of a "good enough quality" to go with the steak. Two things: one, if the wine is not good enough to go with steak, what is it doing on the wine list of a steak restaurant? Second, let's not kid ourselves, what he was actually saying was "I would like you to choose a more expensive wine so I make more money out of the compulsory service charge". This angered me immensely as it is rude, shows ignorance and tells you yet more about The Gaucho Grill's modus operandi. He followed up this exercise in charm and manners by asking at what temperature I would like my steak. I arched an eyebrow in confusion. Temperature? Well I'd like it cooked over a very high temperature and then have it served at a warm temperature. He clearly thought that you cook a blue steak by cooking it for the same amount of time as a well done steak but at a much lower temperature. Jesus H Christ. This really made me roll my eyes. Thankfully, aside from Simon's inability to get our order right, which we discovered when the side dishes arrived, that was his final contribution to spoiling my evening.

Onto the food. The food is expensive; a piece of steak is twenty quid. That's just for the meat; side dishes are extra, quite a lot extra in fact. I ordered grilled vegetables as my side order, priced at seven pounds and fifty pence. For nearly a tenner you get one slice of anonymous tasting aubergine, two slices of courgette, one piece of pepper and two fingers of out of season tasteless asparagus. These vegetables, I assume in order to save time in cooking, had clearly been boiled first and then just given thirty seconds on the grill at the end before being dumped on a plate. They were all bland and lacked flavour or texture. The steak itself was served medium rare. I opted for sirloin because it should be more flavoursome but was told I couldn't have it rare because the fat down the sides needed to be cooked to medium rare at minimum to be properly done. I could have pointed out that in places where they care about such things you cook the steak by holding it in a pair of tongs sideways so just the fat is touching the pan for a minute to cook it, then you can do the meat itself to whatever degree you like. But that takes effort and The Gaucho Grill doesn't do effort, it does lazy and rude indifference. My steak would have been fine had I bought it from a super market and it had cost about six quid. For more than three times the price I expected a lot better. My colleague who had fillet steak, of which I had a little taste, fared much better than I, for his steak was pretty good. However in a steak house, and especially one that takes itself as seriously as The Gaucho Grill clearly does I expect very good steak every time. Oh, and The Gaucho Grill doesn't even give you a steak knife to eat with. You have to hack your way through your disappointing meal with a regular dining knife.

Puddings were uninspired. Amongst the nonsense you could choose was a "carpaccio of fruit", I kid you not. All this was of course were a few thinly sliced pieces of raw fruit. Here, actually, is the dish which best sums up the restaurant and its attitude toward, and expectations of, its customers. "Carpaccio of fruit": let's take this apart. First can you have a carpaccio of fruit? No. Carpaccio is thinly sliced raw beef or tuna and it got its name from the Italian painter, Vittore Carpaccio, who was noted for his use of bloody red pigments in his paintings. The very etymology of the name itself implies rawness and blood, most emphatically not a couple of slices of apple. So it's an oxymoron and an oxymoron from an establishment whose sole aim, one would think, would be to understand at the deepest level the blood and the rawness: the very essence of the steak experience. Roland Barthes' essay, "Steak and Chips" in his book Mythologies takes pages to dismantle and analyse the deep relationship between us and steak, how we claim the strength of the bull from eating it, the ceremony of its acquisition, its preparation and its ingestion. Steak is a profoundly symbolic food with a massive history and mythology that gets right to the core of the human hunter gatherer turned sophisticated farmer turned connoisseur experience...

"Carpaccio of fruit".

That's what this place thinks of its customers. It sounds posh and fancy but it's a nonsense, a plain, poorly executed dish that has ideas and pretensions far beyond what it can deliver.

My pudding was an ordinary chocolate mousse cake served on a base of something that had the consistency of shoe insole and tasted little better. I paid forty five pounds for all this, including a compulsory service charge for some of the rudest and most ignorant service I have ever received. I haven't been so angry at a restaurant since this experience nearly three years back.

Fame and Glory (kinda)

2008-07-14T11:00:00.002+01:00

There's an article up on one of the Visual Effects sites about how we did the work on Hellboy 2. I even get quoted. Crikey.

Guitar Design

2008-07-11T14:01:00.002+01:00

Apropos of nothing I was talking with a couple of guitar minded chums about the state of guitar design. We had come to this topic because one of our number was looking for something "a bit different", which is shorthand for "not a strat, tele or Les Paul". This led me to thinking about those guitars and why they dominate as they do.

Of the three I think the strat is the greatest, it has the most, for its time, revolutionary design, it's functional, never out of fashion and eminently practical as a workhorse instrument. In fact it's basically perfect. It's a situation very much like when John Kemp Starley designed the Safety Bicycle in 1885 and with it invented the bicycle as we know it today (diamond frame, chain driven rear wheel, etc.). He basically got it right in one go, an amazing achievement of bold design and engineering, especially considering that the Penny Farthing was the state of the art in bicycle design at the time. Just as Starley hit the nail firmly on the head in 1885 so did George Fullerton, Leo Fender and Freddie Tavares in 1954. The bolt on neck, the solid contoured body, the exciting bright paint finishes, the whammy bar on and on. It's just perfect. I look at Tinseltroos' Strat and it still amazes me 54 years after its invention.

But does that mean that guitar design is done? Is it not worth trying anything else? Sure, there are guitars like the Parker Fly that tried to reinvent the instrument with limited success. For me, the Strat cannot be bettered in its practicality, non-fussiness of its engineering and the manner of its construction. I like basic electric guitars with all the bits bolted together; it's unfussy and if anything breaks it's quite straight-forward to get a replacement part. The only thing that might be worth playing with is body and headstock design because this is a question of taste and style rather than pure engineering common sense. Even so, there are many limitations when designing a guitar body: the neck and bridge have to fit in a certain configuration for intonation to work properly, you need to be able to rout out the right areas to install the electrics, you need to consider having enough mass for the guitar to resonate but not too much so it becomes unwieldy, although that never stopped Rick Nielsen. Finally you have to think about how it would feel like to have the guitar on: could you play it sitting down? A Flying V, for example, is a strictly standing up only instrument and that bothers some people.

The more I thought about it, the trickier the problem became but it intrigued me all the more too. So I decided to have a go. I love the proportions of my Charvel Strat, and I knew what bridge and pickups I'd want if it were my guitar so I laid out those components from scanned photos in Photoshop and started sketching body shapes around them. It took ages to come up with something that I liked aesthetically that would also work as a guitar. I finally appreciated why designing something new is so hard. Not only do you have to compete with something that is basically perfect already, but there are so many constraints that trying anything else is very difficult. In the end, this is what I came up with:

Run to the Hills, Run For Your Life

2008-07-07T20:30:00.002+01:00

In stark contrast to the subtle and cultured exigencies of Sibelius last week, Saturday night saw Tinseltroos, Sisoftroos, AJS, JJG and myself on a train to Twickenham, the home of English Rugby Union. We weren't there for sport though, we were there to rock. Iron Maiden were playing their first show on UK soil in 2 years and we had to be there.

Iron Maiden became a fixture in our Rock Friday playlists that those of us working on the stone giant for Hellboy 2 put together to keep us going during the project and when we found out about the tour we booked tickets there and then. This was in November last year and the anticipation has been building ever since.

We arrived toward the end of the main support act. The only downside of the gig was that none of the support bands really appealed to any of us but that was a minor gripe.

Having queued for what seemed like 150 hours I finally got a T-shirt, a nice Eddie Cyborg one. Very, very 1980s 2000AD style artwork, just how I like them.

As we took our seats the stage was shrouded in black drapes to keep a sense of mystery. This was finally pulled down just as the show was about to begin revealing an ancient Egyptian themed Powerslave stage design complete with enormous painted back drop.

And then Maiden began. They began with Aces High and continued with a string of classics that kept the forty odd thousand people there very happy indeed. My highlight was probably Run to the Hills, but that's always been my favourite tune of theirs. The pyrotechnics and stage props became more theatrical and extreme as the show progressed ending up with a fifteen foot tall cyborg Eddie marching around the stage as an even larger mummified Eddie reared and writhed in the background. Top stuff.

The show finished after two hours of top-notch entertainment and the five of us, with broad grins, joined the throng to wait for trains to take us back to London.

Crazyish Weather

2008-07-06T20:20:00.003+01:00

Whilst we don't get the serious extremes of weather here in the UK that other parts of the world experience I couldn't help but notice the frequent changes from bright sunshine to rain clouds today in London. Here are a couple of timelapse movies I shot out of the window at Schossadlerflug with my wee digicam.

Sibelius Times Three

2008-07-03T22:04:00.002+01:00

I went my usual classical music going chums to the Barbican last night to see three pieces by Sibelius played by the London Symphony Orchestra under Sir Colin Davis. The only piece on the bill with which I was in any way familiar was the 4th Symphony, which I adore for its almost unrelenting moodiness. Even Shostakovitch generally ended on a high note.

The concert opened up with The Oceanides which was apparently composed on an Atlantic sea crossing; at least in part. It was superb with the orchestra flowing and moving as a unit, unlike many of the recent concerts I've attended where I got the distinct impression that the musicians scarcely knew the score. Sir Colin, who's getting on a bit these days, was pretty sprightly once he got into the swing of things though with his woofy hair and small physique he rather reminded me of Widow Twanky as he tottered to and from the conductor's rostrum.

The second piece was Sibelius' Violin Concerto featuring Nikolaj Znaider as the soloist. As well as being worth a great many points in Scrabble, Znaider was an astonishing musician. The wonderful acoustics of the hall helped but he made every note count and played with passion and total commitment throughout. A really special performance all in all.

The 4th Symphony came after the interval and once again the orchestra really delivered. Whilst the performance wasn't up to the Simon Bolivar Orchestra at last year's Proms (I doubt I'll ever see as electric a concert as that again though) it was right up there with the best of the rest. I came out of the auditorium at about 9.30 really feeling like I'd witnessed something good for the spirit and with that I sauntered through Clerkenwell, back to Holborn and home.