9/11 2001-2011
Showing posts with label ...out of time. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ...out of time. Show all posts
You wanted freedom. I wanted you
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t came as something of a surprise, last Sunday, to find a certain record sitting pretty at the top of my iTunes playlist.
Somehow, this wonderful pop tune has managed to outstrip (in terms of play counts) many worthier tunes: Alicia Keys Empire State of Mind, Annie Lennox's Why, Mercury Rev's Holes, Shirley Bassey's This Is My Life... Even my beloved, brilliant Nothing Like The Rain, by 2 Unlimited.
This song isn't even a "proper" song; it's a TV theme. Now that's sad. But what's really sad is the story of this record, When You Go Away, the theme to failed BBC soap Eldorado, by EastEnders legend Simon May, and performed by Johnny Griggs.
Oh, poor Eldorado. The BBC's white elephant, the big hit that never was. Telly history is littered with the corpses of failed, eye-wateringly expensive follies, TV that's hyped as the Next Big Thing, only to fall at the ratings hurdle.
Maybe you, dear reader, have a one-season-wonder show that provokes pangs of "What could have been..." Is it Metrosexuality, The Tripods, Savannah, Invasion, or maybe, the most recent, the BBC's Survivors.
Back in 1992 a new soap launched, called Eldorado, set Spain's Costa Del Sol. It didn't work out. It was over-hyped and up against impossible deadlines. There were problems with the actors, the storylines, and even the sound. Its executive producer - EastEnders' creator Julia Smith - had a nervous breakdown. Ratings were low, and the press merciless. And then, just when the endless problems seemed to finally have been ironed out, the grim reaper - in the form of a BBC suit - swung the axe. The epic standing set in "a pine forest on a hillside near Coin" was left to gather dust and the actors went home.
Back in 1992 a new soap launched, called Eldorado, set Spain's Costa Del Sol. It didn't work out. It was over-hyped and up against impossible deadlines. There were problems with the actors, the storylines, and even the sound. Its executive producer - EastEnders' creator Julia Smith - had a nervous breakdown. Ratings were low, and the press merciless. And then, just when the endless problems seemed to finally have been ironed out, the grim reaper - in the form of a BBC suit - swung the axe. The epic standing set in "a pine forest on a hillside near Coin" was left to gather dust and the actors went home.
Not only was it a terrible waste (given time, Eldorado could have been a fantastic success), but its failure led to the eventual decimation of TV drama in the UK. The BBC wanted another crowd-pleasing soap, and when Eldorado failed, it looked to existing properties to fill the void. Casualty, hitherto a gritty nighttime drama, was converted into a feeble-minded, pseudo-soap peopled by ex-soap stars and models-turned-actors. ITV followed suit, trashing the formerly brilliant cop drama The Bill, turning it into a tabloid-baiting sleaze-fest. Great shows that were about real people, doing real jobs, played out by real actors, and written by real writers, turned to crap.
Today, British TV is a wasteland, populated by the remnants of those dramas-turned-psueodo-soap (to this day, the BBC churns out year-round episodes of Casualty/Holby City) and so-called reality hell. Let's not talk about the excrement smeared across the once noble Doctor Who. All that's left are the soaps: EastEnders and Coronation Street flourish, beautifully; supposedly mediocre mediums in which great things happen.
As for Eldorado, it bequeathed us this exquisite theme tune: a paean to unrequited love. "You wanted freedom, I wanted you," the lyrics go. Isn't that brilliant? I could listen to this gorgeous, guilty pleasure forever: and in my mind's eye, an empty, dusty mountain village waiting for lights, cameras and action that will never come.
Ah, the stories that could've been told. Not just in Eldorado, but there, everafter.
Download the full MP3 for free, here.
Remember me
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verybody hates banks and insurance companies. There's no reason to like them. Let's face it, they're evil, right up there with Osama bin Laden, Donald Trump and Janine out of EastEnders.
That's why all their advertising is defensive: Lloyds with their cute dreamy animation, Natwest with their Customer Charter BS and Halifax with their tortuous singing employees. They're human! They're cuddly! They're here to help!
A few years ago, insurance giant Aviva rebranded itself (or something) and made an advert filled with lots of famous people we all recognise and/or love, set to The Chemical Brothers amazing The Pills Won't Help You Now. It's a wonderful ad, beautifully manipulative; so manipulative, in fact, that you have to rein in your emotions and remind yourself Aviva is An Evil Insurance Company, and you can not, must not feel any love for them.
Anyway, the best bit of the ad comes around the 0.42 second mark, where we see Macaulay Culkin eating popcorn in an empty movie theatre. His face looms large on the screen in front of him, and over The Pills Won't Help You Now, he says, simply, "Remember me." Oh, eternity weeps...
It's utterly, utterly brilliant, mind-blowingly devious, and as moving as everything that's ever made you cry. Is he saying "remember me" to us, or to himself? Or both? Aargh! In an instant, we're transported back twenty years to a little boy Home Alone, and his subsequent annihilation at the hands of the evil whore that's show biz, to everything that was, and is, and will be. It's simultaneously on message, and yet so much more. The feeling is worse than Bodie shooting Wallace in The Wire, or seeing Gene Anthony Ray at his peak in Fame. That final, awful gunshot in Milk. This isn't an ad, it's arthouse cinema!
We're the same age, Macaulay Culkin and I, so it gets under the skin. But it's meant to.
Gee, I just love Aviva. So where do I sign...?
Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art
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WE ARE DERANGED. We are psychopaths, sociopaths, up the garden path,' said Tanith. 'We are mad, and you are trapped with us.'"
Back in the 1990s when Doctor Who was off the air, Virgin Books - deciding there might still be some life in the brand - decided to publish original Doctor Who novels.
Following directly on from where the TV series left off, the books were written with an adult audience in mind, and were peppered (controversially) with swearing, violence, drink'n'drugs, sex and - in the first book, famously - paedophilia. One of the later novels was written by Queer As Folk impresario Russell T. Davies. Set on a London sink estate, Damaged Goods featured a middle-aged man who visited cruising grounds for gay sex whilst one of the Doctor's then-companions, straight buff blond cop-from-the-future Chris Cwej, was enticed into some boy-on-boy action of his own. Pretty astonishing developments for a series that started out as a kids show in 1963, and - despite the strides made under Davies between 2005 and 2009 - was this year desperately trying to offend no one and please Disneyophiles.
The Virgin novels were 90s cool, angst-ridden, edgy, challenging and very, very dark. They electrified my young mind, and fed my lust for words, for creativity, for drama. So much so that a short story I managed to get published featured a cruising sequence in a park based entirely on what I'd read in Damaged Goods - yes, Doctor Who taught me about cottaging.
The New Adventures were ahead of their time, and very much of their time. One of the last novels was entitled Eternity Weeps. Christ on a stick - what angst-ridden teenage boy wouldn't want to read a book with a name like that?
ka-os|theory presents the best of The New Adventures...
Cat's Cradle: Witch Mark by Andrew Hunt
'Spare no sympathy for those creatures. They were witches, they deserved to die.'
"A coach crashes on the M40. All the passengers are killed. The bodies carry no identification; they are wearing similar new clothes. And each has a suitcase full of banknotes.
A country vet delivers a foal. The mare has a deep wound in her forehead. In the straw, the vet finds a tapered horn. In the darkening and doomed world known to its inhabitants as Tir na n-Og, the besieged humans defend the walls of their citadel Dinorben against mythical beasts and demons.
The TARDIS’s link with the Eye of Harmony is becoming ever more tenuous and is in urgent need of repair. But the time machine takes the Doctor and Ace to a village in rural Wales, and a gateway to another world."
Transit by Ben Aaronovitich
'Oh no, not again...'
"It's the ultimate in mass transit systems, a network of interstitial tunnels that bind the planets of the solar system together. Earth to Pluto in forty minutes with a supersave non-premium off-peak travelcard.
But something is living in the network, chewing its way to the very heart of the system and leaving a trail of death and mutation behind it.
Once again a reluctant Doctor is dragged into human history. Back down amongst the joyboys, freesurfers, chessfans, politicians and floozies, where friends are more dangerous than enemies and one man's human being is another's psychotic killing machine.
Once again the Doctor is all that stands between humanity and its own mistakes."
Sanctuary by David A. McIntee
The Doctor pointed at Bernice. 'The wench’s mind is addled,' he said. 'Arrest her before she spreads her ungodly heresy.'
"The TARDIS is caught in the gravitational field of a dark star. The Doctor and Bernice are forced to evacuate, and find themselves stranded in medieval France - a brutal time of crusades and wars of succession.
As the Albigensian crusade draws to its bloody conclusion, men inflict savage brutalities on each other in the name of religion. And the TARDIS crew find their lives intertwined with warring Templars, crusaders and heretics. While the Doctor begins a murder investigation in a besieged fortress, Bernice finds herself drawn to an embittered mercenary who has made the heretics’ fight his own. And they both realize that to leave history unchanged they may have to sacrifice far more than their lives."
Sky Pirates by Dave Stone
Avast, ye scurvies!
"Hoist the mainbrace, splice the anchor and join the Doctor and Benny for the maiden voyage of the good ship Schirron Dream, as it ventures into the fungral dark of air spaces occupied by the Sloothes - those villainous slimy evil shapeshifting monsters of utter and unmitigated evil that have placed a system under siege!
Watch Roslyn Forrester and Chris Cwej have a rough old time of it in durance vile! Meet the intrepid Captain Li Shao, and the beautiful if somewhat single-minded Sun Samurai Leetha t’Zhan! Roast on the dunes of Prometheus, swelter in the fetid jungles of Anea, swim with the Obi-Amphibians of Elysium and freeze off inconvenient items of anatomy on the ice wastes of Reklon in an apparently doomed search for the Eyes of the Schirron, the magickal jewels that will either save the system or destroy it utterly! Who will live? Who will die? Will the Doctor ever play the harmonium again? All these questions and many more will be answered within the coruscating, fibrillating pages of ... Sky Pirates!"
Damaged Goods by Russell T Davies
'Wherever this cocaine has travelled, it hasn't gone alone. Death has been its attendant. Death in a remarkably violent and inelegant form.'
"The Doctor, Chris and Roz, arrive at the Quadrant, a troubled council block in Thatcher's Britain. There's a new drug on the streets, a drug that's killing to a plan. Somehow, the very ordinary people of the Quadrant are involved. And so, amidst the growing chaos, a bizarre trio moves into number 43.
The year is 1987: a dead drug dealer has risen from the grave, and an ancient weapon is concealed beneath human tragedy. But the Doctor soon discovers that the things people do for their children can be every bit as deadly as any alien menace - as he uncovers the link between a special child, an obsessive woman, and a desperate bargain made one dark Christmas Eve."
Title quote: "Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art." Susan Sontag, American writer.
Youth is easily deceived, because it is quick to hope
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This beautifully evocative shot, "1980s London lad at Severn Bridge", is by photographer Mike Stokes. He writes, "A photo from the 1980s, a boy from London on a visit to South Wales tries to look disinterested as the photographer sets up his shot!
Taken at Severn Beach on the English side of the river on a Mamiya C330 with 250mm lens, FP4 film. The film was "overcooked" and almost possible to print in the darkroom, but by digital methods a very atmospheric photograph has been produced.
The teenage lad from London was staying with me at the time; he visited Wales frequently during the early 1980s and was a legacy from my London years."
I wonder what became of this 1980s boy?
Title quote: "Youth is easily deceived, because it is quick to hope." Aristotle, Greek philosopher, 384 BC – 322 BC.
Return to innocence
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What transports you right back to childhood?
This works for me: Childrens TV in Britain; the late 1980s. And was there ever anything more apt? "When he was made, they found something wrong with him: and threw him away like a piece of rubbish!"
The gay coming-of-age in 47 seconds (see if you can spot the many parallels)...
Title quote: "Return to innocence." Lyrics, Enigma - Return To Innocence (1993).
I start a picture and I finish it. I don't think about art while I work. I try to think about life
You've probably seen some of the "spiritual and erotic art" of Ugandan artist Orokie Okoth before. If you haven't, ole Garçon Stupide is here to tell you about. Ain't you lucky?
There's much, much more of Okoth's beautiful art at Afriboy - African Male Erotic Art Gallery. Learn about the artist's origins of here. There's a conversation with Orokie here.
Don't forget to visit GayUganda too.
Title quote: "I start a picture and I finish it. I don't think about art while I work. I try to think about life." Jean Michel Basquiat, American artist (1960 - 1988).
E STREET
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HERE'S AN OBSCURE piece of pop culture history I'll guarantee no one will get.Unless, that is, you were (like me) unfortunate enough to live in Australia in the early '90s. Not that it was all bad - there was the sexy, utterly bonkers, late night soap E Street.
For a young, barely teenage Garçon Stupide (in the first flush of puberty) E Street was a gift. It had it all - boys, sensational plots, boys, power mad bitches with shoulder pads... And boys. 
Then there was Mr. Bad. A few years ago, Coronation Street was pretty pleased with its serial killer storyline, but that wasn't a patch on the utterly loopy convolutions of the Mr. Bad story. Whole swathes of regular cast members were killed over the course of a year. There were surreal flashbacks. And black and silver facepaint. Mostly though, E Street was about the boys, particularly Marcus Graham's yummy Wheels, and his buff (mute) best friend Joey Valentine. Shirts came off at least once an episode, and heaving male chests were bared. They just don't make them like this anymore...
STRIPPED FOR ACTION
HANDS UP IF you're a Belasco fan?
The Brothers of New Essex: Afro-erotic Adventures (now out of print, and increasingly expensive on both Amazon.com / uk) should be a key part of any gay art collection, alongside Sadao Hasegawa (got a spare $US1,244.15?) and Tom of Finland.
Happily, Belasco's brilliant artwork can also be found at the artist's regularly updated blog. A particular joy are pictures of Belasco's sculptures, including a papier-mâché statue of the infamous Boo.
• Spanish site Gaybanana runs a cute strip called, simply, Dick. You don't need to know Spanish to follow the action, but perhaps fellow blogger and Españophile Sanya will translate for us...
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You're looking at Judgement Day, a photographic mashup by digital artist Troy Dunham, and shutterbug Jeff Eason. It's going to be auctioned off this Sunday at GLAAD's annual OUTAuction in New York City.
As those you who've wastedspent any amount of time here at ka-os|theory will know, your correspondent is a dedicated follower of Doctor Who. What you might not know, is that I'm also a devotee of Dallas, although unlike Doctor Who, that's a recent development. In fact, having reached Season 11 of the Texan epic, I've consumed 10 whole years of Dallas in less than 3. Well what was I supposed to watch - Brother & Sisters?
Combining both shows seamlessly is this utterly brilliant mash-up. Fellow blogger Sanya in España featured this back in July - or was the whole summer just a dream...?
Andrew Orton has rendered the original 1963 TARDIS console room, and manages to work his digital creation into footage from the current series. Very accurate, very cool and really quite moving...
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YOU MIGHT NOT realise it, but you're looking at the cover art for the 1964 novel Doctor Who and the Daleks (an adaptation of the second Doctor Who TV serial, The Daleks).
The difference is, this is the 1980 Japanese edition, published by Hayakawa Books of Tokyo. Artist Michiaki Sato has taken a liberal approach to drawing the Daleks, and created an even looser interpretation of the TARDIS. And is that Darth Vader slaying Skaro's metal monsters?
Four other Doctor Who novels were released in the empire of the rising sun: The Auton Invasion, The Cave Monsters, Day of the Daleks and The Doomsday Weapon. All of the books contained equally striking black and white illustrations and some colour spreads.
More about the books at On Target, where you can also see the internal illustrations.
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