Tag Archives: sk8thing

THE VHS & BETAMAX AESTHETIC

Horror film posts on this blog go triple plywood, but it’s Halloween, so something pertaining to scary movies is obligatory. The challenge is to create something obnoxious enough to alienate people I don’t want to communicate with, but to create content that at least five people might appreciate. That’s the mentality behind this site. I was going to talk about Jack Nicholson’s Margaret Howell jacket from ‘The Shining’ but its been covered elsewhere before to the point where it got a re-release in a slimmer cut. Film jackets alone could fuel a blog for years, as the Film Jackets forum proves. I like the blouson, windcheater style with the Harrington-style pockets in that plum coloured cord. Jack himself insisted on wearing the original, but with Stanley Kubrick insisting on eleven more reproductions, I’ve never known if they were made by Howell or by the wardrobe crew. Given Kubrick’s obsessiveness, I imagine the replicas were made to an equal standard and with a couple going up for auction over the years, does anybody own the original one that Jack himself favoured?

Having spent too long in video stores as a kid just before the Video Recordings Act made British tapes have to carry the same certificates as their cinematic brethren, the sight of a terrified Shelley Duvall on an oversized ‘The Shining’ box with a cracking plastic puffiness that indicated it had seen a fair few front rooms was just one of the few covers that’s etched into my consciousness. That, ‘The Incredible Melting Man’ and ‘The Beast Within’ were obsessions, but there was plenty more to pick from and some boxes promised so much carnage that they had a genuine menace about them.

This was when the British home video realm was like the Old West and nobody was policing content. Family friendly comedies, cheap actioners, splatter and porn alike all lacked formal certification, with warnings or ’18’s on tapes applied in an unofficial manner. Going to the home of friends with negligent or irresponsible parents could mean a screening of both ‘Condorman’ and ‘Nightmare In A Damaged Brain.’ Nobody seemed to care too much. Then the byproduct of the “Video Nasties” scare of 1982 kicked in and the fun was over.

I watched some of ‘The Human Centipede 2’ this weekend simply because of the BBFC’s daft decision to ban it. I imagine that I’m not alone and curiously, Google has reinstated that sense of old video store lawlessness again. Despite the film’s clever conceit, playing up to the allegations of moral rot from the first installment and getting all postmodern with it, the sweaty torture scene and scatological gross outs had me giving up after an hour. I don’t feel especially corrupted though. But that ban gave it an illicit feel that had me nervous from the start as to what lay ahead – the same way that those old VHS and Betamax horrors promised hell on earth to the point where just hitting play felt like the point of no return.

Of course, 98% of the time (the other two percent is mostly Lucio Fulci films and anything with Tom Savini on makeup), they delivered cheap, ponderous sights with periodic blasts of gore, yet the weird synthesised soundtracks and doomy film stocks gave them an effortlessness sense of dread that’s lost in the internet age. We get the dull lost tape documentary look or the stationary paranormal investigation video, the self-referential slashers and the CGI vampires. Then there’s the attempts to channel the early 1980s look and feel minus the menace.

Thank god that remakes are flopping this year though. ‘Hellraiser: Revelations’ is a whole new depth plumbed — even the Cenobites wouldn’t go down to those hellish depths and this was such a bad film that even the fictional Alan Smithee wouldn’t have wanted his name on it (though he got it on the not-nearly-as-awful, ‘Hellraiser: Bloodline’) as proof that something’s gone horribly wrong. This witching season I’m appreciating the more accomplished horrors of the last decade — Frank Darabont’s fearless and peerless ‘The Mist,’ Alexandre Aja’s ‘The Hills Have Eyes’ remake and foreign language masterpieces like Guillermo del Toro’s ‘Devil’s Backbone,’ Alexandre Bustillo and Julieno Maury’s nightmarish ‘Inside’ and Muguel Angel Vivas’s ‘Kidnapped.’ Each is a lean, mean machine in the scare (and more often than not, the bloodshed) department with phenomenal technical ability too.

In the pre-cert world, the booming home video market put pound signs in the eyes of a generation of aspiring distributors. Before the film even began, the company identities would indicate that you were a long way from the big studios. Some British companies seemed based as part of grocery store chains, some were based in glamorous places like Dorset and others were European or Stateside operations. Some were set up just to feed the nation’s porn habit and some would focus on sports. Some would go on to be more famous than others- Vestron and the notorious VIPCO were bigger than the likes of Cyclo, Intermovie, Scorpio, Wizard and many more who’d welcome you to the show. But the identities were often non-static, with animation that made Dire Straits’s ‘Money For Nothing’ promo look like a Pixar production by comparison.

Some titles would be written with a Pepysian style disembodied hand while others would throw in a word like “Distinction” to look classy. They were an eclectic bunch that reek of Portakabins and industrial estates, but they really tried with their fonts and graphics, despite obvious limitations. Even if they were pirated, their name still spread. If I ever had a brand, this would make up much of an inaugural moodboard. It’s good to see that the first season of Sk8thing, Toby Feltwell and Hishi’s C.E. line went back to VHS Argento (primarily ‘Suspiria’) for the imagery, before the brand goes off in a completely different direction to shake off any sense of nostalgia.

For those odd enough to care, here’s 67 pre-cert video company identities culled from the excellent ‘Video Nasties: The Definitive Guide’ DVD extras:

HIP-HOP TV & OTHER THINGS…

Making light of Channel 4’s ‘Street Summer’ season is like shooting beatboxers in a barrel, so it would be too obvious to lampoon their Superdry-friendly mix of parkour, BMX, making music with your mouth and dripping stencils. It is what it is, “urban” culture zip-filed up into some kind of rapping, dancing expression of da ‘yoof. If you expected a three-hour Money Boss Players documentary, a JA character study or a celebration of Hypnotize Minds, then you were being wildly optimistic. Still, it’s curious that T4’s ‘Inside SBTV: From Bedroom to Boardroom’ and some of BBC Two’s ‘No Hats, No Trainers’ felt like superior attempts at the same subject matter.

But their two-hour ‘How Hip Hop Changed the World’ was a wasted opportunity. It’s not a case of naivety and nerdery, angrily fist waving at a lack of Beatnuts — it was just a weak offering that seemed to be cobbled together by the same minds behind ‘Street Summer’s infamous commercial. Idris Elba waved his arms around and swaggered like Danny Dyer on a roof somewhere, Nas was deadpan and dull, plenty of UK acts got excited, people were filmed in the act of racking their memory banks and historically it flitted around like some Burroughs-esqe cut-and-paste hallucination. People spinning on their head! Mike Skinner! Ronald Reagan looking impressed! Diddy being wealthy! The Sugarhill Gang! Weetabix men! A clip from a Wu-Tang Video!

‘How Hip Hop Changed the World’ was simply another ‘I Love…’ nostalgia show that felt curiously dated, like the sort of thing you might catch at 3:15am on a freeview music channel in a drunken haze and it displayed a curious regression — 1999’s ‘The Hip-Hop Years’ attempted a history and failed with a simplistic delivery, but it was more watchable than friday night’s offering. As if to highlight the inferior nature of Channel 4’s latest failure, adverts looked culled from YouTube and plenty of footage from 1987’s BBC Open Space documentary ‘Bad Meaning Good’ and 1984’s ‘Beat This! A Hip-Hop History’ was used. The latter efforts were excellent, and while hip-hop culture operated in a smaller space for documentation, how on earth is hip-hop still being treated as some kind of fly-by-night gimmick in terms of documentation?

The truth of the matter is that hip-hop needs something akin to the ten-part Ken Burns treatment. An adaptation of Dan Charnas’s ‘The Big Payback’ would be fascinating. Some would say that it’s still too immature and others claim that it regressed…that it doesn’t respect itself enough to warrant a serious documentation, but that would be erroneous. Contemporary “urban” culture being treated as some kind of bad musical where folks dance out their grievances in dayglo clothing is part of the problem — depictions of the inner-cities are wildly at odds with the realities, and a multi billion-dollar business that seems to have permeated everything is still being summarised in a 1-minute moving tableaux of twattery.

Forget $299 books retreading the flawed steps of ‘Hip Hop Immortals’ or the equally messy ‘Hip Hop Immortals: We Got Your Kids’ and ‘Rhyme & Reason’ documentaries. The culture got more complicated and the depictions got dumber. How on earth does an expert in Tudor history end up on Newsnight in lieu of any of the young journalists who could have offered some valuable insight without resorting to a Mr. Starkey-friendly “white voice”? How did Channel 4 go from screening Henry Chalfont’s masterful ‘Style Wars’ in 1984 to 120 minutes of unstructured stating-the-bloody-obvious 27 years later? This was a valuable opportunity to celebrate something remarkable squandered.

While we’re ranting, what’s up with the 5D culture of factory-tour videos? If your brand needs to show me the manufacturing process in order for me to appreciate it, then I want nothing to do with it. The provenance of a garment or item seems to be superseding whether it’s actually very good. Making something in the UK and describing it down to the strand of cotton doesn’t necessarily make it better than anything else. Production line shots, earnest images of men in aprons, occasional blur and a SBTRKT or Beirut soundtrack are becoming a formula — if your documentation of handcrafts feels formulaic and clinical, then you’ve missed your own point.

I had a wander round Jacket Required in London. I can’t remember much, but I enjoyed myself. My favourite item was a velvet jacket from Sk8thing and Nigo’s Human Made line depicting a Toddy Cat (aka. the Asian Palm Civet — the creature that defecates the berries that make Kopi Lawak coffee) enjoying a brew. It’s a very expensive item, but like the varsity jacket with a hotdog across the back, Nigo seems to have restored his aptitude for awesome again, building on the URSUS styles to go completely crazy with these surreal, self-indulgent vintage style. I like the Carhartt camo pieces as part of the archive line that are dropping soon too — definite crowd pleasers, and the contemporary buttons on the recent heritage-style stuff have been ridded in favour or something a little more olde world.


Picture from Thursday’s NOWNESS feature.

Rest in peace KASE 2 TFP. I mourned his passing a little too early on Twitter this week, but the one-armed, letter camouflaging, King of Styyyyyyyyyyyle has passed away. I know Goldie painted with Kaze, but did I dream up the footage of a starstruck Goldie meeting KASE 2 back in the 1980s? Was it from the ‘Zulu Dawn’ footage pulled down from YouTube? My love for the ‘Beastmaster’ scene in ‘Style Wars’ has been expounded upon here before, but this legend deserves a celebration.

Linking to that Canon 5D remark, you’re likely to see an influx of tattoo-centric videos soon, but ignoring a lot I’m really enjoying VBS’s Tattoo Age. In a fantastic coincidence (and one that will no doubt cheer up the homie Nick Schonberger, just as VBS started teasing the Grime episodes, Grime Daily started showing their ‘Tattoo Watch’ episodes. In the latter, there’s no talk of technique, just lots of madcap meanings or none-at-all, but the UFO chest piece is awesome.