…taken in the shopping arcade in Leeds where Santiago’s is. Last night. At Boozey Dü. Brill.

It’s the second time I’ve seen the first BTTF on the big screen, but only the first that’s not been off a DVD. The one tiny tiny tiny tiny little criticism I had was that it didn’t seem that the sound had been given as much restorative/enhancing attention as the digital transfer of the picture. Back To The Future has some of the best and, in places, most subtle sound design around. From all the different 1950’s references popping up around Hill Valley through adverts, megaphones, conversations, and jukeboxes…through to Silvestri’s bombastic soundtrack…right the way to my favourite of all film/sound moments – the disappearing hand in the mid-8 of Earth Angel.

You know the bit…everything is going well and Marty is there strumming the chords…”This is for all you lovers out there”…George and Lorraine are dancing and then the annoying guy comes over and pushes George away. Discordant strums begin. Marvin Berry looks a little concerned. Marty looks at the photograph in the headstock of his guitar and sees his brother and sister have disappeared and that he’s next and…oh no….HE CAN SEE THROUGH HIS HAND. This is it. After all that effort it’s all over. And you didn’t even notice that while Marvin is supposed to be singing, “I fell for you, and I knew the vision of your loveliness”, instead the orchestra is going crazily, threateningly, terrifyingly all over the place but then George realises he’s just grown balls and the music all but disappears until he says, “Excuse me” and pushes the guy aside and part of the main theme build-up comes in and then stops as if teetering over a cliff and then George reaches in for a kiss and then you hear it…in the background…”I’ll be the vision of your happiness, Whoah whoah whoah” AND THEN THE WHOLE ORCHESTRA COMES IN and Marty can play the guitar again and everything accompanies that final chorus of Earth Angel…

Holy Smokes.

While writing that I got a massive Proustian rush. My heart rate is still going a bit mad.

It is without a doubt the finest marriage of story, picture, performance, soundtrack, sound design, and song. Something to aspire to. So it would’ve been the icing on the cake for them to really go to town on it…although it was still an amazing experience. Here’s the bit I’m on about…sound without image…

If they can’t dance they can’t kiss and I’m history

I need to calm down. How about these posters by Jamie Bolton that I got sent this morning. Very minimal…very calming…

“The past is never there waiting to be discovered, to be recognised for exactly what it is. History always constitutes the relation between a past and its present. Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of the past. The past is not for living in; it is a well of conclusions from which we draw in order to act.”

- John Berger, Ways Of Seeing, Pelican 1972

Speaking of John Berger, he’s just released a collaboration with John Christie and the mind-blowing Gavin Briars. Briar’s score is stunning. It’s called ‘I Send You This Cadmium Red‘ and it’s brilliant.

In fact, it makes me want to go to any record shop right now. But I’ve got too many things to do up here on the top floor of the mill I suppose.
There’s nothing like walking out of a proper record shop with a proper record.
Mailorder is exciting, but the online browsing/finding/buying experience isn’t as exciting as the physical one. I literally get goosebumps even if something looks similar to Red House Painter’s Rollercoaster LP. Derby has just got an independent record store back from the dead – BPM. From what I remember it was the main one once, dealt with everything, and then got marginalised by Way Ahead’s indie/rock A-Z prowess, and mainly dealt in House and Trance. Now it’s back it’s a one man job and is so far just full of fairweather stuff retrieved from fallen record shops or dead people. But there’s some gems. I got ‘Blood’ by This Mortal Coil last week on double LP. Beast of a record. Once the chap gets on his feet I can’t wait for the distributors to start chucking new releases his way.

On the flipside, I got this through the post today, and (as is now typical to point out on this here) there’s some nice links and thoughts on time therein lifted from the liner notes…

“Time Out is a first experiment with time, which may well come to be regarded as more than an arrow pointing to the future. Something great has been attempted…and achieved. The very first arrow has found it’s mark.”
- Steve Race

For one thing, Doc never got to set the clock, so we couldn’t have seen it in the film. That’s why Marty ends up back in time, on the “red letter date” of November 5th 1955 (the day Doc Brown hits his head on the toilet and wakes up with the vision of the Flux Capacitor).

Here’s Doc saying how far he’s going into the future:

See there. Twenty Five Years To Be Exact. Damn straight. But…

Presuming he was going exactly twenty-five years into the future (can we presume that though, can we really?) he would have gone to October 26th. Check it:

That’s from when Einstein (the dog) went one minute into the future. Oh, and even at the end when Doc does go to the future, he’s heading for “about thirty years” which could mean anything. See you there though…

So…right year, wrong date. Fucking cool though. Hopefully I won’t get sued for using these pictures…and if I do, maybe I can pay the legal fees by doing paid public speaking on Why It Might Be Necessary To Ignore The Opening Of Back To The Future Part II In Order To Fully Enjoy The Sequels, And Why In Doing So You’ll Enjoy Them More, You’ll Even Enjoy ZZ Top’s Appearance In Part III When They Were Allowed To Keep Their Twirly Guitars When Huey Lewis Wasn’t Allowed To Keep His Mullet.

“Run For It Marty!”

Toby brought me this back from SXSW this year. Proper glad I am too because, apart from it being a limited edition (and I do like limited editions), and hand numbered, and A NEWSPAPER (something that still excites me a lot about Newspaper Club (who made it)), and full of great writing and images, it’s also got a lot to say about time and stuff…

“What Charles Darwin did for all life through time, Vernadsky did for all life through space. Just as we are all connected in time through evolution to common ancestors, so we are all – through the atmosphere, lithosphere, hydrosphere, and these days even the ionosphere – connected in space. We are tied through Vernadskian space to Darwinian time.”

- Foreword to Vladimir I. Vernadsky’s The Biosphere. via Matt Jones‘ article on the sun, Solar Storm Watch, Chizhevsky’s ‘Heliobiology’, and the numinous experience.

“…what newspapers are really good at: understandable, highly portable, physical objects that make digesting certain kinds of information easier. Like magazines, they can get you to read things you would never usually be interested in, simply through clever design decisions.”

- Bobbie Johnson on newspapers, and how they are constantly evolving, always in beta, and how they’re not dying – they’re just changing.

Where people congregated in Texas at different times of the day.

Time-sinks. Beautifully arranged, as always, by David McCandless at Information is Beautiful (who did one of my favourite things here).

“The most invaluable resource any writer has is time.”
- Warren Ellis, in the midst of thinking about print, publishing, notebooks with rulers on them, and it not hurting to value the physical…

“Capitalist newspaper names, then, are either temporal or political – and what is politics, but an attempt to freeze morality in time?”
- James Bridle, on the naming of newspapers.

“I think perhaps if that sort of thing does happen – ghosts – it must be more beautiful, more surprising than all these old tales would have us believe.”

- Her Fearful Symmetry, Audrey Niffenegger, p. 62.

“But Tom,” it [the nickly shimmer of the moon on a black lake on the Isle of Skye] said, “the swinging of your pendulums! Everyone’s pendulum swinging, to and fro, and always you’re getting hit by someone else’s swinging pendulum. You’re minding your business, but someone else’s pendulum is swinging around, and pow! you get it in the head.”
“That happens, yes.”
“I saw you and Erin by the shed.”
“Oh.”
“I was there.”
“That makes sense. I saw you, too.”
“I watch you often, Tom. I have time on my hands. Time is different to me than it is to you.”

I was still thinking about what the nickly shimmer had seen. He, however, was warming to the sound of his thoughts.

“I feel time like you dream. Your dreams are jumbled. You can’t remember the order of your dreams, and when you recall them, the memories bend. Faces change. It’s all in puddles and ripples. That’s what time is for me.”

- Excerpt from Quiet, a short story by Dave Eggars, from his collection How We Are Hungry.

I’ve been reading this collection between doses of Kurt Vonnegut and Oliver Sacks. It’s brilliant. The story’s have got the brevity but slightly skewed/detached emotional depth that I love in Raymond Carver and Etger Keret. In particular, Climbing To The Window, Pretending To Dance, and The Only Meaning Of The Oil-Wet Water. The former starts feeling like it would be great as a novel, then it takes your face off, and the latter burrows right under my skin with an uneasy romance between friends. I’ve not finished Quiet yet, but the above quote about time made my brain tick tock tick tock…

Quantum Opinion #1

I was once walking down Sadlergate (more about Sadlergate later) and, I think it was the butcher’s shop that had just closed down and was becoming one of the high-fashion shops (that are now closed down, but more about that later as well), and the ugly eighties plastic hoarding had been ripped out to make way for a new pretty wooden/plaster one. Underneath you could see the old Sadler’s hoarding from god-knows-when-ago, all old tar coloured wood with faded gold letters. Someone’s initials and surname, almost definitely a dealer in some horse related paraphernalia from when the street would have smelt like a hundred horses’ arses, from all the horses arses shitting all over the place as they got their hooves and saddles and whatnot seen to.

It was a kind of Proustian rush back to a time I’ve only seen one faded photo of in a book about old Derby. I go in search for those sights a lot. The bits that have never changed. Even restored building are enough, so that all you have to do is squint to see back to before cars when there were trams, and before trams when there were horses and the roads were soil…

Quantum Opinion #2

Having thought about it all day, I can still say that this is a good idea. But a few things strike me as odd, and these things make the ‘good idea’ come apart at the seams.

Take the previously mentioned Sadlergate. It’s a beautiful street that’s up there in old beauty with York. The shop fronts are all very nicely done up and for the most part the buildings are really well maintained. One thing that strikes you at the moment about these shop fronts though is that they’re empty. There are no shops in them. There are still shops open on Sadlergate, but the ratio of open ones to closed-down ones is getting more even every week. So, if one part of town that already looks nice can’t attract business as it is, how is making another part that doesn’t look as nice look as nice as the one that already looks nice going to attract any more?

By travelling in time, the council are trying to retrace their steps to before they signed off on Westfield building what Charlie Brooker perfectly described as a “hollow, anaesthetising capitalist moonbase”. Business in the actual city centre has been going downhill pretty steadily since the Big Grey Block appeared on the skyline, and will continue to do so until someone pulls it down/blows it up, or better: until businesses reject it for what it is and move back to somewhere with a soul. I’m not ignorant, I know rents are high outside of the moonbase, I know the footfall is less than half that of in there, but venture into the sunlight one by one and see how much better lunchtime is in the market square that in Logan’s Run’s food hall.

So, rather than spending a million on architecture, maybe spend a fraction of that on some consultancy between landlords and businesses. Strike up some deals. Make some introductions. The age of the bricks won’t attract business if the books don’t balance on paper. Fix what you’ve broken before building something new, because going back in time aesthetically is not time travel.