Sunday 15 July 2012

Briscoe - Day Job

I got to participate in another Briscoe video. 'Day Job' is a brilliant, catchy pop song. Here is the video clip:




My role was to wear a yellow pillowcase over my head and sit slumped in an office chair, as though dead. My screen time was around 0.5 seconds, but I came to this task with a lifetime's interest in corpse-acting. If there is a mortuary scene in a police procedural show, I am often unable to follow dialogue due to the overriding attention I pay to the corpse, trying to perceive signs of life. If it is a murder scene with an open-eyed body, I am intent on spotting involuntary dilation of the pupil. a fluttering nerve, the shadow of a pulse. How many takes due to the corpse appearing alive? Do the actors sit about and have a laugh in their corpse make-up between takes? Do they need to have the room particularly warm to prevent the corpse getting goose-pimples?

Despite the brevity of my screen time, it was necessary to sit motionless under the yellow pillowcase for the song's duration, unaware of when the camera would be on me. In attempting to remain motionless, I was aware of every involuntary motion of my unruly body. The sensory deprivation brought about by wearing a pillowcase over my head amplified an extreme self-consciousness of my chest heaving when I breathed, the pillowcase ballooning and contracting with every breath, my heart palpitating within my chest, my limbs twitching wildly with uncontrolled muscular spasms.

Of course, none of this was apparent. Bart also filmed me riding my skateboard around, wearing a suit and with a yellow pillowcase over my head, but this will probably never be used until Briscoe record a song called 'Ben Is A Fucking Show-Off'.



Saturday 7 July 2012

Worlds collide, blood splatters, we giggle excitedly



Look at Phil Noto's Game of Thrones-inspired variant cover art for the first issue of Mark Millar and John Romita Jr's new Hit-Girl spin-off series. Noto is featured in this month's CLiNT magazine, which also has the start of the comic and news about the upcoming Kick-Ass 2 movie.

Bike of Burden


The problem of carrying my skateboard on my bicycle has exercised me for a while. I like riding to the skatepark or between street spots, but I hate to carry my board on my back. Last year I made this skateboard carrier for my bike pannier, which has been working fine, but which I wanted to upgrade with some pockets and a shoulder strap so that it functions as a piece of luggage independent of the bike. Above is the finished item, and it was made thus:

BLUEPRINTS!


denim cut to size, folds marked
pockets cut in denim


pockets sewn and lined
there is a rigid board sewn into the carrier so that it holds its shape. Jez (Jeremy Granville Smith) is a master furniture restorer and totally overqualified to do this, but he did it anyway because he is a lovely geezer with a workshop

it attaches to the bike with either/both velcro and leather straps
bike + board

high-vis strips are sewn onto the edges

elastic straps across the top can carry some additional luggage, such as a comic book


the shoulder strap folds away into one of the pockets, and attaches with these big buttons





Alas, I am not happy with it. With the sewing machine as with skateboarding, my ambitions outstrip my abilities. It doesn't work as well as it ought - I don't trust the shoulder strap to hold, there's not enough volume in the pockets when the thing is closed, I didn't make the velcro straps as long as I should have, and the leather straps are a hassle to fasten. I find myself returning to the carrier that I made last year.

Fairdale Bikes and Roger Skateboards have collaborated on a bike/board set that is way more desirable.