One of the best pics from the BBC image archive…
Archive for October, 2004
This saturday saw me and mrs eyedropper move house. I used this company Txi-vans.com, and can’t recommend them enough. What took us a week to pack, these two guys loaded into the van in 20 mins, they were like oxen; two huge Russian blokes scooping up my worldly goods like they were picking fruit. I had four bread crates full of books, of which I could lift one, they picked up the tower of four in one go! Top chaps. The vans are all fited with GPS so there’s none of that buggering about with the A-Z neither.
Anyroad, after a mad week getting all this sorted, I’m in now, all be it without any electricity. Crystal Palace is great though, there’s loads of great restaurants and bars and shops and stuff. It’s all a bit mad at the moment… I feel like I’m on holiday.
I’m bloggin’ this from the lovely Isla’s house, 24 Fox Hill. If you ever need a nice quality B&B in the south London area to put your parents up, (and this is what we’ll be doing in the near future), this is the place.
just finished James Dyson’s Biography: Against the Odds
His engineering approach and back shed attitude, coupled with his British Indefatigability, means he comes out of the books like a sort of Fred Dibner for the design world.
Choice cuts include:
The problem is this. When marketing began to emerge as a separate and identifiable skill, some time in the fifties, it quickly came to be considered as a distinct managerial area, and ultimately the area around which all others in a company should gather to determine their movements. This was fine, for marketing was still something that began inside the factory and was a process that continued all the way to the consumer, and kept producer and user in delicate harmony. But then is started to move away from its roots. Marketing became more portable, agencies sprang up that did nothing else, and gradually, and inevitably, marketing and advertising became detached from design and production.
Ahhh, so true. Here’s another:
A journalist what came to interview me once asked, ‘The area where the dirt collects is transparent, thus parading all our detritus on the outside, and turning the classic design inside out. Is this some post-modern nod to the architectural style pioneered by Richard Rogers at the Pompidou Centre, where the air-conditioning and escalators, the very guts, are made into a self-referential design feature?’
‘No’ I replied ‘It’s so you can see when it’s full.’
The house I rent has a Dyson, an old DC02, the first ‘pull along’, it’s a bit knackered now, and resembles the battered up robot in Disney’s the black hole. But it’s still going. It’s interesting to see how much his technology has been imitated, as well as his colour scheme a la iMac. Particularly derivative are Hoover, with their new The One. God what a rubbish name, there’s a train company called The One somewhere in England, and it buggers up all the platform announcements in this deregulated age, e.g., “The One 1:51 service is at platform 1″. Anyway, Which? voted The One a pile of shit, and it’s no looker either, cherry red and white? Wasn’t there a toy robot from Tandy with this colour scheme in the 80’s? Anyroad, Vac wars are well and truly on, and up for grabs is the verb, so this weekend I’ll be ‘Dysoning’ my lounge.
PS. Strangely Chuck Norris’ autobiography is called ‘Against all Odds’. It’s, well, odd to think of one lanky galloot tinkering with vacuum cleaners in his shed in the UK, while in the US Chuck’s putting stunt men in hospital with shattered vertebrae.
Bush House Restaurant
Lower Ground Floor
Centre Block
TEA AND SCONE OFFER
4th to 10th October 2004
Buy any Large Tea, with a Scone, Butter, and Jam portion (£1.26)
OFFER PRICE £1.20
Wooo a whole sixpence, I’m actually saving 6p… I know the BBC isn’t allowed to make a profit but this is ridiculous.
Been a lot of this sort of ‘No Logo’ thing recently, only mostly in a bad way. I give you, a tale of two brands.
French Connection has finally dropped the awful FC:UK thing. thank fuck for that one might say. It was a one-liner that went on for far to long. the simple pun FC:UK was poor, but when it got to ‘fancy a fcuk’ or ‘I don’t give a fcuk’ in a hippy typeface, it made me scream! Why stop there, if the aim is to be edgy and daring, what about ‘FC:UK dead dogs’ or ‘FC:UK spastics’?
Let’s face it, FC:UK as a brand is mostly popular with people who… don’t. As shown by booze industry stool pigeons, The Portman Group here, when French Connection tried (and failed) to launch an alcho-pop in 2003.
So now they have a new ad out, which guess what.. sends up the previous campaign! Who’d have thought it eh? According to The Independent, the logo will be replaced by a series of ironic, self-referential phrases such as “Don’t make us say it”, “Something beginning with F”, with no other clues as to which brand they represent.
Jesus you can imagine the pitch… How lame of TBWA, (who’s flashtastrophy of a site don’t work in Safari, and look at their US page, it’s a full on ‘ironic’ under construction flash page!)
I’ve seen the ad, It’s rubbish, first I thought it was that HSBC one, that also featured a denim clad guy travelling across South America on a bike, then when the words came up I totally misread the typeface and thought it was for GAP, because, like most of the Western World, I’m mentally attuned to glaze over when commercials come on. Here’s the thing in it’s shitty entirety.
The Economist on the other hand, have been cleverly playing with their brand for ages. They’ve used one colour and one typeface to great effect. This is supplemented either toying with the title, such as switching it to Morse Code, or appropriating words and phrases from economic circles and popular culture.
Saturday had one of those perfect days, that started with a bit of a hangover and just got better. In the evening me and mrs eyedropper went to the last night of the SW11 Literary Festival. The speakers were Jay Rayner, food critic for the Observer, and Anthony Bourdain, author of Kitchen Confidential and A Cooks Tour. He has a new ‘cook book’ out which focuses on classic French bistro cooking, and Jay has a new book out too, entitled The Apologist. The evening was fantastic, even if most of the audience was Battersea Posh foodies or a little bit mad. There was a bit of a heckler at the back, who had a real thing against Jay it seemed, or perhaps restaurant critics in general. “.. but why do you do what you do, people have got to eat”. Jay countered, “..people don’t spend £150 if they’re hungry”. It was an interesting debate, both read from their new books, and talked about the state of food in Britain. Jay kind of new he was the Alan Rickman Sheriff of Nottingham to Bourdain’s Kevin Costner’s Robin Hood, as did the Audience.After buying both their books and the oblig signing, we ambled off in search of food. We walked all the way down Lavender Hill to the little Micro Brewery Bar that I’ve always been meaning to go to. It was Oktoberfest and the staff were dressed in traditional garb, and serving tasty German beverages. a nip next door to finally meet the people behind Firezza pizzas, then a waddle home via the Battersea Arts Centre to see a live band.. then to sleep.
