Cultrface – a blog dedicated to culture and how it enriches our lives.

Hellraiser, but it's the VHS tape on top of a bus stop roof

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Any time I’m on a double decker bus, I look out at bus stop roofs to see what weird things people throw up (or drop down) there. One thing I’ve never seen is a VHS tape and certainly not the same copy of Hellraiser reappearing after it’s removed but that’s what happened on top of a South East London bus stop for a number of years.

From BBC’s Rabbit Hole:

There was one thing we were particularly intrigued by – a weathered copy of the gruesome horror film Hellraiser on VHS, which had sat on top of a South East London bus stop for years. Every time the VHS was taken down, another one would spring up in its place. Sometimes two copies would lie there, staring menacingly out at you as you gazed through the foggy bus window.

The anonymous culprit spoke to the BBC about the reasons behind the action:

When did you start maintaining it?

I like to make visual art and often try to use the everyday environment outside. After awhile I came up with the idea of “21 on the 21”. The first video purposefully placed out there landed right next to that original and was done on the 21st December 2012. It was the night that was supposed to be the Mayan Apocalypse. I think that day was our first real big apocalyptic let down since Y2K. And with the idea of the bus stop being a raised platform, then the elements really erasing the hell off Pinhead’s visage slowly away from the bus riders, I felt the words and numbers were on my side. So I started the process. There’s been other Hellraisers along the route of the 21, one even on an N21. The idea is for twenty-one to be put out over time, hence the name “21 on the 21”.

This story resonated with me because I remember the first time I saw a trailer for Hellraiser. It was on another VHS tape where they used to do those video promos before the film starts. I remember the grotesque Pinhead, all the smoke, the hooks and chains, and the pulled skin and being so horrified but also morbidly curious (that has never left me; I am the Kombucha girl of horror). Then I gave into that curiosity in January last year and finally watched the first three movies. And here we are.

Sonic the Hedgehog 2: the highest grossing video game movie of all time (to date)

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sonic the hedgehog 2

The hype was real and now Sonic the Hedgehog 2 is the highest grossing video game movie of all time with worldwide box office sales of $323.5 million so far, surpassing its predecessor’s $319.7 million worldwide total. And it’s well deserved. I loved every minute of the film, I loved Knuckles’s introduction, Robotnik’s return, and the ending made me cry because I was hoping it’d happen and it did. I can’t wait to get it on Blu-ray and watch it all over again.

More about Sonic: The Sonic 2 trailer if you missed it, remembering SegaWorld London, and Knuckles’s foray into crypto.

Izu Ani on his love of food and cycling

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Café du Cycliste travelled to Dubai and interviewed Nigerian-British chef Izu Ani. They spoke to him about his culinary career and his love of cycling:

Amongst all this Izu dedicates a real importance to the moments he spends on his bike. This is the very particular way he has of balancing his life. In Dubai you can ride at any time of the day or night, a way to avoid the heat, a way to start a day well.

‘Pedalling is traveling, I always need that. I ride four to five times a week and alone 90% of the time. It is my time to pause and meditate, I let myself go. I love these moments. I come face to face with myself, I refocus, it’s totally essential to my life. Most often I ride alone for one to two hours, the time needed to get out of the rush.’

More on Izu Ani: The Values of Chef Izu Ani, his culinary world adventures, and opening a new French-Mediterranean restaurant in Dubai

An interview with Sy Brand

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Sy is one of my favourite people on the internet and I thought “why don’t I ask them some cool questions”? Here’s what they said:

What is your favourite city in the world?

Apart from Edinburgh, where I live, either Venice or Berlin. I love water, so Venice is perfect for me. And Berlin has so many different sides to it and such incredible art and history.

What’s the most unusual item you take everywhere you go? 

Probably my pin collection. I have around 20 of them on my jacket. A few Twin Peaks ones, a shot from Tommy Wiseau’s The Room, a machine from a Soviet Arcade Museum I went to in St Petersburg, some Ingmar Bergman and Andrei Tarkovsky ones. My favourite is the demon cat face from the film Hausu by Nobuhiko Obayashi, which is one of my favourite films and is just completely wild and unpredictable and beautiful.

Why do you do what you do?

I do my job (C++ Developer Advocate at Microsoft) mostly to earn money to do other things, although I do enjoy the freedom I have to help people, educate, help shape the industry and C++ community. I write poetry to try and capture feelings, images, work through my thoughts on gender, relationships, etc. These days I’ve been spending a lot of time on filmmaking. I want to help people see the beauty that’s in so many everyday things: tiny gestures, light reflecting off water, the sounds around us.

Where do you go to relax?

Into Apex Legends or experimental films. Apex is my perfect “brain doesn’t work, want to blow off steam” activity. I play with a friend of mine multiple times a week; I love the teamwork aspect of it, how I can use it as an excuse to hang out with people and just have some fun.

69, 280, or 420?

69. It’s just very round and nice.

How do you say goodbye in your culture(s)?

I’m Scottish, so you could hear “bye the nou”, or perhaps “fuck off”. In Scottish Gaelic you could say “mar sin leat” as a kind of “see you”.

Jens Müller on 5 of his favourite logos

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Jens Müller explored the origins of more than 6,000 logos from the last 2 decades for his latest book, Logo Beginnings. He looked at 5 of his favourites and spoke to It’s Nice That about them. Here’s what he thought about Burberry’s logo from 1901:

The fashion brand of British textile merchant Thomas Burberry held a competition for a new trademark in 1901. Its anonymous winner was inspired by a 13th Century knight armour which was on display in London’s Wallace Collection at the time, and created a knight on horseback. Complemented by the Latin term ‘Prorsum’ (‘Forward’), which boiled down the company’s philosophy to one word. Until the radical and much-discussed redesign by Riccardo Tisci and Peter Saville in 2018, the figurative mark represented the internationally acclaimed brand.

And Bang & Olufsen in 1936:

This widely forgotten logo for the manufacturer of high-end audio products, initially founded by Peter Bang and Svend Olufsen as a radio factory, was created in 1935. It is not only a beautiful geometric, typographic combination of the two letters B and O, but in a certain way marks the transition to state-of-the-art, modernist solutions in logo design. A development that finally took place from the 1940s onwards, and which can only be understood in the context of its fascinating prehistory as well as pioneering individual solutions like this one.

More on logos: LogoArchive.Africa’s archive of logos from the African continent and Pentagram’s lovely Fisher-Price logo

An interview with Keidra Chaney

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I asked one of my best friends, Keidra, my patented interview questions.

What is your favourite city in the world?

I know I should say my hometown, Chicago but that would be a lie. It’s a tossup between New Orleans and Tokyo.

What’s the most unusual item you take everywhere you go? 

So I have to take a moleskine journal with me EVERYWHERE I go to take notes and lists, but that’s not unusual per se. I haven’t traveled in two years *sob* but when I do I take a small puppy k-pop plush doll with me. He’s seen a lot on my instagram.

Why do you do what you do?

I honestly believe in digital technology as a way to connect people, create community and get the resources they need to thrive. As much as I complain about and critique online culture and the tech industry I really do believe that the people behind the tools and technology can do amazing things with it for social justice and social change and I do what I do to support those people and the work that they do.

Where do you go to relax?

I go to the beach. Or I get lost in my own head through reading a book or listening to music I love.

69, 280, or 420? 

420, easily.

*munches on an edible*

How do you say goodbye in your culture?

Bye!! Or “peace!” But I don’t usually say that.

Remember SegaWorld London?

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The Definitive History of Sega World London

If there was one place I wanted to go more than anything as a kid (besides Toys R Us), it was SegaWorld London. The indoor theme park was opened by Sega in the London Trocadero in September 1996 and was apparently the largest indoor theme park in the world. However, it was shut down 3 years later.

I never got to visit but after watching Badnik Mechanic’s definitive history video, maybe I wasn’t missing out.

Ah, who am I kidding? I was a child—I would have loved it! But the reasons why my parents didn’t take me were confirmed in the video: cost. There was also questions about its quality and some pretty bad reviews from critics (who absolutely weren’t the target demographic—white middle-aged British male journalists? It was destined for failure).

One thing it did have was the AS-1 which I wrote about for Cultrface’s sibling site, LOGiCFACE:

Michael Jackson in Scramble Training was a piece of software made for Sega’s AS-1 motion simulator. It came out in 1993, around the time he worked with them on Sonic 3 and sees the King of Pop instructing you how to pilot a spaceship.

And it had Sonic the Hedgehog because of course it did.

Canary Wharf, before the skyscrapers

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Before it became the financial capital of the UK (and some might say the world but not me), Canary Wharf in London was docklands and derelict buildings post-Empire. But the Greater London Council (GLC) had a vision to transform the area into mini financial metropolis with skyscrapers and office blocks. MyLondon documented the changes from colonial times to the late 80s/early 90s when construction was underway.

More from London: A Jago Hazzard London train/tube triple bill, the ghostly signs of London, and Roy Mehta’s ‘Revival’ exploring Brent’s multiculturalism between 1989–93

Stewart Hicks on the architecture of 'indoor cities'

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The Bewildering Architecture of Indoor Cities

Indoor cities might conjure images of Zion from The Matrix but they’re real things, for better or worse. Stewart Hicks documented these dwellings on his YouTube channel, including the Chicago Pedway and Hyatt Regency Chicago.

Architecture related: Róisín Hanlon on Parasitic Architecture and architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948-1980

Lucia Tang on 'Kristin Lavransdatter' and feeling herself again during the pandemic

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It’s always cool to get a non-spam account following you on Twitter out of the blue but it’s especially nice when it’s a really good writer. That person was Lucia Tang who “tweets, often about medieval mystics and women’s artistic gymnastics” and I read one of her essays today, entitled “The Pandemic Made Me Feel Removed from My Body—This Book Put Me Back“.

My knowledge of medieval times is sketchy at best, so Medieval Norway wouldn’t be my specialist subject on Mastermind. But Lucia’s account of Kristin Lavransdatter, a trilogy of novels by Sigrid Undset, and feeling like herself again through reading, is vibrant and poignant. Here’s a short excerpt:

By the time I started reading Kristin Lavransdatter, the fearful, high-wire intensity of the move had faded to a dull memory. My adrenalinated gratitude at pulling it off safely had calcified too. What remained was a sense of roteness, as if the nerves had been abstracted out of me. I wasn’t scared anymore, or sad, or anything—I was a wind-up toy. I tried to take care of myself, drinking eight glasses of water a day and marking each of them in an app. I cycled between a series of easy Instant Pot stews and ate without tasting them. Three days a week, I made time to exercise, dancing along to ballet barre videos on YouTube without feeling whether my legs were turned out or my feet made the right shape. I stopped often between combinations to check my phone.

Reading Kristin Lavransdatter, though, took me back to a time when my body wasn’t just an automaton but organ of feeling. That’s because Undset clings so closely to the concerns of her protagonist, reporting her every sensation with tactile precision. Across her three volumes, Kristin’s existence unfurls in densely textured detail. From the lusterless quiet of my sealed apartment, the vividness of Undset’s language disoriented me, like a bottle of too-strong perfume.

Good writing hits me in the chest like a punch made of butterflies and that’s how it felt reading this essay at breakfast this morning. The adjectives just hit different (see, I’m a wordsmith too!)

Medieval book related: Codex Argenteus: the mysterious Gothic Silver Bible

Lucia related: An interview with Lucia Tang

Chiyo Shibata and her Japanese cheese

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An interesting piece from Atlas Obscura about Chiyo Shibata, a Japanese cheesemaker and her dream of making the dairy product more of a thing in her native country:

Shibata fell in love with cheese as a young girl when her father, a mechanic with Air France, took the family to Paris for summer vacations. However, it was during her final year of high school that she found her destiny.

“I happened to read a newspaper article that said we would soon face a food, climate, and energy crisis,” she recalls. The article listed fermented foods that could be preserved to prevent waste, “and of those, cheese had the highest nutritional value.”

Cheese is not a traditional part of the Japanese diet, although cows and dairy were noted now and again in ancient records. According to Eric C. Rath, a professor of Japanese history at the University of Kansas, Japan’s government encouraged cows for agriculture as far back as the 8th century, but interest faded because of the difficulty of grazing cattle on Japan’s rocky topography.

Ancient texts, though, also describe three things that may be similar to cheese: so, raku, and daigo. “The problem is that, except for so, we don’t know how these were made. Raku may have been a yogurt drink, and daigo is supposed to be the epitome of dairy products. Buddhist monks compared its taste to enlightenment.” says Rath. “Something so good that it could totally change our understanding of the world.”

Her cheesery, Fromage Sen, is 1.5 hours from Tokyo Station by train and car in the Chiba Prefecture.

More on cheese: Moose cheese, pule cheese: the world’s most expensive cheese made from donkey milk, and Mountain Dew cheesecake.

Have you tried the water pie?

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When times are hard, you make do with what you have. That was the principle behind a Depression Era pie that made use of science and water:

Even among the genre of desserts known as “desperation pies,” “hard times pie” seems particularly dire. Its other moniker, “water pie,” sounds like a practical joke or urban myth. Like stone soup, it implies conjuring something from nothing. The ingredient list is so minimalistic that it challenges what, on an existential level, even qualifies as pie. Plain, old H₂O forms the base of the filling, along with sugar, flour, butter, and a little vanilla. And yet, through a little alchemical magic, these ingredients transform into a wobbly, translucent custard.

“I think a lot of Depression-era cooking was really quite genius,” says Genevieve Yam, an editor at Epicurious who previously worked as a pastry chef at Per Se and Blue Hill at Stone Barns. Yam finds something intriguing about the anonymity of the inventors of these resourceful recipes. No one knows who was behind the first “magic cake” or “wacky cake,” although we can surmise they were women with a better grasp of chemistry than history ever gave them credit for.

Foodstuff was scarce and people had to improvise. While these pies weren’t all water, they mostly were and had liberal uses of butter. And for some added flavour, why not try a Sprite pie (which is basically the same except carbonated and more sugary)?

More on pies (and related baked goods): the split decision pie pan and the emerald marine chocolate mint tart

(via Atlas Obscura)