au: going for the gold
The swarm engulfs the mold as the mold articulates the swarm. ~ David Joselit (2005)
I am watching two shows. Well, I’m watching more than two shows because Covid has given everyone a cover story for tv binging and I’ve done my fair share of it. But currently, regularly, two shows. I don’t watch during the day EXCEPT when I’m on the elliptical I insisted we get when there was no vaccine in sight and it turns out my obsessive city-walking didn’t translate to the country AT ALL. Was it the lack of grid? but I’ve walked happily in grid-less cities like Glasgow, London, Paris, Ghent. Philadelphia. Boston (oh god). But in the country, roads go nowhere.
Peak Practice was a medical soap opera that ran for nine years on ITV. The subject was a fictitious small town practice in a fictitious small town in the Derbyshire Peak District. I have no idea where that is but there are meadows with sheep, lots of rock outcropping and spectacular hilltop views. Someone falls off a mountain (or “peak” I guess is what the Brits call them?) once every season. Not the same person, obviously. I picked it for my Elliptical watching because I wanted something that would last me (in twenty minute increments, 3 times a day) for a good long while before I had to figure out something else. Did I mention it ran for nine years?
The Crown is, well, The Crown. I resisted for a long time but I have an untoward affection for Olivia Colman so I finally gave in and watched her season and then I realized I liked Claire Foy also (known to me from another limited series Brit soap opera White Heat) so I went back and watched the beginning. Now I’m watching the end of the middle and I will be caught up with everyone else by the time Imelda Staunton does her turn as QE2. Good thing my father’s not alive to see this. The writers can devote two whole episodes to the Charles/Camilla saga but not spare a word for Bloody Sunday. Saints preserve us.
The real difference between the two shows - besides the day watching and the night watching - is whether I’m willing to take advantage of the “skip intro” function. I always do on PP - once in while, if it’s the beginning of the season I might leave it run so I can figure more easily who’s in and who’s out. Besides becoming a “fund-holding practice”, they churned through a lot of medical professionals in nine years. There are some clips that carry over - one of a row of ostensible medicine bottles that looks more like backup gear for a light-show and another, also color-related, of an unknown hand checking the read-out on a pee sample against a urine color chart.
I never skip the intro on The Crown. I thought it was just me mesmerized but there has actually been at least one review written about it, in the Guardian of course. Unlike the print ads, the opening sequence features no humans. This lack of portraiture seems more common in British shows than American ones, always closer in design DNA to the 1970s Cannon no matter how cutting edge (though Cannon’s opening sequence, before the parade of guest star bubbles is not that distant from Man with a Movie Camera).
The Crown’s opening relies on the relatively new computer generated art of “liquids” about which I’m completely ignorant. Ostensibly a crown is being built though it’s made to look as if it grows naturally, like antlers. All “liquids” owe a debt to mid-century photographic pioneers such as Harold Edgerton. If you don’t know his name, you’ve certainly seen his Milk Drop Coronet (1935 - he did it again in 1957 but against a red tabletop). His use of the strobe elevated it an instrument of art. MIT has digitized his lab notebooks and put them online but they’re basically illegible to the untrained eye. Maybe a little too liquid.
The Crown title sequence was directed by Patrick Clair, one half of a creative team that calls themselves Antibody. Hans Zimmer scored it. Along the same thematic lines, Zimmer composed the theme song for a game show Going for Gold (1987-1996), which had a weird EU conceit in that all the contestants were from different European countries (albeit competing in English).
Clair is quoted in the Guardian article,
“It was about looking so closely at the crown that you start to see the rough edges, the rough beginnings, the rich histories of all the various minerals and metals and jewels that have gone into it…”
but minerals and jewels don’t grow like that and of course there’s no referencing any of the actual extraction of these materials which is surely blood-drenched. Instead the materials grow organically. What does organic even mean in this context though? I find myself going down the rabbit hole of “fluid animation” where immediately I’m unsure if words are real or proprietary terms. RealFlow has a “body dynamics engine” which happens (not just, surely deliberately?) to be named “Caronte”—the Italian for Charon, ferryman of Hades.
It is — it appears to be — the opposite of all that is solid melting into air. It is air melting into solid. Gold arranges itself into filigree but it is grown like a hydroponic. It is pretending to be a photographic record of an imaginary process.
Gold comes in karats not carats like diamonds. It’s measured in 24 parts like the hours of a day. 24K looks fake; it’s “too” gold, soft and scratch-able.
From the Royal.UK website “50 Facts about The Queen’s Coronation”:
“19. The recipe for the Anointing Oil contains oils of orange, roses, cinnamon, musk and ambergris. Usually a batch is made to last a few Coronations, but in May 1941 a bomb hit the Deanery destroying the phial, so a new batch was made.”
28 november 2020