Blamblog - Brett Lamb's Blog

Wednesday, July 29, 2009

London's Parallel 1980s Art School Universe

My friend Mark sent me a link to his website -- MarkFavro.com -- where he's uploaded loads of music and videos, including lots of stuff from our high school days. I haven't seen these in decades ...

I grew up as a space nerd in a little farm town, but in the 11th grade I was lucky to go off to art school at Beal in London where a bunch of my classmates were the kids of the artists of the London Ontario art scene, including Aiden Urquhart who is working as an artist.

Wow, it's just like the movie, 'Fame' (l to r) Shawn Bristow, Mark Favro, Galen Curnoe, Jay Santiago ... and some guy named Steve, standing outside the high school editing suite where Mark was assembling this.

Hockey was the main recreational activity in the town where I grew up and even though I was forced to play, I hated that stupid game. Dancing was banned in our town by John Lithgow, so sometimes I would have to find an empty barn where I'd turn on my music and just dance. I also just wanted to make super 8 movies and later, VHS videos with the gang on my street. And we did. But, being isolated in a small town, we didn't know any other kids who made movies.

(above) Libby is my Girl, with Mark as Mr. Luba. One of their bean-related Lubatunes videos was banned by the cable access show in London because the cable people thought that 'beans' was slang for 'drugs'.

At art school, once I got to know Mark, I learned that he and the Curnoes and their friends also had been making Super 8 flicks since the Triassic. We started trading flicks and tapes and it was like discovering some weird parallel universe.

Some of the filmmaking conventions were similar ... like the old 'scratching lasers on the film' trick. But there were lots of surprises ... those guys were crazy. Their physical stunts and pratfalls were as reckless as today's youtube stunts. In their films from when they were kids, they would stage fight scenes and fill everyone's mouths with water so that when someone was punched, a huge spray of water would come out as in Raging Bull. In one video, they actually used fireworks for laser guns.

The best thing about their high school videos was Mark and Galen's crazy physical comedy and stunts. Galen was nine feet tall and Mark was only six inches from head to toe, so they played that up in everything, like in this one:

Mark has some newer stuff, too, like this video of Shawn getting kicked out of some art exhibit for passing out. In our grade 12 English class, Shawn once re-enacted a Vietnam veteran's LSD-fueled war flashback for a class presentation. He just got up in front of the class and started freaking out and screaming about 'Charlie':

Check out some of the videos ... the 80s wasn't all Cyndi Lauper and Maxi Priest. I've borrowed my parents' machine for converting VHS tapes to computer files, so watch out ...

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