So after the Zoo I walked down Camden High Street to Mornington Crescent Tube Station where I took a left and hiked down to the Hospital for Tropical Diseases, at least I seem to recall that it was in the direction of Kings Cross. Anyway I got the first of my pre-exposure vaccinations for Rabies there.
I have to admit that I am referring to very sparse notes in the remains of a Filofax I had at the time. I've still got the Filofax but I haven't ever been very good at writing down appointments or keeping a diary. The next note for 1st August 1990 says "Brian's Rushes. Pizza".
Brian is Brian J. McIlvenny. He was then and is now a photographer. He was, in order to support himself and his art, working in a studio in Notting Hill Gate (I think) where his job involved, among other things, duplicating slides for the advertising industry. As a result he did have the use of the studio facilities to pursue his own artistic enterprises from time to time. Brian was making a short film. I can't remember what these "rushes" were. This was his second film (not counting the footage he took at the Town & Country Club B52's concert some while before which he converted into a video with "Bushfire" as the soundtrack).
I had (in a very minor way) collaborated in Brian's first film, his entry in a competition to make an advertisement for Absolut Vodka. Brian's film was called "Absolut Fantasy". It was made during the spring and early summer, before he got his second-hand Eumig 8mm camera, and was a stop-motion animation made using slides. The only reason I was involved was because Brian had, as mentioned earlier, injured his shoulder earlier in the year in dry ski slope accident (causing him to have to pull out of a skiing holiday to Bulgaria) and needed help in lifting heavy items.
Brian's budget for Absolut Fantasy cannot have been more than about £200 and most of that was transferring his efforts onto film at the Kodak processing laboratory in Denham. Brian was up against entries made by staff at advertising agencies with access to every technical gadget available and whose entries might have cost £250,000 if they had had to be paid for. It is an absolute triumph (no pun intended) that Brian's film came 9th. I think Harold Woodruff did the soundtrack. He lived on the ground floor in Brian's building in Muswell Hill. Brian told me it was packed with top notch musical equipment and the guy made a living doing music for corporate videos and such like. At the time Brian had no idea how this guy had managed to acquire so much expensive electronic equipment but there it all was, very handily in the ground floor flat of his building! The competition climaxed with screenings of the top 20 entries. I was there. Time Out previewed the event as set out below (click on it to read it).
I can't remember what the reference to Pizza means. I can only imagine that once Brian and I had finished whatever it was that we had been doing we had a pizza. It was probably a deep dish pizza with ground beef, chilli and extra anchovies. They were always very tasty but hardly worth making a diary note about.
