Mac Spotting

[B S Magnet]

Yeah, I remembered that you were fond of that ABC album, when I posted the video.

I liked this line of hers: "I did degrees and things".
And one by her husband: "Don't get me started on stems".

The Lexicon of Love is always a good starting point, but as Trevor Horn’s first major peacock of a production (i.e., big, showy, the easiest to spot and remember), I’m less a fan of it than one might realize.

For Anne, the first association I make with her is her work as principal of The Art of Noise (whose début was also a Horn/Steve Lipson/J.J. Jeczalik effort). What I love about her (or Kate St. John, as session oboist and woodwinds arrangements) are her many, many session appearances, doing arrangement on pop songs like Lloyd Cole and The Commotions’ “Rattlesnakes”; Electronic’s “Getting Away with It”; and her work throughout ABC’s Alphabet City.

In the early ’90s, once I began to connect the many dots of contributors whose names tend to get largely hidden beneath those of artists, producers, and songwriters, I began to connect why subtle currents in sound carried across different works, and to really appreciate how those session contributors were the subtle DNA which found me either loving or disliking songs (even by the same principal artists).

Making those session connections, like those of Dudley, opened me to a trove of lesser-known songs and artists whose creativity was just as splendid, but whose content was missed by aggressive commercial monetizing (and subsequent milking, via many disposable compilations).

 

[TheShortTimer]

For Anne, the first association I make with her is her work as principal of The Art of Noise (whose début was also a Horn/Steve Lipson/J.J. Jeczalik effort). What I love about her (or Kate St. John, as session oboist and woodwinds arrangements) are her many, many session appearances, doing arrangement on pop songs like Lloyd Cole and The Commotions’ “Rattlesnakes”; Electronic’s “Getting Away with It...

All this time, I had no idea that she arranged and conducted the strings on "Getting Away With it"! A rebuke to me for not paying full attention to credits info. That just makes the song even better. Horn on the other hand, I know people who crossed paths with him - and a lucky escape comes to mind. I'll leave it there. PM me for the full story @B S Magnet.

 

[ojfd]

Horn on the other hand, I know people who crossed paths with him..

LOL. There's no business like showbusiness Full of sharks, con artists and freeriders. I've heard many stories and have a bit of experience myself.
Back to Anne.
I always liked the piano part in this McLaren's “piece”. Only years later I relized that it was her playing
Unfortunately, that part is way too short, one would need two copies to make something out of it, because the rest of it, imho, is a pile of .

 

[B S Magnet]

All this time, I had no idea that she arranged and conducted the strings on "Getting Away With it"! A rebuke to me for not paying full attention to credits info. That just makes the song even better. Horn on the other hand, I know people who crossed paths with him - and a lucky escape comes to mind. I'll leave it there. PM me for the full story @B S Magnet.

While you‘re in awe of learning Anne Dudley did strings for “Getting Away with It”, I was in awe pulling up a link to the music video, only to just now, after 35 years, learn there was a second music video for the track (the one, in fact, I linked to)!

My mind, 🤯

“Getting Away with It” was one of those songs which, when it first appeared in ’89, stood a level or three above everything else. Writing and production-wise, it was such a gateway song beyond, say, “It‘s Alright” (Horn produced it) or “Round & Round” (New Order produced it). Marr, meanwhile, was also headlong at that same moment filling guitar for Kirsty MacColl’s signature album, Kite, and being a rotating member of The The (both on Mind Bomb and on Dusk).

Electronic, being a super-group, played on Sumner’s, Marr’s, Dudley’s, and Tennant’s strengths with “Getting Away with It” in a way so rarely heard — either before or since. It‘s a rare moment when “synergy” has weight to it. It’s easy to hear the unexpected, but impossible to miss synthesis of Technique, Introspection, Below the Waste, and Mind Bomb all come together as they did.

 

[TheShortTimer]

A Mac sighting taken from a couple of 1996 episodes of the Liverpool based soap opera Brookside. Two of the regular characters steal what appears to be a Performa 5xxx from the middle class neighbours and rummage through its HDD and a selection of floppies.

Let's see what they found.

(Apologies for the poor quality images, maybe I can find a better source at a later date!)

The duo find documents of interest. Created with ClarisWorks 3.0 it appears.

Fortunately for the neighbours, the letter's contents are beyond the boys' level of reading comprehension.

Equally fortunate that the stolen computer is found by a responsible parent who immediately orders the pair to return it to the rightful owners.

I was an avid viewer of Brookside during this period and found myself quite taken with this particular Mac and even considered raiding the piggy bank to buy one. Despite its prominence and pivotal role throughout numerous episodes, this was not an instance of product placement because the Performa was instrumental in a storyline where it was used to create forged degrees that enabled a lead character to successfully apply for a teaching job. (Perhaps I should've done that with my PM G4 and saved myself years of studying!)

Somehow, I couldn't see Apple - even during their wilderness years, paying a UK TV production company to promote its products as tools for fraudsters.

 

[ojfd]

Somehow, I couldn't see Apple - even during their wilderness years, paying a UK TV production company to promote its products as tools for fraudsters.

They probably used Performa because it was "all in one". Only one device to carry, much better for the script.

 

[B S Magnet]

Saved this last night, but didn’t get around until today to post it:

This was from a short-lived U.S. television series called Jericho. This is from the truncated second season and, to my knowledge, only the first appearance of an Apple product in the series.

Given how the scene below was shot sometime during mid 2007, below seems to be a 20-inch iMac G5 iSight or else one of the early Intel iMacs. It appears to be paired with an A1048 keyboard and an indeterminate Apple mouse.

 

[TheShortTimer]

I remember Jericho @B S Magnet - it was shown in the UK but I never watched it.

Any good in your opinion?

 

[B S Magnet]

I remember Jericho @B S Magnet - it was shown in the UK but I never watched it.

Any good in your opinion?

Although it carries many of the CBS network sound stage production tropes which scream “THIS… IS CBS” (I’d almost call them meta-leitmotifs: indelible to the ear trained by hearing the American national networks whilst growing up), it is good enough (and short enough) of a series that this is probably my fourth viewing of it since 2006. I’d have first watched it in mid-2010, though. It absolutely has the mid-2000s production feel generally — not bad, but with time, it becomes noticeable and almost quaint. The core premise, however, is every bit as relevant right now — possibly even more so.

It’s the kind of series which I could almost see being re-imagined and extended in a streaming, contemporary reboot, but with some altered context to flesh out things in the world which have happened since 2006. Unfortunately, whereas the 2006 series flew under the radar, I conjecture a reboot would cause a segment of the U.S. population to completely lose their wits about it.

Interestingly, the BluRay subtitles are written in British English.

 

[B S Magnet]

Fringe, Season 3, Episode 8 (“Entrada”), that moment when Peter Bishop grabs the 2009 17" unibody MacBook Pro which isn’t his (his is the one in the foreground) in order to guess the password on Fauxlivia’s work laptop whilst Fauxlivia sleeps. It’s running “Windows”.


View attachment 1794595View attachment 1794596

This week, I’m back on my J.J. Abrams failed series re-watch silliness, watching the very flash-in-the-pan series, Alcatraz. Its short-lived run, 13 episodes, starred the inimitable Sam Neill, Sarah Jones, and Jorge Garcia, amongst other familiar faces. There was certainly enough source material for it to have probably sustained itself for several seasons, but the network, FOX, weren’t feeling it, I guess.

It’s probably the closest in both aesthetic and shooting location to Fringe as any of the TV series over which he was executive producer. It’s probably because there was a lot of carryover from the Vancouver filming and support crew as Fringe was starting to wind down by 2012 — music, camera work, the “base of operations” workspace (being a converted, much older space with similar lighting work), and so on.

I re-watched the pilot and caught this (probably 2011) 17-inch unibody MBP. There seemed to be an abundance of 17-inch MacBook Pros in Fringe, both aluminium and unibody, as well.

 

[MarkC426]

Is that Alan Tudyk….
I have never watched Fringe…🤭

 

[TheShortTimer]

I have never watched Fringe…🤭

Same here.

 

[B S Magnet]

Is that Alan Tudyk….
I have never watched Fringe…🤭

No, it isn’t. But I can see how one might think it could be.

Fringe remains one of my favourite sci-fi-adjacent series from this century. It did what X-Files (post-season 2), could not or would not, and it did so much more.

Particularly from season 2 onward, Fringe has an ineffable grounding about it which feels both plausible and familiar. It shows messy lives and trauma in non-superficial ways. It doesn’t mock neurodivergence. It isn’t afraid of taunting taboos around psychotropic experimentation. Its careful, but deliberate use of licensed music is impeccable. Principal and supporting characters are quirky, yet complex (for a pre-streaming era), bringing still-infrequent nuance to visual storytelling — the kinds of like often get shelved for most TV and film scripts in lieu of simple archetypes, tropes, and baked-in expectations (best known as a “formula”). It has Easter eggs in every single episode and things to decode (for the armchair cryptographers of the world, of which I am not).

There are several zag moments when the viewer expects a zig. With the final, condensed season, the serial storytelling is incredibly strong and carries the contours of deliberately shaping a fine sculpture. Serial storytelling over monster-of-the-week/anthology storytelling is what I prefer generally. Prior to season 5, there’s a (probably required) delicate balance between these two storytelling styles (as network broadcast series were long compelled to deliver), but it was clear the show-runners had found their serial plot lines and strove to weave them in however they could.

If you or @TheShortTimer or others in the camp of having not seen it are still on the fence, two other things:

Season 1 is a slog, because they were still trying to find that groove, with hints of it only emerging toward the end of that season — its cliffhanger being the element to snap that serial storytelling into the sharp focus it needed to move ahead for five seasons.

The other is of Abrams as executive producer: Fringe may the the only series whose writers, under his watch, kept their focus, stayed on the path, and saw it through to the end in a plausible, cogent way. It’s not the meandering, drunken, head-scratching, “world-building” walk LOST was, or the plodding, ponderous, increasingly ridiculous train derailment Person of Interest was (sort of echoing Alias’s end). [I won’t even get into the rigid woodenness of Person of Interest’s entire spread of characters.]

It’s also understandable why so many other of his other series were cancelled prematurely (Revolution, Undercovers, Believe… all on NBC, interestingly). [I won’t even dignify his soap-like dramas like Roadies.] For those, however, like Alcatraz and Almost Human (both Vancouver-filmed and both aired on FOX), the makings of a complex series like Fringe — as well as good casting — were there, but the network (the same as the one green-lighting Fringe) balked. (Then again, FOX have long been notorious for prematurely cancelling strong, sci-fi-adjacent shows like Dark Angel and Firefly.)

(I imagine there are several multiverses wherein FOX also cancelled Fringe after one season, but somehow let Alcatraz or Almost Human live on to a second season. For all the messed up things about our multiverse, I’m glad we at least got 100 episodes of Fringe with a magnificent conclusion).

EDIT to add one more thing: Something I enjoy about Fringe and, as I re-watch it, Alcatraz, is the careful continuity in casting actors whose characters, if related to another principal character, looks plausibly, even genetically related in superficial features, but especially in one’s eyes and face shape. Or, if it’s a look back to when a main character was much younger, the actor cast as that earlier iteration looks as if they could feasibly be the same person/actor from both age levels.

I don’t think I’ve seen this consistent emphasis on character-relational continuity in casting anywhere outside of stuff Abrams has overseen. This casting emphasis was evident even way back on LOST (Danielle and Alex, for example), and even, dare I say, carried over to the casting of Adam Driver as Ben Solo (who bore enough plausible features of a baby born of Harrison Ford’s Han and Carrie Fisher’s Leia).

 

[Nermal]

I just noticed a lime iMac G3 in the music video for Goodshirt's "Sophie". It's also one of the first things to go!

 

[ojfd]

Late Jon Lord sitting in front of what appears to be Apple Cinema Display. Mac unknown, display size hard to guess.
From the 2007 documentary Ian Gillan Highway Star: A Journey in Rock

EDIT. Spotted another one. This time it's Deep Purple manager Bruce Payne with G4 TiBook and Photoshop on the screen.

 

[B S Magnet]

This week, I’m back on my J.J. Abrams failed series re-watch silliness, watching the very flash-in-the-pan series, Alcatraz. Its short-lived run, 13 episodes, starred the inimitable Sam Neill, Sarah Jones, and Jorge Garcia, amongst other familiar faces. There was certainly enough source material for it to have probably sustained itself for several seasons, but the network, FOX, weren’t feeling it, I guess.

It’s probably the closest in both aesthetic and shooting location to Fringe as any of the TV series over which he was executive producer. It’s probably because there was a lot of carryover from the Vancouver filming and support crew as Fringe was starting to wind down by 2012 — music, camera work, the “base of operations” workspace (being a converted, much older space with similar lighting work), and so on.

I re-watched the pilot and caught this (probably 2011) 17-inch unibody MBP. There seemed to be an abundance of 17-inch MacBook Pros in Fringe, both aluminium and unibody, as well.

View attachment 2391895

Now a quick view at Macs spotted in yet-another, short-lived J.J. Abrams series, Believe.

First, owing to when this pilot episode aired (early 2014, but filmed in early 2013), this appears to be a unibody 15-inch MBP, probably a mid-2012 unit. The biggest tell from this angle is the size of the touchpad, whose dimensions are the same across all three unibody models.

Here, an iMac prop which re-appears throughout, despite the physical locations changing as the series proceeds. This is one of the 2009–2011 models, probably a 21.5-inch, paired with a A1314 Wireless Keyboard and a A1296 Magic Mouse.

In one episode, however, a surprise visitor, a 15-inch Aluminium PowerBook G4, cameos!

It’s less clear whether this is a A1138 DLSD or a predecessor. I’m inclined to think it’s an A1138, if going by the proportions of the menubar and default icon sizing. (The keen eye might also notice this is a screen cap of a desktop, opened full screen, probably sourced from a later model with a different screen ratio, as evidenced by the thin, dark bars at top and bottom of display).

The actor’s face ought to be familiar to some of y’all, though. Here, he portrays a journalist whose life is in danger.

Lastly, we see another 21.5-inch iMac, probably same vintage, across from the one from above (seen at right, as screen’s edge), and what is probably the same 15-inch unibody MBP. These few Intel-era Macs were re-used frequently throughout — possibly a sign of the budget allotted to the showrunners. It’s a bit of a far cry from Fringe, which used many, maaany Mac models and Apple products, even within the same season.

This last one amused me. The iMac is not plugged in.

 

[MarkC426]

Gave it a ♥️ for Jamie Chung……😍🥰

 

[TheShortTimer]

I love this thread!

Ok, here we have Halle Berry in 1999 showing off her new website "Hallewood." I immediately noticed the macOS desktop and some further digging brought me to this Reddit thread - which identifies the unseen Mac as a G3 model apparently and the keyboard as the M2452 Apple USB keyboard. Note the puck mouse also.

As an aside, it's fascinating to discover that Berry took a Henry V approach and forged long-term correspondences with women that she encountered online and conversed with them as an ordinary Jane Doe, only revealing her true identity much later and then being disbelieved and blocked.

 

[TheShortTimer]

These images are taken from the 2022 documentary Back to Basquiat. I managed to catch the English language version on TV and spotted a couple of Macs.

Maripol uses a MacBook for a video call with another participant of the film.

Ed Steinberg has what appears to be a MacBook connected to a monitor, playing footage from a video that he shot for Basquiat and his collaborators.

I'd love to know why he has a platinum(?) RIAA plaque for a Digital Underground album/single.

 

[ojfd]

Ed Steinberg has what appears to be a MacBook connected to a monitor, playing footage from a video that he shot for Basquiat and his collaborators.

I don't think the MacBook is connected to that particular display. Each of them have their own menubar and MacBook also seems to have dark theme whereas menubar on display is white.

I'd love to know why he has a platinum(?) RIAA plaque for a Digital Underground album/single.

Bought as an art object or maybe inherited? He has a gallery too, btw.
I googled the videos he did, but Digital Underground apparently weren't among his clients.
I also can not recognise the other record that he has on the wall. Anyone?

 

[TheShortTimer]

He has a gallery too, btw.

Yes, I know. It's stated in the still that I shared.

I googled the videos he did, but Digital Underground apparently weren't among his clients.

Likewise - there's nothing among his filmography that involves them, hence my curiosity. I thought that there might be a connection somehow through Leila Steinberg, who was 2Pac's first manager and she arranged for him to have an audition with Digital Underground but they don't appear to be related.

I also can not recognise the other record that he has on the wall. Anyone?

It's definitely an artist on the MCA roster - but the plaque is too far away (and my recording is only SD) to identify them.

 

[B S Magnet]

It's definitely an artist on the MCA roster - but the plaque is too far away (and my recording is only SD) to identify them.

That MCA plaque has been next to a sunlit window for far, far too long. Taste no rainbow.

Same with the thumbnail of the album art. Were it not for the extreme colour fading, I’m certain I’d be able to recognize what album this is. My guess is it falls within the years I worked in record stores. And given the rainbow label, this dates it to sometime before about 1993, as MCA revamped their branding around that time (1992, if I remember correctly).


UPDATE:

This is what I am chalking up to extreme procrastination, in the face of stuff I Really Don’t Want To Do Right Now.

So I spent an hour on… this.

It’s Jody Watley’s 1987 solo début, but the thumbnail in that platinum frame is actually an extreme close-up of what was probably the cassette rendering of the sleeve:

The panned back, vinyl version of the sleeve art:

With CMYK offset printing inks, typically the magentas and yellows (which, combined, would make red) are the least colourfast. Then the K, or black, layer tends to follow, leaving behind most of the cyan layer. Then again, the original vinyl/CD version of the sleeve art is decidedly a cyan/teal duotone, whereas the cassette art seems, at least in some markets/pressings, was duotone-tinted purple.

Now I have to find something else to let me procrastinate even further (and against my best interest).

 

[ojfd]

That MCA plaque has been next to a sunlit window for far, far too long. Taste no rainbow.

And I was wondering what kind of MCA label is that..

I think we're putting too much on this. Those framed albums are probably just elements of interior design, like everything else in that shot.

So I spent an hour on… this.

Very nice detective work, @B S Magnet 👍

 

[B S Magnet]

And I was wondering what kind of MCA label is that..

I think we're putting too much on this. Those framed albums are probably just elements of interior design, like everything else in that shot.



Very nice detective work, @B S Magnet 👍

Cheers.

I tend to have a semi-photographic recall of images. This came in handy quite often back when I worked in music stores.

We’d sometimes set up display end-caps of product. I remember being called upon to find album covers riffing off other album covers for one end-cap. The whole “this-resembles-that” thing was a constant throughout, and I treated the exercise like a giant, ongoing game of Memory.

Because I also inventoried product manually (we used UPC scanners at the cash, but there wasn’t really a point-of-sale inventorying system for there, as we were on creaky, dusty IBM XTs), I’d see many of the same, popular sleeve covers week in and out.

Although I’ve much known Watley’s two big lead-off singles from her solo début since they were new releases themselves (and the 12-inch sleeve art for these), that album (and said singles) had cycled through by the time I began to work in the stores. By then, her follow-up album was what we tended to keep in stock. So I probably only infrequently saw this sleeve design.

And frankly, given the 1986–87 window this was produced, there were a slew of sleeve designs with many of these same basic aesthetics — Zeitgeist tropes, if you will. Unless one was in the shops at that moment, this one could have slipped by.

Examples from that window:

• extensive use of black-and-white/duotones/sepia;
• increasing use of high-grain, “fast” film emulsion under low light settings (both b/w and colour);
• increased use of tungsten-balanced film (this one, especially fast tungsten-balanced film, was kind of a breakthrough in 1986, and it saw extensive use on sleeve covers and music videos for about two years);
• sharp, flashy script (quite overused, but at least to its favour nearly none of it was canned digital typefaces, but someone doing the type treatment by hand, including the shooting and transferring that enlargement to printing plates);
• and that script/type contrasting starkly from the rest of the image.

What one saw less of by then were the visual tropes embraced by anachronist-nostalgic online folks of these last twenty years (who were probably not yet alive then): the neons, tropical sunset motifs; vivid pastels; futurism themes; the vapourwave tells; and the like.

By 1986, the world was already weary of visual ideas lifted from the first two seasons of Miami Vice (especially season 2) — much of what anachronist-nostalgia folks latch onto and think “ah yes, this is the eighties”. 🤦‍♀️ By the time of Watley’s release, jewel tones, black-and-white, sharp slab-serif text, and even the beginnings of the low-fidelity, postmodernist aesthetic which took over by the start of the 1990s were making their way forward.

See… I’m procrastinating again. >_<

 

[TheShortTimer]

Very nice detective work, @B S Magnet 👍

Yeah, really impressive research!

We salute you @B S Magnet.

If this is what you're capable of whilst procrastinating then I can't fathom what you'd achieve when you're fully focused...

I thought that it might be Alicia Myers from the image - as she was also on MCA and attained triple platinum certification. Jody Whatley is awesome - solo and during her Shalamar phase.

Images taken from episode 3 of the BBC documentary series Archaeology: A Secret History. Mark Thomas presents archaeologist Richard Miles with the results of his DNA ancestry test using what appears to be a 15" unibody MBP.

I can spot eBay, Wikipedia and Facebook amongst the entries in his favourites bar.