A brief history of Tackorama
1994, A film
A film called Priscilla, Queen of the Desert was released. The story follows three gay men travelling across the Australian outback. There is a scene where the three guys stay in a hotel. Walking up the stairs they pass a painted mural of a landscape that stretches from floor to the high ceiling. The remark from one of them goes:
Urgh Tackorama. Who did that?
Tackorama: to express a panorama of tackiness (contracted becomes rama-tack, re-ordered becomes tack-o-rama). Meaning an object/place/artefact is without any redeeming aesthetic quality.
I did not initially view it as an abusive word, even though this was clearly the intention. The word has connotations that reflect upon the apparent superior position of the person using it, given the sometimes (often?) clique and snobbish atittudes of gay men towards other people in general. Use of the word showed a bullying aspect to the different and side-stepped the relative nature and or merits of the object of derision.
While watching city poofs clash with outback locals was fun, what was meant as a good punchline in the film for me became a word that could be used as a trademark when one had created something that ignored taste and got straight to the business of pleasing you. And so it became some time after graduation...
1998, A logo is born
Tackorama products were in existence before the logo and name was actually used on them. Let us be clear on this point: the name Tackorama followed the product, not the other way around. Some 1994 film about Australian gay men gave a name, not an idea. This is not a fucking brand scheme or marketing guff. Most of these early products have been destroyed, often by me.
Anyway, the logo was drawn on a Mac using Illustrator (fuck PCs, they are not professional graphics machines, never have been, never will be...end rant). The logo was based upon the Frutiger Font (or was it Futura? - need to check this), extended a bit, thickened and stretched between two arcs equidistant from the midpoint of the caps. The logo was black as I did not have a colour printer.
And so it was ready. Well almost. Without a postscript printer I had to create a hi-res gif version of the logo. And now it was born (fanfare music in here).
Friday 24th April, 1998 at 16:44 BST.
The logo was needed to adorn the cover of a music tape that was created for a friend (she requested it).
1998, A tape
The first artefact to contain the Tackorama logo was a tape I had produced for a friend. (CD burners were only 4x or 6x then you know and bloody expensive. No MP3 neither. Music was bought on CD but swapped on tapes). Over 90 minutes of music was collected and a quick tape cover was created with a song listing. The logo was about 2cm wide, bore the name Tackorama Records underneath it and was positioned in the bottom right hand corner.
One Hit Wonders: 1980 to 1990
The contents of the tape are not that important. No really. You miss the point if you think they bear a relation on the purpose of Tackorama. What is important is that the tape was listened too, avidly. To begin with, friends and friends of friends pulled faces and said things like "Oh don't put that on" and "You listen to that?" and others just drew in a lot of deep breaths.
But they listened, without screams of agony. Some tapped feet. Few swinged hips and/or pants. The combined effect of listening to those tracks was pleasureable, it got to you in a good way. That's the primary goal of Tackorama - satisfaction, sans taste.
1999, Expansion
Later on in 1998 and throughout 1999 Tackorama was to be making a lot more tapes. And posters. And doctored photos (Photoshop on a Mac, I don't know traditional photography). And postcards. And handmade birthday and christmas cards (far more personal than mass-produced sentimentality).
Tackorama was growing in output and confidence at a time when I was busy with a Masters degree and family problems (health wise, we were not feuding). Add to this the fact that my work-boss had almost finished morphing into a egotistical cunt. Whereas previously I had been granted freedom by him to work and use his big Mac, now he was getting territorial and dictatorial. Due for his mid-life crisis (he was 45 I think) work became really bad towards the end of the year and into 2000. Three of the five guys in the studio walked out in a 2 week period.
2000, Freedom
The straw broke the camels back on 14th February 2000. The details are best not told here to do them justice. But I must mention two things relevant to Tackorama. I was able to move the Tackorama project (enterprise? thing?) to a blue iMac at home at last. And finally I had learnt enough about Illustrator and Photoshop to raise my game, as sports people say. It was time to move up.
New job, new opportunities and just when Tackorama was considering the internet, the damn dot-com bubble burst in the autumn of 2000. Tapes were getting obselete and colour printers were relatively expensive. Tackorama was stuck; no lost is more accurate. It had nowhere to go and no money to move it.
2001-2005, The Wilderness
Over the next few years the logo was trotted out on rare occasions, usually upon request for a tape or poster "Like you use to do". Even when I got a colour Epson inkjet Tackorama never saw much daylight. After the upgrade of Mac in 2004, it was consigned to the CD and not called upon.
Naturally what is missing is all the background events that were occurring at the time, not only in my life but also the world. Tackorama follows product you see and in light of the terrorist attacks and wars and world problems it is curious why it wasn't called upon earlier. When the world turns to shit what else is there to do but make and take pleasure where you can?
2005, Re-birth
In the summer of 2005 there was a plan to go online but the time did not feel right. I had not created anything that was worthy of the name Tackorama. The logo was still on the CD.
And then I had row with the club chairman of CENSORED and resigned my membership immediately. His words kept ringing in my ears "You can't say that". But it was the fucking truth! It was the objective, cold light of day truth and the perveying lie was fatally affecting the club. And I did not even mention CENSORED, CENSORED and the CENSORED "problem". The dinosaur could not deal with it, so he silenced me instead preferring not to have it said aloud.
There it was. I had a reason to revive Tackorama; to encourage my right to speak.
I sat down, fired up the Mac and wrote the most deliberatley evil email in my life, so far. It was long and mentioned names, dates, meetings and was embellished with enough vitriol and sarcasm so you could not stop reading it. And I emailed it to every member of the club, and every affiliate club member, and a few trade publications, and one or two webmasters.
There was no aftershock from the clubs inner circle. But there was surprising number of replies from club members that can be summed up by the phrase "It's about time someone said that." I did not put the Tackorama logo on the email but it deserved it.
Tackorama was back. The handmade birthday cards were back soon after. The logo was off the CD at last!
(Incidentally the club continues to die slowly).
2006, Online and out there
And here we are, the website lives.
Tackorama faces anti- legislation that seems immiment to become law as well as the seemingly anti-fun multitude who use "taste", "decency" and other concepts to silence what they do not want to hear. Fuck them. Fuck them all.
2006, Logo V2: failed
I've tried many times to re-draw and improve the original 1998 logo. Modern versions of Illustrator (yes I'm still on Mac) are significantly better feature wise with the same first rate drawing tools. But depsite the presence of shortcut features to warp type and objects in various shapes and three dimensions, the feel of the original is missing. And so that 1998 logo is still used.
2007, Warming up
Unlimited power and the need to create. 2007 started well with a comic or two are in production, one mini-strip the other a mag sort of affair. Not some faux 1950s Marvel rip offs with affected halftone dots, these will be elegant blends of Photoshop but a hefty dollop of Illustrator, distributed via PDF. A possible Flash animation was planned too, something as sassy as The Anti-Lemming Demo from the Amiga.
2007 also saw a lot more gadgets to aid Tackorama, most importantly the SLR camera. This is the single biggest reason why a lot of the stuff above got started but never finished! Plus the realisation that on top of everything else I had too much to do and too little time (no I'm not one of these assholes that claim to be constantly busy but creative juices don't flow perpertually). That said the best use and most unexpected use of time was for the widgets I created in a juicy burst in August (Trelawney, Lightbulb, Fingerprints). Tackorama on a Mac dashboard, and in Apple's top 50 for months. And some people actually liked them! Thank you Mac persons. Ha ha PC wankers. And you Microsoft junkies got Vista: now that's a good joke.
2008, Small steps
Big plans become focused, i.e. bite size. New widgets are cooking the head (Tinkerbell, Whack Bill) and the first stages of the cartoon (now re-modelled as a strip like one of my favourites Garfield, but with no proper cat and in need of a good title) are almost upon you. The flash animation is on hold for two reasons: not enough creative juices at the moment; and I need to do more research into CENSORED.