Month: September 2018

The Great Pagoda of Kew Gardens – and its dragons

The high point, literally, of the expedition that GodDaughter2 and I made to Kew Gardens back in August was our exploration of the Great Pagoda.

From the top of the Great Pagoda, you can see the Big Things of Central London. But what the Great Pagoda itself looks like is also worth examining.

Here is an early view we had of it:

And here is how it looked when we got closer:

The Daily Mail describes the Great Pagoda as Britain’s First Skyscraper.

Now look how it looked when we got closer still:

So, what are those sticky-outy things on the corners of each sticky-outy roof?

That’s right, dragons. And we’re not talking merely inflated dragons. These are solid looking and scary. You couldn’t kill these dragons with a mere pin prick, and you wouldn’t dare to try.

Most of the Great Pagoda dragons look like this:

We discovered when we got there that the recent restoration of this Great Pagoda had, only a few weeks before our visit, been completed. We got very lucky with that.

Read more about these dragons, and about the Pagoda that they now guard, in this Guardian report.

This Great Pagoda, London’s very first Big Thing, was built by Sir William Chambers in 1762. The dragons were a feature of the original Pagoda, but in 1784 they were removed. Being made of wood, and following a burst of wet weather, they had started to rot.

Wikipedia says that Kew Gardens was adopted as a national botanical garden in 1840. Would that be when the Pagoda was opened to the general public? Whenever exactly that was, Kew Gardens and the Great Pagoda have been what we now call visitor attractions for quite a while now.

During World War 2, the Great Pagoda was used to test bombs. You can still see one of the holes they made in all the floors, to allow the bombs to fall. Keeping that for everyone to see now is a nice touch, I think.

Kew Gardens contains lots of greenery, and green stuff on sticks. What do they call those things? Trees. Kew Gardens has lots and lots of trees, of many different brands.

So, on the left here, the hole in the floor. On the right there, the seat made from many trees:

And in the middle, the seat, seen through the hole.

But back to those dragons. The old rotting dragons have now been almost entirely replaced by 3D printed dragons, which look solid but which are actually far lighter than the old-time originals.

On the lowest roof, right near the ground, there was a different sort of dragon, which looked like this:

I wonder what the story was of that one, for there did indeed seem to be only one such blue dragon. Had the original plan been to make all the dragons like that one? But did its structural weakness cause them to abandon that plan, and go with the other darker green dragon with its scary red tongue, and with its rather more solid wings? Don’t know, but whatever the story is, the winning dragon design is pretty good also.

Everything about how the Great Pagoda looks, inside as well as its exterior, says: class. This is a visitor attraction that I warmly recommend. There is no lift, not originally of course, and not now, but the steps, although quite numerous, are at a comfortably mild angle – rather than, say, like the ones in the Monument. Even better, each flight of steps you go up causes you to reach another actual floor, of the sort you can stand on, with windows looking outwards. So, oldies like me can go up two floors, say, and then have a comfortable breather, without blocking anyone else on the stairs. If we are on the right floor, we can even use that multi-treed seat (see above).

The weather on the day that GD2 and I visited Kew Gardens was not perfect. The dragons look rather dark and menacing in my photos. But that look works, I think. And as days out go, this day out was pretty much perfect.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

La Taupe

To me, nothing says Abroad quite like a poster, somewhere in Abroad, advertising an English speaking movie, whose English title I already know, with a foreign title that is different, but with all the same star names:

La Taupe means The Mole. I preferred the TV series, but I love this poster. Photoed by me in Paris in February 2012.

As was this, on the same expedition:

In the same directory, I encountered other photos of posters advertising the following movies: Drive (Ryan Gosling), Ghost Rider (Nicolas Cage), Underworld (Kate Beckinsale), and Star Wars Episode 1 (whoever). But in those posters, the titles stayed in their original English. Why?

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Pavlova in front of “Portland House”

Yesterday I was in Victoria Station, and as I emerged from it into … that mess of activity outside the front entrance, I noticed that the light seemed particularly appealing. At first what got my attention was the combined effect of the mess in the foreground, in the dark, and the assorted Medium Sized Things in the background, totally mismatched and just jambed down together in the London style, all illuminated. (See photos 1.1 and 1.2 below.)

But then, I found myself zeroing in, yet again, on Pavlova. What got me noticing her was that, finally, I seemed to have found the right moment to photo her with that big concrete lump that calls itself “Portland House” behind her. I have done this a lot, but it has never worked until now. This time, there was a shadow behind Pavlova, while Pavlova herself, and the dwarfed-by-modernity theatre on the top of which Pavlova dances, were both picked out by the light, a combination of circumstances I have never before encountered, or if I did I didn’t notice.

I took many photos of this effect. Partly because I can’t decide which one I like best, and partly because I think these photos look good when small, here are 3×3=9 of them:

Maybe the Wikipedia entry for Portland House does say who originally designed this unlovely edifice, but if it does, I couldn’t find that. Wikipedia does note, however, that Portland House is a miniature rip-off of the Pan Am Building in New York, now called something else.

Further googling got me to a piece by Mike Higginbottom entitled Pan-Am’s London sibling. He rather likes it. Plus, he name checks the now pretty much forgotten architect of said sibling: Howard Fairbairn & Partners. Modern Movement hulks by big name modernists sometimes have a certain in-your-face impact and memorability about them. But this hulk has always seemed to me to epitomise Modern Movementism at its dreariest. It’s not even “brutal”, just big, bland and boring. I greatly prefer Nova, the red diagonalised Medium Sized Thing nearby, which is also to be seen in photos 1.1 and 1.2 above.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

A lorry brings reinforcements

And no, I don’t mean reinforcements for an army. I mean the kind of reinforcements that end up buried in concrete.

Like these ones:

All six of these photos also feature one of the more impressive scaffolding arrays near me just now. The art of scaffolding and the art of creating reinforcements for structural concrete have much in common. Both involve putting together lots of bits of metal. Both need to result in a structure that stays put and does not collapse. Both look pretty to people like me.

But there are also big differences. Scaffolding is very visible, and it remains visible for the duration of its working existence. Scaffolding thus proclaims itself to the world, by its very existence. That we live in a golden age of scaffolding is obvious to all of us, whether we like this fact or hate it.

Also, scaffolding rather quickly punishes those who erect it, if they don’t do it right. While creating scaffolding, scaffolders make use of the scaffolding they have just been constructing, and they are their own first users. They thus have a literally inbuilt incentive to do their work well. And if they don’t, it is not that hard for others to spot this. Bad scaffolding wobbles. Such are my surmises about scaffolding.

Reinforcements for concrete are something else again. By the time they go to work, doing the job they were built for, everyone concerned had better be damn sure that they have done their work well. But, if they haven’t, the disastrous consequences of that bad work may take years to happen, and even then to be controversial. Who is to say exactly what caused a building to collapse? And if the building collapses rather catastrophically, it is liable to destroy a lot of the evidence of what exactly happened, and why. Investigating such catastrophes being a whole separate job in itself. So, getting these reinforcements right, with an inbuilt regime of testing and inspection and supervision, all managed by morally upright people whose declarations of confidence in what they have been inspecting can be relied upon, is a whole distinct industry.

But, this is an industry whose products, by their nature, end up being invisible. We all rely on such work being done correctly, not just “structurally” but also in a morally correct manner. Yet, we mostly never see this work, only its indirect results.

So, I hereby I celebrate the work, morally as well as merely technically good, that goes into the making of reinforcements for concrete. I salute the good men and true who make these (I think) beautiful objects, and who ensure that they perform faithfully. Their moral as well as technical excellence is all part of why I consider such reinforcements to be things of beauty.

I did some googling to try to determine exactly what reinforcements like those in my photos are used for. The lorry says R. SWAIN AND SONS on it. But they are hauliers, not makers of concrete reinforcements. The nearest I got to an answer was this photo, of objects just like those on my lorry, with this verbiage attached: “Prefabricated Piling Cages Made of Reinforced Bars On Site”. Prefabricated Piling cages. Piling sounds to me like foundations. (Yes.) The reinforcing has to be shoved down a hole in one go. It can’t be constructed bit by bit, in the hole. It either gets assembled beforehand on site, or, it gets assembled in a factory and taken to the site by lorry, as above.

The reinforcing that a structure needs when it is above ground, on the other hand, can be assembled on site, and I’m guessing that this is what usually happens.

Just guessing, you understand. My first guess actually was: for an above ground structure, until I came upon the photo I just linked to, and not foundations. But, what do I know?

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

An ideal Showboat

Recently I bought a CD set of Showboat, and yesterday I listened to it. Showboat is not really my kind of thing. When it comes to singing, I tend to prefer either Schubert or the Rolling Stones. I bought this Showboat to learn more about a lady called Janis Kelly. As you can see to the right there, she is one of the star singers in this recording.

Janis Kelly is something of a legend in the classical singing world. She is a fine singer in operas and music dramas of all kinds, and she sang the part of “Magnolia” in this performance of Showboat. She is also a much admired singing teacher, of the sort that singers she has taught spend the rest of their careers boasting that they were taught by, in their CVs and programme notes. And, Janis Kelly just happens to be GodDaughter2’s singing teacher at the Royal College of Music. (GD2’s graduation recital being further evidence, to my ears, and eyes, of Ms. Kelly’s teaching prowess.)

Janis Kelly sounded great on this recording, but what surprised me was how much I enjoyed the recording as a whole. I am used to hearing shows like Showboat performed in a style that is aimed at audiences who basically prefer pop music to classical or orchestral music, and which typically uses pop brashness and pop exuberance to cover for the small number of musicians being deployed. This version of Showboat, however, was “orchestrated”, by Robert Russell Bennett. The sleeve notes claim that this orchestration is based on the “original 1946 score”, and (I’m guessing) might well be closer to what its composer, Jerome Kern, would have wanted than was any performance that Kern himself ever heard. This is a performance which makes clear the direct line from opera to operetta, to the music of Kern. Under the baton of John Owen Edwards, the orchestra makes a far lovelier sound than the din I was expecting.

Mercifully, what has not been opera-ed, so to speak, is the singing style. Where an operatically-inclined manner is appropriate, that is what happens, as when Janis Kelly sings, for example. But when it comes to a character like Ellie, sung by Caroline O’Connor, we get the full Broadway closely-microphoned belting style, a style that someone like Franz Lehar, or for that matter Franz Schubert, could never have imagined.

Further proof of the excellence of the singing in this performance is that, in the best Broadway style, and even when the singing is rather operatic, you can hear every word they sing. Had this show been sung in the full-on operatic style throughout, to emphasise that this is directly descended from Verdi and Wagner and Puccini, that would never have happened. (I’m still grumbling to myself about a performance of Madam Butterfly at the English National Opera (where everything is sung in English), where most of the solo singers might as well have been singing in Japanese for all the sense I could make of what they were singing.)

My feeling about opera is that I tend not to like how it is sung (too wobbly and verbally incomprehensible (see above)), but I love the sound that it makes, in between the singing. When it comes to singing, I tend to prefer the Abba style to the noise made by the average opera singer. (Above average opera singers are a different matter entirely. (Today I listened to Act 1 of this, also on CD, and it sounded stupendous.)) But as for what accompanies that singing, give me the sound of an opera orchestra every time, over the brash, jazz-band-based instrumental belting, banging and twanging that you mostly get when listening to “music theatre”, provided only that the music is the kind that works orchestrally, which in Showboat it is.

This Showboat, then, is for me the ideal compromise, between Broadway and the opera house, being the best of both and the worst of neither. Not bad for a fiver, which is all Amazon charged me for it.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Robert R. Reilly on the nature of Saudi power

I am currently reading The Closing of the Muslim Mind, by Robert R. Reilly, with a view to reviewing it for Samizdata. Brilliant. For as long as I’ve been reading this book, finishing reading it has been my number one concern. Shoving up brilliant stuff here has … not. Some Facebook friends of mine have been choosing the books that have most influenced their thinking, and this book looks like it will be added to my list.

Here is a typically illuminating paragraph from this book (on page 144 of my paperback edition – which I am happy to note is towards the end of it):

The enormous influence of Saudi Arabia today in the Muslim world is often thought by Westerners to be almost completely due to its oil wealth – petro-Islam. However, this discounts the fact that many Muslims, including in countries like Egypt, which are traditionally opposed to Saudi Arabia, see this wealth as a direct gift from Allah. Can it be only an accident that these treasures are under the sands of this particular country? No, they must be there as a reward to the Saudis for following the true path. Why else would the oil be there? – a question that has to be answered not by geologists, but within the understanding that God has directly placed the oil there as He directly does all things. The presence of petroleum gives credence to the Saudi claim that its Wahhabi form of Islam is the legitimate one. It is because of the oil that other Muslims are willing to give this claim consideration. This is why Wahhabism has spread so significantly, even in parts of the world like Indonesia that would seem, from their cultural backgrounds, to have little sympathy with its radical literalism. Therefore, it is not only through Saudi oil largess but also because of where the oil is that Wahhabism enjoys such prominence.

For the sort of Muslim Reilly is writing about (and that’s a hell of a lot of them), what we in the West refer to as “reality” is continuously created by Allah, in a succession of miraculous whims. Even to study the laws of nature is to presume to place limits on what Allah might choose to do, and is accordingly a blasphemy. Whatever happens was done by Allah, and is accordingly right. Might is right.

And if the Saudis have most of the financial clout in the Muslim world, that means Allah must be on their side.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Another go at Bartok – and two competitions

I was summoned to Chateau Samizdata (which is in South Kensington these days) for lunch today, which meant that when I walked past that Bartok statue at lunchtime today, the light was behind me, rather than in front of me and behind Bartok.

So I was able to have another go at photoing him:

But with rather mixed results. The change in lighting made a lot less difference than I had been hoping.

I spent the late afternoon and the evening (a) doing stuff at home, and (b) keeping track of the climaxes of two competitions, this one, which was won by pianist Eric Lu, and this one, which was won by the Worcestershire cricket team. Which means Worcestershire have had a mixed season, having also been relegated from Division One of the County Championship. It was like them winning the FA cup but also getting relegated from the Premier League. However, getting relegated from Division One of the Country Championship makes far less financial difference than dropping out of the Premier League. So Worcester are probably now pretty happy. Counties doing well in one format but badly in another is quite frequent. They all say that, of course, they want to win everything. But in reality, they prioritise this and neglect that.

Tonight, Radio 3 played the last two Leeds Piano Competition concerto performances, the three others having been played last night. I will be checking out the performance of Beethoven 1 from last night, because, while they were waiting for them to pick the various prize winners, they played part of a chamber music performance by the guy who had played Beethoven 1, which sounded excellent. Also, this guy came second in the overall competition, so he’s pretty good.

Tonight’s Beethoven 4, from winner Lu, was excellent, albeit somewhat more subdued than I think Beethoven had in mind when he composed this piece. Lu’s was a very “private” performance of what was actually, I think, written as a rather public piece (about private feelings). But that’s very much a matter of (my) opinion. Given what Lu was doing, he did it very well. Besides which, who would want all concerto performances to sound the same? Beethoven might have been surprised by Lu’s delicate and subtle performance, but that doesn’t mean he’d have minded. On the contrary, he would probably be amazed and delighted that people were still playing the thing at all.

Tonight’s other concerto, the Schumann, was similar in artistic intention to Lu’s Beethoven 4, but to my ear it involved a few too many wrong notes. The Radio 3 commentators didn’t mention these wrong notes, but I don’t think I imagined them. I think they chose to ignore them.

Bartok wrote three Piano Concertos, each very fine in their contrasting ways. None of these were played in the final of the Leeds Piano Competition.

LATER: I’ve just been listening to another county game, just started on Sept 18th, and I realise that the piece I linked to about Worcester getting relegated was dated 2015. Theoretically, they could still avoid relegation this year. But they’re not going to. They’ve just been bowled out for 94 by Essex, and they are about thirty points shy of safety, with Yorks and Lancs both having to cock it up big time for them to escape. As it is, Worcs and Lancs both look doomed to the trop. But, in theory, Worcs are still in with a chance of avoiding this.

I am very sorry to have misled you, in the unlikely event that I did, and that you care.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

A noisy anteater

Last Sunday morning I was trying to have a good old lie-in, but instead I got woken up early by a giant anteater.

Yes. Having been woken up, I looked out my window towards where all the din seemed to be coming from, and this was the scene I beheld:

At first I thought the culprit might be that refuse lorry in the foreground, but it soon because clear that the noise had been coming from that red lorry with the crane-like thing attached to it.

Let’s move in closer:

By the time this photo had been photoed, the big red lorry had lifted its nozzle out of that hole in the pavement on the right there, which I subsequently learned had been dug in connection with electric cables. Evidently there was muck in the hole which needed to be got out, in a hurry. Sometimes technology really sucks.

I was intrigued, and at first greatly puzzled, by picture on the side of the red lorry, and it took me quite a while to work it out. It is a giant anteater. It looks like at least two creatures, pointing in opposite directions, but the “other creature” is, or so I believe, the giant anteater’s giant tail. That tail being a lot of what makes the anteater a giant.

Wikipedia tells us what an actual giant anteater looks like:

I can see why an anteater would have a very long nose. But why the enormous tail? Balance, perhaps? The answer offered here says balance, and also maybe to cover itself when sleeping. It seems to be mixed up with the anteater having a low body temperature, the tail being there partly to keep heat out. So, perhaps also some kind of fan? I couldn’t find a confident answer.

As for the gizmo deployed at the back of the lorry, note how this time, a bendy arm with a tube in it does make use of a bendy tube, unlike that machine for squirting concrete that I mentioned here earlier. Guess: not so much pressure this time, not least because the material itself being sucked up (this time) is not so heavy and bulky. Some pressure, but not so much.

That phone number of the side of the lorry got me to the enterprise that supplied this equipment. But follow that link and you’ll find no mention of any red lorries with anteaters on the side. By which I mean, I didn’t.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Street lamp in front of crane

Today I was in Bermondsey, seeing a man about a blog, and instead of going straight home again, I got out at Southwark and walked to Parliament Square. Then I tubed to Victoria, and did some quite strenuous shopping. All that, plus I am getting old. So, I am now knackered, and am in need of an early night..

Here, picked out almost at random, is a photo I took on my travels, in Lower Marsh.

When photoing this photo, I of course had no idea that part of the blurry crane in the background would be visible, less blurrily, at a weird angle, in the street lamp. Like I always say, my camera has better eyesight than I do, and what with me (see above) getting old, that gap has been growing.

London street lamps are rather fine, I think. In the middle of London. Not so sure about the outskirts.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

The man from Glint

Earlier this evening, I attended a fascinating Libertarian Home talk given by Jason Cozens, one of the founders and bosses of Glint. (Scroll down there a bit, and I think you will see why I think I smell yet another two-man team.) Glint enables those who think that currency ought to be gold-backed to get there hands on just such a currency, thereby personally reversing, as it were, the decision by President Nixon, in 1971, to take the US dollar off the gold standard.

This talk was excellent, and was clearly saturated in Austrianism. In the highly unlikely event that Jason Cozens has not met up with a conversed with Detlev Schlichter, he should.

Here is a photo I took of Mr Cozens waving an ancient gold coin from Roman era Britain, which he had come by in some way that he did describe but which I immediately forgot:

And here is that coin, and him holding it, somewhat closer up:

Glint, however, does not deploy actual gold coins. Any gold it arranges for you to own stays in a vault in Switzerland. You get yourself a Glint account, with whatever combination of gold or other popular currencies in it that you want, and you can buy stuff with your card, which looks and works like any other credit/debit card.

Glint would appear to be well worth investigating.

I also found the evening very advantageous on a more personal level. I was able to solidify no less than two future Brian’s Last Fridays talks, and was able to woo two other potential future speakers of great interestingness. Others present seemed equally busy making connections of their own. Which is a lot of the point of such meetings, and which is all part of why I believe in organising a steady stream of them.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog