A classic looking up photo

I don’t care what the article’s about. I just love the photo at the top of it:

It’s a piece in Quillette.

But where is that? That the plane is so low says Hong Kong to me, but what do I know? The nearest I’ve been to Hong Kong is Greece.

New Surrey stand and thing next to the Pavilion

And they look like a typical London aesthetic cludge, so I guess they’ll fit right in.

Yesterday evening, I did a posting here which collided cricket (some recent and not so recent dramas) with architecture (how the middle of London was looking not so recently). The abrupt change of subject was signalled, as often here, by the word “LATER”, the photo of central London’s Big Things having been an afterthought of dubious relevance to what had preceded it. The only connection was that the two photos in the posting were both photoed on the same day, exactly ten years ago yesterday.

But this posting combines cricket with architecture by being about cricket architecture. Cricket has lots of architecture of its own and is constantly adding to it.

To set the scene, below is a photo I took last autumn.

Me and my Surrey cricket mate Darren went to a very boring game at the Oval on September 23rd of last year. But we had other plans beside watching the mere cricket. We began by creeping up, unnoticed, to the top of the big new stand that faces the Pavilion, at the other end of the ground. I got to take lots of photos, of the stand and from the stand, before someone came up and told us to leave. You can see a few of the photos I took that day in this earlier posting. Those photos were architectural in that they showed lots of the surrounding London architectural scene that you can see from the top of that new stand. But here is another architectural photo I photoed that day, from that same stand, showing how things were then looking in the vicinity of the Pavilion opposite:

The lighting is not good in that, but you get the idea.

Anyway, the reason I mention that expedition and the above photo is that this morning, the Surrey CCC Twitter feed featured this photo:

They’re adding a new stand and a new clutch of indoor spaces next to the Pavilion. The Pavilion being as fine an example as you could hope to see in London of Ancientism, that is to say ancient in atmosphere even when first built.

What they are now doing will end up looking approximately thus:

As always, because it’s London, I’ll probably get entirely used to it and end up liking it, but as of now I think that’s hideous, an absolute textbook example of how not to add modern architecture to ancient or Ancientist architecture.

What a shame they couldn’t get the money together to have started doing this, which was the plan in 2017:

One more marvel that never was to add to London’s copious collection of such dreams.

However things turn out, and you never really know how they’ll turn out until they finish it and let you see it for real, one thing’s for sure, which is that this view, from the summer of 2015, …:

…, which I used to enjoy photoing whenever Darren took me up to the top tier of the Pavilion, is now a thing of the past.

WIll a similar view be photoable from the new stand, and if so, will random people like me be allowed actually to photo it? Fingers crossed. In other words, the opposite of what you do with your fingers when actually photoing.

Incoming symphonies

On CD, by Haydn and by Bruckner, and this despite my CD shelves already being crammed to overflowing:

Oh no my mistake, that’s not my CD shelves, it’s a building, at the top end of Victoria Street.

On a more serious note: Note the colours. Architectural modernity is getting slowly but surely more colourful.

The ups and downs of cricket (and of the City of London)

Ten years ago today, England beat Australia in the Final of the ICC World Twenty20, in Bridgetown Barbados. It seems that Australia batted first, lost early wickets and never recovered.

I watched the final dozen or so overs of this game at the home of Michael Jennings:

Happy memories. What could be better than watching England beat Australia at cricket, at the home of a friend, who is an Australian cricket nut?

My hard disc has a much better memory than I do. I had no recollection of this until I just looked up May 16 2010 in the photo-archives. And up came all these photos of a screen, telling of England’s triumph.

The Man of the Match was … Craig Kieswetter. Whatever happened to him?

It wasn’t good:

Craig Kieswetter, the England ODI and T20 wicketkeeper who was Man of the Match in the 2010 World T20 final, has announced his retirement following the eye injury he sustained last year.

Kieswetter was struck in the face when a ball went between his helmet and grille when playing against Northamptonshire, breaking his nose and damaging his eye socket. He returned for two matches at the end of the 2015 season, then went to play T20 in South Africa, but struggled with the effects of the injuries.

It could have been far worse. That I had definitely not forgotten about.

LATER: Here’s how the City of London was looking that evening, photoed from Michael’s local railway station:

No Cheesegrater. No Scalpel. And no Big Lump, the latest biggest one that has no silly name because it’s too boring. Not, in other words, yet, this, which is how Things are now, give or take a few cranes.

No shininess at Eltz

Nudged, I’m guessing, by this posting of mine, Michael Jennings earlier this month Facebooked this closer-up photo he had photoed of Eltz Castle:

A classic of ancient adhocistical anarchy, I think you’ll agree. The very definition of picturesque.

But I also show this photo of Michael’s because I think it illustrates the opinion I expressed in this earlier shininess of architectural modernity posting. There is no shininess in the above photo, not even in the windows on show. (The things I like best are always the things that tell me how right I was, I find.)

An obvious reason for that is that the windows seem all to be recessed from the surfaces of buildings. But there seems to be another reason. Take a look at this Eltz Castle photo, this time an interior shot (one of those here):

Very lavish, but that’s not my point. Which is: Look again at those windows, the ones with all the circles. They look like Ancientist fakes to me, but Ancientist or genuinely ancient, what those windows illustrate is that glass existed for a long time before they worked out how to make its surface smooth and flat. Above all, they took a long time to work out how to make big sheets of glass, such as we moderns now take for granted. And it’s that total absence of large and smooth and shiny surfaces that does so much to explain the different atmosphere radiated by ancient architecture.

At Eltz, you might get occasional flashes of light, little splinters. And you can see great stuff in old windows, from the inside, as the above photo also illustrates lavishly. But you’re never going to see anything reflected in glass like that, outside. Not any Thing, that you can recognise.

Martin Cook photographs creatures

I follow Martin Cook on Twitter. His day job is medical, which must be interesting just now. But he’s also a Real Photographer. Here we see him lining up a swan with Salisbury Cathedral:

Also, that tree on the left looks like it’s had a big old dose of pollarding done to it, a process that has long intrigued me.

See also: a deer; a rabbit; another deer; a monochrome deer; the same deer (?) in colour; a bee; … You get the pictures.

BabelColour

Simon Evans, whom I follow, did a tweet asking what is the greatest photo ever. Many excellent photos followed.

The Chosen One joined in the discussion:

May I humbly suggest @StuartHumphryes for your delectation? An amazing collection of superb photos

It certainly is. Cue more excellent photos, and excellent photographic restorations and history lessons. This is Twitter being brilliant. Twitter can be horrible. So, ignore the horrible and go with the brilliant.

Simon Evans was already a fan of Humphryes, who calls his Twitter feed “BabelColour” (see above). But I’d never encountered the discoveries and recreations of Humphryes until now.

Following.

The shininess of architectural modernity

One of the biggest architectural trends of the last half century has been the relentless replacement of rough and unreflective surfaces with smooth and shiny surfaces, concrete by glass, old school stones and bricks by glass or shiny bricks held up by regular bricks. Glass is now omnipresent, even as much of it is deliberately arranged not to be seen through. Glass has got a lot smarter, meaning better at making light do exactly what it wants light to do, and a lot stronger and less accident-prone.

As a result, reflections now abound in cities, including reflections in see-through glass, because you actually don’t want see-through glass being perfectly see-through, because then people would keep walking into it and breaking their noses or skulls. So, the surface of see-through glass has mostly been kept deliberately shiny.

If you think about it, the difference between rural picturesque and urban is the difference between rough and smooth, between not-shiny and shiny. Shininess in hitherto impeccably rural settings can be particularly grating. It’s not necessarily the shape of architectural modernity that causes the most offence, in architecturally ancient or Ancientist settings. It is often its typical surface. Its shiny surface.

And it’s not just glass. Even the most mundane of building materials have tended to get shinier. The latest stronger-than-before materials tend to have smoother and shinier surfaces. Modern materials just seem to turn out like that. But also, smooth and shiny surfaces are so much easier to clean. Dirty stones or bricks have to be cleaned with industrial scale toothbrushes and savagely powerful hoses, which tend to rip off the old surfaces of the stones or bricks and make them even rougher and more likely to get even dirtier, later, again. Rinse and repeat until there is either a cripplingly expensive restoration job to be done, or else hardly anything left. A shinily modern surface can just be hosed down more gently, from a distance, with no lasting damage being done to it.

So, lots of reflections. Lots of images bouncing around off urban surfaces, and mingling with the images already on or made by those surfaces. If you are a Real Photographer, being paid to photo some very particular Thing, with no distractions please, this must often be maddening, the ultimate humiliation being when you yourself and your camera end up in the damn photo. But for the likes of me, urban shininess arrived just in time for us to be able to run about photoing it, with joy.

This aesthetic sermon began life as the mere intro to a clutch of shiny photos, but the rule with blogging, often broken here I’m afraid but at least sometimes not, is: keep it simple and keep it brief. Let one link suffice (note in particular the second photo in the Maier set there), by way of (prophetic) illustration. Here endeth the lesson.

Masks in London in June 2015

At the time I photoed these twelve photos, I picked them out and put them in a special directory, but then it went no further. Here they are:

Not bad, but you’ve seen it all before. Photoers photoing, with their faces unrecognisable, a BMNB staple.

But consider that last photo, of the lady whose face would appear to have been covered by her scarf blowing over it, or maybe being placed over it. I included that photo for future display, but for some reason I didn’t consider any of these four photos as interesting:

At least I thought them interesting enough to actually photo them. Maybe the idea was to do a special posting about mask photos. If so, here is that posting. Which must also include one or all of these photos, of her friend, doing the same thing:

History doesn’t just make you experience the present differently. It also makes you look back at the past with new eyes.

Alex Singleton’s website

Yes, incoming from Alex Singleton:

Hi Brian,

Hope you are keeping well.

I thought you might find this amusing – a full and frank confession of my time as a teenager:

https://www.alexsingleton.com/diversions/fast-times-at-dulwich-college/

Best wishes,
Alex

The link above took me to a website entry adorned with this photo of the architectural splendidness that is Dulwich College:

Alex Singleton is a PR person. Not just any PR person, the PR person who wrote The PR Masterclass, which I possess and recommend, and about which, google reminds me, I wrote about the launch of in this rather ancient blog post.

Blog post summary:

If you hold a book launch for a book called “PR Masterclass”, that launch had better be packed out, or you look like a prune.

It was. He didn’t.

I get emails similar to the email Alex just sent me on a daily basis. However, they are usually much longer and duller and they usually refer to my Old Blog, which hardly inspires confidence. They just got my email from some random list. It tells you something about Alex Singleton’s skills as a PR person that I have reproduced his email in full. I assume Alex wants his website, which I’ve not seen before (certainly not this Dulwich piece), to be noticed. Hence this posting.

Alex is the kind of person who has lots of friends. But speaking as one of them, I never feel he is exploiting me when I get an email like the one above. There’s no pressure, not least because it reads like it took him only about fifteen seconds to write, and like he was sending out lots of other personalised emails to other friends at the same time. Maybe this was a mass mailing, with identical wording to all of us, but it doesn’t feel like that to me.

I had a rootle around in the website. Politically, Alex is a Free Marketeer. He doesn’t bang on about this at excessive length, but nor does he hide this fact, which I like. But mostly, it’s about how he does PR and about how he learned this.

He is upfront also in saying that the point of the website is to develop his personal brand. So many people in advertising and marketing forget to do this. They advertise everything, and do marketing for everyone, except for themselves. But if you can’t even drum up business for yourself, why would anyone else trust you to do the same for them? Being a PR person and being a bit pushy about it makes perfect sense.