Another taxi, another advert, saying this:
That’s right: PAY FOR YOUR JOURNEY WITH AMERICAN EXPRESS AND REALLY GO PLACES.
Unless this happens:
Same photo, photoed in the summer of 2017 outside the Royal Albert Hall, but with the bigger picture included.
2020? Really going places is not something being much encouraged.
Here are two signs that go rather too well together for comfort, I think you’ll agree:
And I bet I’m not the only one to have noticed, as I did in May 2017. The photos I photoed just before that and just after that were both moderately close-ups of the Walkie-Talkie, which gives you a rough idea of where this was.
Makes me think of this.
Although, when I image googled the Fry sign, the only images I got with the CCTV sign included were a couple of “alamy” photos. I hate “alamy” photos. They have “alamy” scrawled all over them.
Here’s a photo photoed years ago during one of my Last Friday of the Month meetings, at my home.
It took me quite a while, as in many years, to get that photo. What I wanted was what my meetings were like, but with no faces visible. Convivial, but with no conviviality being facially expressed. And it took me years to work out that the best way to get what I wanted was to stand on a chair and hold the camera up as high as I could, photoing lower limbs, but no faces, and photoing the kind of (decidedly junky) food that I serve.
It will definitely be quite a while before there are any more such meetings. Public moods can change radically, so never say never, but if the public mood concerning socialising remains at all like it is now, these meetings may already have seen their last. We shall see.
More generally, this is why photoing is a specialist activity, by which I mean that you have to work away at particular sorts of subjects before you get the hang of how best to photo them. I have photoed lots of digital photographers and have got quite good at it. I have not photoed many social groups.
You may say, well, given what you wanted – lots of youngish and casually attired bodies but no faces, a down-market style of hospitality – an aerial photo was the obvious answer. Well, yes, once I realised this, it was obvious. Once the obvious becomes obvious, it is indeed obvious.
A great deal of knowledge (all knowledge?), I believe, consists of that which is – has become – obvious. It’s just that it takes a while for the obvious to become obvious, for the penny, as they say, to drop. Many learning experiences have an element of Why-did-I-not-think-of-that-until-now? about them. Learning stuff need not lead to arrogance; it can lead to humility, as each step forward in knowledge proves how slow-witted you were to make it as slowly as you did.
Many is the late afternoon when I have walked along the South Bank from Westminster Bridge, past the Wheel, and on downstream, until fantigue caused me to seek a tube station. And quite often, I have enjoyed the shadow cast by the Wheel onto the face of the Shell Building, Here, for instance, are some photos of this effect that I photoed way back in 2006. This was how such shadows usually look, featuring the clearly visible pods on the rim of the Wheel.
Yesterday, I did this same walk again, and as already revealed in that earlier posting, the light yesterday afternoon and evening was really special. There were numerous clouds that might have blotted out the evening sun, but they didn’t, or not always. Therefore, there were times when the sun was crashing in past Parliament onto the Wheel, and casting a Wheel shadow onto the Shell Building, just as usual.
What was not usual, however, was the exact nature of the shadow cast. Because of an accident of direction, and perhaps also a quirk of the time of year (I seem to recall another never-to-be-forgotten lighting quirk that happened around this time of the year seven years ago), the exact shadow cast on the Shell Building was very different:
You may not recognise that, but I absolutely do, and did. That’s the middle of the Wheel. No pods. No Wheel rim. That’s the bit around which the Wheel rotates and from which the spokes radiate. I have never observed this effect before.
I am beginning to get less hostile about everyone besides me calling the Wheel the London “Eye”. This is because of certain puns that only work if it’s the Eye. Eye shadow. Eye pods. Change it back to Wheel, and those two don’t work, and there are surely more Eye something or something Eye things to enjoy, if only I could think of any.
Indeed. Photoed by me late this afternoon:
I photoed lots more photos today, but I also did a lot more walking today than I’ve been doing lately, and having, as I do, the choice between doing a long posting and going to bed quite late, and doing a short posting and going to bed sooner rather than later, I choose the latter.
I now intend (although I promise nothing) that more will follow about today’s excursion, including mention of the dramatic weather which caused that dramatic sky, and which caused me to be out photoing it.
I have recently recognised a particular sort of BMNB posting, which is a response to a story from some time ago, which I had permanently open. I didn’t know why I was intrigued by the story, which is why I did no blogging about it, but I was intrigued nevertheless, which is why I refused to forget about it.
Here is one such story, concerning Uber boats in London. And there was a photo to go with this story that I particularly liked:
That story and photo appeared on August 3rd. I think what I liked about this story was simply that I liked that photo, with its splendid Docklands towers, recent and not so recent.
On August 16th, I was over in that part of London, and while beside the River that day, I managed to grab a photo of one of these Uber boats, with a result that wasn’t as good as the above photo, but which does at least confirm that the City AM story is really happening and not something they merely passed on, which someone had adorned with a piece of photoshopping. There are now Uber boats in London:
Same part of London in my photo, as I say, but less showy buildings in the background. Also, my lighting was more lugubrious.
However, these boats are not what I’d call real Uber boats. They are merely Uber adverts. What Uber have done is a sponsorship deal, with the people who already drive these boats back and forth along the River. They aren’t adding anything aside from some cash, in exchange for Uber being painted on the side of the boats.
Real Uber boats would be boats you could personally summon with your mobile phone. They’d be small, fast, and there’d be lots of them. Fat chance of that happening any time soon.
All of which reminds me of a story I once read about a British aristocrat, circa 1920, which is based on the same sort of contrast, between what these Uber boats suggest that they might be, and the humdrum fact of what they really are. The Aristo was told by one of his senior underlings that he needed to tighten his belt and cut the household budget. A number of economies were tentatively suggested, including the idea that His Lordship might perhaps consider using fewer taxis, and instead travelling more often by omnibus. Said the Aristo: “Good idea! Have one sent round in the morning.”
Every so often, a combination of my ever more gargantuan classical CD collection, of my own shifting tastes in classical music, and of my particular life circumstances result in me experiencing musical binges, of various sorts over the years, during which I binge-listen to a particular category of music.
Sometimes a binge will focus on a single piece of music. At other times, as recently, it consists of constantly listening to a particular category of music.
When Lockdown began, at that now vanished time when I and millions of others were genuinely scared that our lives might be about to end prematurely, I found myself listening to, of all things, Haydn symphonies, again and again and again and again. I possess many CDs of Haydn symphonies. Here are about two thirds of them:
That’s a lot of Haydn symphonies, and there are about half as many again still on the shelves, which I also listened to. Plus I even bought another great box of them, because I already had one of the CDs in question and really liked it when I listened to it again.
Haydn is in many ways the “ideal type” of the Classical Music Composer. If you really like his orchestral music, then it can be said with confidence that you really like classical music. What makes me say this is that his music seems to me to posses an absolutely satisfaction with the musical means that were available for its making, and no feeling whatsoever that “art” means in some way feeling obliged to transcend these means, in the manner of someone breaking out of a prison or of dreaming of such a breakout. Put it like this. If Mozart or Beethoven had lived at a different and later time, when musical technology had expanded, you get the strong feeling that their music would have sounded very different and a lot more dramatic. With Haydn, I feel as if it would probably have sounded much as it sounds now.
This is especially true of his earlier symphonies, which I found myself preferring, during my binge. My habit was to assemble all the performances of Haydn symphonies by one conductor and ensemble, and then listen to them in chronological order. And I found that the later symphonies, to my ear, had a bombast and an assertiveness about them that I found, by comparison with the earlier ones, unappealing. Basically, the symphonies he wrote for his aristocratic bosses in Vienna and nearby places struck me as wonderful, utter perfection. But, the later symphonies that he wrote for bigger and less grand audiences, less old money and more new money, in places like Paris and London, London especially, felt to me like Haydn forcing himself to express feelings that his audiences felt more strongly than he did.
It may very well be that actually, Haydn felt horribly imprisoned when he wrote his earlier symphonies, and liberated when writing his later ones. But what I was hearing was a case of one kind of atmosphere, which I found perfectly (and I do mean perfectly) appealing, compared to another that was less congenial. Raucous brass instruments, and above all the percussion, started to interrupt the serene perfection of the earlier symphonies. Bang bang bang, wah wah wah. The later symphonies sounded to me, by comparison, to be bourgeois, in a bad way. Nouveau riche, rather than old riche. New money waving itself in the air, rather than old money simply taking its ease, without fuss or the need to assert itself too stridently. It was as if Haydn had moved from a world where he was in perfect command of his art, to one where he was stressing and straining after something that came less naturally to him.
The irony being that the official programmes of many of Haydn’s earlier symphonies are concerned with exactly such stressfulness and strain. There is even a famous group of earlier symphonies collectively know as the “sturm und drang” – storm and stress – symphonies. But these felt to me like serenely detached descriptions of such emotions, rather than any sort of effort to be engulfed by such feelings on behalf on an emotionally incontinent audience of upwardly mobile poseurs.
I suspect that finding myself being treated as a gentleman of leisure by Haydn, rather than as some sort of new man, a stresser and strainer after such things as “improvement” and “solutions” and “radical progress”, was exactly what I was finding so congenial. Lockdown demanded nothing of me. Literally, it demanded nothing. And, as the owner and operator of a CD player, I could pause the music at will with one touch of a button, which made me even more of an aristocrat than Haydn’s bosses were. How they would have loved to be able to push a button and pause their musicians in mid bar, while they, having been delayed by other business, sat themselves down and made themselves comfortable at the beginning of a musical performance, or while they needed to deal with a discreet interruption from an underling about something that needed a quick answer. And how the likes of Beethoven and Wagner, Wagner especially, would have been outraged by my pause button! My music, Wagner would have shouted, takes precedence over your little life! Shut up and listen, in darkness, and have your emotions aroused and sculpted by me, the Great Composer. I am not hear to amuse you with my art, you are hear to worship me and my Art.
Haydn, especially in his earlier Viennese, pre-bourgeois form, made no such demands upon me. And during the early, serious bit of Lockdown, he was, for me, the perfect musical companion.
If you have read this far, thank you. I hope you’ve already worked out that I am not asking you to agree with me about Haydn. Rather I ask you to think of whether you have had similar bursts of aesthetic enthusiasm, and to reflect on them, as I have on this recent one of mine.
The main thing about such episodes, I would say, is that they can’t be forced. You can’t decide to have one of these binges. They just happen.
Left to right, 2009, 2015, 2020:
2009: Buildings and cranes.
2015: More buildings. More cranes.
2020: Just buildings. No cranes.
For now, I reckon it’s finished. Not finally finished, you understand. Just finished for now.
This afternoon in Wilton Road:
It was the Walken faces that got my attention, as was surely the idea. Big Jim, or maybe just one of his hirelings, was behind the glass, doing a trim, and I was with someone. So this was all done in haste. But despite all the reflections and the confusions, I like them, and partly because of all the reflections and the confusions. What with windows being such a big deal in architecture these days. They create a lot of the particular look and feel of our times, the look being reflections, and the feel being the resulting confusions.
It’s late. All I’m really doing is showing you some half decent photos that I did today, rather than photos from my previous life.
Here’s the Big Jim’s Trims website. It’s a franchise. So, that won’t be Big Jim himself, just a guy with tattoos on his arms.
And here’s what that Barbicide sign is about. I can make no sense of it myself, but if you want to try, click on that, and I wish you luck. “Barbicide” ought to mean killing barbers, or maybe killing barbie dolls. Is that a clue?
I thought about calling this posting “Beauty”, but decided to go with actual accuracy rather than attempted comedy:
A photo done on a very bright and hence very reflective day, in August 2008. No idea exactly where, but somewhere by the River, upstream from me, out west in Putney or some such spot. See also this earlier posting, about an American lady photoer of the last century who also enjoyed this kind of thing, with another selfie by me.
I can now proceed with the rest of my day, in the knowledge that I have already put something here.