Tomorrow, Patrick Crozier and I will, all being well, recording a conversation about the Industrial Revolution, aka The Kink.
Too busy re-remembering what they said to be able to write about that now.
Category: My photographs
Big Things combined differently
I was in John Lewis in Oxford Street a few days ago, and despite being encumbered with two huge new pillows in a vast bag, I managed to photo this photo:
The inevitably artificial light was unhelpful and I couldn’t get far enough away to capture it all properly, because well, I just couldn’t. There was stuff behind me, stopping me. But nevertheless, there it is. It is made of wire, attached to the wall with those little plastic thingies with a single nail.
Here, purely for context rather than artistic impression, is a close-up of the plugs at the bottom of this Thing, showing the manner of this Thing’s construction:
I rather think that the idea was that the parts of this Thing made of one big wire circuit, the black wire rather than the grey wire, would be able to light up. But although that plug is in the on position, no light is manifesting itself. Ah well.
I collect graphical representations of London of this peculiar sort, often just by saving the graphic, but also by photoing (scroll down a bit there) such things. Here (scroll down again) is a three dimensional version of the same strange thing.
The strange thing being how the individual Big Things of London are always, in these graphics, or models, or (sometimes) faked photos, combined in new, inaccurate and often rather creative ways. It’s like they’re chess pieces. Hey, I wonder how Big Ben would look if it was right behind Tower Bridge! Hey, what can we see differently by looking at it through The Wheel? Let’s put the BT Tower right next to the Shard! The Tower of London next to Battersea Power Station!
I know London well, but other cities far less well. Is this a particularly London thing, or do all cities do this, in their graphic representations of themselves? I sense that London is rare in having just so many of these rare and rather quirky Things, highly individual and highly recognisable, that just beg to be played around with. But maybe lots of other big cities do the same, with all the individual and quirky Things they’ve got.
Cardboard face
It’s a common experience. I’m making absolutely no claim to originality here. We humans regularly see faces where we know, even as we see these faces, that there are no real faces to be seen. Yet, we see them:
That is one of the bits of cardboard I photoed for that earlier cardboard-v-polystyrene packaging posting. It looks happy.
Closely related to seeing faces where there are none, is the way that humans see human-like expressions in the faces of animals, and react accordingly. An animal may be just standing there, looking cute. But what that animal may well be thinking is: Could I beat this creature in front of me if we had a fight? And if I could, what would his flesh taste like? We all know this. Yet, our brains overrule our minds.
I hesitated quite a while before showing my latest clutch of Oscar photos, this morning. My reason being that by showing such photos I am proclaiming myself to be rather soft in the head, in the sort of way I have just described. I don’t think that Oscar was contemplating attacking me and trying to eat me. If we had a straight up fight, I’d win, and both he and I know this. But Oscar may well have been thinking: When is this idiot going to feed me? Yet still, I find myself liking Oscar. All because he has evolved to behave in such a way as to make my brain think him a combination of a nice, warm-hearted, generous person and a comfort blanket. I can’t help myself.
Related: I regret the apparent fading out of Idiot Toys, where there was a whole section devoted to gadgets with faces.
Woodcat and Oscar
Am I becoming a cat lady in my old age? Probably. Although it may be more that, as I get older, I become less bothered about pretending not to be a cat lady, having always been one.
That’s Oscar, and a wooden cat, photoed just as I was about to leave GodDaughter2’s family in the South of France last January, and head for Carcassonne airport and back to London. I was all packed up and read to go, and waiting. So I filled the time photoing the two cats in question.
The reason I show so many photos of this photo-session is that if I merely showed you one of the last two, of Oscar next to Woodcat, you’d be assuming that Oscar was there, and I put Woodcat next to him. But, the above chronologically displayed photos show that I was photoing Woodcat, who remained immobile throughout, and then Oscar joined in. Rather obligingly, I think.
Lots of cardboard – no polystyrene
On the left here, my newly acquired Dyson Graven Image …:
… and on the right, a look, in particular, at the packaging it came in.
I note with interest the complete absence of expanded polystyrene. All the packaging was done with cardboard, often manipulated into extraordinarily elaborate shapes.
Why would this be? I tried googling for an answer, and got lots of stuff about how to buy cardboard packaging, but found nothing about why polystyrene is now out of favour. Are there new regulations, caused by the anti-plastic obsession? (The Pacific Ocean with its fifty miles across patch of floating plastic waste, blah blah, etc. etc..) Is it just that a right-on company like Dyson chooses to bow to such notions?
Or, are their real economic reasons to prefer cardboard for a job like this? Have they, for instance, recently managed to contrive machines which can automatically, and hence cheaply, create elaborate cardboard packaging like this, the way they couldn’t only a few years ago? Has polystyrene become more expensive, for some reason? Has cardboard itself got cheaper? Does cardboard mean that the packaging doesn’t have to be quite so big, thus cutting warehouse costs?
Anyone? Comments are very welcome, as they always are, but especially, in this case, if they in any way answer my questions.
Quota photo of a sign about Croydon Spaceport
Whatever that is.
Busy day ahead. That to-do list (see previous posting) is already demanding that I go off and do various things, which leaves little time for blogging now.
So, quota photo time, and it’s very strange:
I already like the building, but I tried internet searching about this Croydon Spaceport stuff, and am not much the wiser. Basically, I can’t tell how serious they’re being. Are they promoting Croydon, which is a place I’ve always loved? Or space exploration, which I also strongly favour? Either way I’m for it, but am still a bit baffled.
No time to do much linking now, but may add some links later.
LATER: I am none the wiser.
Mayfair Tanning & Waxing
You see weird things in London. Well, I do:
For years and years, this sort of car decorating was impossible. Now: everywhere. But not usually as artfully as in the above.
Photoed by me, in Oxford Street, three years ago today.
When you type in the website on that midget car, you discover that this enterprise now calls itself Mayfair Aesthetics & Beauty. Which is not so weird. Which would be why they changed it.
Cromwell plus scaffolding
I grow increasingly fond of the statue of Oliver Cromwell, which is right next to Parliament itself rather than out in Parliament Square like Churchill, Gandhi, Smuts, Mandela and the rest of them.
Here, photoed on February 5th, is one of my more recent photos of this Cromwell statue:
I like that because although Oliver himself is very small, he is still very recognisable, and also because he is small you get lots of context. In this case, you get Parliament, in the form of … that big tower, the other one from Big Ben.
And, you get a zillion tons of scaffolding, including scaffolding with big white sheets spread out over it, which makes for a constantly changing background for this statue.
London’s Parliament is now one of the great epicentres of the scaffolding industry. This being because Parliament is sacred and must at all cost be preserved. Yet, it is collapsing, both inside and out. My understanding is that it is currently being entirely rebuilt, but that this total rebuild is having to be visually disguised as a mere refurbishment. Seriously, it might well have made more sense to flatten the entire place, then rebuild it entirely, with the outside being meticulously reconstructed to make it look as if nothing major had happened.
Meanwhile, it’s all a great background for Oliver. Memo to self: Dig out more photos of this statue, with varying backgrounds, and show them here.
Will you SURVIVE THE PLAGUE?
I’ve just been meandering through the photo-archives, trying to find out when was my last totally pre-Covid walkabout. Not even any vaguely threatening headlines, just life as we knew it before … it. And it would appear that the last time I was able thus to indulge was on February 5th. I went looking for just one fun photo that would celebrate this bygone age, and it was no contest:
Nothing says definitely-before-You-Know-What like an advert for a Plague-based entertainment, for tourists, on a bus, on Westminster Bridge. And not a face mask in sight. Any more than there were face masks in any other of my photos that day. (The above graphic still survives at the London Dungeon Website.)
The next time I ventured out was on the 24th of that month, to Middlesex University, to hear a talk given by Steve Davies. And I distinctly recall how mention was made of how the fear of You Know What had definitely slimmed down the size of the audience. Maybe it had, maybe it hadn’t. Maybe it was just a slim audience. But my point is, we were already talking about it by then.
Oddly enough, I’m damn near certain that at an earlier talk I heard Davies give, at the IEA, well before the Plague struck, Davies was asked in the Q&A about what the next chunk of history might consist of, and he included in his reply a reference to possible plagues. We’re due one, he said. That’s how I remember it anyway.
Upside down pylon
A pylon is just a pylon, but if the pylon is upside down, it must be art, because what else could it be? Also, the bloke who turned it upside down gets the credit for this, rather than the people who made the pylon. Them’s the rules.
My photo of this pylon, which is in the vicinity of the Dome, photoed earlier this month:
More dramatic photos of this upside down pylon here, and here.
My photo is of particular interest to me because I photoed it with my new mobile phone, rather than with my regular camera, which for various boring reasons had run out of SD card space.