Brian Micklethwait's New Blog

Vauxhall Bus Station is (maybe) about to get demolished

When they were building it:

Now:

Both photos photoed by me, on April 17th 2004 while they were building this Thing, and earlier this evening.

It’s Vauxhall Bus Station, which is just a walk from my place across the River, and which they are now about to demolish. Well, I say that, but what with all the History we’ve been having lately, all bets like this are probably now off. What they had in mind, before the History, was to knock down the Bus Station, and then have Zaha Hadid Architects supervise the erection of two new towers where the Bus Station was. Towers with a new Bus Station at the bottom of them.

Memo to self: Go back to this spot earlier in the day when the light just might illuminate this place, rather than plunge most of it into darkness. But in my defence, no matter how dark it is, you can still see the two … sticking up things.

I have been believing that the big new tower already there was also the work of Zaha Hadid Architects, but I think I got this notion from perusing an earlier plan which included the two new towers they only now intend to build. Actually this new tower is the work of KPF. This tower looks just like a regular tower, except that it looks even more like a pile of big boxes piled up, nearly in line but not quite. That way, you can tell it’s architecture, rather than just a building. Actually I quite like it. As towers of this sort go, this is quite good.

As for the Bus Station, well, I think I’m going to prefer the new towers, if they ever happen. The trouble with those two thingies sticking upwards for no very obvious reason is that they look like they might be providing shelter, but they don’t. Okay, they are something of a local landmark. You know where you are when you see them. But, they’re right next to the MI6 Building, which is even more of a landmark. The ZHA towers look like they’ll be much classier.

I plan on keeping an eye and my camera on developments at this spot, if there are any.

Howard Goodall on the world’s first recording star

I’ve been dipping into Howard Goodall’s Big Bangs, which is a book (based on a BBC TV show), whose subtitle is “The Story of Five Discoveries That Changed Musical History”. I have started at the end, with Bang Number Five, which was when Edison recorded sound. Here’s what Goodall says about the impact of the nascent sound recording industry on the life and career of Enrico Caruso (pp. 218-220):

Enrico Caruso was one of seven children born to a working-class Neapolitan family living in the Via San Giovanello. He received his first singing instruction as a choirboy in a local church, and as a teenager he made a few lire every night singing favourite Neapolitan songs for the cafe customers on the harbour waterfront. He began work in a factory, but eventually he was able to turn professional with his outstanding voice. After a shaky debut in Naples – he vowed never to perform there again – he was invited to sing at the holiest of all opera’s shrines, La Scala, Milan. It was here in March 1902 that Fred Gaisberg, the Gramophone Company’s European representative, heard Caruso performing in Franchetti’s popular opera Germania. Gaisberg offered the young unknown a deal to record ten arias for £100; Caruso duly accepted the offer, to the horror of Gaisberg’s London office, which tried to forbid the spending of ‘this exorbitant sum’. Gaisberg, however, backed his hunch, using his own money. That April, in Suite 301 in the Grand Hotel, Milan, the ten records were cut, beginning with ‘Studenti, Udite’ from Germania. Gaisberg went on to recoup his investment thousands of times over – and the records earned his company a fortune.

Most of the ten masters made on that occasion remain in perfect condition to this day. After their release, Caruso’s fame spread dramatically throughout Europe and America. He made two recordings, in 1902 and 1907, of the aria ‘Vesti la giubba’, from Leoncavallo’s opera I Pagliacci, which between them sold over a million copies. I Pagliacci was at this time a relatively new opera (it was given its first stage performance in 1892), based on a recent real-life criminal case. It’s hard to find a modern equivalent for this – a modern opera being as commercially successful as I Pagliacci. Even the hit records released from the shows of Andrew Lloyd Webber are based on stories from the past (Evita is probably his most contemporary non-fiction subject). As for the work of contemporary ‘classical’ composers, the thought of Harrison Birtwistle writing an opera which included a million-selling song is, let’s face it, laughable.

Caruso was to the early gramophone what Frank Sinatra or Maria Callas were to the LP, what Elvis Presley and the Beatles were to the 45-rpm ‘single’, and what Dire Straits and George Michael were to the compact disc: the ‘software’ of the music that drew listeners to the ‘hardware’ of the machines and materials. He was the first recording megastar, as much a household name in his day as Charlie Chaplin, prodigal son of another medium also in its infancy. Caruso’s voice had a timbre and range that perfectly suited the limitations of the medium, it could soar and tremble with such strength and depth that the background hiss and the indistinct accompaniment were all but forgotten. To many people, hearing him scale the summits of high opera was both miraculous and moving and this was not just their first experience of the true potential of the gramophone but also a gateway to the whole classical repertoire.

Edison’s humble contraption was to become a universal gift with the popularity of Caruso, catapulting classical music out of the small, exclusive world it had hitherto known.

The Gramophone and Victor Companies were buoyed by Caruso’s success. What’s more, all the other top singers now wanted a piece of the action, hurriedly dropping their objections to the quality of the medium once they realised that it could make them rich. The female equivalent of Caruso was Nellie Melba, an Australian soprano with a peach of a voice, and a good head for business, who held out until she got £1,000 – and her own label in passionate mauve.

Another dirty vapour trail

Yes, on a mostly sunny day in May 2015, to add to an earlier one:

And actually, although rather fainter, there’s another one behind the big and obvious one.

What this photo also shows is how this phenomenon happens. Basically, there’s a big band of cloud that stops the horizontal evening sun lighting up the vapour trail, but the cloud leaves the sky behind the vapour trail still lit up. So, the vapour trail is turned into a silhouette. These circumstances are not common, which is why dirty vapour trails aren’t either.

If vapour trails always looked this this, air travel would have been a lot more unpopular and a lot more expensive.

Also, mmmm, cranes.

Bloomingdales of Putney

More archival grubbing got me to this, which was photoed with my old Canon A70 in the summer of 2004, in Lower Richmond Road, Putney:

Here’s what Google was able to tell me a few moments ago about how the same spot is looking now:

I figured there’d be no “Bloomingdales” there now. Time was when such a place would attract strictly local attention, and would build its business from there. But now? Most “shops” are now at least half based on the Internet. And imagine trying to call yourself “Bloomingdales” on the internet, unless you’re the real Bloomingdales. First off, people wouldn’t be able to find you, because the real Bloomingdales would get totally in the way. And second up, if anyone could find you on the Internet, the real Bloomingdales would find you also and immediately be all over you with an army of savage USA type lawyers.

Hearing about the Welsh goats from the Bee

I’m referring to this:

A herd of goats has taken over the deserted streets of Llandudno, north Wales, where the residents are in lockdown during the coronavirus pandemic.

The Kashmiri goats that came down from the Great Orme and into the town were originally a gift to Lord Mostyn from Queen Victoria.

This was in the Guardian, but I only just heard about it. And I heard about it only because the Babylon Bee guys featured it in the “weird news” part of their most recent podcast, the April 15th one, which I just listened to. Listen to the Babylon Bee podcast and learn.

An elephant on top of a bird

It’s still Friday, right? So, an elephant:

Photoed by me in March of 2016. (I’m doing a lot of rootling in the archives just now.)

The next photo is even less technically accomplished, but it does show a bit better where I saw this elephant:

This was beside the Regent’s Canal, in the vicinity of Victoria Park. But what, I wonder, might a “Kiskadee” be? I asked The Internet, and apparently it’s a bird. Two birds, actually. The great kiskadee, and the lesser kiskadee. From this concluding paragraph at the other end of that link, it would appear that boats are more likely to be lesser kiskadees:

The aggressive great kiskadee, 23 cm (9 inches) in length, is found in woodland, savannah, and wet areas from Texas and Louisiana to Argentina. Shrikelike, it drops from a perch onto such prey as frogs and insects. It also eats fruit and is known to make shallow dives for fish. Its grass nest has a domed roof. The lesser kiskadee, 19 cm (7.5 inches) long, lives from Panama to Bolivia, always along waterways. Its call is a nondescript whistle.

Blog and learn

Time tricks

When I woke up yesterday, I could have sworn it was Friday. And I at once did two things. I checked for an incoming email telling me when a food delivery would happen, which wasn’t there. Odd. And, I did a blog posting about a bird photo. On a Thursday rather than on a Friday, Friday being my usual day for such things.

I’m not the only one suffering time derangement. I am hearing this lots, in the course of all the phone calls with friends and relatives I am doing to stay in touch. People everywhere are losing all track of what time it is, what day of the week it is, what date it is. Let’s see what The Internet has to say. Yes, this is now an official Internet Thing:

In my case, two forces are at work. At any moment I am either absorbed in something, with no fear that if I stay absorbed I will miss something that’s coming up. In which case I lose all track of time, and it goes far faster than I expect. Or, I’m doing nothing, wondering what to get stuck into next, in which case I also lose all track of time, because it then seems to go so slowly. Combine these two things, and I really lose all track of time. All of this quite aside from the fact that I am getting old, a major symptom of which is … losing all track of time.

What is lacking for me, and for many others, is Things Which I Have To Be At Or To Pay Attention To At A Particular Time. Work. Events. Meetings. Sporting events, for real or live on TV, which are not retro-wallowing but which are actually happening now, at a definite time which you have to be aware of or you’ll miss it. And it turns out that if you lack such Events to keep reminding you of the time, which includes the day of the week and the date as well as merely whether it’s 10am or 4pm, you … lose track of time.

Hence the bird.

Good news, the food delivery has now been delivered, that email having earlier arrived telling me when to expect it. These people. Recommended to me and now recommended by me.

Art machines in all our pockets

Taken by a friend, beside one of the Walthamstow reservoirs:

The point of showing this is that it is such a fabulously vivid and artistic photo, yet it was taken with a mobile phone.

Here’s another photo that I took myself, of a slogan that was adorning Tate Modern during the Summer of 2016:

That piece of self-important verbiage perfectly sums up how artists like to think of themselves, as leading the world. They dream up new Art things off the tops of their oh-so-Artistic heads, and the rest of us follow along behind them, changed by this new Art into living different lives.

The above bird illustrates a very different reality. And the above Tate Modern slogan ought, for the sake of accuracy, instead to read: “WE CHANGE ART CHANGES”.

We all now, all of us who want such devices (and this is very nearly all of us), have these amazing Art-making machines in our pockets, all the time. We don’t even have to deliberately search out Art-ops, the way I still like to on my photo-perambulations around London. It is sufficient that when, going about our normal business, in this case just taking a walk beside the reservoir, if an Art-op appears, it can, instantly and expertly, be captured.

This changes, for all of us, our experience of Art. Art, at any rate of this sort, has now become something that we can all of us do for ourselves. (And if we don’t have time to photo pretty birds, we all of us have mates who do, and the technology to be shown their efforts.) Which leaves Artists, who once upon a time used to earn their living by making pictures like the above bird, even more unable to compete than they first were, when photography was first invented. At least then Artists could switch to being photographers. Now, they have more and more realised that mere pictorial beauty is a business in which they simply cannot compete. They have consequently moved towards such things as political sloganeering, not just because they and their friends are becoming more politically opinionated. They have always been politically opinionated. The change for them is that shouting their politics in their Art is how they can now still hope to scrape some sort of living.

I expressed similar thoughts on this and related matters, in this rather wordier Samizdata piece. (Good grief, that was seven years ago.)