Indeed. Photoed today by me in London’s Chinese district:
Today I went on a long photo-walk, and am exhausted, plus I have other things I have to do before turning in. So, that will have to be that for today.
I don’t actually know if they are Chinese lanterns, because the sun is doing all the lighting.there. But they are definitely Chinese somethings.
Again with the maybe-betrayed-confidence-but-I-hardly-think-so routine. Michael Jennings tells me and whoever else he told, on Facebook, that he liked this Forbes piece, about how Digital Currencies And Credit Cards Have Subways To Thank For Their Existence.
Quote:
The following century …
… i.e. the twentieth century …
… saw an explosion in urban populations, and a requisite growth in the world’s railway network, but this was not accompanied by a substantial changes in the world of ticketing. Manually-operated entry gates to train stations had slowly become more common, but most public transport passengers continued to rely on bits of paper – or occasionally, metal tokens – to get around their city.
In 1950s London, this was starting to cause problems. The Tube network was bigger and busier than ever, which prompted operators to consider installing automated gates, like those in NYC. “We knew that this would help ease congestion, but it was complicated by the fact that London has always had fares based on distance,” Shashi Verma, Chief Technology Officer of Transport for London (TfL), told me, “Standard metal tokens weren’t an option.” So, the then-named London Transit Authority started looking at alternatives. The result, which was released to the world in 1964, was the printed magnetic stripe. The idea of using magnetism to store information had been around since the late 1800s, and magnetic tape was patented in 1928 by audio engineer Fritz Pfeulmer. But transport was its very first ‘real-world’ application. A full decade before the now-ubiquitous black/brown magnetic stripe was added to a single bank card, it was printed onto millions of tickets for the London Underground.
I miss Transport Blog. The old link to it no longer works, and it would appear that it is no more.
More and more of my photo-time is spent collating the photos I have already taken. Last night, for instance, I went looking for (more) photos of London taxis with adverts on them. There is something especially appealing, to me anyway, about a large number of objects all exactly the same shape, but each decorated differently. (Some time, I must go searching for my photos of elephants.)
Equally appealing, to me, were those Gormley Men (LINK TO THE OLD BLOG). In that case, each Man was the same, and undecorated in the more usual and rather bland sculpture way. But, each one was in a different place and a different sort of setting. My Gormley Men photos did not need collating, because Gormley had already collated them, by putting all his Men in the same part of London at the same time. Therefore my photos of the Gormley Men mostly collated themselves.
Not so the elephants, or taxis. When looking for taxis, I am looking for taxis photoed in the course of all manner of different photo-expeditions each with their own directories.
But my point is that in the course of all this taxi-collating, I was clicking through literally thousands of non-taxi photos, and I kept coming across non-taxi photos that I particularly liked. Like (like as in “such as” – this is not a command) this one, for instance, taken last June:
I like doing modified cliches in writing, and I also like them photographically. A view, for instance, of some London Thing that has been photoed to death, but put beside or in front of or behind something that is not so usual. Most photoers would regard the above scaffolding as a problem rather than any sort of solution, to the Eros-has-been-photoed-to-death problem.
The scaffolding’s wrapping has the effect of clearing away all the usual clutter from Piccadilly Circus and replacing it with something a lot like sky on a dull day. It puts Eros in an empty field in the countryside, you might say. And yes I know, I like clutter. But not always.
Here is another modified cliché photo:
The Wheel has been photoed to death, and that’s a view I regularly see – and regularly photo – of it, from the point where Strutton Ground meets Victoria Street, looking down Victoria Street towards Parliament Square and beyond. But that sky behind The Wheel made The Wheel look amazing, on that particular day in January of this year.
Finally, one of many photos I took this year of Battersea Power Station:
The Power Station and (if you are a craniac like me) its crane cluster are the clichés. And if you want to take the sting out of a cliché, one way is to reflect it in something. At that point its extreme recognisability becomes more a virtue and less of a bore. Its very clichéness becomes helpful to the photo.
This photo was taken from the upstream side of the Power Station, where there is already a big chunk of new flats up and running, with accompanying tasteless sculpture, coffee serving places and the like. All sparked, I believe, by the new USA Embassy.
This photo of mine turns Battersea Power Station upside down. I’ve always thought that an upside down Battersea Power Station would make a rather good table. But, until now I never thought to go looking for such a table on the www. Here we go. That took about three seconds, so I bet there are plenty more that are cheaper. This guy had the same idea, but those two links were all I could quickly find concerning this notion.
Here is another modified cliché photo of Battersea Power Station, the modification this time being smoke.
Come to think of it, all those London taxi photos I’ve been digging up are also modified cliché photos, aren’t they? London taxi = cliché, adverts = modification.
Over the summer, a friend of mine was performing in a show at Warwick Castle about the Wars of the Roses. And early last August a gang of her friends and family went there to see this, me among them. It was a great show, albeit wall-to-wall Tudor propaganda, and a great day out.
Warwick Castle is quite a place, being one of Britain’s busiest visitor attractions. It’s No 9 on this list.
I of course took a ton of photos, and in particular I photoed the horses in this show, the crucial supporting actors, you might say. The stage was out of doors, of course, and long and thin, the audience on each side being invited to support each side in the wars. Long and thin meant that the horses had room to do lots of galloping.
None of the photos I took were ideal, but quite a few were okay, if okay means you get an idea of what this show was like:
The basic problem, I now realise, is that the horse heads were at the same level as the audience on the opposite side to my side. As Bruce the Real Photographer is fond of saying, when photoing people, you start by getting the background right. And I guess he’d say the same of horses. Well, this time, for these horses, I’m afraid I didn’t.
So it was a case of nice legs, shame about the faces. (That link is to a pop song from my youth, the chorus of which glued itself to my brain for ever. I particularly like the bit where they sing: “Shame about the boat race”.)
I recommend the show’s own Real Photographer, for better photos, potted biogs of the leading historic characters, and a little bit about the enterprise that did this show.
Russell Roberts, Tweeting in response to a Tweet that has vanished, but it’s still worth quoting:
If you think the economy is a zero-sum game and getting rich makes people poor, you have trouble explaining the last 250 years. That wealth can be created and not just rearranged or come at someone’s expense is so basic but may be the single most important insight of economics.
I prefer “fixed-sum” to “zero-sum”, but otherwise, my sentiments exactly.
I am not now Tweeting, merely perusing the Tweets of others. If I were Tweeting, this would be a Tweet.
Yesterday I was writing here about how temporariness is a great softener of visual blows. If you don’t like it, wait until it goes away.
Well, here is news of progress in the technology of making how something looks something that can keep on changing:
Flexible electronic paper could be available in colour as early as next year, allowing designers to create clothing, accessories and other products that double as display screens.
Commonly used on devices such as Kindle e-readers, e-paper has until now only been available in monochrome, restricting its appeal.
But advances in flexible e-paper technology mean that products such as shoes, watches and garments could soon feature full-colour text, patters and images that can constantly change.
It won’t just be how people dress.
However, this will be a different kind of temporariness, because the changing, at least potentially, will never stop. There will be no normal that gets interrupted, which you can wait for things to get back to, the way you can with scaffolding.
But, “could be available …” means that all this will be taking a while.
I’ve asked it before and I’ll ask it again. Why do I regard most of Modern Art as silly, yet relish real world objects which resemble Modern Art? Objects like this:
The above photo was taken on The last really fine day of 2018, just minutes after I had taken the one in that earlier posting.
You don’t need to go to an exhibition of sloppily painted abstract art, when the regular world contains wondrous looking objects like that. And what is more, they are wondrous looking objects which have worthwhile purposes. This wondrous object is for supporting and protecting workers as they work on a building.
Here is how that same scaffolding looked, unwrapped, about a month earlier:
I particular enjoy how the sky changes colour, in my camera, when a big white Thing is inserted into the picture. (This afternoon, I encountered this, by Real Photographer Charlie Waite. Same effect.)
Thank you to the (to me) invaluable PhotoCat, for enabling me to crop both of the above photos in a way that makes them more alike in their scope and which thereby points up the differences. I’m talking about the invaluable Crop But Keep Proportions function that PhotoCat has, but which PhotoStudio (my regular Photoshop(clone)) 5.5 seems not to offer. (I would love to be contradicted on that subject.)
Despite all my grumblings about how silly most Modern Art is, I do nevertheless greatly like the way that this Big Thing (the Reichstag) looks in the pride-of-place photo featured in this BBC report, an effect which presumably makes use of the same sort of technology as we see in my photo, but on a vastly grander scale:
I have to admit that this is several orders of magnitude more impressive than my scaffolding. (Maybe that was the last really fine day of 1994.) My scaffolding looks lots better than some badly painted little abstract rectangle in an Art gallery, but it’s not nearly as effective as the Reichstag, as wrapped by Christo and Partner.
Because this Big Wrapped Thing was so very big, and because it is such a very interesting shape, it really does look like it added greatly to Berlin, in that summer of 1994. I entirely understand why all those people assembled to gaze at it. Had I been anywhere in the vicinity, I would have too. And had there been digital cameras then, I would have taken numerous photos, as would thousands of others. Thus giving permanence to this vast piece of temporariness.
Because, what I also like about this Reichstag wrapping is that, just like my scaffolding, and just like all the other wrapping done by Wrapper Christo and his Lady Sidekick, it is temporary. That BBC report calls it Pop-Up Art, and it is of the essence of its non-annoyingness that any particular piece of Pop-Up Art by Christo will soon be popping down again.
This Reichstag wrapping happened in 1994, but is now long gone. Did you disapprove of what Christo and his lady did to the Reichstag? You just had to wait it out. Soon, it would be be gone.
Do you think scaffolding, especially when wrapped, is ugly? Ditto.
Here are what I suspect to be some wise words, from Rob Fisher, in a comment on this Samizdata posting I recently did about Facebook’s political bias:
Facebook is for cat pictures, baby photos and holiday photos. I recently posted some photos of some old model trains I have and another friend offered to give me some old toy trains they don’t want any more. That’s what it’s for.
People trying to do politics on Facebook serves only to demonstrate how unsuited it is for that purpose.
That’s comment number 42, and very possibly the last word on the matter.
Like I say, this sounds wise, in the sense that it seems to contain an important truth, even if it doesn’t really sound like the whole truth. After all, I just did another posting here about something political which I first heard about on Facebook.
Here is a photo of Rob’s toy trains that he recently posted on Facebook:
Am I betraying a confidence, meant only for Rob’s Facebook friends? Hardly, since Rob has already mentioned his trains on the Mainstream Media, in a comment at Samizdata.
It occurs to me that I have some toy trains that Rob might like. Like because I think they are N gauge, but perhaps something even smaller. Rob, if you read this, take a look at them next time you visit me.
I just watched Dominic Frisby, accompanying himself on the ukulele, singing a right wing comic song, recorded live at something called Comedy Unleashed.
I watched it on Facebook. Here is a link. Does that work? Does it work only if you are on Facebook? Does it work only if you are on Facebook and a “friend” of Dominic Frisby?
I have just suggested that this video be stuck up at Samizdata. If that happens, I’ll add a link to that here.
Anyway, whether you get to see this video or not, it did make me think about that mythical beast that keeps on being talked about as something that exists or could exist, but which is now so seldom actually sighted. I’m talking about right wing comedy. In Britain.
What distinguishes Dominic Frisby from what you’d think a right wing comedian would be like is that he is so nice. When he does comedy, at the usual comedy places, and as he has been doing it for years, he clearly fits in. He is part of it all. He likes – or does a damn good job of pretending that he likes – doing it, and the people he is doing it for. He is mates with the other comedians, or comes across as that. He has been following the time-tested rule for all challengers of the status quo, which is to start by thoroughly acquainting himself with that status quo, and showing that he is perfectly capable of winning by its existing rules. That way, he learns his craft, he learns his audience, and he proves that he is not dissenting from orthodoxy merely because that orthodoxy is something he cannot do. The new product he is offering is not sour grapes, but a new sweetness.
In this particular song, Frisby does not clobber his audience with confrontational opposition to assumed lefty wisdom, which he assumes his audience all shares and which he hates them all for all sharing. No, he starts, in the manner recommended by noted philosopher Karl Popper, by summarising the case of those he disagrees with in the most respectful possible manner. Only then does he suggest, in the most modest possible way, that there just might be another way of looking at the matter (maybe Tommy Robinson has a point, maybe Trump’s not all bad), and in a way that suggests he isn’t the only one who has been having these heretical thoughts. He is leading his audience in a direction he really thinks they might follow him along. It’s all done in the manner of George Formby, with grins and hints and merriment, with enjoyment simply assumed.
I never thought I’d hear a comedian get a laugh with one note played on a ukulele. But that is exactly what happens, in the intro to verse three (which says that maybe Theresa May should get the sack).
More about right wing comedy in this, if you can decipher it. It’s a photo of a big Sunday Times spread.
Let me try to make it easier to read:
On the right of all this, not included in the above, this:
I saw a woman in a T-shirt that said “Smashing patriarchy!” on it. Nice to see that some of them appreciate the hard work we put in.
That’s not Frisby. That’s another right wing comic. As you can read above, there’s a whole bunch of them.
But this is Frisby. It’s another song called Secretly In Love With Nigel Farrage. Sadly, the sound balance is all wrong and I couldn’t hear the words properly. I hope Frisby has another go at recording that, on some future comedy occasion.
I’ve been a Frisby fan ever since I first heard of him, and I’ve not been wrong. He even did a couple of my Last Friday meetings, doing very early try-outs of future Edinburgh shows.