April 2020 – Page 3 – Brian Micklethwait's New Blog

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.)

Reflections in blue sunglasses

According to my hard disc, I photoed this photo on October 6th 2004. I fefinitely photoed it with my ancient Canon A70:

Not bad. Clearly visible on the right spectacle lens, as we look, and especially so if you click and make it bigger, is a current architectural obsession of mine, Battersea Power Station.

The guy wearing the glasses was a fellow pupil in a digital photography course, run by my Local Authority, which I participated in. To very little effect on me, I’m afraid. I was then and remain a self-taught pointer-and-clicker, on Automatic. Most of what I have learned is how well pointing-and-clicking on Automatic actually works. Aside from a few wisdoms about light and how to get it on your side, most of what I have learned has concerned what it makes most sense for me to be photoing. As I have noticed more things that I find worth photoing, my photos have got slowly better.

On the left, me. I don’t like regular selfies, with nothing but me. But I do enjoy Alfred Hitchcock type selfies, where I can be glimpsed in photos that are mostly about something else, or at the very least about more than just me.

Happy Easter

As in: I hope you’ve been having one. Because it is now quite late on Easter Sunday.

Although a devout atheist, I’ll celebrate with three big London places of Christian worship, all photoed in June 2016, from the top of one of them.

Here are the other two, an Abbey and a Cathedral:

On the left, Westminster Abbey, with Big Ben right behind one of its towers. On the right, St Paul’s. With a green crane right in front of it.

And here are a couple of photos of the building I was photoing from, the other Cathedral, Westminster Cathedral, a walk up Victoria Street from the Abbey:

On the left, looking down on Westminster Cathedral, again from the top of its tower; on the right, the shadow of the Cathedral’s tower, on some of the Big Lumps of Victoria Street.

Look very carefully at the photo on the right, and you can also see the other Cathedral, in the middle and far off, and the Abbey, off to the far right and far off.

Finally, two rather off-topic photos (not quite the phrase I’m looking for but it’ll have to do), photoed from and inside the same spot:

On the left, well, it’s been called a cathedral. Of power. Battersea Power Station, now being surrounded by apartments, them being the object of my last two expeditions.

And on the right, I’m just inside the tower of the Cathedral, with the openings to one of the outside balconies shaping the light as it crashes through onto where the lift is. That one had me saying “wow” when I was clicking through the old directory, and I hope you agree that that’s a good sign.

Like I say: Happy Easter.

Battersea silhouettes

I’m still, as yet, going on quite long photo-walks. These are combined with shopping and a lot of exercise, the latter being even greater now what with public transport being off limits. There is plenty, since you ask, of social isolation, far more even than is usual. Nevertheless, I still fear that the photoing aspect may soon attract the disapproving attention of authorities, formal or informal. Too little shopping. Insufficiently strenuous exercise. Too much enjoyment. We shall see.

But in the meantime, yesterday afternoon, I checked out, again, the now stalled progress of the new apartment blocks that Frank Gehry has designed to go next to the Battersea Power Station. Last time I tried photoing these, the weather let me down. Not yesterday. Trouble was, the light was coming from behind the buildings I was most interested in photoing. But there was so much of it bouncing around that even though starting out from totally the wrong direction it was still a great improvement on the earlier trip, for photoing that Gehry-weirdness. Which I may or may not get to blogging about.

But as always, on a successful photo walk, the official destination was only part of the story. When I took another look this morning at what I had, I realised that, in among all the beautifully lit photos I photoed pointing one way, with most of the light coming from behind me, were photos like these, with me pointing the other way:

I’ve photoed that amazingly tasteless sculpture of the naked woman pointing herself forwards at the front of a boat, but this is by far the best photo of her I’ve ever photoed. The secret? Added cranes and roof clutter.

Also in the category list below is other creatures. Spot the other creature.