September 2020 – Page 6 – Brian Micklethwait's New Blog

A rearrangement

Around three days ago, GodDaughter2 and I fixed to meet up, face to face, for the first time since Lockdown began, and before she disappears to the South of France for a month. We agreed on: Royal College of Music, 2pm. I would have preferred somewhere different, like somewhere nearer to where she’s been living over the summer (Acton), because I like having reasons to journey to and photo new places, and because the College is a bit of a walk from South Kensington tube and a walk I’ve now done many times. Also, a couple of hours later would be better, because I’m a lazy old bastard. Plus, I don’t mind long train journeys because I can sit and read a book, undistracted by the Internet, which I don’t do nearly enough of. But what the hell, RCM 2pm it is.

But, this morning, an email from GD2 arrives. She’s running a bit behind, and could we possibly (grovel grovel xxx) make it Acton Central Overground Station, 4pm?

Yes. I can do that. No problem. It’ll be fine.

Whatever I say in such circumstances will sound like a polite lie and a big old sacrifice, even though it’s nothing of the kind. Sometimes, when your Jewish Mother says to you: “Don’t you worry about me, I’ll be fine”, what she really means is: “Don’t you worry about me, I’ll be fine.”

The Tower Hotel could benefit from Magic Paint

One of London’s more impressive architectural survivals from the Brutalist era is this building:

That’s the Tower Hotel, with Tower Bridge in the foreground. I am fond of this edifice, not only because of its Brutalism, but also because of its impressively cluttered upper reaches, which look like this:

Both of the above photos were photoed by me in 2016. (What is that VW sign doing there? Never noticed that before.)

I love the combination of orthodox Brutalism in the main body of the building and anarchy on the top of it. (See also this splendid edifice of the same architectural vintage.)

I also recall that this hotel played a prominent support role in the final scene of a long ago movie called Sweeney!, which was a movie spin-off from the TV show of that name. A sinister villain played by Barry Foster is being put on a boat by British spooks, after he’d stayed the night at the Tower Hotel, which then looked quite new and “modern”, not dated at all. But Regan (John Thaw) showed up and arrested the Barry Foster character for making money off of immoral earnings, and the Barry Foster character was immediately shot dead, by two other villains in a taxi, to stop him spilling any beans about even more sinister villains. (Regan was angry with the Barry Foster character because he had had a prostitute (Diane Keen) killed, and Regan wanted revenge.) All of which took place on the river bank between the Tower Hotel and the River. For some reason, this scene had a big effect on me, and a lot of the reason for that was the Tower Hotel.

The reason I mention this building is that it is a fine example of the sort of building that might go up in public estimation if it were decorated with the Magic Paint that I mentioned-stroke-invented in this earlier posting about Colourful architecture in the past and in the future. This was about how various ancient buildings, now as dreary in colour as the Tower Hotel has always been, used to be a lot more colourful, and about how similar effects might yet be contrived again, with … Magic Paint. (Magic Paint is paint that can take on any painted pattern at the flick of an electronic switch. Inventors: get busy!)

And the reason I mention this earlier posting about Magic Paint, colourful gothic cathedrals, and the like, is that someone on Facebook with quite a following has recently linked to this old posting, causing a rather gratifying spike in traffic here during the last few days. But, all I can learn from my traffic analysing page is that the link comes from somewhere on Facebook. It could well be someone I know, or know of, and therefore someone that some of my readers might know, or know of. Anyone? Maybe you, sir or madam, have just come from that very Facebook location of which I write, and can tell me who it was. That’s if you feel inclined.

“Any bridge constructed by an engineer who believes that should have a large warning sign attached …”

Douglas Murray writes in the Times about the Pluckrose and Lindsay book that is subtitled “How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity -And Why This Harms Everybody”. And the invaluable Mick Hartley quotes Murray, at greater length than I am about to, out from behind the Times paywall:

Pluckrose and Lindsay have waded through all the core texts that I and other critics of this school have had to read. They have also contended with many less familiar ones. What they reveal is essentially a self-sustaining academic Ponzi scheme. Where good writing might once have been seen as a successful effort at rendering complex ideas understandable, researchers in these studies have become virtuosos at nothing other than making highly contestable ideas incomprehensible. Take Homi K Bhabha in full flight: “If, for a while, the ruse of desire is calculable for the uses of discipline soon the repetition of guilt, justification, pseudo-scientific theories, superstition, spurious authorities, and classifications can be seen as the desperate effort to ‘normalise’ formally the disturbance of a discourse of splitting that violates the rational, enlightened claims of its enunciatory modality.”

Nor is this rot limited to the humanities. The social justice movement has Stem in its sights too. One recent book, Engineering and Social Justice, claimed that “getting beyond views of truth as objective and absolute is the most fundamental change we need in engineering education”. Any bridge constructed by an engineer who believes that should have a large warning sign attached.

We are talking about the collapse of civilisation. This is no mere metaphor. Spouting gibberish about Shakespeare or Coronation Street is one thing. Teaching techies to do technology in a way that goes beyond its “enunciatory modality”, in plain English which does not work properly, is something else again.

When bridges start collapsing, plagues start being spread, food starts being poisoned, cars and trains start falling to pieces and killing their passengers, because of people being anti-educated in this fashion (there are plenty of other reasons why such disasters happen to do with the fact that such stuff is difficult to do), that will be the moment when civilisation reasserts itself by starting to shut down all the university departments in the grip of this insane idiocracy. And, if necessary, entire universities. Or not, in which case our civilisation really will start collapsing.

The homeless are not as homeless as they used to be

Okay, not the prettiest photo you’ll ever see, but it makes my point:

Which is that homes for the homeless have got a lot better lately. In two big ways. First, as you see in the above photo, shelter is now something you can just plonk down on any piece of land that is flat.

It is no part of my purpose in showing you this man’s home to make difficulties for the man himself, and I also didn’t want him even feeling threatened when I took the photo. So, I contrived to hide him (and myself as seen by him) behind that big black rectangular lump there. He couldn’t see me, and you can’t now see him. But I think you can see that what we’re looking at, in the autumn gloom at the top end of Tottenham Court Road last Thursday late afternoon, is a home.

The other thing that has got a lot nicer about living like this is mobile electronic communication. You can now live like this, instead of merely existing. You needn’t just sit there, hoping for nice weather. You can do all those things in those articles and diagrams and photos concerning all the clumsy great gadgets that have now been replaced by your mobile phone.

I’m not saying that living this way is easy or comfortable, merely that it has got less difficult and less uncomfortable in recent years. I’d hate to have to live this way. But if I had to, I would find it that little bit less miserable than it was a few decades ago, when electronic communication was implacably immobile, and when erecting a tent meant finding a grassy field that you could bang tent pegs into.

What all this means is that, if all other things are equal (which they never are but let’s be economists and pretend this for a moment), more people are going to be living like this than used to, thirty years ago.

See also this earlier posting, featuring a Michael Jennings photo of a tent erected next to a private jet.

The Royal Albert Hall with pictures of the Royal Albert Hall on it

Whenever 6k picks up on a posting I did here I always reckon that means I’m onto something, so I’m pleased that he noticed that posting I recently did about a building with a picture of itself on the front.

So, for him and for anyone else interested in such things, here’s another such circumstance, much more recent (February of this year), and much more spectacular. It’s the Royal Albert Hall, no less:

On the left, the big picture. And on the right, we can see the three elements involved in this sort of process. Top left, the ancient Greek looking frieze, that’s the actual Royal Albert Hall itself. On the right, the scaffolding, under a bog standard white covering. And then bottom left, occupying most of the picture, the photo (if that’s what it originally was) of the exact bit (or so I assume) of the Royal Albert Hall that it is covering.

The bit in the middle behind the statue is the also the building itself. “Shadows” is included in the categories list below, on account of there not being any real shadows, just fake ones, when it is just a flat surface. Which makes a real difference to how easy it is to see what the original building consists of. That difficulty actually being an early clue as to what’s really going on.

As often, the trees, although at least leafless, are not helping.

The statue in the front is of Prince Albert. On the other side of the Royal Albert Hall is his Memorial. For a view of the Royal Albert Hall from the same angle, but with rather less scaffolding, and also for some closer-up of this Prince Albert statue, see Royal Albert and his Hall.

LATER: In the original posting, the photo above on the left was a bad choice. I had a better one available, and that has now replaced the first photo.

A couple of recommendations for understanding The Plague

I am no doubt biased, by my libertarian politics to start with, and by the guesses I have already expressed in (what passes for me as) public. Nevertheless, for whatever it may be worth, I found this article, and, unusually, also its quite numerous comments, about why the world became so bent out of shape by this Plague, to be very intelligent. It’s more a panic than a conspiracy, he says. Which fits what I’ve been thinking.

And now I am listening to a man whose nickname is the Vaccine Pope, speaking with Ivor Cummins, whom I have been following on Twitter.

Oscar looks down on his neighbours

GodDaughter2’s Dad recently sent another photo of their cat Oscar, displaying his lack of any fear of heights:

And also, in this case, his desire to keep an eye on other cats in the neighbourhood.

Photo taken by GD2D from a nearby balcony. On the left, the original photo that incame. On the right, a crop showing the other three cats down below, just in case you missed them, as I did when I first looked at the photo.

I don’t fully understand Oscar’s relationships with other cats nearby. My first impression: It’s complicated. Whenever I witness Oscar “socialising”, there seems like a lot of exchanging of territorial proclamations going on, in among other stuff, but what do I know? And note that the three cats below are also, in a quieter and smaller way, keeping their distance from each other.

When you observe cats with each other, you get to realise how nice and polite most of them are to us, by comparison.

Scaffolding as architecture

I’m not the only one who thinks scaffolding is pretty:

That’s not a house that is being worked on by builders. It’s .. a house. It’s finished. Here.

However, when architects start “designing” scaffolding, I think that for me the scaffolding loses a lot of its appeal. A lot of what I relish about how scaffolding looks is that the people who put it up don’t care how it looks. When they start caring, as the designer of this scaffolded house clearly did, scaffolding loses its essential aesthetic purity.

Anther way of putting this is that once architects start designing scaffolding, I fear that it may start falling down.

Actual people attending a cricket match!

Yes, there’s an actual crowd at the Oval this evening. Well, a socially distanced crowd:

Note the presence of the Wheel, behind one of the gasholders. You can see a lot of Big Things from the Oval, if you know your way around.

It looks like a well attended four day game. Actually it’s a badly attended T20. I’m watching it here. Live. On almost-television.

Interestingly, they’re using the whole ground, and trying to hit sixes is rather difficult. They have to go a long way or you get caught in the deep. Makes a nice change.

Going by their form this year, Surrey, now well placed as I write this, will find a way to not win. If you care, see how it’s going, or more probably how it ended, here.