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APEROL brightens up Bankside

When I met up with GodDaughter2 last week at the Blue Fin Building I got there a bit early and had some time to kill. Which of course I did by photoing, one of the photos I photoed being this:

What appealed to me was how over-the-top colourful this fake-floral display was, so far over-the-top that it quite triumphed over the unseasonal and deeply gloomy weather that day. (Today has been a bit better, or at least a bit warmer.)

But what, I wondered, is “APEROL”? At first I thought APEROL was the name of the indoor place behind this display. Turns out APEROL is a drink, which has been putting itself about lately, and that the above sign was because APEROL was sponsoring a pop-up, whatever exactly that may be. See categories list below, which I now realise must include “Getting old”. No doubt someone can – and perhaps even will – explain. I’m guessing it’s an outdoor eatery or drinkery of some sort which isn’t so much built, but rather simply assembled in a hitherto public spot big enough to accommodate it, made into a trend by Lockdown. If that’s right then I assume that money changed hands, in the direction of the local authority concerned.

Fine by me. The architecture surrounding this sign (we’re a place that calls itself “Bankside”), is, especially at street level, as modernistically dreary as you could ever hope not to see, and anything that brightens up the area, like a piece of colourful product placement, is to be welcomed. It certainly cheered me up.

Architects are soon going to get over their obsession with black, white, brown and grey, and generally pale and lifeless shades of boring – even the Blue Fin Building isn’t properly blue – and start doing proper colour on the outside of their now boring buildings, big time. This is a stylistic pulse that I do happen to have my finger on, unlike the pop-up thing, and I know whereof I speak. And it can’t come too soon, I say.

Also, to fly off at something of a tangent, expect people to start saying that they’re starting to like Nova, instead of everyone just carbuncling on about how trashy they think it looks. At least that adds a bit of real colour to the London skyline.

Today Patrick and I had another conversation about World War One

We had already decided that our chat today would be about what kicked off World War One. However, as part of my homework for this, I listened again to this earlier conversation we recorded about World War One, way back in 2017, and I was reminded that we’d already had quite a lot to say about the causes of World War One. This was the very first of these conversations of the most recent clutch, and I was agreeably surprised by how much sense it made, and by how relatively little irrelevant tangenting and general repetition and waffling I inflicted upon Patrick.

All of which meant that we needed to steer the chat towards things we hadn’t said in that previous one. We went into a bit more of the detail this time, about how Russian military reaction to defeat in 1905 by Japan might have made Germany nervous. And we also talked more about how Britain was, in the years before World War One, threatening to tear itself apart over how to answer the Irish Question, which meant that in 1914 Britain consequently seemed very weak, compared to how strong it eventually turned out to be.

I also added some attempted generalisations, about how nothing on its own can cause anything else (I blamed and have long blamed Sherlock Holmes for immortalising the error that consists of contradicting this fact), and for how a multipolar world made that world vulnerable to a cascade of escalating declarations of war, all of them restrained, but not restrained enough, by the fact that this huge war was actually much feared, but not feared enough. Which is all quite orthodox, but I feel I understand all this stuff a bit better than before. However, I did digress rather wildly into giving this book about Brexit a plug, because it illustrates well how the cleverest people can react to events really quite intelligently, and still get, for them, a very bad result.

No apology for returning to this vexed subject. I mean, historically, could there be a more important question?

This latest effort will arrive at Croziervision, whenever it arrives, presumably accompanied by the very helpful notes that Patrick now likes to introduce these conversations with. Nothing we said can’t happily wait a couple of weeks, or whatever the wait turns out to be.

I miss proper light bulbs

One from the I Just Like It directory:

March 2019. A sure sign of a true Big Thing is that you recognise it even when it’s out of focus. Well, even if you don’t, I do. Plus, is that a photoer on the bridge there? Maybe it’s just two people.

Now the above photo just makes me angry about how lightbulbs have degenerated into these bullshit bulbs that look pretty, but don’t give off enough effing light. Why didn’t I buy a lifetime’s supply of the old ones, that worked properly, when I had the chance?

Facadism ten years ago

On May 20th 2011, in other words a decade and three days ago, I photoed these photos, of a fine example of facadism in the process of being contrived. That is, an old facade is preserved, but an entirely new modern interior is inserted behind that facade:

I don’t know exactly when I started noticing this phenomenon, but these photos prove that I been doing this for over a decade.

Sadly, the resolution of these photos, photoed with my ancient last camera but about five (about six if you count the new mobile), a Canon S5 IS, is such that although there are street names to be seen in some of these photos, they are too blurry for me to read them clearly. So, I don’t know exactly where this was. The only other photos photoed that day provide no clues.

On the day, I would appear to have been at least as much interested in the crane.

What I mostly now note from the above photos is that in May 2011, the weather was the sort of weather that May weather should be. Our current May may get some nicer weather just before it ends, but that is still only a hope.

Views from and of the Blue Fin Building

GodDaughter2 has been doing a job in the Blue Fin Building, which is just behind Tate Modern. About three quarters of the way up this building there is a roof area you can walk about in and sit at tables in, and also an indoor sort of bring-your-own-food canteen with views out on outside this roof area. And yesterday, she arranged for us both to go up there are sample the views. Sadly, the weather was pretty filthy, and entirely lacking in the sort of bright sunshine illuminating everything that I so much prefer for photoing. But of course I photoed anyway:

What the above photos all have in common is that they combine views of London beyond the Blue Fin building with close-up views of this or that aspect of the building itself. Sometimes the Blue Fin foreground dominates, but often you just see a bit of the outside of the building, like the big transparent “wall” that stops you accidentally walking off this roof to your death, but which, because it is transparent, actually makes me (and GodDaughter2) scared to go near the damn thing, because transparent walls at the top of cliffs are not things that humans have all evolved not to be freaked out by. If you get my drift.

The best you can say about the weather was that it wasn’t raining all the time, just spitting some of it.

How the artificial meat story will play out

Andrew Lilico tweets:

People seem to imagine there’ll be a “Yuck!” factor barrier to lab-grown meat. But a) in a sausage or burger are you even going to notice? And b) if you think “Yuck!” about lab-grown meat, wait til you find out how they produce non-lab-grown meat!

And “Discount Davy Jones” immediately responds thus:

Step 1: vat grown meat is a luxury, rich people eat it to look better than animal-killing proles.
Step 2: vat grown meat is cheap enough for everybody and becomes a staple of fast food.
Step 3: rich people start eating expensive animal meat because it’s more authentic.

Lilico:

That’s exactly how it’ll work.

Me: Yes, probably. But add in that at some point regular meat will be made illegal, at which point there will be a thriving black market in it.

When good things happen, “progressives” (the sneer quotes because these people typically get in the way of progress rather than make any significant contribution to it) always try to get on the front of the trend by making whatever it is illegal, compulsory, whatever, thus … well, getting in the way of progress, in this case by bullying the old and recalcitrant, and by introducing criminals into the mix.

Nevertheless, I do think it will be progress when we mostly become much nicer to animals, by not imprisoning them and then eating them on the huge scale we do now.

ISIBAISIA, although I couldn’t quickly find where (that link is to a posting about Modern Art): The planet earth is becoming one gigantic zoo.

Michael Jennings tells me more about mobile phone photography

Today Michael Jennings, the creator and still technical curator of this blog, who was in my area for the first time in quite a while, called round and we went out and had drinks. In a Pimlico pub. Indoors. Unmuzzled. With quite a few other people also present. This being the first time that either of us had done this with anyone for … quite a while:

I photoed him and his Lockdown hair, and he told me more about how photography on mobiles is developing. He has an iPhone, which you can just see bottom right of that picture. My mobile only has ~~one camera~~ two cameras (see comments 1 and 3), but Michael’s iPhone has three, thus making variable and quite impressive zoom possible.

Michael speculated that it may not be long before the whole of the back of his next iPhone but three with be covered in cameras, like: well over a dozen.

The limiting factor on this sort of multi-camera is not the cameras themselves. The problem is processing power. Making sense of the output of such a large camera array will take a lot of that, and also lots of ultra-clever software as yet still being contrived.

And there we have the ongoing story of digital photography, better explained than I have ever heard it before. All that processing power attached to an old-school camera would presumably triple its price. But mobiles already have all that processing power, or soon will, so it makes sense for your camera to be part of your personal pocket Kray computer, that you use for all your other mobile computerising.

Several years ago, the big Japanese enterprises who decide these things decided that they would spend no more money making regular dedicated cameras better, which is why these things haven’t changed in the last half decade. They decided to throw all their photography money at mobile phone cameras.

What I had not realised was how very, very good the mobile phone “camera” (quotes because it will really be cameras plural) is going to be, and how inexorably it will go on improving. 3D images? Oh yes, said Michael. The processing power applied to these camera arrays will make imagery possible of a sort that no single dedicated camera, no matter how complicated and costly, could possibly now contrive.

Which means: that old school cameras, even of the most sophisticated sort, will ever so slowly but ever so surely fade into the history books. And actually, do so really rather soon. In historical time, in the blink of … a camera.

Which further means that the best of all those photoer photos that I’ve been photoing for the last two decades will just keep getting better and better, like old wine. Plenty of other people have photoed such photos, but I know of nobody else apart from me who has made a point of doing this on such an industrial scale.

Here are thirty such photos I photoed in July 2006 and which I displayed here last January. There are plenty more where they came from.

This entertaining photoer habit, on the other hand, looks like it will be with us for a while.

McCloskey summarised by Scheidel

I have recently been reading Escape From Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity by Walter Scheidel. Scheidel himself summarises the arguments in this book in this piece.

Better yet, Scheidel also provides (pp.489-490) a very short summary of Deidre McCloskey’s very long trilogy about how the bourgeoisie ignited the Industrial Revolution:

Deirdre McCloskey has advanced a bold thesis that places values at the center of modernization and the Great Escape. In her telling, “liberal ideas caused the innovation” necessary to sustain this process. By 1700, talk and thought about the middle class began to change. As “general opinion shifted in favor of the bourgeoisie, and especially in favor of its marketing and innovating commerce and investment in human capital expanded as a consequence of this shift, rather than precipitating it. This led to a sweeping “Bourgeois Revaluation” embodied in a new rhetoric that protected the pursuit of business: whereas aristocratic-inflected discourse had previously stigmatized it as a vulgar pursuit, it now garnered acceptance and even admiration. This new mode of thinking permitted the bourgeoisie to join the ruling class and to infuse and enrich it with innovative and competitive traits. In the final analysis, the idea of liberty and dignity for ordinary people was the principal driving force behind this change.

According to McCloskey, this process unfolded in a series of steps. The Reformation together with the growth of commerce, the fragmentation of Europe, and the freedom of their cities enabled the Dutch bourgeoisie to enjoy freedom and dignity. Over time, Dutch influence that encouraged emulation of their practices regarding trading, banking, and public debt converged with the spread of printing and English liberties in similarly liberating and dignifying the British bourgeoisie, whose efforts subsequently unleashed modern economic growth.

Thus, “the Four Rs” – reading, reformation, revolt (in the Netherlands), and revolution (in England in 1688) culminated in late seventeenth-century England in the fifth and ultimately decisive “R,”the revaluation of the bourgeoisie, an “R-caused, egalitarian reappraisal of ordinary people.” Democratic church governance introduced by the Reformation emboldened the populace, and northern Protestantism encouraged literacy. McCloskey regards political fragmentation as vital to these processes: these forms of improvement worked better on a small scale. But political ideas, and ideas more generally, took the lead: “rhetorical change was necessary, and maybe sufficient.” She consequently documents at great length the emergence of a pro-bourgeois rhetoric in Britain during the eighteenth century.

As one who has struggled to plough through all of McCloskey’s three books, I am very grateful to Seidel.

I have dipped extensively into the McCloskey trilogy, and my guess is that if I joined up all my dippings, so to speak, I would conclude that these books are long on illustrated assertion but short on actual arguments to the effect that what is asserted is right rather than just asserted. As it happens, I share McCloskey’s admiration for the bourgeois virtues and I think she is right to believe in their transformative importance in British and global economic history. But if I didn’t already agree, I don’t believe that these books would do enough to convince me of much besides how strongly McCloskey believes what she believes. And what I actually believe also, but for other reasons.