Space Salmon

Now, if they looked as convincing as this, I could understand how the ancients managed to agree on the names of those various random alignments of stars we call "constellations". As it is, this fat salmon surging through space is nothing more than an equally random grouping of cracks and tiny bubbles embedded in the ice of the Staff Club pool.

I'm very attracted to those moments when the universe appears to speak -- or at least to clear its throat -- but then falls back into its protracted silent sulk again. It's a species of what theologians call the numinous (go on, look it up for yourself, I'm in bed with a cold, watching the snow fly past my window). In the end, the inescapable mystery is that there is a pulse, a systole and diastole, of meaning and meaninglessness that has led us, as a species, to propose various spiritual and philosophical palliative syntheses to that headache-inducing dialectic. But our true genius as a species, however, has been to invent Paracetamol to make such headaches go away. I think I'm due for my next dose in about 20 minutes.

Repeats

It's fairly obvious, I suppose, that if you photograph your familiar surroundings on a daily basis you will eventually find yourself standing -- at the same time of year, in the same place -- in front of something you've photographed several times before, even if that something is fairly unusual. This for example:



For a brief window of time around the new year, we are treated to the spectacle of a two-tone plume of steam billowing from the chimneys of the university heating plant. The conditions have to be just right: cold enough to cause the water vapour to be visible, clear and bright enough for the light to pick the plume out against a blue sky, and -- most crucially -- the alignment of the rising sun with the narrow alley between two Engineering buildings has to be perfect. As far as I know, this conjunction has no astrological or religious significance. It looks like this:



The other dependable seasonal phenomenon is the repeated freezing, thawing and refreezing of the pool outside the Staff Club:






Students cannot resist trying to stand on the ice, so it reliably gets broken and refrozen into strange shapes, and air bubbles get trapped in the ice. Luckily, the water is too shallow to have much of a mishap in, unless you insist on lying down.

New Year

A New Year's Day walk and photograph is a custom I have kept to for many years now. Yesterday afternoon we went to St. Catherine's Hill near Winchester, but decided to cross over the motorway (which was laid through an open chalk wound slashed into the ancient and historic downlands in the 1990s) to Twyford Down.

It was an exhilarating, frosty day for a walk, with a clear even light, even though the sun was already beginning to set. As it got lower in the sky, however, the sun took on a particularly red radiance, and cast a weird glow onto the flinty, frozen fields. A fox made its way across the ploughed ruts shortly before this photograph was taken.

New Year's Day 2010, Twyford Down

Nice One, Cyril

I've always found that the unexpected Christmas gifts are the best ones. When I was small, even though I would have spent several over-excited nights in anticipation of receiving a train set or a tape recorder from my parents, I usually ended up spending the days following Christmas Day entranced by a knitted soft toy from my godmother, or a battery-operated torch from a grandparent, or, as I recall with great fondness, a fat grey "Home Study" dictionary which became a beloved companion, given to me by my uncle Colin who, sadly, died in the week before Christmas this year.

As I think I've already mentioned, in recent years my partner and I have endured a series of deaths that has removed most of the senior generation from both of our families. Apart from the customary sadness and a slightly grim sense that we have ourselves now entered the front rank in the losing battle with mortality, one of the main legacies of this has been piles upon piles of boxes upon boxes of inherited stuff. And, as I think I've also already mentioned, we're not good with stuff.

We are barricaded and corralled by stuff. No door, no cupboard, no passageway is unobstructed. We are constrained and constricted by tottering piles of paper, bubble-wrapped objects, and stacked crates and boxes. Substantial surplus items of furniture loom like the proverbial elephant in the room, presences so large as to have become invisible. You think I exaggerate?

This is our entrance hall, front room, and dining room
(after the pre-Christmas tidy up...)

Sigh. My partner is the main conduit of most of this stuff; I don't exaggerate when I say that I took my legacy home from my father's funeral in a carrier bag. She, by contrast, has filled several vans with hers. Her family has comprised people of substance for several generations, and the stuff of people of substance, it seems, is peculiarly sticky. Quantities of letters, diaries, photo albums, books, jewellery, pictures and furniture that have passed and snowballed through several generations are now stashed away in unlabelled boxes or propped up in every available nook and cranny of our modest house. It's as if History came to visit one weekend and decided to stay.

Whilst attempting to make enough space to shift the marble-topped washstand that traditionally bears our Christmas tree from one room to another, I happened to stop and take a look through a box of books inherited from the Prof's grandfather, Cyril B., who had been a classics don at Oxford. Scholars' copies of books can be fascinating (to other scholars, at any rate) for their annotations and inclusions. As a librarian, I know only too well what bizarre objects can serve as bookmarks, so I flipped through a few with some curiosity. As expected, various objects emerged -- ranging from schoolmasters' letters querying points of grammar to bus tickets -- as well as the usual pencilled notes. But one book, a small volume neatly bound in leather with gilded edges like a prayer book, made me gasp with astonishment when I opened it.



If I say that the first thing I noticed was the age of the paper and the publisher's device, a dolphin curved around an anchor, you may guess where this is going. The name Aldus Manutius may not mean much to most people, but to students of books and printing it is a name to conjure with. Working in Venice in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, Aldus was one of those Italian humanist scholars who, in effect, invented the Renaissance. He set up one of the first publishing houses, with the express intention of gathering together the best manuscripts of classical sources, and making them widely available in printed form. Amongst other achievements, it was Aldus who created the first italic type. In my hands, in our own house, I was holding an octavo Aldine edition of Lucretius, in perfect condition, printed in 1515, and beautifully rebound in red leather. OMG. WTF. LOL.

My son, who is a budding historian, was stunned. FIFTEEN FIFTEEN! That's, like, before Luther's theses, that's before Henry met Anne Boleyn, that's impossible! Unlikely, yes; impossible, no -- not in a house where History is a tolerated house guest, camped out in cardboard boxes.

I think I can feel a new year's resolution coming on... A spot of exploratory archaeology may be in order. After all, also in the box was the Baskerville edition of Lucretius of 1772, which I'd noticed before (but almost boring after the Aldus Manutius, of course...)

Sunset & storm over Southampton Water,
from Old Winchester Hill, Boxing Day

Just to lower the tone a bit, I discovered recently that in Ireland those ubiquitous plastic bags caught in the branches of trees and thrumming in the wind are known as "witches' knickers". Isn't that perfect?

Afterthought: Is it just me, or does the Aldine dolphin bear a strong resemblance to Roadrunner and/or Sonic the Hedgehog?

Christmas Eve

Two shop window displays in Hungerford, photographed earlier this week, before snow and ice made travel (and yesterday even walking) difficult or impossible in the South of England. Luckily, our Christmas goose has been sitting in the boot of the car for several days (house too warm, goose too big for the fridge, and way too tempting for foxes). I've resisted the temptation to put a speech balloon in the top picture.

Back in a few days!

The Idea of Order at West Quay

A lot of people are secret aristocrats. I don't mean that they are really titled folk, who choose not to make a fuss about it. I mean they believe that certain Truths offer a hotline to reality, and that these Truths -- though they can and should be learned and respected by everyone -- are found in their purest form ready-made in the hearts of an Elect.

For example, consider this slightly bonkers, boy-scoutish view of aristocracy:

I believe in aristocracy, though — if that is the right word, and if a democrat may use it. Not an aristocracy of power, based upon rank and influence, but an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate and the plucky. Its members are to be found in all nations and classes, and all through the ages, and there is a secret understanding between them when they meet. They represent the true human tradition, the one permanent victory of our queer race over cruelty and chaos.

The aristocrats, the elect, the chosen, the Best People — all the words that describe them are false, and all attempts to organize them fail. Again and again Authority, seeing their value, has tried to net them and to utilize them as the Egyptian Priesthood or the Christian Church or the Chinese Civil Service or the Group Movement, or some other worthy stunt. But they slip through the net and are gone; when the door is shut, they are no longer in the room; their temple, as one of them remarked, is the holiness of the Heart’s affections, and their kingdom, though they never possess it, is the wide-open world.

E. M. Forster, Two Cheers for Democracy, “What I Believe” (1938)

You might say, there are a minority of people who have discovered -- reluctantly, perhaps, and with an appropriate level of humility -- that they already know everything that matters. The rest is just information. It's like the difference between inherited and acquired wealth. You're simply starting from a different point, and this brings with it certain privileges and responsibilities. Like, say, running the world. Or even running away from it.

As a lapsed member of the Elitists' Club (motto: "Tell Me Something I Don't Already Know"), I am not immune to this madness. I feel it most acutely at weekends (and especially in these weekends in the run up to Christmas) if I go shopping in the shopping mall in Southampton known as West Quay. The sensation that I am walking like a delegate from another planet through so many people's idea of Heaven sends me into an inner rage. In the face of so much negative sensory input I enter a kind of trance state, an ecstasy of disdain for this Bosch-like spectacle of idiotic purchases and hollow desires. Needless to say, this can be quite fun.

Now, if you recognise the allusion in the title of this piece (West Quay? Key West?), you and I have already exchanged an aristocratic wink. Wallace Stevens is not for everyone. But then neither is cage fighting. The problem is, that those of us who read Wallace Stevens (or at least know who he is and what he represents) believe in our hearts that this civilisation is ours, just as those who live in the swankier postcodes of a town believe that the town really belongs to them.

Delusional, obviously, in both cases. Cage fighting may belong in the grimier neighbourhoods of the broader culture, but has as much of a claim on its participants' hearts as poetry does on ours. And, of course, it forms its own parallel aristocracy (something Lord Byron, for one, would have understood). Indeed, the overlappings, frictions and negotiations between the various aristocracies -- the "players" -- is, in this aristocratic view of the world, the true engine of society. Everyone else is just a spectator or a consumer or a victim -- mere "civilians".




Our culture seems to be undergoing a profound struggle at the moment, one which may be much more important than any "war on terrorism". It's a battle for control over our values, over our history, and nothing less than an attempt to disempower the majority by encouraging us to despise the very people -- teachers, public servants, politicians, artists and writers -- who would seek to empower us. A neat trick. The nature of the struggle is heavily disguised as a shrink-wrapped celebrity-worshipping consumerism, a false democracy in which you need not feel uncomfortable if you settle for lowest common denominator choices, or guilty if you opt to spectate rather than participate, or foolish if you have come to believe that, in essence, life is a lottery.

Indeed, the whole point of a celebrity culture is to create a shop-front aristocracy whose very superficiality is their primary value: when the content of aspiration has been hollowed out, peddlers of aspirational values (those boring teachers, those dull politicians, those unreadable writers) end up with nothing to sell that anybody wants to buy. Who needs to concentrate, or to pay close attention, or to learn any history, when we all already are, in essence, celebrities-in-waiting, simply minus the cash? There's nothing to learn or achieve -- just spin the Wheel of Fortune, and keep your fingers crossed! Life is a lottery, isn't it?



But, oddly, no-one seems to be baffled or troubled by the cornucopia of improbably and disposably cheap goods that is emptied over us daily like animal feed in our shopping malls. No-one asks, "What have I really done to deserve or to earn this bounty?" No-one wonders, "Is someone else, somewhere else, paying the true price of these cheap clothes, this abundant food, this ceaseless churning of brands and colourways? Can it go on forever like this?" Too many questions! Perhaps, like the girl in the haircare adverts, we simply feel entitled because "we're worth it."

Maybe it is just the way of the world. The Wheel of Fortune has spun, and it happens to be our turn on top. But have you also noticed how in the background, well behind the ephemeral celebs and the steady shower of fool's gold, the same old aristocrats -- the ones with wealth, with control, those with something to lose -- are securing their grip on power ever more tightly, invisibly and with the active encouragement and participation of the majority, by the simple device of dressing down? No conspiracies, no tanks on the corner, no manifestos, no burnings at the stake... No smoke, just some conveniently-placed mirrors -- simple!

"Down with a world in which the guarantee that we will not die of starvation has been purchased with the guarantee that we will die of boredom."
Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution Of Everyday Life

Whether you celebrate it, tolerate it, or simply can't avoid it, do have an endurable Christmas, and may I wish you a happy New Year! And, if you meet the Buddha on the road, you know what to do.

Newsflash: Return of The Revenants

I'm pleased and surprised to say that it appears that I'm going to be having a sort of after-shock exhibition, at the Kunstraum Café Mitterhofer, Innichen, which is situated in that interesting, mainly German-speaking border area in the Dolomites of North East Italy. Manfred Mitterhofer, the director, has said that they will show the single sequence The Revenants, which he describes as "a very intimate and elegant work", something I am not about to disagree with. Thanks, Manfred! The show will run from 13th March to 7th May 2010. I'll keep you posted about any developments.

I have to say, it seems singularly appropriate that this work -- which is, amongst other things, about the way one thing turns into another -- should be shown in that Alpine borderland where North meets South, perhaps slightly out of breath from the climb, and languages and peoples shade into each other in border-defying fluidity.

In case you're stuck for a Christmas present, my Blurb book of The Revenants may be seen and purchased by following this link. Here's a little reminder of the work:

Time Passes

Kent's comment on WW1 in my previous post ("Hard to believe that war is almost one hundred years in the past") reminded me of something I have had in my (rather overstuffed) back pocket for a future post. Through my professional life, I came to know a man -- let's call him Michael -- whose family has an odd trait: all the men have their children very late in life.

This was once not uncommon: unmarried seafarers and soldiers might only return to these shores in later life, often with more wear and tear than was normal even for those more abrasive times (those eyepatches and wooden legs are not imaginary*), and thus not prime candidates in the marriage market. It might take a few years to find a woman willing to take on a particularly salty old seadog or vinegary old sweat. My own great-grandfather Henry Mabbitt was one such, a Victorian soldier who returned to his home town from overseas, and married a kind-hearted younger woman who had been disfigured in a domestic fire but had a winning way with home-brewed beer and wine (see the post Stick It In The Family Album, Part 1).

But to return to my colleague's family. What was unusual was how very late in life his forebears had left it to start families, and how this had been a serial occurrence. Michael was the son of a man of sixty plus. So was his father, and his grandfather before him. In other words, Michael was born in 1954, his father was born in 1894, his grandfather around 1834, and his great-grandfather perhaps in 1774 ...

Those dates are astonishing, aren't they? For comparison, a more typical sequence (where, let's say, the father is aged 30) would run 1954, 1924, 1894, 1864. Michael is a man of exactly my own age, but his father had fought in WW1, and his grandfather had fought in the Crimean War -- the Crimean War!

Now that is a long time ago.






* A favourite joke:

Q: Why are pirates called pirates?
A: Because they "aarrrrr!"

Good Morning

When I was younger, I had a prodigious appetite for bed. If there was no compelling reason to get up ("getting on with one's life" or even "eating" just didn't cut it) I simply didn't. As a student, I became a nocturnal creature, going to bed in the small hours, and often only getting up around 4:00 in the afternoon. In the winter, I could easily miss daylight altogether.

My daughter seems to have inherited this propensity, and it's hard work getting her to school in the morning. I am not troubled by the hypocrisy of my semi-feigned rage when she falls back into a doze for the third or fourth time: life has its phases, and I am now a light sleeper and early-riser who has come to enjoy the view from the (admittedly shaky) moral high ground endowed by parenthood. We have to take our pleasures where we find them, especially on weekdays when staying in bed is no longer an option.

Of course, what all true late sleepers know is that you don't so much sleep during those hours as enter a trance state, in which you drift in and out of dreams and reveries. Like intoxication, this is a state which most people try to avoid, but which a minority find extremely compelling -- you become a shape-shifter, a shaman of daydreams and dozing. The Beatles song "I'm Only Sleeping" has the feeling of purposeful lassitude exactly right -- "Keeping an eye on the world going by my window".

The details of one's bedside environment become deeply imprinted by those hours of close-focus gazing. This ragged curtain, for example, in our bedroom. It's an early example of man-made fibres from the 1950s, inherited by my partner from her grandparents' house. It is covered with mysterious glyphs and graphical gestures (mainly in the direction of leaves and domestic utensils), in that sub-abstract style that passed as rather sophisticated in those days. I have meditated on its mysteries for many years. Now, that little arrowhead-shaped tear is what tells me it is morning, and time to make the visit to the bathroom I have been postponing for several hours.




Where I will encounter this east-facing blind, and these rather sophisticated faux-batik fish that will no doubt look every bit as quaint as the curtain's Picassoid leaves, pots and pans in 50 years time.

Thoughts From An Anechoic Chamber

Pascal famously wrote in the Pensées, "J’ai découvert que tout le malheur des hommes vient d’une seule chose, qui est de ne savoir pas demeurer en repos dans une chambre" (I have discovered that all of man’s misfortune comes from one thing, which is not knowing how to sit quietly in a room*). This has never been my problem. Especially if the room contains a bed. You might say I have done my bit for global peace and harmony by keeping a low profile.

I take no action and people are reformed.
I enjoy serenity and people become just.
I do nothing and people become wealthy.

Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

That's what I tell my staff, anyway, when they ask why they haven't had this year's appraisal yet.

Yesterday, I was doing my best to sit quietly in a large room -- having my morning coffee break in the Staff Club -- when something unusual happened: a young woman came up to me and asked if she could talk. It turned out she was a Belgian art student on an exchange visit, who was running a project which involved getting people to sit in an anechoic chamber for 15 minutes, allowing whatever altered state that might induce to occur, and then photographing them in the immediate aftermath of the experience. She had noticed me sitting there, and wondered if I would volunteer to be a subject?

After sorting away this novel ice-breaker in my memory for possible future use, I agreed. I've always been a fan of altered states, and this sounded intriguing. So, this morning I found myself being led to a chair in what must be one of the odder rooms in the University. An "anechoic chamber" is a sort of large padded cell, in which the walls are covered with protruding wedges of cloth-covered foam, quite pleasingly arranged, with the intention of suppressing all echoes and ambient noise. As -- in this one at any rate -- the wedges are nicely irregular and organic looking, it's a bit like sitting inside an installation by Louise Bourgeois. Or being digested by some gigantic predatory soft toy.

I was shown the panic button, and the padded door was shut, rolling slowly forward on its rails. I sat there quietly for 15 minutes. I clicked my fingers a few times to check what it sounded like: it was rather like being underwater. The deadness of the sound reminded me very much of one summer in France when my ears became completely blocked with wax. After a while I noticed with pleasure that the acronym "ISVR" (Institute of Sound and Vibration Research) had been picked out in 10 foot high capitals by placing black wedges among the beige ones. Nice touch. I found my tinnitus was being less intrusive than I had anticipated. I noticed the remnants of previous, scientific uses of the chamber, in the form of dangling wires, bits of string, and chalkmarks on the floor. There were no scattered human bones, or scribbled appeals for mercy that I could see. It was entirely benign; with a book, I'd happily have spent the morning in there. I did wonder whether I was being secretly filmed, so refrained from doing anything that might embarrass me in years to come on You've Been Framed. As I'd been told to do whatever I wanted or felt like, I did consider lying down, but didn't want to get chalk all over me.

Then the door rolled back, and I was led -- wordlessly and non-directively, apart from a whispered "You OK?" -- to another chair, this time in front of a plain white backdrop, and a medium-format Bronica on a large tripod. It was at this point I realised the project was doomed. Not only was the anechoic chamber not remotely disorientating or upsetting or exhilarating or anything much, but the photographic setup was so stiffly restrictive and formal that it was obvious the poor girl was going to get nothing more interesting than passport photos. I had expected something rather more Avedonian, where a subject's involuntary whole-body language and expression would get a chance to betray inner turmoil, or deep peace, or something. Instead, I was sitting on an uncomfortable plastic stool, and being asked to turn my head a bit more to the left, look down, focus on something -- hold it. It was about as spontaneous as getting an x-ray at the dentist.

I filled out and signed the model release form (which, oddly, asked for my union representation), exchanged a few pleasantries -- I'd revealed I was also a bit of a photographer - and went back to work. I felt slightly sorry for this student: she'd come all the way from Belgium to study at Bournemouth University, devised a project and arranged access to a scientific facility at Southampton University, plucked up the courage to approach complete strangers to take part in the project, and come away with -- well, what? Some headshots of random people sitting in front of a blank backdrop, by the look of it.

Now, if there is one thing photography is not very good at, it's seeing inside another person's head. It can be quite revealing of what is in the photographer's head, and it's extremely good at reflecting back at us whatever we project onto its subjects. But, I would bet a large sum of money that a posed photograph of me (having sat in an anechoic chamber for 15 minutes) is pretty indistinguishable from a posed photograph of me (having sat in a dark cupboard for 15 minutes) or me (having listened to 15 minutes of white noise) or me (having listened to 15 minutes of amplified insane laughter). I'd go further, and say that any differences between them could in no way be attributed to the experience that had preceded their creation (unless that experience had been 15 minutes in the ring with a heavyweight boxer).

It's why we pay actors large sums of money. They can "do" pretend feelings on their faces, which we can read, provided we share a common cultural background. But the cues that, in real life, tell us a person is upset, ecstatic, or bored are very subtle, are not in the main visual, and don't translate well into the two dimensions of still photography.

I'm no educator, but I'd say this project was flawed in its conception, and whoever is supervising this student should have spotted that, and done something about it. Given that art is about lies (hey, ask Plato) you'd have thought it would be just as (un)interesting to fake the whole damn thing: set up a set of bland portraits and tell the viewer, "These people were previously waterboarded for 15 minutes in the name of art -- check the suppressed anguish in their faces!" How could anyone tell the difference?

The caption game is very interesting when played with photos. You can create whole new layers of interest and meaning with them. I'll never forget being at a critique session where someone showed a series of large-format views of slightly run-down and deserted playgrounds in an overcast, wintry light -- forlorn swings, puddle-filled potholes, odd bits of debris here and there, and so on. The collective yawn was transformed into electrified attention when the photographer announced: "These playgrounds are all in Bosnia, taken on a visit in 1994, mainly around Sarajevo but also in Banja Luka, Mostar and Tezla..."

I suppose the lesson was that although some photography is about "location, location, location" all photography is about "projection, projection, projection". For all I know, the bit about Bosnia was a lie, but it did engage our attention on what turned out to be some quite interesting photographs. We were suddenly pleased by what we could construct for ourselves, from the echoes the images were reflecting back at us from our own minds. But if they hadn't been interesting pictures (to look at) the effect would have been short-lived.

The problem with the "conceptual" diet art students seem currently to be digesting, is that the caption (in other words, the devising and description of a clever-sounding project) seems to have taken over from the picture. It's all sizzle, no bacon. Or, perhaps I should say it's the very opposite of the anechoic chamber -- all echo, no sound.


* Actually, I have just discovered that, in contemporary French, "faire un malheur" means "to be a smash hit" (as in "son dernier album a fait un malheur" -- his last album was a smash hit). I doubt Pascal had this in mind, but it would be interesting to know how much smirking goes on when a French teen reads this particular bit of sententiousness.

Let It Bleed

I often read the online version of the New Yorker, mainly for the mystifying cartoons and the caption competition (this one makes me hurt with laughter any time I think about it). However, I do read the odd article, too, and a paragraph from a recent review article by art critic Peter Schjeldahl ("Let it Bleed: '1969' at P.S.1, , New Yorker Nov 16 2009) made an impression on me. He wrote:

"The embitterment of right-wing politics today isn’t a patch on that of leftist temperaments in 1969—an alienation so deep as to resemble indifference, but scintillant with rage. The art world, or community, became a destination of internal exile. Art works became tests of initiation. If you wondered what they were about, it meant that you would never know."

An alienation so deep as to resemble indifference, but scintillant with rage ... That's Miltonic, isn't it? I love the use of that archaic word "scintillant", with its suggestion of dark brooding cinders and spitting sparks. It's also a good definition of "cool" (as an attitude or lifestyle, that is, before it became a simple synonym for "good"). Schjeldahl knows this, of course -- his last sentence alludes to the famous answer (variously attributed to Louis Armstrong or Fats Waller or Miles Davis) to the question, "What is jazz?": "If you have to ask you'll never know". Which, in its coolness, barely conceals an anger which is equal and opposite to the disdain expressed in that other famous answer, "If you have to ask the price, you can't afford it".

It's also true, and something I hadn't really thought about before. I was still a kid of 15 in 1969, but in the mid-70s I kicked around in the ashes and embers of that rage as a student activist. There was little choice: it was pretty much the only game in town. You could hardly sit down for a coffee in Balliol JCR without becoming embroiled in a prolonged, often shouty debate over the "degenerated workers' state" or the finer points of The German Ideology. The smoke of May '68 (or maybe it was just Christopher Hitchens' cigarettes) seemed still to hang in the air, and the likes of Alex Callinicos and David Aaronovitch held snarling matches over pint mugs of tea.

As a member of the Howard Marks Tendency I was tolerated, just. Despite making myself useful, I never truly belonged to that scene, because I had to ask, and would therefore never know. I was too interested in unserious things (such as myself), too clearly a hedonist, something I could tell was considered deeply suspect. My working class origins did make me an object of curiosity to some of the public-school educated revolutionaries, but not that much. I was a clown, a tourist, a Useful Idiot.

I think I've used this before, but some pictures deserve a second showing

For all its ideology of universal love and peace, the Left I knew was fuelled by a shared sullen anger, the source of which was obscure to me. It was quite depressing to be around, like living with someone in an all-encompassing chronic sulk. The movers and shakers were continually cross about a whole shopping list of issues, causes and grievances, and expected fools like me to give them regular opportunities to vent their crossness; indeed, they were clearly disappointed if you didn't. It was a mystery to me, then and now, how anyone barely out of school could have arrived at such deeply held, radical opinions about events -- often obscure, historical events -- in countries I could scarcely point to on a map. I was amused, but also impressed: you have to acknowledge a class act when you see it.

In the late 70s, when I was living as a squatter in Hackney, you would still encounter members of the elite special forces of rage: muttering back numbers of the Angry Brigade, and smouldering, pseudonymous Germans from the fringes of the RAF. But, by then, the anger had gone mainstream and downmarket; these semi-fugitives seemed like kids playing hide and seek who hadn't heard that the game had been called off. The sudden, unexpected assault by punk music -- all that snarling, spitting, self-harming posturing -- was probably their worst nightmare come true: it was the appropriation of sham political "attitude" by pop culture. Welcome to The Society of the Spectacle, indeed.

Things could only get worse (or better), when the Thatcher government was elected. Everyone fully expected the pervasive sense of grievance to achieve critical mass and explode, which it did, briefly. The cool facade of indifference finally gave way to hot, angry defiance. But it was not led or fomented by a disciplined Marxist vanguard, however; it was a spontaneous eruption of the much talked about but much ignored lower orders, fed up with the police interfering with their hedonistic pursuits. Another time, remind me to write about how the Prof and I were present at the St. Paul's Riot in Bristol in 1980, probably the most exciting party I've ever been to.

By the late 1980s, it was all over. Despite ever-increasing and systematic social inequality, some truly oppressive government legislation, and the gradual break-up of the welfare state and the political consensus that had built it, it seemed no-one could be arsed to do anything much about any of it. I was a trade union activist at local level for that whole decade, and the frustration was at times overwhelming. Even the Miners' Strike in 1984/5 was only half-heartedly supported by the wider trade union movement and membership: we had moved into the era of power-dressers with flipcharts, and those dreary miners wanted to take us back to the era of flat caps and shaken fists ... so 1930s! The attendance at meetings and demonstrations steadily dwindled. Academic "Marxists", with careers based on readings of Althusser or Walter Benjamin, were rarely, if ever, seen at union meetings, and were even spotted crossing picket lines. The anger had dissipated, and the action was elsewhere (in career development and home improvements, it seemed).

Your blogger assembles the People's Flag, ca. 1980

(I seem to have spent my life attached to a bag)

The Poll Tax Riot of 1990 was an event most of us watched on TV, perhaps with a sense of nostalgia, but with no great inclination to join in. After the astonishing events of 1989 everyone and everything had gone all ironic and post-modern in a punch-drunk kind of way. Political protest seemed to become simply an extreme sport, defined by and restricted to special interest groups, mainly youngsters with time on their hands. Spectacular, but quickly contained and easily ignored. It looked like fun, compared to endless meetings, but... Like the rave scene in music, I looked on with the envious eyes of middle youth. No more acid for me, thanks, I've got work in the morning.

I grow old… I grow old…
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Meanwhile, those movers and shakers had moved onwards and upwards. Familiar names would flash in the news -- rising journalists, barristers, politicians, professors -- as yesterday's disdainful, angry comrades took up their rightful, ordained places in the order of things. Occasionally one would refer to his or her past life as a mere interlude spent as a "revolting student". Some moved steadily rightwards. I began to feel real sympathy with those nutters I'd met hiding out in Hackney, like those Japanese soldiers who used to emerge from the jungle on Pacific islands, long years after the War had ended, still ready to die for the Emperor.

Twice on marches in London against Thatcher's rounds of cuts in higher education I bumped into guys whom I had once counted as friends, covering the event as journalists. Both times we said "Hello!", but then they quickly moved on when it became clear I was a mere foot-soldier. Well, of course: they were working, and I was not the story, just local colour at best. We could hardly have popped over the road for a pint. And I had one end of a banner to carry. But those incidents and others like them bothered me: no matter who I had been, no matter who I might have become, I was now -- actually, relatively, effectively (perhaps "objectively", as we used to say) -- nobody, it seemed. It was not a good feeling.

A great truth struck me around that time. That is: It really does all come down to social class (duh!). Most left-wing activists were, are and probably always will be bright young middle-class kids with an optimistic view of the world mixed in with an understandable sense of guilt at the privilege of their upbringing. It's an explosive cocktail for a while, but -- like all bright young middle-class kids -- there is no way they are not going to achieve their ambitions, once the fizz has gone out of that brew.

They work hard at making connections, getting feet on ladders, setting themselves goals: those simple secrets of achievement are known to them (is it something they learn at school?) and they work that knowledge hard -- competitively, even ruthlessly sometimes. The disdain of my old comrades for my ignorance of the situation in Nicaragua or Namibia was not "essentialist", I realised. It wasn't that they thought that by nature I was an ignorant piss-artist. It was that I hadn't done my homework. To their way of thinking, I had chosen to be an ignorant piss-artist. In the middle-class worldview, what greater condemnation is there?

By contrast -- and this is something Left activists will probably never understand -- the standard-issue working class worldview is, basically, that of a cargo cult. "I'm entitled to my share, too! You bastards are so lucky! Can't wait until it's my turn!" Activists pretend to sympathise, but they can't; they believe in analysis, in actions that set in train processes that will have results. The last thing an activist would do is buy a lottery ticket, punt a week's wages on a horse, or wish upon a star. Activists don't believe the wealth of the world is distributed by a system of luck, magic, and entitlement; they believe that their parents created it by exploiting the labour of others, then converted it into cash, and put it in the bank.

I suppose my real insight was that, despite a prolonged education and much exposure to middle-class people, I had retained my cargo cult view of the world. I wanted to achieve things, sure, but I thought these would and should happen because I was deserving of them or entitled to them, or because they were "intended" to happen. As a result, I did nothing about it. The idea of making things happen by hard work and shameless exploitation of contacts seemed like, well, cheating. I remember how, at the end of our three years of study, I had surprised one of my friends furtively leafing through glossy recruitment material from IBM, as if it were a copy of Hustler. "What are you doing??" I demanded. "Um, looking for a job," he said. At the time, I thought this was both sad and funny.

So, eventually, I woke up -- sort of -- after a decade or more of sleepwalking. I was like the sheep in that famous Far Side cartoon by Gary Larson, portrayed achieving an herbivorous moment of satori in mid-mouthful: "Wait a minute! This is grass! We've been eating grass!" The great wisdom of that cartoon, of course, is that all the other sheep are paying her absolutely no attention at all.

Call Me Tischbein

This is one of my favourite pictures. It stands, framed, on my bedside cabinet, alongside a couple of family photos and a heap of bedside books. That's how favourite it is. It's a watercolour sketch by Johann Tischbein of the young Goethe, looking down onto the street from a window of what is now known as the Casa di Goethe, in Rome. Tischbein and Goethe were room-mates in this very chamber, on their Italian adventure in 1786.

Tischbein's other portrait of Goethe, "Goethe in an Idiotic Hat in the Campagna", is very famous, of course, but this one is far superior. I love everything about it. I love the contrast of interior and exterior. I love the simple colour washes of Prussian blue and terra cotta. But, in particular, I love its informality, the unself-conscious crook of one leg playing with a slipper, the untucked shirt, and above all that sense of the young genius craning out of the window to watch the sunlit street life below, putting together in his head the legacy of his classical learning with the reality of Rome. It's the ultimate holiday snap.

Although the focus is on that sunlit head and the hunched shoulders, there's also an innocent, mildly homo-erotic quality that shines through so limpidly that's it's easy to miss. My daughter, aged six, spotted it straight away, though: "Daddy, that lady's showing her bottom!" That hint of a smile in Goethe's breeches does put one in mind of the lines in Rilke's poem "Archaic Torso of Apollo" (also, as it happens, about the afterlife of the classical legacy -- see my post "You Must Change Your Life"):

... Sonst könnte nicht der Bug
der Brust dich blenden, und im leisen Drehen
der Lenden könnte nicht ein Lächeln gehen
zu jener Mitte, die die Zeugung trug.

(Literally: "... Otherwise, the bow of the breast couldn't dazzle you, and -- in the gentle turn of the loins -- a smile couldn't run to that centre which bore his fertility")

But this is not a picture of sexual desire, though it is a picture of one of the oldest love stories: North meets South. It is a picture of loving admiration and friendship, and of the sheer happiness of being young, talented, and away from home, with a whole lifetime of achievement ahead. Yes, I realise Goethe was 37 in 1786, but I was 17 when I first saw this picture in 1971, and therefore so was Goethe, as far as I was concerned. I wanted, more than anything, to be the young man in that picture.

I'm happy to say, I have been there, and more than once; in a sense, my life has been measured by its "Tischbein moments". During the three summers, 1971-73, that I spent hitchhiking around Europe with a succession of friends (see the post Songs Are Like Tattoos) I had so many such moments that I began to think I might indeed be Goethe. However, the three following years as a student at Oxford put a brake on that fantasy. Goethe I was not. There was clearly more to it than leaning spellbound out of high windows.

I recall a later occasion on a tour through the Basque Country and Northern Spain, one of several I made with my girlfriend and various other couples in the years following the fall of Franco. I awoke one September morning in Santiago de Compostela, in a gigantic creaking wooden bed like a boat in an ancient hotel room without running water, that was equipped with a wooden washstand and ceramic bowls that could be filled from a tap down the corridor. It was impossible not to feel that one had gone back fifty years, if not a century or two.

Throwing open the shutters onto the morning life of an ancient city and centre of pilgrimage, I breathed it all in. The voices, the clap of pigeons, the traffic, the freshly sluiced cobblestones, the geological complexity of the architecture, and -- still asleep in the gigantic creaking wooden bed -- the complicated woman with whom, I realised in that moment (after five or so years of an on-again, off-again relationship) I was going to spend the rest of my life. I admit I had to stand there for a minute or two longer, composed in my Tischbein moment, to see what I thought about that.

Self-portrait with backpack in a distorting mirror

Three Windows & A Water Feature

Wasn't that a film?

The Cloud Club

Next to the Pentagonal Pool is a flight of steps, leading up to a little-used back entrance to the Students Union. No doubt following some Health and Safety edict, these (along with most other steps on campus) were recently painted a peculiar shade of orange.

I have always been intrigued by the grandness of this entrance, and it has something of the feel of a discreet but magnificent club. There is a high mezzanine floor, just below a vast extractor fan in the roof, which I think of as the Cloud Club, as the glass is smoked and highly reflective, and the view inside is frequently obscured by clouds.




This week, armed with the 70-300 telephoto, I finally captured an image of the Cloud Club which does it justice. I think it will make a suitable closing image for the "Mirrors, Windows, Walls" sequence:


I opened the sequence with a quotation from journalist Sidney J. Harris ("The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows"). I'm thinking of closing it with these words from Ciceros' De Natura Deorum:

"The authority of those who claim to be teachers is often found to be an obstacle by those who are keen to learn."

Or perhaps these from Daniel J. Boorstin's The Discoverers:

"The greatest obstacle to discovering the shape of the earth, the continents, and the oceans was not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge".

The Long Shot

Although, as I said in a recent post, I'm most comfortable working within the short focal length range of a "normal" zoom, I think my favourite lens for when I want to have some fun is the Canon EF 70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS. On an APS-C DSLR, the zoom range becomes the equivalent of a 110-480mm lens (in 35mm terms), which is quite some reach, but the built-in "image stabilisation" means that it's still a hand-holdable lens under most circumstances. You can really reach out and grab those interesting vignettes in a landscape that otherwise get overwhelmed by context. For example, this oak on campus has been catching my eye all week, as I take my morning coffee break in the Staff Club:



The long lens, used from a slightly elevated position, gets in amongst the branches in a way I could never achieve with my feet on the ground in front of its magnificent bulk. The foregrounding and isolation of decorative detail puts me in mind of the nineteenth century sketches of the likes of John Ruskin and Edward Lear. The flattening perspective of the telephoto lens comes in handy, too, for sculptural juxtapositions like this one:




Or it can compress the reflections in a campus window into something like a painter's canvas:



That two-dimensional look is something I always find attractive in a photograph. At heart, I suppose, I'm still a drawer and painter who uses photography.

Autumn Leaves

I've been keeping my eye open for chances to photograph autumn leaves without falling into cliché. It's not easy, but I quite like these two. I like them because they say "autumn leaves" without saying "photo competition entry".






And then there's this one. The first couple of times I passed this logjam of Japanese acer leaves I averted my eyes and hurried past. But eventually I gave in and gave it a couple of shots. Sigh.

The Best is the Enemy of the Good

I knew I'd regret getting sucked into gearhead world, but -- like Joni Mitchell and Hell in the song "Blue" -- I thought I'd take a look around it, though. Having earned a bit of spare cash (did I mention I sold thirty pictures at my recent exhibition?) I found myself in the unusual position of having the option, should I so decide, to buy pretty much anything that took my fancy, and at a time when new and exciting photographic gear seems to be emerging every week. Within reason, obviously: there was no point in even looking at the Leica M9 but, hmm, perhaps the X1?

I'm just no good at spending money, though. It gives me little pleasure. I do enjoy the thrill of the chase -- getting good stuff cheap, sniffing out, running down and snapping up unconsidered trifles at a bargain price -- but there's no fun to be had (for me, anyway) in simply looking up the good stuff in the catalogue, typing in my Visa number, and waiting for it to be delivered. It feels like cheating. So, as a compromise, I decided I'd pass up on the Panasonic GF1 or the Olympus EP1 this time round, bank most of the money against next year's crop of photo-novelties (hello, GF2 and EP2) and hunt out something tasty on Ebay instead.

I like Ebay. It reminds me of what was once my favourite magazine, the Exchange & Mart, which my friend Alan and I use to pore over together in our early teens. The Exchange & Mart -- which finally ceased in print just this year -- was a typographic and typological miracle, columns of tightly-packed classified ads expressed in a special language of categories, abbreviations, and euphemisms which you had to master to get anything out of it. We rarely actually bought anything -- that wasn't the point. As I have written before, growing up in a new town gives you a thirst for and curiosity about Old Stuff. The Exchange & Mart was a weekly dictionary of Stuff, and a practical education in the value people put on it, and indeed in what people value. Why is a used Gibson Les Paul guitar so expensive? Why is a used Ford Willys jeep so cheap? Who is this writer Henry Miller, and why are his books mixed in with thinly-disguised pornography? And why do people have such a thing about SS ceremonial daggers?

Ebay has the same attractions, but with the added delights of pictures and interactivity. There is an exciting sense of risk, but also a compensating sense of community (decreasingly so, sad to say) . It's all about strategy. There's no sense in wading in and placing an early, hopeful but modest bid. But there's also no sense in making bids that overvalue the item you're after. You need to feel out the market, bide your time -- maybe sitting out the first few times your object of desire comes up for sale, just to watch what others are willing to pay -- and then make a calculated pounce. The ultimate satisfaction, which truly gratifies one's inner market trader, is to realise that no-one else is going to bid, and that the the price is going to stick at 99p for an item without a reserve price and worth considerably more.

So, what was I going to take a caculated risk on? As I have bought into the Canon SLR system in a modest way, I thought it might be worth taking a look at "L" lenses. It should come as no surprise to long-term readers of this blog that I am a "kit zoom" photographer. Eighty percent or more of my work is done with the EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS zoom lens, which comes attached to the bottom-of-the-range DSLR I use, but which I have found to be a perfectly satisfactory lens, though I am not the kind of person to put it on a tripod and photograph test cards to calibrate the degree of its perfection or my satisfaction. It takes very nice pictures.

However, camera manufacturers run two parallel universes, as far as lenses are concerned. There's an affordable "consumer" range, in the main perfectly adequate assemblages of glass, but in plasticky housings and far from weather- or dust-proof, and then there's a "professional" range, with stellar optics, and robust, weather-proof housings. The main difference, of course, is weight, size, and above all price-- you can add a thousand pounds or more to the cost of your pathetic, plastic, "consumer" lens for the pro equivalent. That's a lot of money.

In the case of Canon, the pro lenses are designated "L" (for "ludicrously expensive") and have a tasteful red line around the barrel. It's hard to avoid conflicted feelings... On the one hand, you suspect that that you may be falling short, somehow, on image quality; on the other, if like me you have arte povera tendencies, it's fun to laugh at foolish "advanced amateurs" overburdened with their collection of heavy and expensive lenses.

So, having a bit of funny money I thought I'd see what all the fuss was about. I settled on the EF 17-40mm f/4 L USM: one of the cheaper L lenses, but with a good reputation, and covering the sort of modest zoom range I like. I got into my Ebay stalker's hide, and waited, watched and pounced. For £390 I thought it was a reasonable bargain.

Now, if you are susceptible to "fit and finish", a lens like this is a pleasure to handle. It's big, weighty, and everything is just right, from the damping of the focus and zoom rings to the feel of its heft in your hand. My little 450d practically squeaked with delight as I slotted it in. You just know it's going to take your photographs into a new dimension.

Except, it doesn't, not really. Or, at least, it hasn't. In fact, I'm losing a lot of shots I would have got before, doubtless due to the lack of built-in image stabilisation. "IS" in its various guises has been one of the real advances made possible by digital photography -- with good technique you can hand hold at shutter speeds that were previously impossible, and guarantee sharpness at more normal speeds. As you get older (or colder, or both) this is a serious advantage. And the cheapie 18-55mm zoom has it, and the "stellar" 17-40mm doesn't.*

Of course, the shots I do get are pretty good, quality-wise. Several people remarked on the "fossil marble" image in the post Fishy Rice, which was the first "L" image I've posted. There is a certain descriptive clarity which the lens brings to the image-making process which, normally, I would have to bring out in post-processing. But it really doesn't make me think, "The sheer quality of this lens is worth all the shots I'm missing because of its lack of IS". In the end, it's a lens designed for 35mm film cameras, and the game has changed since then.

This is in many ways a pleasing result. I'll stick with my nice, cheapie zoom, and recoup my money on Ebay. I've had a little adventure into gearhead world, and returned intact. But the fact that I've had the lens on the camera all week and have no pictures I really want to share with you speaks for itself. As someone (Voltaire?) once said, "The best is the enemy of the good"...


* There is an argument over whether in-lens IS is superior or inferior to in-body IS. Clearly, a camera system wth in-body IS would mean that the qualities of such a lens migh have a better chance of shining through.

Stormy Weather

In the last year or so I have been noticing a new sort of cloud over Hampshire. What I keep seeing is a downward-breaking plume, falling away from a horizontal cloud or cloud layer, as if a large object had plummeted through the the cloud, or a strong local suction had been applied to it from below. It sometimes has a bit of a twist, but is quite wispy and is nothing like as dramatic as a tornado funnel cloud, but nonetheless noticeable. This element of verticality in the sky is striking and, to my mind, new.

I saw a particularly fine example this week over Southampton as I drove to Romsey to do a Saturday morning shop. As often happens when driving, my mind went off in two different but related directions. First I thought, "Perhaps these unusual clouds are the precursors of storms, or even tornadoes", and then the words in Hertford, Hereford and Hampshire, hurricanes hardly ever happen sprang into the forefront of my consciousness, and repeated themselves like a mantra.

It took me a while to place the words. Is there anything more infuriating than a name or memory that stays just out of reach? Upsetting, too, if it goes on for too long: once you've watched relatives vanish into the hell of dementia all the humour goes out of memory loss. Luckily, I soon remembered that those words are, of course, one of the elocutionary phrases Henry Higgins inflicts on Eliza Doolittle in the musical and film My Fair Lady, and which figure in the song "The Rain in Spain", once a staple of light radio but now, I suspect, unheard from one year to the next.

The memories flooded back. "On the Street Where You Live", "Wouldn't It Be Luverly?", "With a Little Bit of Luck", "I Could Have Danced All Night" ... I know every note, every word of those songs, although I loathe most of them. In 1964 we went on a family expedition to London to see the film, and we owned the soundtrack LP which was played constantly until the soundtrack of West Side Story took its place. Ah, more, better songs! By the time I reached Romsey I was singing "The Jets Song" and feeling very good.

When you’re a Jet,
You’re a Jet all the way,
From your foist cigarette
To your last dyin’ day.

Of course, the inevitable next thought had to be: they don't write them like that any more, do they? And the truth is, of course, they don't. The ability to write popular songs with the sheer variety, melodic inventiveness, fun, wit and narrative cleverness of those classic musicals seems to have vanished from the world.

Not only don't they write them, they don't play them on the radio, either, and it's such a shame. It made me feel sorry for youngsters brought up on an exclusive diet of beat-driven rock and pop. And worried, too: what if you never learn to recognise and appreciate these more sophisticated qualities simply because you have never learned to loathe "I Could Have Danced All Night", or laughed out loud to "America" or "Gee, Officer Krupke"? And perhaps you can't ever really appreciate beat-driven rock and pop unless you have sat through an hour of dross on Two-Way Family Favourites, yearning to hear just three precious minutes of Elvis or the Beatles.

As it happens, when I had finished the shopping in Romsey, the front page of the local paper caught my eye. It seems a mini-hurricane had torn through South Hampshire on Tuesday, leaving a swathe of mild devastation (fallen trees, damaged roofs, blocked roads) from the New Forest to Winchester. And those words popped back into my mind: In Hertford, Hereford and Hampshire, hurricanes hardly ever happen... Well, maybe things are starting to change. Perhaps I'd better check where the rain in Spain is mainly falling, these days, though -- if my geography is worth anything -- I doubt it ever fell mainly in the plain.

Storm passing over Llandrindod Wells, Wales

Fishy Rice

Not so unusually these days, but perhaps still worthy of remark, I do all the cooking in our family (and I do mean all -- I cook evening meals six or seven nights a week, plus lunches at weekends for anyone too idle to make their own). When the kids were younger, this would often mean two meals every night, and occasionally three, as someone had usually decided that day that they didn't like rice / pasta / potatoes any more. As it was a rare meal that pleased more than three out of four, I have learned to cook a last-minute omelette or operate a grill whilst feeding myself with the other hand.

I'm not a good cook, understand, or even particularly enthusiastic; it's just that I can be bothered, and the Prof can't. After over 15 years of family cooking I have evolved a repetitive menu of set meals which I can cook on autopilot and with which, no doubt, I have dulled the palette and gustatory curiosity of my children. I'm as predictable as a school canteen: if it's Friday, it must be toad in the hole. In that respect, I resemble 80% of traditional Mums. Though my own mother was a deeply unenthusiastic cook, who relied on staples like frozen burgers, instant mashed potato and tinned and frozen vegetables to get us through the week. By comparison, I'm Nigel Slater.

Just to, um, vary the blog diet a bit, I thought I'd pass on a store-cupboard recipe I made up years ago in a tight spot, and have cooked ever since. It's called "fishy rice", because that's what it is.

Ingredients:

1 tin of mackerel in oil
Long grain white rice (approx. 300 ml by vol. *)
1 heaped teaspoonful of Marigold Swiss Vegetable bouillon powder (accept no substitutes) in 450 ml of boiling water
1 onion, chopped
[optional] 1 clove of garlic, finely chopped
half a red pepper, chopped
half a green pepper, chopped
two or three mushrooms, chopped
[optional] a handful of shredded white cabbage, or some frozen peas
Tomato puree
Jamaican hot pepper sauce
Salt & pepper
Random herbs (a.k.a "mixed herbs")

* I have found that one of those small Chinese tea bowls contains enough rice for one person, and contains roughly 100 ml, which makes the "one and half times by volume" calculation for the water very easy.


Pour all the oil from the tin of mackerel into a heavy bottomed saucepan. Heat the oil gently, and fry the onion and garlic until soft. Add the random herbs, salt and pepper, and the other vegetables and stir fry until you're bored with it.

Add the mackerel, breaking it up into chunks and stirring it in with your favourite spatula. If it's getting too dry, add a little olive oil. Add the rice, and stir to coat the rice with oil. Add a few good dashes of hot pepper sauce.

Pour in the vegetable stock -- this should make a wonderful sizzling sound. Stir, adding a good squeeze of tomato puree -- about 10 cm from a tube. Bring to the boil, then cover the pan with a square of aluminium foil, and press the pan lid into it to give a good tight seal. Reduce heat to the lowest you can possibly manage, and cook for 20 minutes.

Turn off the heat, and leave to stand for 5 minutes. Remove the lid and foil, stir and serve. It ain't pretty, but if you get it right it's very tasty. The secret ingredient is the oil from the tin, obviously (please don't tell me about mercury poisoning, etc.). I can report that if, under stress, you forget to put the rice in, it tastes quite good anyway with pasta. Serves two greedy adults plus two picky children.

Cards

It's time to make this year's Christmas / New Year cards (via VistaPrint, as usual). As has become my habit, I'm doing two: one which gestures vaguely in the direction of "picturesque", and one which doesn't. If you have commented on this blog before now and would like to receive one, just email me your terrestrial address if I don't already have it.


I was heartened to see my statistics take an unexpected leap upwards earlier this week. On closer investigation, however, I discovered that this was because a website specialising in "corporal punishment" had linked to an earlier post concerning my primary school, which happens to mention the use of the cane. Be assured, you very strange people, that spankings and "severe French lessons" do not and will not figure prominently in the subject matter of this blog, so you might as well stop reading now. Unless, that is, you have enjoyed what you have found. But don't even think about asking for a Christmas card until next year.

Three Square

The challenge of working with extreme contrasts in light intensity, which you get at this time of year particularly, has almost become a project in its own right. I've been refining a set of moves during exposure and processing that work well for me and my extremely casual (almost careless) modus operandi; I don't think I could ever resort to a tripod, multiple exposures and HDR software. Nothing particularly clever or secret, merely shooting RAW, exposing for highlights, and making use of the tools within Photoshop Elements 6 like "Adjust Colour Curves". It helps, of course, if you're not afraid or ashamed of inky black shadows...

Autumn Watch

Autumn seems to have come on sooner this year, and to have taken a deeper grip much more quickly, at least on certain species of trees. I don't recall seeing such heaps of leaves on the ground in October; the planes at Mottisfont this afternoon had dumped huge loads, although the oaks are still fairly green.

On the other hand, the trout there seem to be hanging around in greater numbers than usual and are still in their summer haunts, although some of the bigger specimens that dominate the choice spots by the bridge are looking distinctly worse for wear. I've no idea where they go in the winter months -- do the older generation die out? -- but they're usually much less obvious by now. When I first came to Southampton in the mid-80s salmon were still coming up the Test in November in numbers, and had to negotiate a salmon leap built into a mill-weir on the river at Romsey, which had been carefully sandbagged to protect them from damaging themselves on the brickwork. It was a very entertaining spectacle, and you half expected to see a bear hanging over the parapet of the bridge, to swing a speculative paw at the great fish. They've become a rare sight now (the fish, that is) and last time I looked the sandbags had rotted away and not been replaced.

Autumn Day

I'm a sucker for Autumn, it plays on my Celtic sentimental streak like a harp. I discovered I was susceptible to the lacrimae rerum in the sixth form, when we came under a steady drizzle of autumnal, valedictory poetry, for which I had been primed by an unexpected break-up with my first "steady" girlfriend: hey, Werther, c'est moi. Keats, Matthew Arnold, Tennyson, Goethe, Rilke -- sometimes it was all I could do not to sob into my exercise books during double English. In self-defense I took refuge in portentous, inky marginal doodling, a habit I have continued to this day.

A poem I have always loved from this period of my sentimental education (and which, because of its juxtaposition in the Penguin Book of German Verse, I always misremember as by Friedrich Nietzsche) is Herbsttag (Autumn Day), by Rainer Maria Rilke.

Herr: es ist Zeit. Der Sommer war sehr groß.
Leg deinen Schatten auf die Sonnenuhren,
und auf den Fluren laß die Winde los.

Befiehl den letzten Früchten voll zu sein;
gib ihnen noch zwei südlichere Tage,
dränge sie zur Vollendung hin und jage
die letzte süße in den schweren Wein.

Wer jetzt kein Haus hat, baut sich keines mehr.
Wer jetzt allein ist, wird es lange bleiben,
wird wachen, lesen, lange Briefe schreiben
und wird in den Alleen hin und her
unruhig wandern, wenn die Blätter treiben.

Ranier Maria Rilke, 1902

As I'm at home this afternoon, with a cup of coffee and a German dictionary to hand, here's my (slightly free) translation:

Lord, it is time. That was one big summer.
Disconnect the shadows from the sundials
and let slip the winds upon the fields.

Require the last fruits to be full;
a couple more southerly days
will turn them out perfectly, and hound
that sweetness into heady wine.

Whoever has no house, won't be building one now.
Whoever is alone, will stay that way now:
wakeful, reading, writing long letters,
and restlessly tramping The Avenue, over and over,
driven by the leaves.

I enjoyed doing that. I almost wish I could submit it for approval as a piece of homework to my old teacher, Dr. Splett. But he is long dead, and our school now mutated out of all recognition and, I hear, soon to be moved to a new site. Sad, when you consider a school has occupied that site since 1558.

I wrote "The Avenue" rather than "the avenues" (Rilke's "Alleen" is plural), because a leafy thoroughfare of that name ran up the side of our school grounds, and was a favourite haunt for introspective walks and midnight fun in those far off days. It has a particular resonance, as "Alleen" is a close rhyme for "Alleyne's", which happened to be the name of our school. Sniff...

Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,
In looking on the happy Autumn-fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, 1847

As I say, I'm a sucker for Autumn...

Friday!

Well, that was a busy week -- sometimes Friday arrives sooner than you're expecting, but also not a moment too soon. Thank goodness for lunchtime -- here's something I'm pleased with from my favourite port of call, the Pentagonal Pool, taken this week. I've no idea what that irridescent substance is, but it really does catch the light.




The clocks go back an hour in Britain this weekend, and we "gain" an hour's sleep on Sunday morning -- outstanding!

Wally!

Non-British readers may find this post a little baffling, and perhaps even British readers aged under 40. I feel a bit like the aged narrator at the outset of an adventure story: "I think it my duty that I set down, while the memory is still fresh, a true account of what transpired in those long-gone events -- can it really be 40 years ago? -- so that it may be passed on to a new generation, who may find it of no little interest to learn that their elders were as susceptible to youthful folly as themselves -- nay, perhaps even more so. Etc."

To begin at the beginning. You may, at some point, have heard someone described as "a wally", or "a bit of a wally". It's an expression that had its vogue in the 70s and 80s of the last century, but may still be heard on the lips of the older sort. [Sorry, I can't shake off this R.L. Stevenson tone]. We've already discussed "minced oaths" in a previous posts (Gadzooks!), and at root "wally" is clearly a minced-oath version of "wanker", but with the added cachet (back in its heyday) of hipness and contemporaneity.

There has been a lot of discussion, over the years, of the origin of the term "wally" in the pejorative sense of "an uncool, embarrassing person, prone to impulsive acts of clumsiness and foolishness" -- in many ways, an equivalent to the "shlemiel"* of Yiddish. This discussion has been confused by the fact that the word "wally" itself has a long heritage. I remember, for example, how when I was eight we used to walk home from Cubs in the winter dark, and would stop off for a steaming sixpenny bag of chips. A few of the boys with East End parents would ask for "a six penn'orth and a wally, please"; that is, a pickled gherkin, fished with tongs from the enormous cloudy jar on the chip-shop counter, mysterious and murky as a display of preserved body parts.

But the advent of the usage under discussion can be dated, and accounted for, fairly precisely. It all started at one of those chaotic early 70s open air rock festivals (Weeley? Bickershaw?) when a group of friends somehow lost contact with one of their number named, um, Wally. Easily done, in the Somme-like conditions. What distinguished this group from others, however, was that they loyally spent the gaps between acts wandering the grounds calling out, ever more disconsolately, "Wally? Wally! WALLY??" They even got one of the on-stage announcers to ask over the PA, "Wally? Has anyone seen Wally?", and the "Wally" refrain was taken up by the crowd. For a time, to call out "Wally!" in a random quiet moment was considered the very pinnacle of wit, and hilarity would reliably ensue.

Naturally, people brought this novelty home with them, including some of my own friends, who gleefully explained the whole thing the next week at school. It seemed to have been the best bit (indeed, the only good bit) about sleeping in a wet field, in unsanitary conditions, occasionally subjected to a poorly-amplified, wind-blown barrage of music. Sure enough, at the next season of gigs in our little town, someone would reliably shout "Wally!" in a quiet moment, to gales of laughter and the bafflement of visiting bands. It was a kind of in-crowd, "I was there" gesture. I imagine the same scenario was repeated all round the country.

It didn't take long for the novelty to wear off, however. It just stopped being funny. In the end, the only ones to call out "Wally!" at gigs were the kind of attention-seeking, over-excited twits, impervious to their own tragic unhipness, who couldn't possibly ever have "been there" and who, naturally enough, came to be referred to as "Wallies".

Date? 1972. Around the same time as young suburban things in Britain started exclaiming "No way!", using air quotes, and decrying the "rip-offs" which they (alright, we) couldn't "get our heads round", probably later than ultra-cool urbanites but a decade or more before any of these cult-ish new speech mannerisms entered the mainstream.

I have to say, even if shouting "Wally!" stopped being funny in 1972, it still amuses me mightily to hear the likes of cabinet ministers talking solemnly about "Rip-Off Britain" or exclaiming "Higher taxes? No way!", like the small-town head-bangers which, of course, a few of them might once have been. Like minced oaths, it's one of the pleasures of language-watching to see which subcultural currents rise to the surface, and how long it takes for trash talk to emerge from the mouths of the respectable.

And perhaps you can also see the roots (conscious or unconscious) of Martin Handford's mystifyingly popular Where's Wally? books of the 1980s -- the main point of which is trying to find a bespectacled fool named Wally hidden in a vast crowd of tiny people. Sounds familiar? What I hadn't realised is that this very British "Wally" went on to become "Waldo" in the USA, had a bit of a makeover, and found massive commercial success. Who knew? It's Fleetwood Mac all over again.



* Not to be confused with a "shlemazel", a habitually unlucky person. Definition according to The Joys of Yiddish: the shlemiel is the one who spills the soup over the shlemazel.

Put Out More Flags

I'm not sure whether this set of flags spells anything ("England expects...", maybe, or more likely "Send three and fourpence, we're going to a dance"*), but I'm running them up the mast anyway.



















Once you start looking, you can't help seeing them everywhere. Stand by!


* Explanation added on 20/10/09 for non-British readers:

It is a (hopefully) apocryphal story told about the British army, that an urgent signal was sent from the front: "Send reinforcements, we're going to advance". This was misinterpeted at HQ as "Send three and fourpence**, we're going to a dance".

** "Three and fourpence" = three shillings and four pennies = about 16.6666666666 new pence.

Time

Once you've got enough life under your belt to have a personal "history", it's sometimes very enlightening to work out some simple timelines. If nothing else, it gives you a real sense of the way subjective time differs from objective time, and personal time differs from historical time. It may be a well-worn cliché to say that time goes faster as you get older, but it is also simply true. This may be due to the fact that five years is half of a ten year old's life but a mere tenth of a 50 year old's life, but the sweet carelessness of our youthful years also makes for more intense experiences compared to the routine and anxiety of later life.

An acute sense of time passing and time wasted can be panic-inducing, though. This is perfectly expressed in Pink Floyd's superlative piece "Time", on Dark Side of the Moon:

Tired of lying in the sunshine
Staying home to watch the rain
And you are young and life is long
And there is time to kill today
And then one day you find
Ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run
You missed the starting gun...

I had a jolt of this kind recently, when I realised that not only had I lived in our current house longer than anywhere else in my entire life -- twenty years -- but also that this was two years longer than I had kicked around in my "home" town, and that the whole stretch I had done in this town -- twenty five years -- was not far short of half of my age. What had started out as a young man's temporary, career-oriented move to a city I didn't especially want to live in, has become my life.


More strangely, there can sometimes be a slippage in the relationship between relative time and objective time in the opposite direction. I remember a few years ago going into one of the Games Workshop stores, where black-clad youths were hunched over tables, painting tiny models of trolls and dragons, heads bobbing simultaneously to the in-house heavy metal muzak. Hang on, I thought, I know this, this is Black Sabbath ... And the penny dropped: these kids are listening to music that is thirty five years old! It was as if I and my 16-year old chums might have been sitting around in 1970 listening, without irony, to 1930s big-band swing, rather than something newly-minted that year like, well, Black Sabbath. Somehow, rock has torn a hole in the fabric of the fashion-time continuum, through which anyone is now free to pass back and forth.*

Talking of which, I listened to Dark Side of the Moon again recently for the first time in a very long time, and stepped straight back in time to 1973. I'm happy to report that part of me is still there, staying home to watch the rain, with time to kill.

Every year is getting shorter,
Never seem to find the time
Plans that either come to naught or
Half a page of scribbled lines
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way
The time is gone, the song is over,
Thought I'd something more to say...

Very 1973... The "monocle" is the lenscap of a Fed 3

* Afterthought at 5:30: It suddenly struck me that, of course, that is exactly what some of us, at least, were doing, in our enthusiasm for the Blues -- Robert Johnson was recorded in 1936, though obviously most people came to Johnson via Clapton...

Kindle, Schvindle

Way back last year I described my purchase of an e-book reader (My New Toy) and how the missing player in the UK market was Amazon's Kindle. Anyone who uses Amazon regularly will have noticed that, finally, a UK version of Kindle was launched this week. Except, it isn't.

What is being made available is the new "international" version, sold to us in the UK via Amazon in the USA, and which makes available not a new UK Kindle store but (for now, anyway) the existing USA Kindle store. Not only that, but the price per item is going to be 40% greater in the UK ($13.99) than in the States ($9.99). Not only that, but the connection to the Amazon store will be achieved by "roaming" on various 3G phone networks, which immediately puts a question mark over availability (ever tried ringing home from a train? Check out the Ofcom "3G coverage maps"). Hmmm. I ordered a Kindle in the initial excitement, then almost immediately cancelled it. Wait and see, I think.

However, the fact is that I'm encountering two problems with my current e-reader, which even the advent of a full-blown UK Kindle would not address.

1. The first is good old "digital rights management" (DRM), which will be familiar to users of music downloads. They simply don't want you to use your purchased books on more than a couple of nominated machines, don't want you to use rival DRM formats on the same machine, don't want you to buy "US only" books in the UK, and sure as hell don't want you lending your books or dropping them off at the Oxfam bookshop when you're done with them. Sure, there are "open" and portable formats like PDF, but even these are sold in DRM-ed versions for in-print items, so an "Adobe PDF" can't be used on your Mobipocket e-reader, even though it can read Mobipocket PDFs and non-DRM PDFs. Oh, and not all e-books are available in all formats. It's pretty tiresome.

2. There are quite a few e-books available, but you simply can't get the books you actually want. Example: I recently came across Charles Portis -- one of those cult writers you can't quite believe you've never heard of before, about whom people rave, and whose best-known books were first published decades ago, but are still in print. Although repeatedly frustrated by previous "dead cert" searches (John Le Carré? Nope) , I really did fully expect to hit paydirt this time. But none of his books is available as an e-book, not a single one.

Now, I'm perfectly happy with my current device as a piece of technology. Yes, it could be a lot easier to buy and upload the e-books. That's where the Kindle would score mightily with its promise of instant gratification: find a book, and download it directly to your device in 60 seconds (unless, of course, you're looking for Charles Portis or John Le Carré). Yes, it would be nice if the pages turned instantly, and navigation were simpler and quicker. Yes, it would be good if the contrast (and, for the sight-impaired, colour) of the "electronic paper" could be adjusted. But, the thing works well enough for a simple, linear, page-turning read in good light. I wouldn't want to use it to study a student textbook, though.

What I object to is that the availability of e-books is making my reading choices for me. I wanted to read more Robert Stone, but all I could get were his memoir of the sixties, Prime Green. I wanted to read Larry McMurtry or Dee Brown on the pioneer days in the American West, but ended up reading Blood and Thunder by Hampton Sides instead -- a good read, but not where I wanted to go.

One day, of course, none of these things will be problems. I'll let you know when that happens. Until then, unless you're a first order gadget freak and/or a book fiend in search of an urgent space solution, I wouldn't bother to buy any of them. Though the new Sony Pocket e-reader does look very tempting...

I Can't Go On. I'll Go On.

This weekend sees the first anniversary of this blog, and that means it's time to decide whether to stick with Plan A, which was to spend a year checking out the Blogging Experience -- finding out what it was like having a public shop window and whether anyone would like what they saw in it -- and then maybe moving on to to something else. I always had the example of photographer Alec Soth's blog in mind, which ran a brief but exciting arc from September 2006 to September 2007.

I was unsure whether I could sustain regular written content of sufficient interest and variety to entertain both myself and anyone else who happened to read it. That has not turned out to be a problem, but it has been difficult finding a consistent tone and subject matter, and (perhaps not unconnected) impossible to boost the regular readership into three figures. I've noticed I get the most visits and the most comments when I attempt humour, and when I get into the territory of family and personal history. But it's also clear that most people, understandably, prefer their content to be predictable: the people who arrive here because of an interest in Panasonic cameras are not going to stay to read about Joni Mitchell, and the ones who like blogs to operate in non-stop confessional mode are not going to be turned on by donnish jokes about obscure words.



So, what to do? The thing is, I've got used to making the effort: it's like keeping a diary that I happen to leave open for others to read. It concentrates my attention on what I really mean to say to know that even as few as 50 people may read what I write. And, of course, it's useful being able to give new photographs an informal outing, before new sequences and books take shape. The reactions to them can be quite instructive. I'm enjoying this too much to stop.

So, in short, I am going to carry on for now, but perhaps at a considerably more leisurely pace. I may also try to write less, as in "write fewer words" -- I'm appalled, looking back at what I've written, at how pompous and portentous I can become, once I get going and the word count goes up. So I'll stop now, having undertaken to carry on.

Northam at Noon

I had a day off work today, and decided to take a camera over to a part of Southampton I rarely visit these days: down by the waterside in Northam, one of those mixed light industrial and residential areas that is a palimpsest of successive waves of development and demolition. I particularly wanted to scout some locations for a later, more considered shoot of some gorgeous Victorian gasometers and a spectacular scrap metal yard. The light was not ideal for a late morning photographic session -- rather too bright and too harsh in contrast for my taste -- but perfect for an autumn walkabout, and I had a good time. Here's a little gallery of first selections.

A Chair in the Sky

I keep seeing chairs which people have left in odd corners, presumably to enjoy the autumn sunshine. This puts me in mind of Joni Mitchell's adaptation of the Charlie Mingus tune "A Chair in the Sky" on her 1979 Mingus album, which I bought last year in an attempt to catch up with those lost years between Hejira and Night Flight Home. Maybe I'll listen to it this afternoon.



Or maybe I won't. We've got to pack up the son's things ready to drive him to "uni" (as I must learn, reluctantly, to call it) tomorrow and won't need any encouragement to lachrymose retrospection. Later for that.

My Tribe

In the wake of the Innsbruck exhibition, I've found myself explaining myself and my motives a lot, mainly to the kind of intimate stranger you meet via a blog -- kindred spirits who live on the other side of the planet and who may or may not be using a pseudonym. It's been a bit like a little taster session or homeopathic dose of fame, and as a consequence I've been reading the kind of things writers and artists say to journalists with a new sympathy. No-one wants to be boring, but it must be a royal pain to have your throwaway remarks jump out of a press cutting to bite you half a lifetime later.

As so often, I don't really know what I think until I've said it out loud, and the most interesting and surprising thing I've heard myself say, is that I feel quite European these days. I had been listening to an interview on BBC Radio 4 with the self-taught Norwegian saxophonist Jan Garbarek, and had experienced an enormous sense of fellow-feeling. That's my tribe, I thought. I've been a long time ECM records listener (not hard to guess, perhaps) and Garbarek is central to that project. As a label, ECM is highly distinctive; not just cerebral Euro-jazz but all kinds of multicultural crossovers such as Garbarek and the Hilliard Ensemble's surprise hit Officium. Many people will own that recording and classics like Keith Jarrett's Köln Concert or Arvo Pärt's Tabula Rasa without realising their common denominator.

Of course, one thing ECM is famous for is its record sleeves. They are an education in good taste and photographic excellence. If I could name my dream job, it would probably be supplying images for ECM recordings. In fact, as soon as I've finished this post, I may well sit down and draft a job application: it's not far from Munich to Innsbruck, after all, and maybe Manfred Eicher needs a nice day out...


[Talking of which: If anyone has a copy of the book ECM: Sleeves of Desire (basically, an illustrated catalogue of all the ECM sleeves from 1970 to the mid-90s) which they are prepared to sell at a sensible price, please do get in touch. I do have a copy of the more recent book Horizons Touched (still available and which I recommend to any ECM fan) but Sleeves of Desire has attained the cult status of an unobtainable classic. By "sensible price", I'm afraid I mean less than 100 Euros...]

Dawn to Dusk

As September rolls past the Equinox, the days begin to shorten noticeably up here in the north of the planet. From a photographic point of view, this is good news for us working folk, as it means we get that good raking light coming across the car park and the adjacent allotments when we clock in of a morning, and shining back through some of the better windows on campus as we clock off at the end of the afternoon. It's not my favourite light for the drive home, however.

In compensation, any day now we'll have the first morning mists and frosts. Scraping that first frost off the car windscreen in the morning is one of those moments that, like the first reappearance of the swifts in spring, reassures me that -- despite everything we've done as a species to put a spanner in the works -- things are still working more or less as they're supposed to. But, now that I won't be dropping my son off at the railway station every morning (gulp), I really should start walking in to work again, to help that little bit more to keep it that way.

The Winter's Tale

We went to see Simon Godwin's very effective production of that strangest of plays The Winter's Tale the other evening, and it's been haunting me ever since. It was the first time I'd found myself sitting in the front row of a theatre, with Paulina's spittle flying over my head in the spotlights as she rounds on Leontes, and making eye contact with Time and the old shepherd -- all three played by the same remarkable actor, Golda Rosheuvel. It was an interesting encounter with the reality and transparency of that theatrical "fourth wall".

After a while, Shakespeare's themes in the late plays can start to seem almost obsessive. Irrational fathers and husbands destroy stability through jealous rages, and in the ensuing chaos children are thrown aside and lost, strange unions and separations occur, and women move determinedly to the centre of gravity, faced with the idiocy of their men. Miracles of art and coincidence bring reconciliation of a sort after long passages of time, but a heavy price is paid, and at the end some bitter outsider is left out in the cold. People have often commented on the parallels of The Winter's Tale with the story of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, but there's surely something deeper, more personally tragic, working its way to the surface here. We'll never know, of course, but sometimes some appalling personal truth seems so very close to erupting out of these plays. Maybe that's part of what has made them so compelling for 400 years. Perhaps one day, a production will be so insightful, so compelling, that the whole Shakespeare phenomenon will be laid to rest, like an exorcism. Not yet though, old mole, not yet.


Meanwhile, here are two flags I found this week, window hunting:

Teed Off

When I was at school I had such a pronounced accent (a sort of car-crash of Hertfordshire and Cockney) that my own teachers would mock me, in that ironically barbed way that school teachers used to deploy. My German teacher once remarked that, in stark contrast with my English, I spoke German with the accent and clarity of an aristocrat. The same man was determined to cast me and my equally incomprehensible friend Alan as the gravediggers in the school production of Hamlet. I later discovered that I was notorious in the staff room for always trying to divert the class onto "woider isshoos."

Now, northerners like Tony Harrison seem to have cornered the market in tales of "how my teachers worked class upon me," but all deviations from Received Pronunciation were once regarded as a strong marker of lack of intelligence and/or ambition. At one extreme, this led to the sort of suburban gentility that is so mockable ( "The cake h-which you gave to he and I"); at another, it led to the ruthless self-extirpation of any trace of class (though not necessarily regionality) once you stepped through the door of a university.

However, as Shaw wrote, "It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him." Once you stepped out of your "natural" accent, you were in a social minefield. A pick'n'mix approach to RP (a bit of BBC, a bit of thespian, a bit of Oxford) simply alerted the native speakers that, although you were unlikely to steal the silver, you didn't really belong. The snobbery of the Bloomsbury set was hardly unique, merely very well documented.



This process had started to stop by the 1970s. At university I felt no obligation whatsoever to work on my vowels, though I had already had my cockneyfied glottal stops forcibly removed by my parents, anxious that anyone asking for a "glarssa waw'ah" was doomed to be a dustman. Indeed, the process had begun to go into reverse. I encountered privately-educated contemporaries who -- especially in the context of radical politics -- had consciously taken the edge off their "natural" public school accent by rubbing away some random consonants here and deflating some vowels there, and in a few extreme cases had actually gone to the extent of taking de-elocution lessons. This put the boot on the other foot: you can no more adopt a pick'n'mix working class accent than you could fool Virginia Woolf about the drawer out of h-which you had come. Think Dick Van Dyke. Worse, think Dick Van Dyke trying to sell you a copy of Socialist Worker at the factory gate.

In the last decade, we've seen the rise of a new breed of politician, many of them my contemporaries (like Tony Blair, ptah! and Peter Mandelson, double ptah!), people who have learned to adapt to new realities like chameleons. It seems that voters cannot be commanded or convinced now, but must be won over subliminally by a species of branding campaign. New Labour was the first conduit to power for this new image-aware breed, but the Lib Dems and Tories have them, too. Voice and accent play an important part in this permanent revolution, sorry, makeover of the political class.

The old political parties were unashamedly class-based but, in all parties, an unreconstructed working-class accent was once perceived as an obstacle to power. Consider the CVs of Roy Jenkins or Ted Heath, men of humble origins who acquired preposterously fake voices at Oxford, though nowhere near as preposterous or as fake as the vocal mannerisms of Margaret Thatcher. But that has changed, and now that yesterday's radicals are today's government ministers or opposition shadows, carefully class-neutral voices are to be heard all over the radio and TV, and I have to say some of them do sound very familiar.

All this is a preamble to this simple comment: every time I hear a politician like Ed Balls or Nick Clegg or David Cameron on the media carefully inserting random glottal stops into each sentence I want to scream, "Stop it! You're not fooling anybody!! Everyone knows you were educated at a private school!!" It started a few years ago with Tony Blair, and now everyone's doing it. Even the bloody heir to the bloody throne has started doing it. It drives me mad.

Guys, listen: a glottal stop is not just a substitute for any old "t", and you get no credit for putting one in the wrong place in the wrong words. It's patronising. Just stop it.

DIY

There's an old poster from the 1970s, which I presume started life as a cartoon somewhere. I'm sure you've seen it: two extremely hungry-looking vultures are perched on a tree. One is saying to the other, "Patience, my ass. I'm gonna kill something!"

Something of the same entrepreneurial spirit lies behind self-publication. Face it, you are 99.999% unlikely ever to be "properly" published, so why not do it yourself? If nothing else, at least you may have left a permanent trace in a library or on a bookshelf somewhere. When posterity realises you were William Blake all along, it'll be a good place for posterity to start looking.

I'm a big fan of "on demand" self-publishing websites like Blurb and Lulu. They do seem expensive for the end purchaser, unless you understand the true costs of self-publication. Look, in all accounting, there are two sides to the balance sheet: income and expenditure. But, for most self-publishers, there will be no income side to speak of. I mean no income. As in zero. Accept that you will sell no copies of your book. As in not one. So your pre-publication sums, calculated to deliver that modest profit based on modest sales, are a fantasy. You actually stand to lose thousands of pounds. And we haven't even talked about publicity and distribution. Just forget about it.

If you understand that, then suddenly the prospect of getting into print and making available for sale (at a profit, if you like) decent-quality illustrated books totally free of cost starts to seem very attractive indeed. OK, the quality may be variable, but it's a small price to pay not to be stuck with several large cardboard boxes full of unsellable books. What, you think anyone is ever satisfied with the reproduction quality of their own photographs in any book, anyway?

The other sort of web-based service of which I am an enthusiast is the sort of jobbing printer typified by VistaPrint. This setup looks like a scam, feels like a scam, endlessly junk emails you with free offers just like a scam, but actually -- isn't. VistaPrint is actually a terrific custom printing service for postcards, cards, business leaflets, fridge magnets, t-shirts, etc., etc. I won't bore you with the details, but if you're in the market for, say, small runs of nicely printed postcards or gift cards of your photographs, then get yourself on their mailing list, and believe that the endless weekly emailed free offers are just what they say they are: free (but plus postage). Actually, my favourite thing about VistaPrint is the relentless creativity they put into getting your attention: each week, there seems to be a fresh new pitch. They really, really want you to have your 100 free postcards! I have used them to print my postcards and Christmas cards for several years, and will do the same this year, too.

Go on, do it yourself. Enough patience. If you're hungry, it's time to kill something!

The Ups and Downs

As you can see, I'm a fan of grids (Ha! It's the way I tell 'em). If nothing else, a subject with true verticals and horizontals is a good test of your camera technique. It's also a good test of your fusspot quotient: do sloping horizons or converging verticals bother you? More to the point, does it even occur to you to notice them?





I confess they do bother me more than I'd like to think, but only in this kind of shot, where getting them "wrong" would be so noticeable (or a conspicuous and provocative act of anti-fusspot-ness). Lee Friedlander can slope those pavements all he likes, as far as I'm concerned -- it works. Although I'm a 100% hand-held photographer, I do tend to notice and straighten verticals when composing in the viewfinder, although I do have a tendency always to raise the horizontal to the left.

In fact, if I had to name one simple thing that had improved my work, it would be "paying attention to vertical edges" and, for most purposes, trying to keep them parallel to the edge of the frame (i.e. not pointing the camera up or down). If nothing else, it means you often have to try different angles of approach, or using the "built in leg zoom", which often means finding better pictures.

Christmas Trees

Anyone who admits to an interest in photography usually becomes a convenient one-stop shop for friends and colleagues seeking photographic advice: usually variations on the question "What camera should I buy my partner for Christmas?" I can imagine there are enthusiasts for whom this is a golden opportunity to sound off -- all that compacted review reading and blog lurking suddenly finds an outlet, and the enquirer finds herself engulfed in a bewildering tsunami of second- and third-hand expertise. Not me, though. I'm not keen on spending my own money, never mind anyone else's.

It generally does no good to explain that I am not a pixel-peeping gear-head with views on the relative strengths of in-body versus in-lens image stabilisation, or that in my opinion one camera at the same price point is much the same as any other and that, in the end, you get what you pay for and the real question is, will you ever make use of half of what you've bought? No: I have been outed as a photographer, and it seems to matter to some people what I think. Flattering, I suppose, really. But, as the venerable saying has it: in the world of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.

In the extremis, as Phil Esterhaus used to say on Hill Street Blues, I have been known to direct the enquirer to find out what the intended recipient's favourite colour is, and to go with that. Or to say out loud the sacred names "Canon, Nikon, Olympus, Panasonic, Pentax, Sony" and to make a note of the one that feels most pleasing or auspicious to invoke. I never include the name "Leica" in this incantation, of course, as I'm not prepared to be responsible for the consequences.

The more interesting (and genuinely flattering) side of becoming known as a photographer is that people want your opinion of actual photographs, sometimes their own, and sometimes -- less hazardously and more interestingly -- those they have come across. As a person who has held strong opinions on most things since firmly rejecting green vegetables at age three, I have constantly to remind myself that having a broad spectrum of strong views is not the normal human condition. I have learned to tread carefully. A snort of derision ("Ansel Adams!") can crush the green shoots of curiosity as effectively as a boot heel, whereas an admiringly raised eyebrow ("Richard Misrach?") can be all that is needed to drive through the green fuse a mighty oak of creativity.

The thing that emerges consistently for me from these random encounters is the extent to which people are held back by an elevation of subject matter over "making pictures". Most people, understandably, take photos "of" something. They want to represent what they see. After all, it's the obvious strength of photography over, say, drawing: it is quite hard not to achieve an acceptable likeness of the reality presented to the camera. But, on the other hand, it is still just as hard to produce a good picture "by, with, or from" the subject rather than "of" the subject.* That is, to make a satisfying arrangement of two-dimensional marks on a flat surface. This (in my view) is the only really productive approach to photography.

It doesn't help that famous photographers are often known by their characteristic subject matter, in a way that painters tend not to be. It confuses people about the "how" of great work. They think, "If only I could stand in the desert where Richard Misrach stood, or find before me the interesting people that Richard Avedon found, or be present at scenes of heart-breaking tragedy like Sebastião Salgado, then I, too, would take great photographs." Well, no, actually you wouldn't. Because, let's be honest, you can't even take an interesting photo of the family Christmas tree.

This has little to do with "art". No-one employs an "artist" to represent the sinks and stoves in a kitchen catalogue, after all. They're just photographs. But the question that few aspiring photographers ask is, how is it that the photographs in the humblest product catalogue or cookbook far exceed in quality and impact anything I can achieve? It's similar to our unquestioning acceptance, as naive filmgoers, of the astonishing but artfully transparent feats of the cinematographer.

Just a little thought, a little analysis, and a lot of looking at good photographs, will raise interesting questions about colour, composition, lighting, and lenses to which, it turns out, there are conventional answers which are reliably known to work (see: the kitchen catalogue) and, sometimes, new, exciting, original answers (see: Misrach, Avedon, Salgado). Learning to appreciate the difference -- basic visual literacy -- is the first giant step down the road to making an interesting photograph of the family Christmas tree.

At least, that's what I tell the few people who don't flee once I have evaded their question about the quality of their holiday snaps and have started to rant about kitchen catalogues and Christmas trees.








* Genitive versus ablative photography, perhaps?

Obliquity

The windows on campus still exercise their fascination. This natural pair came together this week, while taking my new camera body (Canon 450D) on its lunchtime patrols. The venerable 350D body will go to my daughter, who is showing all the danger signals of creative talent.

We Salute Attenborough

I found this unexpected insight into the mind of Werner Herzog (maker of some of my favourite films) on the Werner Herzog Archive:

New Statesman: To British viewers, at least, Encounters At The End Of The World will seem like a very warped take on the traditional TV nature documentary.

Werner Herzog: Yeah but I wouldn't put them down because in Great Britain you have some of the very finest nature documentaries worldwide.
New Statesman: Are you a David Attenborough fan, then?

Werner Herzog: I am. I like his excitement, I like the fervour and how he comes across to an audience is just wonderful. You see the excitement that you feel as a child when you discover for the first time that there are mountains on the moon when you look through a telescope. He transports this kind of excitement, this spirit of wonder, into what he sees and what he presents. So I would not like to put down what you see on television. Some of it is phenomenally beautiful.
New Statesman: In a way, you and Attenborough are trying to get at the same thing, just approaching it in different styles.

Werner Herzog: In different styles, but the wonder and excitement makes us brothers. I salute Attenborough.
New Statesman: Let's hope he sees this interview!

Werner Herzog: Whatever. He knows that he's good.

I'm a David Attenborough fan, too (who isn't?). When I was small, the Zoo Quest programmes on the BBC were an inspiration, and for many years I was an avid collector of creatures in jamjars and wildlife detritus. I still have some of my Zoo Quest books: Quest Under Capicorn sparked an interest in Australian aboriginal people which lasted for many years. When I was about twelve, I used to cover sheets of plywood with imitation bark paintings of goannas, barramundi fish and wondjinas.

It's strange when heroes from two apparently different domains of your life come together like this, and shake hands. Herzog, too, has an interest in indigenous peoples, of course: I wonder whether he read Quest Under Capricorn?

The boy who would be Attenborough

You'll think I'm making this up, but: this photograph was taken on my first camera (a Fed 3) by my father in the Austrian Tyrol, not far from Innsbruck, just seconds after I found this classic Red Deer antler. Remarkably, or ridiculously, I still have that antler, 40-plus years later.*


* Still got the camera, too.

I'd Like To Thank...

As you know, I was unable to attend the opening of "Der Widergänger" last night in Innsbruck but I have given some thought to what I might have said had I been there. It is traditional -- or at least appears to be so, if one takes televised award ceremonies as a model -- to give public thanks to the people who made it all possible, starting with one's parents and ending with wails and broken sobs.

So, here's my list*. I'd like to thank:

The unknown holidaymaker on the beach at Hemsby, Norfolk in August 1959 who let me use his high-quality Zeiss binoculars all day. Looking through those silvery lenses made my heart soar, and sharpened an appetite for simple seeing that has never left me.

John Boxley: my best friend in Infants School, whose pride in my ability to draw aeroplane wings as seen from the side was such that he would get me to sketch them in front of other kids in the playground dust with a stick. "Look, look! He's drawing them FROM THE SIDE!" This early taste of celebrity convinced me this was something worth persisting with.

Miss Dorothy Hendey and Mr. Michael Davies: primary school teachers at Peartree Spring Junior school in Stevenage, who entered me for several national junior painting competitions, two of which, ahem, I won. They made me feel success was the natural consequence of working on one's talents (such as being able to draw aeroplane wings from the side! Damn, I was good).

The unknown holidaymaker in 1967 (at the Gasthof Lamm in Tarrenz, Austria -- "Warum vorbei?") who turned out to be both interested in moths and butterflies (then my main enthusiasm in life) and photography. He took the time to explain the advantages of his SLR for insect photography, but also explained how I might use supplementary lenses on my brand new Fed 3 Russian rangefinder. Such life-enhancing kindness to show to a shy 13-year old boy.

The unknown conference attendee who stole several of my drawings from my college room one vacation. Almost as big a compliment as offering to buy them. So I will also mention Dick of Dicey Corridor because he did ask to buy the original of one of the drawings I used to do for the cover of Strumpet, a radical student magazine. It revived the heady feeling I had experienced some years before when the older sister of a schoolfriend bought my ink portrait of John Lennon. However, it would be another 30 years before I sold anything else.

The difficulty of etching: For a long time I thought of myself as a printmaker. After gouging many linocuts and woodcuts -- those gateway techniques -- I finally gravitated to a course on etching: the hard stuff. One evening, after being shown how to produce a photo-etching from a negative in an enlarger in a darkroom, the penny dropped. Etching is difficult, dated, and dreary; the photographic darkroom, by contrast, looked easy, exciting and fun (well, two out of three ain't bad).

Mike Skipper: Mike laid the foundation for everything I know about photography and the black and white darkroom, on a course in 1984 at the Southampton branch of the Oxford Darkroom. Above all, he took me to one side at the exhibition that was the culmination of the course and said some kind things that convinced me I had started on a lifetime journey.

Richard R.: Richard was my drinking companion for several years when I first arrived in Southampton in 1984. A keen photographer himself who once exhibited alongside Fay Godwin, he is probably the most patient and gifted printer of black and white negatives I have ever met, truly a wizard. Sadly, Richard gave up photography for windsurfing, and we haven't had anything to talk about since. Why, Rich, why?

Peter Goldfield: I said what I have to say about Peter here. I realise hyperlinks don't really work in an Oscar speech, but there we go. For me, without Duckspool, nothing. Simple as that.

Finally, The Weather of the British Isles : I dedicated my master's dissertation to "the weather of summer 1977" because it had been such a blessed washout compared to that legendary sun-fest of 1976. I don't think I could have written the tedious thing otherwise. The weather has been a source of fascination, frustration, joy, despair, exhilaration, anger, but never indifference or boredom, ever since. Above all, it is the ever-changing British weather that gives us the ever-changing British light, and ... and ... which ... I ...[sobs incoherently]


* I could also compile an anti-list -- for example my secondary school which made me choose between continuing art lessons or studying German (noooo!) -- but we don't want to go to that bitter place on this happy occasion.

Oh well

It is one of the great unresolved mysteries of my life that I was never approached to join the Secret Intelligence Service. It is one of the mythic scenarios of university life, after all: the casual approach from a tutor, wondering out loud whether one had any interest in being of service to one's country, the subsequent meeting with the Man from London in the pub, etc. Next stop, a life in which one has to answer the question "And what do you do?" with even more evasion that I have to muster now. Or perhaps not. I believe Spooks'R'Us has a webpage now and recruits quite openly via the newspapers; they probably twitter, too.

I would have said no, of course (I think, probably), but I was such a good fit -- speaks a range of European languages including German and Russian, of nondescript appearance but possessed of an easy charm and ready wit, comfortable with the highest and the lowest in the land, with a wide acquaintance among political radicals and various subcultural currents, desperate for cash and easily seduced by the romance of a Lark ... Dammit, I even had the under-16 equivalent of a brown belt in judo.

On reflection, I think the problem may have been that no single person knew all of these things about me. That, and the fact that I spent three years more or less permanently in bed during daylight hours. Thinking about it, very few people other than a small group of similarly-inclined friends may even have noticed I was ever there.



The other classic opportunity for Great Things at university -- one that did come my way, but which I passed up -- was the approach from a future kingmaker. Last year, Geoffrey Perkins died. His name may not mean much to non-Brits, but if I say he produced The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and held Douglas Adams' feet to the fire to get the scripts delivered you get the idea. As a writer and producer, he was central to a whole generation of influential (but strangely forgettable) British radio and TV comedy.

When he died, pictures of him in his Oxford days were shown on the news, and I remembered: one evening in 1973 or 74 the very same slightly goofy lad wearing the very same silly tank top and another guy had come knocking on my door.

"We hear you're quite funny," he said, "Would you like to write some stuff for our review?"
"No," I said.
"Are you sure?"
"Yes," I said.

And that was that.

What's On In Innsbruck?

For the German speakers amongst you, here is some early press coverage of my show in Innsbruck, courtesy of Rupert Larl. Modesty forbids me from translating for you, though I will point out that the item with "Kitsch" in the headline is not about me, thankfully.





This is an exciting experience for me, as you can imagine: and not just the exhibition, but also reading about myself in my favourite foreign language. Klasse! (does anyone still say that? It was quite hip in 1970...) Like Alice, I seem to have passed through the looking glass...

Septembrist

Increasingly, I find myself asking "What is wrong with this country?" I've always felt a bit of an outsider -- you couldn't grow up where I grew up with my interests and aptitudes without feeling that way -- but I think that nonetheless I've always unthinkingly bought in to that smug view that Britain, somehow, is at the centre of things. After all, there's a venerable tradition of inclusion in Britain which puts strange, difficult folk like William Blake or Isaac Newton or even Winston Churchill at the centre of the national myth, at least after they're dead; you used to feel there was a place for everybody, including "the awkward squad". But recently I have started to feel less like a bit of an outsider than a visitor from another planet.

I only have to leave these shores for the feeling to be amplified tenfold. It's like waking up from a terrible dream. Clean streets, decent houses, no drunken, loutish behaviour, no feral kids or street gangs, reliable public transport, state of the art health care ... Simple things, to be sure, but we -- as a nation -- seem to have decided to unzip our collective fly and piss all over them. We are an unlovely, loud presence at the fringe of everything that is right about Europe.

I read this week in The Guardian that increasing numbers of British artists are taking up residence in Europe, where to be an artist is regarded as an honourable vocation worthy of public subsidy, rather than as a scam for the work-shy. Pianist Nicolas Hodges, based in Stuttgart, "recently gave a Ligeti recital at Salzburg to a packed 1000-seat hall; in comparison, he says, he would have an audience of around 100 at Huddersfield contemporary music festival." It's hardly surprising people are leaving, is it? After all, no British gallery would ever offer the likes of me an exhibition.

It's a funny feeling, though, falling out of love with your own country. I can't help feeling that it must somehow be my fault ("It's not you, it's me") and perhaps it is. Or at least perhaps it's the fault of our generation, with our over-extended childhoods, our corrosive political cynicism, our covert worship of that falsest of gods, America, and our fear of seriousness masked with irony. We mocked and rejected the stuffy, traditional ways that delivered us the peculiar country we grew up in, but never quite came up with anything adequate to put in their place. We thought the European Project was too earnest and too boring to take seriously. We thought politics was "show business for ugly people." We said, "Don't vote, it only encourages them," and "Whoever you vote for, the government still gets in." We were right, of course, on every count, but that was never going to be enough: no surprise, then, that some ugly people took over our politics.

But I don't really feel responsible for all this mess, whether by neglect or a refusal to participate. I'm just a face in the crowd, 2000 light years from home. Instead, all I can do is shrug and contemplate the queue and the contents of the shopping trolleys in Tesco on a Saturday morning. "Are these my compatriots? Is this what they want? What is wrong with this country?"

Septembrations

It's September, and I've had a good break, if hardly a long one, and as a family we've had a positively astrological run of good fortune during the summer: the partner became a professor, the son got the grades for his chosen university, the daughter got good grades in the five GCSEs which -- against our judgement -- she was made to take a year early, and I'm about to have what promises to be an excellent exhibition. So am I relaxed and happy and refreshed? Far from it. Returning to work is so depressing. And so much good fortune in a row is making me edgy.

It's a truth that we mainly choose to ignore, that holidays are not really good for us. We all invest too much in our precious "time off," and it never really delivers. Face it, two weeks of play in a pair of shorts will not turn an ant into a brown-kneed grasshopper, nor will it much sharpen the edge of the boy Jack's dullness. Just ask Gordon Brown...

In a previous post (A Perfect Dordogne Read) I wrote of reading an Andy McNab thriller on holiday:

"As well as a bracing immersion into a single-minded world of Glocks and gollocks*, its compelling simplicity convinced me that I could sit down when I got home and write a bestseller myself. I would become rich, and then lead a life of my own leisurely choosing ever after. This was actually a more exciting fantasy than the book itself.

Now I come to think of it, such infantile musings are often the stuff of my vacation reveries. After all, the most powerful side-effect of any decent holiday is to cast a strong, unflattering light onto the other 95% of your year. It's a tantalizing glimpse of your "if only" life. I suppose that's why France is full of farmhouses, converted but unoccupied most of the year by British owners who have let such fantasies get the better of them."

On reflection, I realise I may have stumbled across a great truth about my life here. The problem is I can't quite figure it out. Maybe it has something to with the way the two parallel realities -- the workaday reality and the holiday daydream -- might be brought explosively into contact by simply enacting the fantasy. Write the bestseller! Live life as a holiday! Leap tall buildings in a single bound! Why not? Well, because. Or maybe it has something to do with recognising the superior and self-contained nature of one's capacity for daydreaming over one's capacity to "live large"? The "fifty things to do before you die" type of person always strikes me as needy, and never particularly fulfilled. Fulfilled people have usually learned to sit quietly in a room, and rarely go in for bungee jumping (though they might have a quiet smile thinking about it).

I have recently found myself in the odd position of repeatedly explaining why I'm not straining every nerve to travel to Innsbruck on September 11th** and I have found myself reaching for an analogy with the distinction between those who want to be writers, and those who want to write. The former are yearning for a lifestyle and fantasize about huge advances, booksigning tours in the USA, and Booker Prize acceptance speeches; the latter just want to be left to get on with writing their books.

Personally, I am not turned on by the idea of enacting the role of "photographer" or "artist." It is very gratifying indeed that Rupert Larl likes my work enough to give me a show in his gallery, but I'm very happy for the work to speak for itself. Although I can be a dreadful show-off, I'm more of a heckler than a main act, and anyway I'd like to think that the images are way better than anything I could say about them. On the other hand, if planes did fly direct from Southampton to Innsbruck and back every day I think my ego could withstand just a little attention. But they don't, so it'll just have to get by.

But what does turn me on is EVERYTHING about making photographs, from the hunter-gatherer outings where the ecstasy of "getting in the zone" is always within reach, to the exquisite agony of long evenings spent editing and sequencing images. For me, it's all about the process. Yes, of course, the destination is important (whether it be prints or self-made books or now an exhibition) but it's the journey there that matters. Crucially, I have found that making photographs is something I'm able to do, want to do, and do do -- day in, day out, year in, year out. Unlike, say, writing, painting, print-making, playing the guitar or any of the other things I never quite transformed from daydreaming or dabbling into doing.

But the thing about going on holiday is that being away from work and from home means that I also take a break from photography -- beaches and sunsets and mountains and pretty villages are not my thing and, besides, what is more boring for a family than a father who wants to hang out in strange corners with a camera for hours on end? So in order to get to do what I want to do I also have to be back at work, which is a paradox I could do without.


* re. "Glocks and gollocks": I forgot to gloss this in the original post -- a Glock is a popular and euphonious brand of sidearm, and a gollock is the British Army's preferred (Malaysian) term for a machete. Neat, eh? I'm going to monitor the spread of this linguo-meme closely, as it's currently unique on the entire internet!

** The ominousness of the anniversary has only this second struck me, and played no part in my deliberations, honest!

Translation Service

I've been asked to provide a translation of the text on the exhibition invitation so -- in case your German is not what it was -- the German texts read as follows:

"We invite you to the opening of the exhibition on Thursday, 10th September 2009 at 18:30.

At 19:00 Jennifer Charmandy will read texts by Mike Chisholm on photography from the blog Idiotic Hat.

Guided tours for school parties through the exhibition may be arranged by telephone on Saturdays 19th September and 3rd October, as part of the programme 'The Long Night of Museums'.

THE REVENANT is open Tues-Fri 15:00-19:00 and Sat 10:00-13:00 until 10/10/09.

web: www.fotoforumwest.at, mail: fotoforum@aon.at, phone 0043(0)512-572236"


There are about 80 images in the show, a selection from the sequences "The Revenants", "Brilliant Corners", "Pentagonal Pool", and "The Mysterious Barricades".

Consider Yourself Invited

Here is the rather nice invitation that Rupert Larl has made for my Innsbruck exhibition. It's a 21cm square, folded vertically about 6.5cm in from the left, so that a narrow slice of the image on the reverse folds over to conceal the left hand column of text and make an A5 sheet -- very elegant. Vielen Dank, Rupert! I only hope that the photographs can live up to their billing.

The title ("Der Widergänger") means "The Revenant", a reference to one of the sequences featured in the exhibition, and to my habit of repeatedly haunting the same spots. Unfortunately, one spot I am unlikely to be haunting in the next month is Innsbruck, though I haven't yet completely abandoned the prospect. But, should you happen to be in Austria between 10th September and 11th October, please do drop into the gallery, and make yourself known as a reader of this blog. It is Fotoforum West, at Adolf-Pichler-Platz 8, Innsbruck.

High

The view from Old Winchester Hill on Sunday

I think if I had a lot of money and leisure, I'd spend most of my time getting high. Not in the chemically-assisted sense, but literally: one of the most reliable thrills is looking down on the surface of the earth from a great height. I'm sure one of the motivations behind the invention of flying machines was simply to see what it all looks like from up there. I'd employ a personal pilot to fly me around in a helicopter or, if that's a little anti-social, maybe some silent steam-punk airship powered by nothing but the force of strong opinions (not so much an aviator as a bloviator).

For me, the best bits of a flight are the first and the last ten minutes, when you bank steeply over a city and its surrounding countryside, having what I think of as an Inverse Auden Moment, where the "something amazing" is not (hopefully) a boy falling out of the sky, but the 21st century equivalents of ploughmen and a horse "scratching its innocent behind on a tree" seen from 1000 feet above. Yes, I'm that idiot going "Look! Look down there!" when half the passengers are trying studiously not to do precisely that.

Two of the greatest aids to timewasting and woolgathering that have been invented in recent years are Google Maps and Google Earth. There's a great post by Struan Gray on his blog on this very subject, which I won't try to improve on. Suffice it to say that, in idle moments, I like nothing better than to trace routes from Old Haunt A to Old Haunt B from the commanding heights of the Google satellite imagery, zooming in to check out the field marks and archaeology which is invisible from the ground, and zooming back out to admire the broader colours, shapes and patterns. The sense of controlling an all-seeing crystal ball always reminds me of the time some friends and I were ejected from the camera obscura perched high on the top of Bristol's Avon Gorge for engaging too ecstatically and too vocally with the large and luminous saucerful of secrets laid out before us by that miracle of optics. I think it was the same afternoon in 1972 we were also asked to leave the Arnolfini Gallery, after interacting too vigorously with an exhibition of kinetic art ("This is an art gallery, not an adventure playground").

Back in those same far-off days when the chemically-assisted sort of high still seemed like it might be a useful route to knowledge, I saw an extraordinary film called Powers of Ten by Ray and Charles Eames (yes, they of the famous chair) which, adopting the manner of an educational short made for schools, proceeded to blow minds simply by proposing a journey out into the universe in a series of 10x enlargements, starting looking down on a man lying on his back on a blanket and ending at the limits of the observable universe. The trip is then reversed, but this time it doesn't stop with the man on the blanket but goes straight on through to the inner space of the sub-atomic level. Like, Whoah! I imagine it's a little quaint, now, but at the time it mapped nicely onto a series of [sub]cultural concerns that sought to negotiate a link between art and science, and found an austere new sublimity in the objective but "conceptual" insights of maps, graphs, catalogues, inventories and indeed photographs.

This sensibility found expression in works as various as the music of Terry Riley and Philip Glass (think of the film Koyaanisqatsi), the famous "Self Burial" photo-sequence by Keith Arnatt, the land art of Richard Long and Hamish Fulton, and the early films of Peter Greenaway. There was an exhibition ("1965 to 1972 -- When Attitudes Became Form") in 1984 at Kettle's Yard in Cambridge and the Fruitmarket in Edinburgh which documented some of this alternative to central casting's appallingly inaccurate "flares and flower power" view of the period, and the catalogue is worth seeking out. Its legacy today can be seen in the camera-less photography of Susan Derges and Garry Fabian Miller, and its decadence can be detected in the ironic but pointless scientizing of artists like Mark Dion. "If in doubt, make a grid" was always a handy guideline, but has probably outlived its usefulness.*

Of course, the desire to get up high and look down from a great height is as ancient as our envy of the freedom of birds. A shaman's inner journey to the Otherworld is usually at some point an experience of flight -- it's as if flight were a latent human capacity just waiting to be realised. During WW1, for the first time in human history, significant numbers of men did experience that realisation (and troops on the ground will indeed for the first time have witnessed "something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky"). One such aviator was O.G.S. Crawford: archaeologist, Marxist, crank, and pioneer aerial photographer who learned his trade as an observer flying over the Western Front, and who acquired an enthusiasm and sense of wonder for what the aerial view could reveal about structures on the ground.

One of the privileges of working in a university library is close contact with a huge stock of books, most of which are dull or impenetrable, but some of which are exceedingly interesting and rare. One of my favourite finds has been O.G.S. Crawford's volume Wessex From The Air, published in 1928, and filled with wonderful aerial photographs of classic archaeological sites like Stonehenge, Maiden Castle, and Eggardon Hill. Its binding, typography, text and illustrations all reek of the atmosphere that pervades accounts of those post-war years, exemplified by J.L. Carr's A Month In The Country. For years the book was my private enthusiasm -- almost as much as the photographs I loved the ink interpretations of them, carefully hand-drawn and lettered and enclosed in ruled frames, in that style that textbook illustrations always used until the advent of cheap lithographic printing; they are unselfconcious works of conceptual art.

I had little curiosity about the author himself. Being a plunderer rather than a scholar, I am usually on the look out for visually-stimulating material, not a potential subject for a thesis. But, remarkably, last year Kitty Hauser arranged an exhibition about Crawford's photography in the gallery on our campus, and published an intriguing book about his life, Bloody Old Britain. It turned out that Crawford had lived locally and worked for the Ordnance Survey, whose exquisite maps are the ultimate conceptual bird's eye view of our landscape. There's a review of the book by Simon Heffer here, from which I quote this:

The ultimate act of stupidity by Crawford's masters was their refusal to ship the Ordnance Survey's records, books and maps to a safer location before the Blitz - as a port, Southampton was a prime target for the Luftwaffe. Crawford eventually took the matter into his own hands, and had much that was vital shipped out surreptitiously to his village home. Two final vanloads of his most personal papers were waiting to be driven out one evening when the drivers were called to a 'dental parade'. The vans and their contents were obliterated that night in the bombing, a blow from which Crawford seems never properly to have recovered.

Ironic, or what? The former military aviator's views of the ground from above destroyed by military aviators looking down on Southampton. On a personal note, I should add that my grandparents had moved to Southampton in 1938, and my grandfather, a veteran of the trenches of the Western Front, was in the Millbrook Home Guard, watching over the Docks. He would have witnessed the raid that destroyed Crawford's papers. You don't have to be high to get that feeling that, somehow, it all just fits together.



* Somewhere around this time, the word "experiment" seemed to detach itself from the laboratory and became a sort of mission statement. There was "experimental" music, film-making, and theatre. Intellectually curious young people didn't just get off their faces, but "experimented" with drugs, which always sounded better in court. Strange to think there was once a time when lying in the gutter looking at the stars could be regarded as an "experiment" but, although in retrospect experimenting with drugs is about as wise as experimenting with Russian roulette, it was by and large an innocent and geekish enterprise to which the word "experiment" was not completely inappropriate.

The Big Show

Long-standing readers of this blog may recall that back in November I was approached, completely out of the blue and much to my surprise (and, I admit, not a little suspicion), by a publicly-funded photographic gallery in Innsbruck, Austria about a possible exhibition of my work. Things went quiet shortly thereafter, and I began to speculate whether this might be some elaborate but oddly ineffective scam.

Well, it has come to pass. If all goes to plan, there will be a show of 80 or so of my photographs (selected from the sequences Pentagonal Pool, The Revenants, Brilliant Corners, and The Mysterious Barricades) at the Galerie Fotoforum West in Innsbruck, from 11th September to 10th October, provisionally called "Der Widergänger" (The Revenant). Eighty images is a big show, and it's all a little bewildering.

There is, of course, the ongoing feeling that they must have got me mixed up with someone else. I am no stranger to "self esteem issues," it's true, but I am also not deluded and although I do not suffer unduly from false modesty I do know the contemporary art photography scene very well, and I thought I knew my place in it. I even took a certain pride in being an "outsider". It's all a little confusing. But my German is reasonably good and the gallery director, Rupert Larl, has unambiguously identified me as that English guy who spends his lunch hours endlessly photographing the same puddles of water. The Revenant, c'est moi.

If anything, this is an illustration of the power of the internet, and the new paradigms it has brought in. By putting it "out there" the work of a completely unknown artist will be seen by considerably more people than ever wander into most art galleries. Like many unknowns, in the past I have spent hundreds of pounds printing, framing, and putting up modest exhibitions in modest public spaces, and been glad of the opportunity. Sometimes I recovered my costs in sales, usually not. In the end, as I mentioned back in November, I had decided that hanging my work onto a wall was an outmoded rite of passage which I could easily do without. Ironically, the Web then brought me this extraordinary opportunity to do precisely that, on a scale and in a manner and in a place I would never have dreamed of. It's hard to take seriously.

Unfortunately, I will almost certainly not see the show myself. It would be difficult to pick a worse time for me to travel abroad than September shading into October. I have a responsible job in a university library which pays the bills, and my busiest time is looming -- a computer system upgrade, the usual preparations for the start of a new academic session, with the added complication of planning for a possible Swine Flu outbreak when the students return and start breathing all over each other and our staff. Too bad. But, should you happen to be passing through Innsbruck in September, why not drop by, and let me know how it looks?

But Rupert, who is self-evidently a very cool guy, has a plan. In my absence, he has arranged for a Canadian opera singer, Jennifer Chamandy of the Tiroler Landestheater, to read extracts from this very blog. No, really. It's going to be just like the Oscars: "Mike can't be with us this evening, so Jennifer will read out some thoughts on swearing and umbrellas..." I have suggested that, in the interests of verisimilitude, she probably ought to be made to wear a false red beard.

The gratifying thing is to look back on this "old" work with new eyes (in this case, Pentagonal Pool) and think: "Yes, that's not bad: I can see why someone would want to look at it."

Flat

I recently got a chance to offload one of my favourite anecdotes as a comment on Mike Johnston's blog. It's simply the best non-theoretical insight into the Long Debate on "representation" I know of. Here it is again:

"Just then my eye was caught by an unframed canvas standing on a shelf above Jacqueline's head and to the right. It was a portrait of a girl—Jacqueline, I would have said—in tones of green and black and white. She was shown in profile, looking off to the left, and Picasso had given the face a mildly geometrical stylization built up of triangular forms which emphasized the linear treatment but at the same time preserved the likeness. I pointed to the painting. 'How would you explain to a person whose training made him look on that as deformation, rather than formation, why you had done it that way?' I asked him.

'Let me tell you a story,' Picasso said. 'Right after the Liberation, lots of GIs came to my studio in Paris. I would show them my work, and some of them understood and admired more than others. Almost all of them, though, before they left, would show me pictures of their wives or girl friends. One day one of them who had made some kind of remark, as I showed him one of my paintings, about how 'It doesn't really look like that, though,' got to talking about his wife and he pulled out a tiny passport-size picture of her to show me. I said to him, 'But she's so tiny, your wife. I didn't realize from what you said that she was so small.' He looked at me very seriously. 'Oh, she's not really so small,' he said. 'It's just that this is a very small photograph. ' "

—Picasso, interviewed in The Atlantic, July 1957

In the best version of the story, which I've never managed to source, Picasso then turns over the photo and exclaims, "My God! You poor man! She's also completely flat!!"

Owl contemplating butterfly on cheek
Mapperton Manor, Dorset