Now you see it, now you...

The Lived Experience

The outdoor place can be a wonderful thing. I enjoy the sense of 'now', a process which wisemen of the east could gift to you through the insight of tales. Tales of mountains, zen masters and a hungover student in the backseat asking, "are we there yet?" over and over again.  

I hold no such insight, for my most frequent reaction to facing a new environment is this

...

Do you see it? 

That was an attempt to convey the 'blank sensation'. 

As I pass through new territory, I'd like to believe that under my gormless facade sits a brain threading together the unfolding arrangement of landscape features, distance and weather into a delicious casserole, one that releases steaming calculus into the air when you cut into it! But it's blank. Therefore, I'm grateful for the supplements found in documentaries, pictures and yes, writing!

The Reflected Experience

However, sometimes reading about places can leave one in the following stations;

1. The information station

2. The haunted territory station

The information station reminds me of a scene from The Trip, a TV show featuring Coogan and Brydon.

(if this link doesn't work, it features Coogan looking over a beautiful landscape yet having a passer by ruin it by regurgitating information of the geological process) 

No one wants to be ear beaten or feel like they're reading through a manual (for the record, I believe manuals can be written and laid out very well! I also believe most of those have been stolen by giants). However, I love finding out how things work!  

The haunted territory station is one where a description of 'now' contains information of what came before it. This is a mind boggling world as one is constantly re-clarifying the links of now and then whilst being juggled around in the author's psyche. Most of what I'm reading is in this latter category. However, it's not only in words that landscapes have turned into ghosts, but in images too. I was hoping to take a photo of this sign, located in essex. 

Yesterday I found it was gone. Now I hold it here as a piece of digital archeology.

Essex is moving up in the world. 

Radio On and the scales of change

"Why do the english always want to live by the sea?"

"It's the last resort"

"huh?"

"They always think it's gonna be better than it is"


Wie gehts holmeslice! Ahem, Radio On follows a trip from London to Bristol. Like a lot of road movies there's a vague ambience to the journey which is interestingly contrasted in a technical and precise delivery. 

A car pulls over so we can get down to some bladder alleviation. In the same shot, the passenger opens the door, 

...exits and takes a leak with the door performing some wonderful groin censorship. Remember, this choreography is just for a guy having a piss - I told you it was technical.


Thoughtfully shot, beautiful photography and a soundtrack we could proudly send to aliens as a declaration of our sensual ingenuity.

But this is not a review or recommendation of the film (though for those curious, I would recommend it on a day when nothing needs to happen. It's also available via a certain daily motion website. You didn't hear it from me, tigerbalm)

Shot in 1979, I couldn't help but compare artifacts. In general, small things can be susceptible to rapid change;

Cassette tapes

Vinyl

Television (if you can stack amps, you can stack tellys)

At the living room scale, we start to slow down. The TV might be the give away but the bauhaus style lamp is still available to purchase at a retail centre near you.

 And bigger scales, what about nature?

Take away the lens and its quite familiar. Slow rates of change to landscape but it is certain change (middle picture is a quarry). Even looking at gardens now you will find fewer variations in styles than compared to houses. Especially in the UK, we're pretty conservative, that's how we roll.

There's an interesting remark in the film about the phrase, "pylons spoil the countryside". I don't hear that anymore, it's been usurped by wind turbines. 

Pylons are just so 1979.

Nighty night pixel readers!

The Supermarket Trolley

The Ancients say it extended from the hand, morphed into a basket and leaped on to some wheels. Each step seemed like autonomy from god yet it was always in god's service. 

That's one way to look at it.

Another view; Sure, the trolley accepts its nature, always to be god's hand but if we map out its shape, its shifting form, there's a progression towards independence.

Another view; By becoming mobile there's an effort to reflect our own mobility, to mimic us. 

Cyborg Trolley (source)

It wants to be us but this is as simple and cheap a solution as we give it. If we lived on water perhaps we'd have an elegant solution, a floating wicker basket to hold Moses along the river reeds. But plastic bottles rafting a wheelie bin would be more likely. 

This is not a story of us and them, technology verus people. In the same way as Science is mistaken as a singular all agreeing collective, the Us (the god earthlings) are built of many groups. Which one of us the trolley serves is clarified at the border line.

"Please note trolley will stop beyond this point"
Trolley disabled at the border line (source)

"...the logic of identity is, always and everywhere, entangled in the logic of hierarchy." - David Graeber, The First 5000 Years of Debt

postcards from the beach

Sometimes when thinking of ideas isn't good enough you might think, "if I was in a different place, I'd think of better ideas".

 
Imagine what incredible ideas I'd come up with if I was at the beach! So I went there, in my mind and came up with this!

which is no different to being at the desk.

Or maybe I chose the wrong location?