Projections

(Map from openstreetmap then scribbled on top)

Automated Coincidence

Today it's a cool 20c. Not suicide weather.

Or should I say, if you did commit suicide there would be no paradigm shift. The trees & flowers would remain the same. Flying insects, with the freedom to take position anywhere in the vast cubic dimensions of space, will still opt for landing in your eye. People will still hide behind their ineptitude for driving with self righteous announcements of stupidity, "use the cycle lane!" (because the throne of stupidity in one part of their brain discussed it with the council of stupidity in the other part of their brain and concluded it to be so. Laws of the real world get in the way of this ageless system). Meanwhile the council in the real world would guarantee the cycle lane rode like someone repeatedly hitting you up the arse with a baseball bat. 

Conversely, there will always be a junction with a cyclist stranded in no man's land, perfectly placed where s/he can't see a traffic light and waiting directly in the path of an oncoming car. Perhaps it's a challenge to the consistent mechanics of the world, "Vehicles can't always follow the same trajectory in a system with defined lanes!" - the rebellious voice of the urban lemming.

God knows why the earth is so finely tuned in this manner. 

It's a consistent mantra that great numbers of people living in the countryside shuffled over to the city in the past 100 years and the easy conclusion is we're all teething together. All impulses, and impulses breed similar impulses. After all, the spontaneous meeting of people in public/open space operates under a fine window of time, so the cordial nod to a passer-by or barking frustrated curse can be reciprocated in the same time it takes to check your watch (because waiting in a public space seems to bring these urgent performances, "I'm waiting so I'll check my watch. That's what people do when they're waiting, I've seen it on a music video". Have you ever waited for someone in the countryside? If its dry, you can lie down - and imagine insects crawling up your shirt). 

God knows why the earth is so finely tuned in this manner. With so many people close together it's not necessarily so that we have to process each other this quickly. In some cultures (which I have just made up) speed is not a currency. 

I will conclude this post with a picture of a pub I used to frequent over a decade ago.  

Still there.

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?

A13, Trunk Road to the Sea

Have you ever wondered what the following places look like;

 Wapping, Barking, Dagenham, Grays Thurrock, Basildon, Pitsea, Thundersley, Hadleigh, Leigh-on-Sea, Chalkwell, Prittlewell and Shoeburyness?

If so, you've most likely heard Billy Bragg's "A13, Trunk Road to the Sea". 

Coming from England, the song was written because Bragg couldn't visualise the American towns on the classic "Route 66" which led to him penning his own version. 

However, I'm from the UK and I've only been to a handful of places mentioned in the song. So I thought it would be cool to sequence some glimpses of this journey.

I punched the co-ordinates in Google Maps

Which gave me this route

Hit play


and its off we go!

Starts down in Wapping

By-pass Barking

Straight through Dagenham

Down to Grays Thurrock (to the right)

Basildon on your left

Pitsea

Thundersley

Hadleigh

Leigh-on-Sea

Chalkwell?
(By mistake, I dropped the google street dude in an old clock shop  that offered a 360 panaromic walk around.)

(I tried to find the kitchen - cup of tea hunt - but ended back on the street mesmerised by the ghost cars. AHEM, back to the song...)

Chalkwell

Prittlewell

Shoeburyness

Phew!

Well, it's one way to synchronise a 2 hour journey to a 2 minute song.