Photo-Walk, 1 March 2014

Lunch

That's Pretty Cool

An Alley Full of Horses

"It's number thirteen, but the three is in italics." 

Spooky

Candid Pose 

Mask

Yawn

Trellick Tower

A Cafe Full of Moroccan Men 

Sunset Somewhere in London

Dude Was Snoring

Photos

A quick note about this post: I wrote it over a month ago, upon returning to London from a weekend in Massachusetts. I wasn't pleased with it when I wrote it, so I left it here and forgot about it. I have since made some changes and am more comfortable putting it up. - Dan

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I went home unexpectedly this weekend because my grandfather died. My first night back in the States was spent sifting through projector slides of 20 years' worth of photos he took of our family and scanning them into digital format to be printed and hung at his wake as well as to be saved permanently.

I got back today, napped, and went to my first class of the semester, Modernity through the Lens: The Avant-Garde, Utopia, Technology, and Mass Culture. The below image was discussed as an example of the transformative effect that photography had on the way people processed their reality through images.

Before these photos existed, horses were only seen in real life or in paintings. The painted ones, even when depicted mid-gallop, were shown with one foot on the ground at all times. As you can see above, this is often the case. Argument arose over whether a horse in gallop ever left the ground completely; it was ended by the production of the above frames. These photos exposed a new facet of reality the viewer had previously been unable to see.

I had thought about my grandfather's death before this week. He was old, and had been slowing down more and more each year. I knew him as Charley the octagenarian who couldn't work his camera, and who tried and failed to hide his habit of feeding the dog under the table. Until this weekend, I hadn't realized I'd sought little account of what he was like before 1990. The slides showed Charley the newlywed, Charley the salesman, Charley the young father, obviously all Charleys I'd never met. I only got to hold onto one of the photos I found this weekend, one I'd previously have said was of the former Charley. I'm glad to have seen all those slides this weekend, because now I get to see all the other Charleys when I look at that one as it hangs in my room here in London.

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On a lighter note:

I’ve always enjoyed telling people about Grandpa Charley, because it gives me the chance to pass along my favorite of his stories, the one in which he, as a student at Boston University, traded racist jokes with none other than fellow Terrier Martin Luther King Jr. Apparently whenever they saw each other Charley would bust out his top black jokes and the Reverend would respond with his best material on the Irish. Now, as much renown as he gets for his skills as a revisionist historian, Grandpa’s clairvoyance is often overlooked: my personal favorite part of the story as he tells it is that following one of their repartees Grandpa said, “Listen Martin, I like you, but if you’re not careful you’re gonna get yourself shot!” As careful as Martin was, he did get shot, leaving no recourse for those of us who would love to get a second opinion on the veracity of this story. I consider myself one of those people, but I think the story still shows Grandpa very truly, whether or not the details stand up. He was an unfailingly friendly man who could make anybody laugh, and often wanted to do little more. That’s how I’ll remember him.

Here's a photo I took of him last summer.

Victor

I met Victor because I almost tripped on a raised manhole cover on the sidewalk at 4:45 am. He's lived in London 10 years after having grown up in Brazil with his parents, who are from Japan. He is the latest in a long line of people I meet whose picture I realize I should have taken as I walk away from them.

He was walking home from clubbing. He has tomorrow off, which is to say he has today off, which is how he let himself out on a Sunday night. He'd been gaining on me for a few blocks. I was walking home from getting a bagel. It had been 3am when I realized I had no appetite for sleep, so I decided to go out for a walk and a bite.

The Brick Lane Beigel Bake is open 24 hours and is something of a London rite of passage, or so said Victor. I got Hot Salt Beef, which came with a mustard that burned the back of my nostrils after every bite. The instant coffee complemented it so well that I'm reluctant to drink the good stuff I have here in my kitchen.

I got the sneaking suspicion he might have been thinking about trying to pick me up; there was a more awkward goodbye when we parted ways than I would have expected from someone I met on the street. Probably just the caffeine and sleeplessness thinking for me. Regardless, I was glad to have someone to talk to for a few minutes.

I walked away listening to "Some Weird Sin". My free version of the Spotify app won't let me replay songs, but if it did I'd have started over every ten seconds until I got home.

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Sorry, anyone reading this, for the delay on blog posts. No class this week -  more coming.

Connors Family in London

My whole family came here to visit for Christmas, which was a nice dose of home. Here are some of photos of them from the week:

Dave, hiding

Mom, after midnight mass at St. Paul's

Dad, listening

Mom, laughing

Caroline, being a morning person

Dad, laughing

Mom and Dad, at British Museum 

Dave, enjoying the Tate Modern 

Caroline, outside the Saatchi Gallery

Scotland Photos

Sunrise in Glasgow

Biker Group, Glasgow

The Tall Ship, Glasgow

[I forgot to find out the name or author of this work of art], Glasgow

Sunset in Glasgow

Sunset in Glasgow II

Statue and Cliffs, Edinburgh

Arthur's Peak and the Ocean

Edinburgh Castle, Edinburgh

Sunset in Edinburgh

Sunset in Edinburgh II

Some Guy

“Wait, you don’t work with Nelson? You’re just some guy?”

I could barely believe it either. I’d been in Glasgow less than twelve hours and had already found my way into a party in someone’s apartment. Most of the party was made up of a group of friends, with an assortment of significant others and coworkers. This last designation constituted the pretense of my entrance to the party.

I’d met Nelson on the street. I’d been walking to a bar the Guardian had said was cheap and cool when the group of drunks ahead of me paused to take a picture. Nelson was the photographer and used his artistic license to demand that I join the photo, which of course I did. I like imagining them looking through the night’s photos and seeing me but not knowing who I am.

I hadn’t expected to be engaged in conversation following the photo, or to be invited to a party with these people as a result. Nelson made me promise to tell the other guests I was a new coworker of his, the old ones being the group with whom I’d just been photographed. We rehearsed my role while shepherding the rest of our office (they’d been drinking since 3 pm; it was nearly 10) to the apartment where the party was to be held.

We were greeted by a line of huggers – most of the people at the party had known each other since college and were good friends. (The fact that I would even be able to start a sentence with ‘we’ on the first of five nights traveling alone in Scotland was a luxury I’d not anticipated.) When I reached each new person in the line there was a pause, as I was of course a new face. I mostly stuck to handshakes so as not to be strange but got a few hugs anyway.

The ruse lasted about an hour and a half. In their friendly inquisitions, Nelson’s friends forced me to make up a background for myself. Apparently I was in Glasgow as a social worker as my first clinical experience for credit in my graduate program back in the US. My school had set up an exchange program because there was greater need in Glasgow than locally, and I was enjoying it so far, having only lived here for a few weeks. My flat was on the east side, and no I hadn’t seen any crime there yet, but I’d be sure to keep my wits about me. I hadn’t been in the office long enough to witness any tension between the psychologists and the social workers (apparently this was a complaint of Nelson’s) and would attempt to stay clear of it should I encounter any.

In an eventual lull in conversation between Nelson and myself and one of his closest friends, he leaned in close and gave me a conspiratorial look.

“Todd, you know Dan here, he told you he’s a social worker?”

“Yeah, told me all about it. Says he likes it so far.”

“See, funny thing is, he’s not. I met him on my way here.”

I was enough of a fixture at that point that they let me stick around, having proven myself friendly and unthreatening (are there people who agree to come to parties on such terms who aren’t?). It was a “bad holiday jumper” party, and having not dressed for it I was without one until one of the hostesses leant me an extra one. I was introduced to of the guys who’d been in the other room, and I asked if he’d been told anything about me, to which he responded, “Oh yeah, I heard. You’re the talk of the party.”

It was 3am by the time I left. In their hospitality they’d ensured that I was drunk, and as such I was inspired to wander back to the hostel, which was about a 45-minute walk. I went to the bathroom to consider my exit, and through a combination of not wanting to make a scene or an imposition (God forbid, right?) and hoping to preserve an air of mystery about my presence that night decided to slip out without saying goodbye or thank you. 

Ambivalism

I've been assigned several manifestos to read this week for my Architectural History & Theory:

- "The Manifesto of Futurist Architecture", Antonio Sant'Elia (1914)
- "Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture", Robert Venturi (1965)
- "Junkspace", Rem Koolhaas (2002, republished in the aforementioned Content)

Upon reading and analyzing these the notion of writing a manifesto seems rather quaint, despite the date that the last one was published. Even this is something of an anti-manifesto, a diatribe against the "fallout" from Modernism that never goes so far as to prescribe an alternative. Indeed, both Koolhaas and Venturi are directly responding to the unrealized utopia promised by the era immediately following Sant'Elia's writing.

What I've been observing in this class (and in another on 20th century art) is that this period, roughly 1920-1945, was the last gasp of Movements, and that the full sum of creative work that followed it falls under the vague and enormous umbrella of postmodernism. Broad though that statement is, I think I'm standing on fairly firm ground in making it.

Which leaves us ... where? Here, I guess. Which is everywhere, apparently.

A reading from the art-based class (specifically about painting, but it seems relevant) names the appropriation and combination of various styles Pluralism, and while the author seems to regard this approach as ahistorical and uncritical and its practitioners as dilettantes, to me it seems rather appropriate.

Media today functions like a limitless museum- I'm equally in reach of information about Warhol as I am about Michelangelo. Does the opportunity of Pluralism negate critical engagement? Or is it incumbent upon critics to navigate the field of references laid out by a mixing of styles? Or should I leave my apartment more?