UNLIKELY STORIES, MOSTLY

I merrily dashed the last dregs of from a magic pot o' cash across the Indian subcontinent. Because: sheep/lamb, etc. Other, less magic, pot arrived mercifully quickly. Writing of the tooth-extracting and non-tooth-extracting kind continues, of course. Details to follow.

But! In the realisation of several girlhood dreams I am a radio announcer, now. For a bit. It's all these flat vowels ever wanted. Listen to or-bits.com's 128 kbps objects here 'til Sunday. 

IT'S AN IDEA

Phew! Back just in time for the dawn of a new socialist Europe and a showboating moon.

LEARNING TO LIVE ON YOUR OWN

Should you ever find yourself on a month-long research trip-slash-wild goose chase in the Midwest in pursuit of a forty-years dead writer from whom your critical distance has lapsed to such an extent that you are convinced that, like Oedipa Maas, you are being subjected to an elaborate web of posthumous booby traps, wherein you remain in almost total isolation for four weeks, attempt to read 47 novels (mostly all at the same time), become addicted to the Food Network whilst eating mainly stale taco shells and wasabi peas and spend much of your time tramping up and down freeways since that’s what you like to do when you are in America, and you find that Glenn Branca plus Fox News does not rouse you sufficiently enough to take it all out on the gym’s elliptical machine, then I recommend silencing the rattling inside your head by listening to Serge Gainsbourg’s Histoire de Melody Nelson which, like alchemy, will soundtrack the up-lit marble atria, limestone and Frank Lloyd Wright-lite of your temporary home into a tense Soderbergh corporate thriller of your very own creation.

Then you’ll be like Catherine Zeta Jones or something rather than this hot, mildly-coddled woman who has her photocopies, her 27 new polyester thrift-store scores, her sunburn and far more esoteric paperbacks than will ever fit in her tiny broken suitcase, and would like to bugger off home and scoff a whole block of mature cheddar and enjoy some actual human company as soon as possible, please. Ta.

 I met you under the balloon, on the occasion of your return from Norway; you asked if it was mine; I said it was. The balloon, I said, is a spontaneous autobiographical disclosure, having to do with the unease I felt at your absence, and with sexual deprivation, but now that your visit to Bergen has been terminated, it is no longer necessary or appropriate. Removal of the balloon was easy; trailer trucks carried away the depleted fabric, which is now stored in West Virginia, awaiting some other time of unhappiness, some time, perhaps, when we are angry with one another.

THE ROCKY NEST IN PICTURES

I recently shot Hull band The Rocky Nest in a sandpit on Hull Marina:

APPROACH

• BE MORE AGGRESSIVE
• GET MORE INVOLVED (TALK TO PEOPLE)
• STAY WITH THE SUBJECT MATTER (BE PATIENT)
• TAKE SIMPLER PICTURES
• SEE IF EVERYTHING IN BACKGROUND RELATES TO SUBJECT MATTER
• VARY COMPOSITIONS AND ANGLES MORE
• BE MORE AWARE OF COMPOSITION
• DON'T TAKE BORING PICTURES
• GET IN CLOSER (USE 50mm LENS)
• WATCH CAMERA SHAKE (shoot 250sec or above)
• DON'T SHOOT TOO MUCH
• NOT ALL AT EYE LEVEL

- Tony Ray Jones

JOE / Schloss Schönbrunn

THE CONVERSATION

Incipient nark due to painful Burton on the stairs late last week quickly curtailed by this astonishing view from Szent-Istvan Bazilika.


Not quite Union Square, but definitely a Polanski view of the city - with iconography to match.

JENNIFER HODGSON IS PERHAPS THE MOST INTENSELY GROWTH-ORIENTATED INDIVIDUAL YOU WILL EVER MEET!

Though I bitch n' moan about the misuses of the internet rather a lot (blog monetarisation, the Raw Food movement, online personal development gurus - "you too can finally experience the kind of life that deep down you always knew you were meant to live" - and personal branding passim) one of its very best functions is, I think, as a sort of clubhouse for enthusiasts and connoisseurs of all shades to guild together and gently indulge their bent, however obscure.

8333696's collection of pictures of abandoned and disused buildings is a fine example. She's one of a hardy band of benign trespassers (I believe the term correct term is Urban Explorers) who tote their cameras to places they shouldn't be (derelict lidos, asylums, factories, power stations) and chronicle what they find.

I don't edit these, promise. It seems there's some kind of dayglow pigment in the yellow ochres, dusky roses and orange peels they slap on the exterior of buildings here.

BUDAPEST: ALSO AVAILABLE IN OTHER FLAVOURS

There is something definitive, I think, about the gusts of pastry glaze and fag smoke that emit, at pavement level, from underpasses and metro stations here. Budapest, however, does also come in other flavours.

Before this week, we had yet to really breach Buda further than atmospheric transport interchange, Moskva Ter, largely due to the gargantuan, though no less atmospheric, Mammut Mall, which draws us in, every time, from square's northern edge. (You might call us Mall Conneisseurs: we've visited three of the largest in the Budapest metropolitan area already, each time, as if on a whim, by accident, 'oh look where we are!').


On Monday, however, we scaled - no - scrambled - no - tramped up the Gellért Hill to the Citadella then over, via Deli Station (where in 2006 we missed the airport bus and endured a hair-raising and wrenchingly-expensive early morning taxi drive to Balaton Airport) and the Mom Park Mall (ouch, caught!) to the Roszadomb. In the Buda Hills, the city does a brackish, lemon yellow, stucco'd thing rather well. These suburbs are famously bourgeoise, positively chi chi, an enclave of residential confections strung over the hill that's named after the flowers that dervish poet Gúl Baba, entombed nearby, is credited with introducing to the city.



Yesterday I went tramping solo on Margitsziget. This long, straggly island on the Danube has an altogether different feel. In season, it's a pastoral pleasure palace, with baths, spas, lidos, tennis courts, bike tracks and incongruous contiki-style kiosks doling out canned drinks and (utterly gross) oversized pretzels to the sweaty. In winter, most of its attractions are closed and hemmed in by wire fences or functioning undercover, to protect tennis courts and outdoor pools from rain and autumn leaves.


What's left is astonishing in its own right; modernist leisureworld architecture outcropped against skeletal trees, with the Buda Hills rising beyond on one hand and the concrete towerblocks of the Újlipótváros that line the Danube on the other.

ALL KILLER, NO FILLER

...except not really. I am knee-deep in writing obligations just now, no rest for wicked, etc. However, I do have a couple o' observations and some point n' shooting for yer.

1. Confidential to the clothes horses: H&M here is, like, as good as it was in Britain 5 years ago.
(Backstory: Way back in, erm, 2001, "London of the North" Leeds was the shopping Mecca for Hull's rag tag youth. At that point, without simulacra'd High Street (read: be-roofed wind tunnel) St Stephens, we were a little lacking. Favourite favourite for me was always H&M, which Hull sadly lacked, and whose multicoloured eurofashions always seemed pretty exotic. And, importantly, cheapex)

2. Subway, I think, has the same yeasty-and-tomato odour the world over. Except you'd ask for the pleasingly-transliterative szendvics here, natch.

Anyway. Photos! Then, back to it.


More on my Flickr here. Budapest is a total embarassment of picturesque, and I have become quite the shutter-bore.

BONFIRE NIGHT IN BURNT ORANGE

Infilling / Something Good

We're winding down our last days in Norwich. With a week and a half to go, my Boo is holed up in the Graduate Resource Centre putting his PhD to bed whilst I potter around, feeling about as a "chill" as I ever have, making wrinkle-nose gross faces at our flat's mould infestation, tinkering with my new swank camera, taking day trips, mentally compiling Norwich's Greatest Hits, toying with a PhD proposal.

Countdown

Appleby Horse Fair, Dave Thomas

... and hello from my desk, a corner of our front room that's currently pretending to my office, and where I can be found - intermittently - ploughing through research assignments, attempting to summon a PhD proposal from the depths of my psyche and half-heartedly making peace with the city of Norwich (Fine City, I love you, but you're bringing me down) as my final days here rattle through at a pace that's something like fast-slow-fast-fast-fast-slow.

Appleby Horse Fair, Dave Thomas

I'm peering above the parapet to direct you to photographer Simon Robert's response to my look at his work-in-progress We English. That is, if you're interested in two Englishness pervs hashing out the finer points of the concept of nostalgia. And to urge you to look at the archive of Northeastern film and photography collective Amber who are pretty much too wonderful to write about (although I'll give it a go in the next few days, no doubt). Go look!

Package Tourist

On the day that the first Helmut-bashing story of the summer made its way into the tabloid press (cheers, the Sun), I took an impromptu awayday to Great Yarmouth.


There's more point n' shoot Great Yarmouth here. Results from my lubed-up manual SLR are forthcoming.

The English, Seen

I've been sneaking a peek at photographer Simon Roberts' work-in-progress We English. He and his family have hit the road in a campervan; he's documenting scenes from English life to produce a photographic journal of life in England in 2008. You can follow his progress on his blog here.

After a stint in Russia - which produced the startling monograph Motherland - Roberts is turning his lens homeward. In impulse and in method, his English journey reprises the Anglocentric turn of culture in the mid twentieth century moment, when the British Empire's sun finally set and ravaged by German bombers, English culture began the anxious work of reevaluating, reinterpretating and reconstructing in pursuit of a national identity it seemed to have mislaid.

What's interesting about Simon Roberts' work is that his English journey seems so anachronistic. Taking in Cromer Fair, Midhurst Carnival and lawn bowls at Weston-Super-Mare, Roberts' aesthetic is squarely rooted in the mid century moment. Roberts cites scenes from English life first seen in the work of Bill Brandt, Tony Ray-Jones and Martin Parr. And this is no criticism of Roberts' endeavour; what his shooting itinerary highlights is how these elements have become a visual grammar of Englishness. On the present, what these archaisms reveal is the pervasive nostalgic feedback loop at the heart of the English cultural imagination.

The same was true of the mid century period during which this photographic lexicon first emerged. As now, these depictions of English life were already old photographs of the present day. Ray-Jones's knowing archaism, his black and white pathos, was, in his words, the attempt 'to record the "English way of life" before it becomes more Americanised'. Again, there's this sense of shoring up a frail culture against its immiment demise.

Ray-Jones needn't have worried. In Roberts' (and others') representations of Englishness, we see that Americanisation is no match for good old English nostalgia, indeed, these archaisms are England - at least in our imagination.


































Beachy Head and Beauty Contest, Southport by Tony Ray-Jones