Bonjour, mon Readership. A little photographic tease to get you in the mood before I talk about the weekend TLC and I spent in the South of France. There’s a lot to show you.
Category: ramblin’
ramblin’
The Saturday Shot: Invasion
You can find them in most big cities, if you know where to look. Tucked away, above eye level, in corners and other points of the city that we render invisible through our blithe in attention. If we fail to notice them, are they even there?
Well, yes, they are. In London alone there are over 100 of the little blighters. I can think of three within 500 yards of where I’m sitting as I write this.
Actually, four, and this is the biggest one I’ve ever seen. They’re getting bolder, daring us to seek them out. It’s too late to watch the skies. Now it’s the buildings that we have to keep our eyes on.
Slowly but surely, we are being invaded.
Be Vewwy Quiet, We’re Hunting Banksys
A call to action hit my inbox last week, from that most damn’d elusive of characters, the pseudonymous documentarian DocoBanksy. “I need cutaways,” he declared. “I need fresh pics and footage of new graf from my namesake.” Like Sancho Panza to his Quixote, I could only respond affirmatively. I packed my go-bag with cameras and memory cards. On a fresh, bright Tuesday morning, DocoBanksy and I set out for an adventure.
Fall
Spent a great day yesterday with that damn’d elusive docoBanksy, shooting a few cutaways just to fill in the odd gap in what is now an essentially locked project. More on that in the next post. For now, here’s a shot of the most recent graf from the man hisself, on a shuttered building in a quiet side street in Mayfair.
I’d like to see the scrapers get this one off the wall…
Road Less Travelled
See, I get these ideas. They always seem so simple. Having lunch with docoDom at a riverside restaurant by the Design Museum on the South Bank of the Thames, I suddenly thought how nice it would be to keep going. At least as far as the Thames Barrier, which I had never seen up close. Dom, bless his heart, was up for it. It would be easy, I told him. Look, it’s only five miles. It says so here on Google Maps.
Famous bloody last words.
The Friday Foto: Staircase
I love a trip to Tate Modern. It’s always good to visit old friends like the brooding Room of Rothkos and my favourite Jackson Pollack. The curators are also good at refreshing the displays, so that if you visit a few times a year, you’re always certain to come across something new.
Staircase-III stopped us in our tracks. Do Ho Suh’s huge sculpture is a representation of the stairwell to his Manhattan apartment, hanging about ten feet off the floor. There are clear nods to Rachel Whiteread in the casting of an architectural feature, but the use of sheer cherry-red nylon gives the piece all kinds of different connotations. I pass a few staircases in Soho every working day that glow with that kind of colour.
But somehow there’s no feeling of threat or sleaze. Unlike most dark-lit stairwells, you can see exactly where this one leads. Dom called it a Stairway To Heaven, and you can see what he means. Don’t forget, in China the colour red signifies good fortune.
Staircase-III has a room all to itself and it was full of people, gazing up with smiles on their faces. I love this piece. It’s warm, optimistic and dare I say it–sexy?
45
Bill Drummond, that shaman, that Justified Ancient, postulated that there are four ages of man, and that by happy coincidence they can be compared to the rotational speed of different types of vinyl record. That is, 17, 33, 45 and 78. Youth, adulthood, wisdom, dotage. He’s writing his autobiography as separate volumes based on that idea. The world turns much more quickly than that, of course (although it’s disturbing to realise that the speed of the earth’s rotation varies depending on where you are on the globe. At the equator, it’s something around a thousand miles an hour. Up here in drear old Blighty, things go more slowly). The idea of mapping progress onto a circular path amuses me no end. We are cyclical in nature and habit, making the same mistakes, replaying the same songs over and over, dropping the needle back at the start after the music fades.
The City Awakens
An advantage of an early start to the work day is the chance to see London before it properly wakes up. It’s a bit bleary-eyed, needs a shave and a haircut and another coffee wouldn’t go amiss.
No. Wait, that’s me. But the principle holds, and just after sunup is a good time to change focus and look up rather than at the pavement. Things catch your eye.
The reflection of a street in a car hood, and the way the attention is drawn down a bleak alleyway to a white tower in the distance. Two office blocks, squat and menacing, guarding the way into Oxford Street. Or a jet trail, catching the light in just the right way, lancing into a department store by Leicester Square, sending out a plume of statues like surrealist flowers.
Looking at these three together, I suddenly realise how much sky there is in them. As I work in a dark room all day, I’m sure there’s a reason for that.
Holy Heck: The Fall Of Frank Miller
It’s never good to watch your heroes fail. When you base your art and your writing style on the work of a man that you worship and respect, only to find that he is only human, and the sort of person you’d go out of your way to avoid at a party, then the hit is even harder. Somehow, his mistakes rebound on you. All of a sudden, people pop out of the woodwork, saying how they’d known that the guy was a jerk for years, how his work was a clear indicator of his inner malaise. All of a sudden, you look like a fanboy and an idiot.
That’s what I’m going through at the moment, Readership. Because my all-time comic hero Frank Miller has apparently just outed himself as a close-minded, ill-informed rightwing jagoff.
The Night Market
Yesterday saw Oxford light up, as their annual Night Light festival ushered in the Christmas season. The town was heaving as the colleges and museums opened their doors to the curious, and markets filled the labyrinthine corridors around Oxford Castle and filled St Giles’ wide boulevard.
It was great fun to wander about and catch unexpected moments and photo opportunities. Mummers wandered through the throng. A drum troupe set up on the Monument and shook the air. Belly dancers gyrated in the halls of the Ashmolean, the sinuous music a fitting soundtrack to the new Egyptian galleries. TLC and I sat in the great hall at the Bodleian Library, and felt 2 IQ points smarter just by osmosis from all the learning that had soaked into the narrow benches we sat upon.
I had been there earlier in the day, looking at an exhibition of some of the Library’s greatest treasures. I stood wonderingly in front of an original page of Mary Shelley’s manuscript for Frankenstein, complete with corrections and additions from Percy Bysshe. An edition of the Koran from the 15th century glowed in gold-leafed perfection, and I could see where Craig Thompson’s obsession with Arabic calligraphy came from. An illuminated Gutenberg Bible, one of less than 20 left in the world, came close to giving me the chills. The fact that these documents still exist is amazing enough. That they are such beautiful artifacts in their own right is nothing short of a miracle.
At its best, Oxford is a magical place, filled with history and wonder, with new delights down every narrow alleyway. Yesterday it shone, lit up like a beacon of civilisation and knowledge in the darkness.
EXCUSES AND HALF TRUTHS 
