Exfoliation

I remember a time when bank cashiers were called tellers (is that purely from my early visits to the US?).  Perhaps it was because at that time they would tell you whether they could let you have any money.  It's funny what your memory will do.  I'd got it fixed into my mind that I had a postcard showing Bank (the underground station), it's odd to have a postcard of a tube platform - was it for tourists to send abroad or an alternative reminder for Londoners?  Why wasn't it sent? Why send it? Why buy it? Why keep it? On digging it out and looking at it more closely it's not for Bank at all but a view of Seven Sisters.  Is that the Queen standing in the foreground?

Along with millions of others I've walked the Seven Sisters, thinking it would be a gentle 8-mile stroll (that's what I'd been told) clearly my research was lacking as it turned into something more like 18.  Starting at the edge of a village, at the corner of a field that I would never ever consider mowing because it reached up to the sky and it was a hot, hot day.  Traversing the field took an age.  Walking through one of Brandt's locations, Cuckmere Haven, was delightful though STILL relatively at the beginning of the walk.  I'm a walking weakling, give me the flat any day, boring but flat.  Or my flat.  Instead, my body inches away from the chalky grass up-hills like a downhill skier at Kitzbuhel, bruised face stretched into a smile to hide my horror at what I'd agreed to, being totally unfit.  The sight of the chalk bleeding into the sea made up for a lot, although vertigo had something to do with my needing to crawl so my legs wouldn't fly, of their own accord, over the edge.

Jem Southam makes work at Beachy Head, on the shore.  Setting up his 10x8 camera on the beach and creating beautiful visual documents of the cliff deterioration (does he go by boat, surely not that walk that exfoliates your face followed by a dance with death abseil downwards?).  I like to think I have a wall that cries out for one of Jem's enormous prints, that way I could look at the sea and look at the beach of Beachy Head without going outside, or walking that walk.  It's big enough this wall, even with the piano.  Art and music - well - art is music and vice-versa.  So maybe they'd go very well together.  But that perhaps is for sometime later.

Being 'up north' again means having the tv on to while away another long evening in a motel.  I noticed a very naughty ad-man has encouraged a bank to produce the oddest ad using animated figures that have an uncanny likeness to the Chapman brothers' early work I referred to in an earlier post.  If that's not the case then maybe they just came out of Giuseppe's workshop, either way it's bad news.  Do they realise?  The bankers I mean.  Someone should tell them.

Road work

Suffering from a form of OCD does make life somewhat difficult.  It means everything takes that much longer because I have to repeat some or all of the steps a number of times until I feel content about proceeding.

To my mind, aesthetics are very important.  They do matter.  Sloppiness, unless intended, is abhorrent and makes my skin crawl.  So, on seeing some new road markings today I felt a burning need to ask questions.  What is the point of removing the white lines identifying a long thin parking bay only to repaint them a little later slightly thinner?  Can only lines of a certain gauge denote a long thin bay?  Did the thicker ones imply something else?  Furthermore did those thicker lines interrupt our view of the architecture surrounding them?  Was the result as intended?  Is it more aesthetically pleasing or less?  Has the painter studied painting and is she/he making reference to one of Degas' barely erased legs?

While the planners have been busy putting their plans into effect: those of digging up the entire city centre where I work, to replace it with an idiosyncratic mixture of paving slabs and cobble stones (designed to keep fracture clinics busy) - the road department has been busy going off on a tangent to create a study in contrast.

It is interesting how one person's work might have an effect on how another's turns out.  By co-incidence my lecture this week was about why it's worth carrying your camera at all times and researching into art and ideas.  I began with Josephine Baker and ended on Andy Warhol (apparently A to B is back out in print).  With a deviation in between via Iain Sinclair and a strange route to Bill Brandt.