I am not Spartacus
Spent a fruitless ten minutes yesterday trying to take a picture of a swan, which was quite unmoved by my presence:
It reminded me of a welder I had seen earlier:
(Note the ubiquitous Haribo iconography)
Anyway, at last I got my shot, nature watchers!
Exciting news from Stockholm: no, I haven’t been given the key to the city to honour my contribution to Scandinophilia – Elinor Ostrom has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics!
Sadly I have no time at the moment to comment on this further. But it’s unCommonsly good news!
For now, I just have time to upload my latest photographic Meisterwerks, fresh from the dark room. I have been walking through the park in the mornings in the absence of Brutus, my bike, which carelessly let itself get stolen a few weeks back despite looking particularly intimidating and hulk-like. Anyway, every cloud has a silver lining, cause I’ve been able to commune with nature and take some more fuzzy and underexposed shots (my camera appears to be permanently set to Blur) on the way to work:
Sky!
Trees!
Numchuk! Sorry, tuk-tuk!
Now get ready for an action shot:
I don’t really understand the concept of wild pigs. They’re like feral children who get all shaggy haired and go without washing. They probably aren’t even able to say “Oink” because they were too busy truffling to be taught the building blocks of grammar. I bet if you took one home to the farm and washed it in the trough you’d find that it’s pink underneath, a bit like how polar bears have got black skin. Anyway, I just don’t think pigs belong in forests. It’s like finding a bactrian camel in Dorothy Perkins. Only a camel hasn’t got foot-long tusks that can MAUL YOU TO DEATH.
My first night back from Bangkok, I find myself in a German village hall listening to three musicians from County Clare:
Weee!
The man playing the pipes (one Blackie O’Connell) was the best. You’ll have noticed that he is playing the uillean pipes, of course. My friend Brigitte said he looked “like a pirate” and couldn’t understand a word he said. Fair enough; he was from Doolin. The accordion player was also Quite Good, although I must admit that I heard echoes of the Bavarian Bierhall in his music. As far as I could gather, every song he played was an old song written by the second best accordion player that’s ever lived in County Clare about the best accordion player that’s ever lived in County Clare.
They did one jig/reel/thing together that they learned from an old man in a pub in a remote village near Galway (yes I know that’s not in County Clare). Mr Accordion said you could tell the music was old because it had a lonely sound to it, on account of the village being so isolated. I quite like the idea that you can hear what a place was like from the music written there.
Anyway, very nice it was too, like. The moment they stopped playing triggered some kind of Pavlovian response for everyone to go for a cigarette outside. Even though it was raining. And they could have smoked inside. Some of them didn’t even have cigarettes, they just stood there uselessly twitching their fingers. I suppose they wanted to recreate that West Country Ireland smoking ban spirit. Ah, pubs. I went in one, once.
In other news, I saw a documentary the other day about three young storm chasers in Tornado Alley. The driver had the cool job of, well, driving the car, straight into the path of torrential rain, lightning and zero visibility. The guy sitting next to him hacked into radar and GPS data on a laptop while geekily ejaculating things like, “There’s a giant tornado forming right on top of us! Yeah! Wooh! That’s what I’m talking about!”
And then they would suddenly stop the car and make the stooge sitting in the back seat get out in the middle of the storm and catch hail stones the size of tennis balls. It made me laugh because he clearly nearly died every time he did it, but they had only just got around to sorting him out with elbow pads or some other form of insufficient protection. They said they were paid to collect hail stones “by an airline company”, but I’m fairly sure they were just getting back at this chump for scoring higher than them in a meteorology exam in grad school. Hmm – macho geeks. I think they are possibly the most dangerous men in the world.
Well, the good news is that I’ve found either a wormhole to a parallel universe, or God:
If you are not experienced in the world of metaphysical enquiry, let me give you a visual prompt:
This, of course, is marvellous news. I am keen to press ahead and publish, but in the spirit of science I have not yet ruled out a third possibility: that I have discovered a direct logistics channel for end-consumer delivery of Skittles:
Given that Skittles do not appear to be available to buy in shops in Bangkok (whose skyline is shown at the bottom of the image), however, I rate the likelihood of this option at 10 to the power 7,650,350 against.
After my exciting Misty Ferry shot, I bring you the latest release from my occasional series of Boats You Can Get To Work By:
Whoosh! This is a water taxi quite literally ferrying people to work. I am in Bangkok, where, judging by the traffic jams, a not inconsiderable number of people need to get to work on a near daily basis. Unless they are all going to the park to hunt monitor lizards:
(This may well be my Best Ever wildlife photograph.)
In the few spare moments when I’m not being chased by (a) reptiles or (b) taxis, I have taken some time to appreciate roofs. Here is a red one:
In this context, here are some more roofs, contextualised in an urban context:
Of course, my real work here is to edit important documents join as many Thai municipal libraries as possible. I suspect that, administratively speaking, it may actually be easier for a Bonn citizen to join a library in Bangkok than in Bonn. Perhaps I am just feeling bitter after my recent contretemps with der Bonner Stadtbibliothek, in which I was required to transfer monies to the city hall treasury office for a questionable “late book return” offence. But that’s a story for another day.
Bsketti is back! But I’ve forgotten how to blog. In fact I can barely type. Luckily, with my camera all I need to do is press the button and it gives me nice pictures.
First, this is where I live:
(To clarify, I don’t actually live on the hill like Moses. I live nearby! Not sure if Moses lived on a hill either, or if he just visited. Can’t have been easy hiking in those sandals in any case. Don’t see mountain goats wearing sandals, do you? I think that tells us something. Oh my God (sorry to blaspheme), I’ve just thought: both Moses and mountain goats have beards. What are the chances of that? Beards are the best.)
Anyway, here’s an action shot:
And this is how I get to work!
And this is the slightly sicky feeling I get when I consider leaving such a nice place and moving somewhere inferior:
Eeennnnngggggggggggggggggggmeeuuuuuurgggggghhh
It’s a cruel life, being all restless and stuff.
It is autumn, which means certain things will happen. Leaves will fall. Evenings will Draw In. Parents will lovingly allow their small children to dress up as malevolent spirits of dead people. And women’s fashion magazines across the world will run preppy fashion spreads inspired by the film Love Story.
If you have not seen Love Story and have no idea what I’m talking about, I can only imagine that you have never read a women’s magazine between the months of August and March. As a matter of fact, I’ve never seen Love Story either. But I don’t need to – I’ve read so many derivative fashion stories that I feel like I’ve watched it seventeen times.
The point is this: there are sub-plots to the film about young love, class divide and tragic early death, but the main message is that Ali Macgraw wears unfortunate 1970s polo necks and woolly hats. A lot. And, at some point between meeting Ryan O’Neal on campus and, well, dying, she evidently finds time to run crunching through autumn leaves in some of the finest municipal parkery ever captured on the silver screen. Ryan gamely matches her step for step with striped college scarves and the like, and the result is a blueprint for Preppy Style which is aired by fashion editors every year like some dusty old school blazer brought out from the wardrobe every September:
According to Filmsite.org, one of the film’s most touching scenes is “the montage of the couple tossing snowballs at each other.” Jesus.
It’s frightening how the magazines never deviate. I have, in fact, seen one bit from Love Story, in which Ryan O’Neal was sporting some minky ice-hockey gear and trying to catch Ali’s eye with some daring puck-related moves. I’m not sure what she saw in him, actually, but then, she wasn’t well. Anyway, there are never any “How to dress like a porky male ice-hockey player” spreads in the magazines. It’s always, “How to look waifish in a punt with some young Etonian”. And who needs help with that?
I’m betting that none of the fashion editors have actually seen Love Story, and have all been copying the same feature published in Paris Vogue in 1981.
The annoying thing is that readers in the northern hemisphere really don’t need to be told to wear flared jeans, brown boots, warm coats and minging 1969-apres-ski-in-Gstaad knitwear when it’s October. It’s as natural as farting in the bath. What we do need help with is, for example, how to wear low-crotched trousers without looking like MC Hammer, how to wear the Folk-Gypsy-Luxe look without getting incarcerated by Italian police, and how to run away from rapists in Christian Louboutin shoes. By contrast, the preppy style is impossible to get wrong.
How extraordinary, then, to find in October’s issue of Germany’s Amica (“Das Fashion-Magazine”) that they have fluffed up the obligatory Love Story feature! How is that possible, you ask? Well, they score points for cable knits and some argyle sock action, but then they go completely off piste by putting the model in Russian fur hats and, even worse, sixties mini-dresses. Nein, nein, nein! Das ist nicht Preppy! Haven’t they READ the source material?
I’m afraid this is the nail in the coffin in my relationship with German women’s magazines. Try as they might, they never get it quite right. There’s always loads of horrid real fur, the shoes are grim, and the photography doesn’t show the clothes off well at all. In Amica, a model is pictured lounging on a furry white carpet in wrinkled beige tights and a rabbit-skin jerkin while caressing a lobster. That, I’m afraid, is beyond the pink. Adios, Amica!
When a newsreader is reaching the ‘And Finally’ part of his slot and begins a new story with “Levi Stubbs, the lead singer with the sixties soul group The Four Tops, …”, you somehow know the story is not going to end well for Mr Stubbs.
The same goes for “Robert Lantz, one of the most influential Hollywood agents of the 1950s…”, or “Isaac Hayes, the American soul singer who won an Oscar for scoring the 1970s film Shaft…”. The BBC World Service is not going to mention blaxpoitation movies unless there is a pretty deadly reason.
No, I’m afraid there is only one way these bulletins are going to end, and it is not going to be with the news that said celebrity has launched a new cruisewear fashion line.
It would be nice if, just for once, instead of finishing the line with “has died at the age of 72″, they could say, “Levi Stubbs, the lead singer with the sixties soul group The Four Tops, has released a new acid jazz album.”
Or, “Levi Stubbs, the lead singer with the soul sixties group The Four Tops, has converted to Islam.”
Or, “Levi Stubbs, the lead singer with the sixties soul group The Four Tops, has had a new Stannah StairLift installed in his Albuquerque mansion, where he lives as a virtual recluse with his three former band members and a butler from Azerbaijan.”
I look out of my window this morning and see a young man in my neighbours’ garden with a shotgun. He is inspecting the gun intently. It is shiny and conker brown. I hope he is not trying to work out which end the bullet comes out of. Then he takes up a killing stance, and stares down the barrel. Is he going to shoot one of the chickens that run about the garden? Or a dog. Please let him maim one of my neighbours’ intensely annoying dogs. Perhaps he is waiting for his family to emerge from the house, ready for church no doubt. They have cut him out of his inheritance, and he is going to blow them away.
No, he takes the gun away from his face and inspects it again. Fascinating. I note he has got a TopMan scarf tied in the city-boy way around his neck. This seems a bit incongruous with the general hunter-stroke-assassin vibe. Ah, here comes another male – his father? – and they drive away in what looks like a Toyota HardCore 4×4 Destructor. Perhaps they are going off to shoot things together. This is a huntin-shootin-fishin-killin kind of place.
“Lewis advises Mike and Roy on the planning and building regulations necessary for the house conversion. It’s going to be a few months before the work can start. Mike’s disappointed that a connecting door is impossible, for fire safety reasons, but Lewis talks them through the plans.”
There is a hole in my heart where this sort of passionate drama should be.
