Cultural Cartography

Not here

Or are there? Doesn't talking about culture and how we navigate it demand a conversation about the role of women, the role of ethics, and the fact that we are helping sell things. Possibly.. all I know is that I like the sign. (Thanks to Creative Review)

Memorials

I've always loved memorials as they always tell a really interesting story. Particularly now we are so bad at dealing with death, it's interesting to see the dignity that is summed up in a memorial like this:

It's at Baker Street Station, London, UK. The dignity might not be epitomised in the actual memorial itself- after all, a lion destroying a snake is hardly the most restrained of images, but in the location. It's just on a wall as you go down on to the platform. It's not in a church, not outside with a huge space around it. It's just there, with thousands of people walking past every day and not stopping to look. Underneath it, if I remember rightly there is also a rather strange memorial which is like a bullet, but the picture I took of it was so phallic that I deleted it.

Further and more academicky thinking on memorials here: Download cc-thoughtpiece1-diffperspv3.doc

Internet bookmark??

I wonder if anyone can help me. I'm looking for a tool which basically marks webpages I'm looking at but haven't got time to read properly and then bookmarks them, not only the whole site but that page. So that when I open up my browser again, they are there and just waiting to be read. Exactly like a bookmark works in a book. Most of us readers don't decide I'm going to read and then go and browse the shelves, deciding what am I going to read in today? So starting from scratch each time. Instead we go the book we have next to the bed and open it up where we left off. I know (before you tell me) that the web is not like a book, but if there is this tool out there, I'd be really interested to know. Thanks

PS. My Mum is brilliant, she just ignores this whole changing technology thing. She continues to write me letters as a way to communicate information and she has recently started a bookmark collection. Good on you, Mum

Fly-aways

An interesting post on an interesting site about ephemera, which is the perfect name for old paper too. Little Lord Fauntleroy.

It reminds me of when I worked in the Special Collections cataloguing department of JHU in Baltimore. It was my job to work in the Cage (and yes that is what they called  it) to go through the old uncatalogued books and try and work out where they would go in the catalogue. I always felt it was  hug privilege to open these books which no-one else had looked at for decades in some cases. I had to wear special white cotton gloves which were always completely dirty and dusty when I finished.

I also worked here: John Work Garrett Library where I really felt like I was an adventurer in paper. It's hard to describe the thrill of taking down a book and a leaf or something fell out. In one case it was a piece of velvet ribbon, which was just utterly charming.

Winter wedding

On my travels in London, I saw this couple outside Westminster Abbey. Getting married is really interesting semiotically because try as you might (and I'm speaking personally) you can't escape the semiotic significance of the various elements such as a white dress and a veil. It's like so much of semiotics: because it's there and it has prescribed the meaning, you have to either go with it or realise that in not going with it, you are making a cultural comment. Even if it's winter and it's freezing.

Men and their women/ Women and their men

I'm not quite sure where I'm going with this thought, but it really struck me recently when a gay colleague showed me photos of his current squeeze. I realised that my other male colleagues had never shown me pictures of their female partners and I started wondering why. I realised as well that I had probably never shown my male colleagues who are straight pictures of my other half. Why not...?

I first started thinking about why we shows photos at all. And it's all about pride. I'm convinced that my guy is gorgeous, very sexy and very masculine. And I want other people to appreciate that and give me recognition for that. And only the right kind of people can do that. Who are those people?

It's people who can can translate what they are seeing into the right kind of response and a response that not only is right, but also fulfills the purpose of why I'm showing the photos. It has to be the right recipient of the message or to talk in marketing speak, the right target group.   As a woman if I was shown photos of a woman,  I would not comment in the same way a heterosexual man would but more importantly I wouldn't be the right target group because historically I'm not on the same playing field.

It's all quite primeval and maybe I'm not saying it quite right,  but it's about whether the person you are showing the photos too could have been competing for the person you got.  And so are their comments valid because they know what they are talking about. 

Keyboqrd Nqvigqtion

A=Q M=; W=Z and some others

I qn in the lounge qt Chqrles De Gqulle qirport qnd hqving extre;e difficulties using this keyboqrd: this hqs nothing to do zith the s,qll zhiskey I drqnk lqst night to cql, ,yself dozn qfter groups: Insteqd it is thqt it is not q QUERTY keyboqrd qs I knoz the,: there qre certqin si,ilqrities but so,e 9qnd qs you cqn see the ,ost i,portqnt letters qre not zhere they "should" be: I donù^t knoz if this is nor,ql but it is very disturbing:

It shozs ,e hoz typing qnd the auip,ent for typing hqve beco,e qn essentiql in our dqily lives: Q ger,qn keyboqrd is qlso different: So zhen zill ze hqve q keyboqrd thqt recognises zhqt you zqnt to zrite qnd just gets on qnd does it:

Clever work

Travelling through Victoria one evening last week at rush hour, I saw this:

It's a real person, relaxing under a sun shade wearing holiday clothes. And the message was "BA's sale is now on." It's not very clever thinking, quite simple in fact: Remind people of what going on holiday is about. But it was highly effective because it really made you stop and think: Mmm yeah, I might check out their sales and see what they have.

Shop windows

I seem to remember that Marx’s theory on capitalism talked about shop windows and how that when the goods were placed in shop windows and displayed as objects independently of their use, they became fetishes for people to possess. I don’t think he thought this was a good thing. However some recent shop windows I saw not only seem to be doing an excellent job of this, but in fact they have perfected the art of fetishsising the shop window itself.

This is of course all the more true around Christmas where people including myself will go and look at the window displays and enjoy them as that and not as an attempt to show you goods that you might want to buy. It's also interesting when you consider Benjamin's perspective on the metropolis as represented by Paris: that as well as being the seat of commercialism, it is also the most immediate expression of the modern experience.

The Nation has an interesting take on Benjamin's most interesting and problematic work from a while ago: Benjamin and the City of Light. I still think Benjamin is underated as a visionary and overrated as theoretician but that's another long debate.

PS. If you look closely in the photo with the tiger, you can see a ghostly image of me enjoying the most immediate expression of the modern experience. I'm the one with the hat

The anarchy of fireworks

Happy New Year everyone. I'm gearing  myself up for a couple of big posts, some of which I've been thinking about for quite a long while. I feel if I write that here, I'll have to put them up, as otherwise I'll be a blog tease - if there is such a thing.

But first things first: Fireworks. I was in Berlin for New Year (called Silvester as it is the name day of a pope from the fourth century AD). It's a great city and has lots of anarchic tendencies, which I really appreciate. This really came to the fore at midnight on Jan 31st, where all over Germany everyone goes out on the streets and lets off fireworks. They don't go to organised events where you are all safely held behind barriers (like the Brits on Nov 5th), no, they turn up with huge sports bags filled with the scariest looking rockets and boxes with names like Teufelbox "devil's box" and just set up at the corner of the road and proceed to let them all off, one by one. As it is dark and cold, most people are quite well wrapped up. As it is New Year's Eve, most people are somewhat inebriated. And so the whole thing has a very anarchic feel to it: You'll see what I mean hopefully when you see the pictures.

And then there's the fireworks. Semiotically they clearly symbolise the fight against the darkness of winter and the need for humanity to hold back the dark and bleak feelings of the season. They are signs of man's attempt to demonstrate his control over the sky at night. They explode in a variety of colours and are uncontrollable in the way they light up the sky and which way they fly. And they are to me, undescribably beautiful, precisely because of the anarchic sparkling shapes they write across the sky.

So now the pictures. I hope you'll agree with me that this feels quite scary when you see it as an image.