Cultural Cartography

Letting people know you exist

how do brands tell you they exist nowadays? By telling you they do. spotted this at Charles de Gaulle waiting in line. Now I know that Usbekistan Airways is a force to be reckoned with, as least as far as their ability to organise queues is concerned.

Pre-flight blues

I'm flying to NYC today. Flying business with BA so what is there to complain about? Nothing and everything. I am really starting to have pre-flight blues. I try and get myself excited about the trashy films I can watch but then I also start to worry about what all the other serious people will think when I start hiccupping with tears at "The Reef" or some other CGI film (my personal faves for films). I think I could have some nice champagne but I also know it's bad for you and dries out your skin. I worry about the environmental damage I'm doing and whether carbon offsetting really does make any difference (see the article in the Guardian Money this Saturday). But mostly I think about how terribly terribly tedious and pointless the whole thing is and how all these little treats only go someway to making up for the fact that I am wasting precious hours of my life in a metal tube in the air.

This is an example of the passport held by us busy business travellers: Every one of those stamps is half an hour at immigration!

 

The true use for Post-Its

Telling it like it is!!

Another shop window in Berlin

This was the window done by Vanity Fair in Berlin at KaDeWe (Kaufhof des Westen). Very topical, very American and quite charming I think.

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.

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.

 

Hanging on the telephone

Is it just me or is there still a more intimate feel to a call conducted on a landline. I know that when I'm travelling I never feel quite like I'm really connecting to my loved ones, because not only am I miles away and often in another timezone, but because there is no physical connection to them.

All the traditional words we use around telephony are to do with tangible connections: the line, connection, to get through to some one etc. And the iconography is even more powerful: you can't strangle someone with the reception from a mobile phone. The tense moment in whodunnits and thrillers where someone has to wait for a call next to the phone because the cord is not only the connection but also the limiting factor; it stops you taking the phone away with you.

I know that the mobile phone has given us lots of other things. But that sense of intimacy and immediacy and sometimes threat which comes from being physically connected by the phone cord is being lost.