Worcestershire Beacon
Observing the Three Counties
Lunch fortifies
To the Obelisk
One last hill
Chase End.
Friday, April 30, 2004
Malvern Hills Photos
Great Malvern to End Hill
I know to you this doesn't look a lot, to me this is the only thing I got!
I've got all these papers to mark and I'm wondering if there's chocolate biscuits in the house and the doorbell rings oh hoo! it's a nice little package from Amazon. Oh I ordered a Yello compilation CD because my vinyl is completely stuffed and here it is put it on put it on!
Yello are one those rare artists who manage to be blisteringly funny and profoundly musical at the same time. Pinball cha-cha is so brilliant -- I mean who ever heard of a carnival drumming sequence fashioned entirely from cheesy Seventies pinball machine samples (except not samples : lovingly recreated bleeps and squawks). And sooo groovy! That's why like them on loud when marking exams. This post's title is from the last line of that track: seems appropriate to blogdom somehow.
Yello are one those rare artists who manage to be blisteringly funny and profoundly musical at the same time. Pinball cha-cha is so brilliant -- I mean who ever heard of a carnival drumming sequence fashioned entirely from cheesy Seventies pinball machine samples (except not samples : lovingly recreated bleeps and squawks). And sooo groovy! That's why like them on loud when marking exams. This post's title is from the last line of that track: seems appropriate to blogdom somehow.
Monday, April 26, 2004
turning a different colour
Being basically non-tannable, my watch-hand now goes pink-white-pink following a marvellous Saturday tramping along the length of the Malvern Hills (random link). The weather was uncharacteristically not pissing down, the hills spectacular and the exercise bracing.
I was with three blokes I hadn't seen for a long while. You may know the sort of thing. Not so much Last of the Summer Wine as the Middle Bit of the Summer Beer. Oh yes, plenty of beer, curry and rude male bandinage. (Forget "Men are from mars", the more essential definition is, at least if we are not required to defend anything, Women are from Venus, Men are Fifteen. Still, what do you expect?) On grounds of by-virtue-of-residence Welshness I refused point blank to wear the "team" shirt, so I must have looked like their manager.
Photos imminent - the usual things: screwy trees, odd constructions, holes in stuff. Oh, and hills.
I was with three blokes I hadn't seen for a long while. You may know the sort of thing. Not so much Last of the Summer Wine as the Middle Bit of the Summer Beer. Oh yes, plenty of beer, curry and rude male bandinage. (Forget "Men are from mars", the more essential definition is, at least if we are not required to defend anything, Women are from Venus, Men are Fifteen. Still, what do you expect?) On grounds of by-virtue-of-residence Welshness I refused point blank to wear the "team" shirt, so I must have looked like their manager.
Photos imminent - the usual things: screwy trees, odd constructions, holes in stuff. Oh, and hills.
Sunday, April 18, 2004
regularity
caveat: some pictures are ~200 KB.
In Jill's blog, a concept-driven photo series was reported. I was Not Impressed, or did not like the results (can't honestly say now which occured first), although the general thrust of intersecting a usual view with a time-grid did have some merits -- the main outcome being a partial suppression of the "artist's" own opinion at each moment, in favour presumably of their sensibility over time. The GPS-based Degree Confluence Project is superficially similar, though I find that ludricous (yeah right, whose grid?).
There's some better examples reported in the subsequent commentage. But hang on, I must have liked the idea once: didn't I try a 12-hour series a couple of years ago. And am I not doing a pond, right now?
Here's "my" pond again, roughly a fortnight ago, reached on the day using a wonderful mode of transport. The obvious, if not to say hackneyed, idea behind this growing pond series is (algorithmically, but without being overly disciplined) to continue recording the same scene, observant of any changes: in the landscape; the picture-taker; the viewer; anything else. The real objective is of course to reveal non-obvious ideas.
Possible N-O.I. # 1: an algorhythm.
More on this later. Suffice to say that since I'm too busy/lazy/disorganised to always turn up at a particular time, the idea of a strict metronomic schedule is unavailable to me. I go there whenever I can -- the site is a healthy walk from one of my workplaces -- and grab a shot. One or two a week would be fine.
The real rhythm outdoors is different, anyway. Absolute, yet infinitely flexible: Spring is later [1,2] on this slightly exposed plateau, than elsewhere in the country, where daff's are long gone; Moscow is still waiting for spring, so I hear.
Possible N-O.I. # 2: the human gnomon.
Notice the light and the quality of the ground in this scene. It being mid-ish-day, the sun is higher and the sandy ground drier than of late. Compare to another, months earlier. Good ol' Jill's got one like it but she's way up north: yet another variable!
and she sticks her hips out more ;)
Possible Supplementary: could a worldwide group connect, through their photos, an arc (in space and time) of specific equivalent solar moments? Let's imagine us all waiting for rays at 45 degrees (casting shadows of the person's exact height on the ground). My 10 o'clock in London to your 7 am in Barcelona to another's Noon in Stockholm? Here's another human-gnomon from those degree-chasing boys (they will be boys, I trust).
In Jill's blog, a concept-driven photo series was reported. I was Not Impressed, or did not like the results (can't honestly say now which occured first), although the general thrust of intersecting a usual view with a time-grid did have some merits -- the main outcome being a partial suppression of the "artist's" own opinion at each moment, in favour presumably of their sensibility over time. The GPS-based Degree Confluence Project is superficially similar, though I find that ludricous (yeah right, whose grid?).
There's some better examples reported in the subsequent commentage. But hang on, I must have liked the idea once: didn't I try a 12-hour series a couple of years ago. And am I not doing a pond, right now?
Here's "my" pond again, roughly a fortnight ago, reached on the day using a wonderful mode of transport. The obvious, if not to say hackneyed, idea behind this growing pond series is (algorithmically, but without being overly disciplined) to continue recording the same scene, observant of any changes: in the landscape; the picture-taker; the viewer; anything else. The real objective is of course to reveal non-obvious ideas.
Possible N-O.I. # 1: an algorhythm.
More on this later. Suffice to say that since I'm too busy/lazy/disorganised to always turn up at a particular time, the idea of a strict metronomic schedule is unavailable to me. I go there whenever I can -- the site is a healthy walk from one of my workplaces -- and grab a shot. One or two a week would be fine.
The real rhythm outdoors is different, anyway. Absolute, yet infinitely flexible: Spring is later [1,2] on this slightly exposed plateau, than elsewhere in the country, where daff's are long gone; Moscow is still waiting for spring, so I hear.
Possible N-O.I. # 2: the human gnomon.
Notice the light and the quality of the ground in this scene. It being mid-ish-day, the sun is higher and the sandy ground drier than of late. Compare to another, months earlier. Good ol' Jill's got one like it but she's way up north: yet another variable!
Possible Supplementary: could a worldwide group connect, through their photos, an arc (in space and time) of specific equivalent solar moments? Let's imagine us all waiting for rays at 45 degrees (casting shadows of the person's exact height on the ground). My 10 o'clock in London to your 7 am in Barcelona to another's Noon in Stockholm? Here's another human-gnomon from those degree-chasing boys (they will be boys, I trust).
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