From Studland to Obama Land?

Last post before I fly. I wanted to post a picture of what I'll miss, but I don't have a heart pic with Vick, Sunny Herb & Rosie Dog in it. I'll only be away for a week, but I get homesick very easily. I'll miss the beach, too, so here's a picture of that, at Studland not Swanage, but you've had a few of Swanage lately. This was a couple of years ago, but I have about 20 that Sunny spotted with me at the end of the summer but I've yet to put them together.

I'm going to be in New York for the last 5 days of the presidential campaign. America decides! The rest of the world holds its collective breath and thinks 'Not McCain, you fools, not McCain!', though a large proportion of middle-aged men seem to have a thing for the crazy Creationist. It amazes me how most people who you hear about who believe in Creationism seem to have missed the good philosophies of the New Testament and sided with the nasty bits of the Old. I suppose if you can't understand the difference between myth, storytelling and reality, it's difficult to have empathy for people different to those around you.

Anyhoo, enjoy wherever you are. I'll be sporting an Obama badge and looking up at buildings a lot, and I'll type more when I return.

Marilyn Monroe, Love Hearts & Guerrilla Advertising

A week today and I jet off to New York. I'm only there briefly, but I plan to use my time to take as many photographs as my camera can manage, as well as seeing everything, doing everything, eating everything (vegan) and supporting my good friend Rachel in her bid to run the marathon in under four hours... I'm sure she'll manage as long as I run alongside, shouting supportive things as I munch on a vegan burger, waving an Obama flag and photographing all I can see.

I had a nightmare the other night in which I'd been there 4 days and hadn't found a single heart. I can assure you, dear reader, that will not happen! It must not happen! I will not allow it! And even if it does, I'll return with a thousand 'very New York' photographs to pick from, as I'm already planning a show of sorts. No idea what, but it'll include graffiti, skyscrapers, taxis and a hotdog seller, I'm sure.

The picture above felt a little New Yorky - it's from an alley in Bournemouth, my local metropolis, and makes me smile. I really enjoy finding witty graffiti, and I really love this type of sticker street art. It can look fantastic and it eventually rots away, so it's eco friendly too. The stencilled graffiti I find interesting, but I have some problems with it. This can be found in a few places around Bournemouth - check out the website it advertises if you like. It's an unusaul and economical way to promote yourself, but it is vandalism, just as any graffiti is. I'm happy to see graffiti in many places, but advertising.... not so sure. And isn't it inviting the local authorities to look you up and prosecute you for defacing a public space? If it isn't, you may start seeing http://www.love-landscape.co.uk spray painted around the place... though I don't think it would make me very popular.

Love at Low Tide

One of the bestest things about living by the seaside is, without a doubt, low tide. There is nothing finer than walking on the firm sand among the shallow puddles of sea water left behind by retreating, gentle waves, looking for familiar shapes among the wormcasts.

Seeing your treasured dog leaping along in the shallow water, exuding the purest joy, makes this even better. I am at once relaxed and a million miles from this infernal computer, and filled with happiness in seeing the joy in her. Wonderful.

There's been a geography field trip in town this week, probably from London, where low tide brings a bad smell and dusk is lit by orange sulphur. I hope they appreciated the differences, though I know I think of London and long for the scale of art & culture we lack here. In their passing along the beach the teenage geographers left behind them a trail of footsteps, dragged equipments and exotic names scratched in the sand. They also left a few hearts. I missed most, as I only saw them after dark, but Hannah and Andy are celebrated here, along with the last of the setting sun as it picked out the boats on the bay.

It's a Kaupthing...

"It would be fun to kill all capitalists". So says one of the elephants in this picture.It's probably an obscure reference to something, somewhere in Venetian pop culture, but I just thought it was funny - and I'm posting the picture now because it seems so appropriate. Capitalism appears to be killing itself.

Don't get me wrong - I do understand that, given time, the greedy extreme of capitalism will be back in full swing, with city types making a short term killing at the expense of all of us. And we'll let them; we'll let them because so many of us think that one day we could do that too, if we tried, and why stop the very greedy getting richer if one day we might like to do that too. In the US they call this the American Dream, and it's why the American poor tend to be more supportive of the right to be extremely wealthy than the middle classes are.

Wouldn't it be nice if we didn't let it return, though? Wouldn't it be nice if people had a better understanding of the possibilities of liberal socialism, and if we all worked for the benefit of not just ourselves, but for the benefit of the wider community? It won't happen because it isn't in the anglo-saxon nature - we have gradually moved towards a US style attitude of looking after ourselves first, and forgetting about anybody else around us. We complain about the 'Nanny State' and 'big government', but nobody seems to mind when Nanny fixes the dodgy heart you've gained because you didn't listen to advice on diet and smoking, or when big government bails out the greediest amongst us - the banks.

It's hard work being a lefty most of the time, but at the moment it's hard not to walk around holding a 'told you so' placard... in the meantime, I must transfer some cash to pay my credit card bill, then make sure there's still enough in the account to pay the mortgage, oh, and Vick's off to Tesco in a bit, so I need to write a list....

Escalating Laziness

Just a quick post - another from Barcelona. This was the end of somebody's tag - it seems a popular way to end a tag, actually, unless I keep seeing the same tag in various cities. One of the things that amused me in Barcelona was the way that the hill rising up to and beyond the Magic Fountain had escalators taking you as far as the art gallery. Very sensible, I'm sure, and very popular with my kids, but such an odd thing to see outside!

I Will Not Draw As I Am Told

I didn't get to see as many galleries in Barcelona as I might have done, but did see the fantastic Joan Miro permanent collection as well as a fascinating show by Olafur Eliasson. Strange, off-puttingly minimalist website he has there, but worth seeing his work.

We also stumbled across a fantastic wall of graffiti behind the covered market in the centre of the city - it covered a hundred yard stretch of derelict wall left where a building had been demolished. This lavishly illustrated wall kept me and the kids entertained for some time. Unfortunately a high metal fence kept us from the artworks, and with the lens I use I couldn't get in to shoot the heart as close as I would ordinarilly.

Happily, I don't think this matters too much, and gives me a more subtle view, a different take on the project I've been working on for so long. At this scale you may find it hard to see the heart (click on the image to enlarge it and it should help) but it is there in the very centre of the right-hand image. It actually puts the heart into its own context, and it could tell its own story without a need for the left-hand image. Again at this scale it's hard to read it, but a stencilled text repeated on the left side of the image says 'I Will Not Draw As I Am Told' and spaeaks volumes when seen in the context of a wall of graffiti.

I couldn't resist the pirate-style Jesus, either. Perhaps he wasn't hanging with the fishermen of Galilee at all!

A quick PS - I googled 'I will not draw as I am told' and see that it's a popliar phrase amongst the graffitiati - here's a fantastic example. Click on the image to enlarge it - the script the artist has used will make your eyes pop!

I Love Barcelona

I've just got back from a long weekend in Barcelona. Carbon guilty. And we flew with Ryanair, which makes me doubly guilty, as not only does Michael O'Leary treat the environmental issues associated with flying with contempt, he treats his customers and staff in a similar fashion. I hope never to fly with them again - it's worth the extra expense of travelling to a different airport and flying with a mid-cost airline just to have nothing to do with his miserable low-rent business.

But apart from that:

Dozens of hearts! Tons of graffiti! Hell for vegetarians!

Barcelona is a fantastic city, and one I hope to go back to soon - there is way too much to see! I photographed hearts outside Joan Miro's gallery, around the huge ghost-town of the Olympic buildings, on the subway, in the lift to our apartment, on several streets and in several parks, and even inside Gaudi's Sagrada Familia! Graffiti in a church! Crazy!

It is the first city I've been to where I was actually shocked by the amount of graffiti - they7 really do have a problem. The type of graffiti I photograph tends to be small and innocuous, though I do enjoy the artistically stunning 'illustrations' that can be found here and there. What I can't abide is tagging - fair enough, you can write your name, but why write it on the shutter of every shop in a street? If you want to prove you have a bigger cock than the other guy, get it out and show him - nobody else is interested! One of the largest tags on the motorway out of the city was in the shape of a coathanger. Maybe coathangers are cool in Spain - I don't know.


The people everywhere were fantastic - we'd read all sorts of warnings to be wary of taxi drivers, pickpockets, bag snatchers, muggers, but we found people went out of their way to be helpful. I want to learn the language now, too - possibly to help out with plans for a trip to Cuba... Food was a problem - we took a list of vegetarian restaurants in Barcelona, but they weren't often in the same place as we were, and even self catering is hard as food isn't labelled very well. Had we been there for longer we would have found it easier I think, but the Spanish have a lot of catching up to do when it comes to catering for people who care about what's on their plate. I think that's why people have opened specifically vegetarian places to go - to compensate for the lack of understanding of 'sin carne' elsewhere!

Enough about my holiday... I plan my trips now around places where I think a heart or twelve might be found. I fly to New York in a month... I alone will be responsible for an extra degree of global warming. My children will have every right to curse me. I'm going to look at carbon offsetting the whole lot (I know it's knocked, but it's better than doing nothing) though surely being vegan counts for most of it!

The picture above was taken in Joan Miro's park, which was suprisingly run down and rough, but due to be refurbished. I found the face first, and the light on it was delightful, then I looked for a heart. I was determined to find one as I was so pleased with the 'landscape'. This stunning little carving was on a bench right beside the stone ball, as it turned out. It was only later (and too late) that I realised that the camera was still set to 1600 ISO after photographing the Magic Fountains the night before, so these images are very noisy, close up. If it were grain, I'd be happy, but noise adds some ugly colourful speckles. I need to do a test print to see how it looks at full size... and then I'll pretend it was deliberate. Don't tell anyone!