August 2013 Review

August was another of those months that I thought sucked, and on careful inspection it turns out it did. I don't know anyone who likes August: it's a long month, not much happens, and it's usually humid and hot with no sunshine. So this one was different: at least the sun shone. August is review-the-finances-month, and it took a while to find anyone paying even 2% for savings. My Cash ISA stayed put, and it turns out that The Bank actually offers a decent one-year bond rate for the money I can't get into a Cash ISA, so there I am. I don't need to rant about savings rates - you know what I'm talking about.

Sis and I had supper at 1701, the upmarket super-kosher restaurant attached to the oldest synagogue in the City, hiding off Bevis Marks behind an ornate gate with a bouncer in front of it. The food was worth the visit, and we both took some photographs of City towers in a magic evening light.

Tired of being tired and having no fun in the gym - being hot and sweaty before you've even lifted will do that - I changed my gym routine around without really thinking about it. I'm now doing fewer exercises but with higher weights. At the start of the month I raised eyebrows by doing 3x10 box-jumps on a heap that came about six inches above my knee. The jump was okay, but on trying to do abs later, I found that I'd hit my lower abs really hard with the fast knee-raising needed to get the height. So having proved the point, I stopped doing that and graduated to 100lb+ deadlifts with the big wheels, which I'd been working up to slowly with some regular bar weights. I hit a lifetime best 2x3x80 kgs with a spot one Saturday, and started again on the pull-ups after my shoulder recovered. This time I'm going to focus on reps to exhaustion and decrease the support only when I can knock out 3x10 and still breath afterwards. I I started swimming on the non-training days, for about fifteen minutes, mostly as an excuse to shower and change before going home so I feel better. And as a way of trying to get tired enough to sleep.

On the night of Monday 12th I didn't get to sleep. Nor on the Wednesday, nor on the night of the Bank Holiday. I was fine during my week off at home. There's another post about that, but having insomnia is no fun, especially when it's the no-sleep-at-all variety. 

I met my nephew at the Tate Modern cafe after work one Friday to help him with a statement for university application. He still wants to go and he still wants to study some combination of History, Politics and Philosophy. Since he's working and doing all sorts of interesting stuff - webmaster, architectural photographer, marcoms production - his desire is strong. I would have, I think, given up. The idea of explaining why one wants to study a subject at university strikes me as silly, but maybe the world is full of kids who know they need a piece of paper and don't really care what it is, along as it says Upper Second.

I tried using the Overground from Calpham Junction to Shoreditch High Street. It takes longer, but it's restful and doesn't have the crowds. I won't use it all the time, but every now and then it's a change.

I watched a bunch of DVD's, including Big Boys Gone Bananas, El Bulli: Cooking in Progress, Pumping Iron (finally!), Of Time and The City, Chris Marker's Level Five, Park Row, Howl, Godard's Film Socialisme, and the two programmes about Sylvie Guillam: Portrait and At Work. I read The Swerve, The Pop Revolution, Future Babble, Paris Peasant, The Night, Octopus, a couple of short studies of Rothko and Jaspers, and two books of pop-ish sports psychology: Mind Gym and Peak Performance Every Time.

And then it was over, and September is almost over already.

City of London Towers at Dusk

Sis and I went to high-end kosher restaurant 1701 the other week and came out on Bevis Marks at exactly the magic moment of dusk. We snapped away with our cameras - iPhone for me, AS510 for Sis, and got these. The City just doesn't look any better than this.

New District / Circle Line Rolling Stock Test

So I'm standing on Sloane Square station a couple of Tuesday evenings back during a week off work, when something strange comes into the station. Whoo-hoo new rolling stock on test!

Just looked this up, and it's called the S-stock, and is the through-corridor stock that's used on the Met line now. Fewer seats, more standing, seven cars. (That's a lot of people standing by Hammersmith eastbound in the rush hour.)

Concrete Vices vs Abstract Virtues

There's a video in the MUAMTS (Man Up and Marry The Sluts) genre which I watched because Dalrock mentioned it and I had nothing better to do. A guy called Mark Driscoll, who is some kind of big-name pastor (which is what Protestant vicars are called in the USA because they can't be vicars, because that's a C of E thing, and there is no Church of America, so they are freelancers, which means that their first responsibility is to bring in the money, but I digress...) and he says amongst many other loaded things...

"You've got guys who are...consumers, not producers, so it's food and it's sex and it's drugs and it's alcohol and it's video games and it's entertainment and there's no production, there's no life and growth and help and hope and healing for others." 

And my jaw dropped open. Read that again. Slowly. 

Didn't see it? All the bad things are described concretely: sex, drugs, alcohol, video games. Short of mentioning actual brands, he couldn't be more concrete. But when it comes to the good stuff, it's all abstract nouns: "production", "life", "growth", "help", "hope" and "healing for others". I'm guessing those are code words where Pastor Driscoll comes from but I don't speak the code.

This happens every time someone wants to diss the way a bunch of guys live: they describe in concrete terms what they want the guys to stop doing, but when it comes to what the guys should be doing, they use more abstract nouns than a bad passage of Hegel. "Life". For frack's sake. I'm not even going to guess what that's code for. It's as dumb as those people who say "you should be out there living". Yeah. Let's see. Living. That would be the thing that if you're not doing it, you're dead. Right? And since I'm not dead, I must be alive, and that means I'm living. So I tick that box. Or did you mean something specific? You did? Like what? Uh-huh, you call that "living"? Jeez.

The good Pastor can't get to specifics, because then everyone can have a discussion about just how desirable, possible, affordable and otherwise do-able those specifics are. And because in modern consumer society, most of the things we can do are pretty darn pointless and can, depending on exactly how much you squint and tilt your head, be seen as self-indulgence, then the good Pastor can be seen as substituting one bunch of worthless crap for another. (I'm willing to bet that more than once Paster Driscoll has suggested that all those nouns can be made concrete by, oh, raising money for his ministry? D'ya think?) 

This is partly Pastor Driscoll being sneaky, and it's partly a problem with the way evaluative language works. Most concepts in the English language are piebald: slightly descriptive and slightly evaluative. Even if the evaluations are your own personal views. Brands have value exactly to the degree that people have warm fuzzy feelings towards them: "Coca-Cola" is the name of a drink and a company, but it's also something towards which you have feelings (I'm a Coke man, do they even still make Pepsi?). "Pornography" is a concept with descriptive content and examples, but there's also some evaluation in there, even if it does vary from person to person. "Life", as the good Pastor uses it, is not what we all do or we'd be dead, but something ineffable and Good. Lots of evaluative weight, but almost zero descriptive content. And the moment he gives it any specific descriptive content, the evaluative weight drops off, because we can say "Whoa there Nelly! What's so freaking great about that ?". Words like "good" or "bad" are purely evaluative, and don't mean much more than "I you do that, I will un-Friend you" or something along those lines. The Pastoral trick is to use words that look like they mean something specific - like "production", "life", "growth", "help", "hope" and "healing for others" - and indeed do mean something, just different things to different audiences. As opposed to real descriptive words, which mean much of the same thing to almost everyone.

It's not about any asymmetry between virtues and vices. Vices are naturally concrete. Galatians (via Wikipedia lists):  adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, sorcery, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings. All of those have pretty clear descriptive and even legal meaning. The virtues according to the Catholic Church - faith, hope, charity, prudence, justice, temperance and fortitude - are also pretty specific, and very far from wishy-washy stuff like "life, growth and healing for others" - even if prudence (which in Catholic theology means a sound situational judgement of what should be done) is a little vague in practice.  

Concrete Vices and Abstract Virtues is a rhetorical trick used by people whose main aim is condemning rather than offering a positive vision of right behaviour. Just like Pastor Driscoll.

I Live In The Countryside - Leafy Lanes and Fields

I don't think of sunny Feltham-by-the-M3 as having to do with the countryside. I think of it as having to do with industrial estates and the airport. What I forget is that regular villages often have a nearby light industrial estate nearby. Anyway, a few weeks ago now, when the days were really long, I took a couple of walks round the block, which looked like this, and which really did feel as if I was in the country, and not on the edge of London.

I Live In The Countryside - The Combine Harvester

I returned home a couple of Wednesdays ago, after leaving a very worn pair of shoes at Crockett and Jones on Burlington Arcade for repair, and dropping a few pence on some photography books at Waterstones, to find this sight on my local air park. A combine harvester. Just like it's the real countryside.

Who Left That There?

Sometimes no further comment is needed. I passed this on a walk round my block the other week.