Vapour Trails

 I took this about 07:30 in mid-May.

Whenever the planes stop flying, the skies around where I live clear up and stay that way for days.

Until you see it, you don't believe it.

Vapour trails are water, by the way.

Not carbon dioxide.

Which is good for plants.

But let's not go there.

Look at the pretty vapour trails!

Burgers 'N Fries, Camden Lock

 Sis and I went to Camden Lock recently, by way of the gardens in Regent's Park, and even in the middle of the week, when it's raining, the place is busy busy busy. And it hasn't changed since whenever the last big refurbishment was... ten years ago? I suggest clicking on this to enlarge and appreciate the calm absorption with which the chef is working.

How To Do A Good Rodchenko Tilt

Is this picture skew or it is just from an odd angle?

I thought it was skew until I checked the tower on the right-hand side.

It's vertical.

So not skew then.

But it looks skew.

Because it's taken from an odd angle, and the perspective is all over the place.

So your eye, and mine, spends most of its energy trying to sort out how the camera angle is wrong, so it can correct it.

That probably means a) it's a not-good photo, b) I'm a second Rodchenko.

So it's not a good photo.

When Rodchenko tilted his camera, somehow, the perspective remained comprehensible. Your eye says he forgot to put the camera straight, and adjusted accordingly.

With my photo, everything is so messed-up, you can't see what's wrong.

It's about doing something enough so it is intentional. Once our eye spots `intention', it can work out what that might be and correct for it. So this is an okay Rodchenko imitation....

but for this one, well, I just can't shoot a straight horizon...

Why I Let My Art Newspaper Subscription Lapse

Dear Editor,

My subscription to Art News ran out recently and I am not renewing.

I thought I would tell you why.

I made a mistake subscribing in the first place.

I thought Art News would be to the art-world what, for instance, the FT is to business.

Sure you have a certain amount of insider favour-trading and re-cycling of press releases in the FT, as in any newspaper.

Along with articles about how Western Civilisation will crumble if the Government gives one penny less to the Arts than it did last year.

That goes with the territory.

It's the delicate souls a-flutter at a two-hundred year old transgression of this year's taboo.

The use of -isms to splash `political' meaning onto empty work.

When a museum `apologises' for its `implication in slavery', its PR department counts the column-inches it generates.

I am not interested in the moral character or beliefs of artists / curators / gallerists / researchers / restorers / dealers / whatever else.

I want to read about the work they are doing.

Not what they are saying to demonstrate their candidacy for in-group membership.

So I didn't renew my subscription.

Regards

A Former Subscriber

The National Windrush Memorial, Waterloo Station

The SS Windrush docked at Tilbury on 22 June 1948 with 802 people from the Caribbean. The BBC says so. Tilbury is on the Fenchurch Steet line, which does not pass Waterloo at any time. Maybe the monument is going on tour or maybe the artist insisted that it was somewhere people actually passed through. Waterloo is still the busiest passenger terminus in the UK by long stretch.

That's not why I like this photograph. I like it because of the people around the monument. I don't usually do people in my photographs, and it's something I want to change.

 

Smile Please, Camden Lock

 There's always one guy, and it is usually a man, who looks straight at the camera lens when I'm taking a picture of a crowd some of whom are facing me. And he's smiling. Maybe he's an actor, or a politician, or destined for senior management.

(In other news, a man resigned from his job the other day. He was the first man ever to do so in the history of mankind, so there was a lot of press coverage about it.)

Liberal Totalitarianism

What on earth is a liberal totalitarian?

You know those people who said we should re-run the Brexit referendum?

Because it produced the wrong answer?

That's the attitude I mean, and those are the people.

Democracy is okay, as long as the people vote for the "right thing", which is, of course, what liberals want.

They don't understand what Democracy is.

It's a system in which, at regular intervals, the government has to pitch for its jobs. It does so by promising to do roughly what the majority of people want . When it is in power, it still keeps an eye on popular sentiment, in case it does something that will so displease the populace that they vote it out, by voting the other lot in.

Liberal totalitarians want a system in which Government does the "right thing", which is whatever fashionable opinion liberals have at the time, and the rest of the population shuts up and pays for it through taxes.

In other words, it doesn't matter who wins the election, the liberal policies are always passed.

People who have the wrong opinions - the Deplorables - should be at best ignored and at worst re-educated.

Opinions which differ from the liberal mainstream must be banned from any form of publication. Because it must be hate speech. Or stupid. Or deplorable.

Right-wing.

Populist.

Eeeuuugh.

I'm always surprised when obviously smart people turn out to be liberal totalitarians.

I don't mind the 'liberal'. I mind the 'totalitarian'.

Totalitarianism is the system of the petty bureaucrat. The one who made rules about how only six people may gather together, or you can't see your grandmother in her dying days, or a supermarket can sell cheese, but not Easter eggs. The ones who said that a bidding process was more important than getting vaccines out to the people. The ones who say that the `rights' of illegal immigrants trump those of the taxpaying locals.

Totalitarians are the people who want to make laws and regulations to deal with everything.

Their rules, about their issues.

And to hell with everyone else.