More oldy-worldy design relics. This one reminds me both of the Boston Globe Graphics, and the bomb shelter stencil.
Its a sign for weight limits over the bridge at Blackheath Station. It is not surprising that such a relic has been preserved. Blackheath seems rather gentrified, a little oasis of posh between Lewisham and Greenwhich. The DVD rental shop looks like an antique store.
Here we have the typical, pretty much index-case example of a Web 2.0 internet startup: Wigadoo. (One of the directors is a friend of mine).
Basically, it acts as a sort of escrow service, to allow groups of people to avoid awkward financial shenannigans when booking holidays. I hear they already have some kind of deal with LastMinute.com.
If they found a way to make it work for resident’s committees and communal stairwells, then I reckon it would take them only a matter of weeks before they pretty much take over Scotland, which is full of tenement blocks with leaky roofs. At present, most residents wait for the council to place a Statutory Notice on their building, and pay the council individually for communal work (the council takes a heafty administration fee, obviously).
It would also be handy for All Tomorrow’s Parties, which only sells group tickets.
Like Conor at the Liberal Conspiracy, I can’t really get behind this clamour for a windfall tax on oil companies. I would love to have a dig at Big Oil, but something grates.
Its not that I am like Tim Worstall, who has barrels of faith in the market to sort the problem out fairly. Oil extraction and distribution is a sort of cartel, not a free market. In any case, such a market takes time (maybe measured in decades or centuries) to do its ‘thing’, and in the meantime it is probable that excess profits will accumulate while everyone else is suffering from a recession.
No, my problem is that arguing for a windfall tax is surely another way of saying that you want to change the rules retrospectively.
Economists often argue that to change the rules, and to impose a windfall tax, simply breeds uncertainty in the market, and cause the oil companies to under-invest. Its an irritating argument against taxation, because it has an air of a threat about it: “don’t tax us, or we will mess up your economy”. In the case of a windfall tax, which everyone (even the oil companies) assumes will be a very rare occurrence, it is less believable than (say) the case of top-rate tax-payers. So I can see how the campaigners might discount this economic argument.
But leaving aside the economic risks that a windfall tax entails, surely changing the rules is simply wrong wrong wrong, no further discussion required? Imposing some kind of law (in this case, a tax law) retrospectively is the stuff of wild-eyed dictatorships, surely. Windfall taxes are short-cuts. An easy, lazy solution to a complex situation.
Play by the rules… and if you feel you must change the rules, do so only at the start of the game. If we percieve a problem with the way our country operates, its fine to legislate so that it doesn’t happen in the following tax year. Nationalise the oil companies if we must, or tax them at 99%. Whatever. Only this: we must to legislate for the future, not the past.
There’s a familiar saying, which goes something like “you can judge a society by the way it treats its most vulnerable”. Well, an alternative might be that we should judge ourselves by how we treat our most despised. The oil giants are certainly some of the most resented institutions in the country, but to subject them to anything other than the rule-of-law is not, I would suggest, cricket. Compass should leave the oil companies with this year’s profits, and get busy lobbying for a law that would redistribute future profits. That’s the right way a democracy should approach this problem.
The only counter argument that has piqued my interest has been that a large portion of the oil companies profits have arisen because of preferences in the system of allocating carbon credits via the European Emmissions Trading Scheme. However, while this is a definite argument for going after excess profits, I’m not sure it justifies doing so retrospectively, as a windfall tax would.
“Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun!” wrote Noel Coward. I think he missed a trick: there was no corollary ditty, about mad Scotsmen going out in the rain.
Many of my recollections of peace and contentment take place in the rain. Playing cards under a canvas canopy of an eight-man Stormhaven tent on a scout-camp; Sitting at an old desk and writing a diary during the afternoon storms in Zimbabwe; Leaning against the door-frame of a rural Brazilian villa, watching clouds sweep through the valley. Sure, rain prevents you from stepping out into the street, but it also protects you. It creates a barrier you can hide behind. It isolates you like an incoming tide. It enforces privacy. Sometimes there’s nothing better to be stranded indoors by the rain. Open the window and listen to it fall.
Although, if you’re caught out in the rain, you might as well pull a Gene Kelly, and stay out. There’s a serenity to that too. A favourite quote:
There is something to be learned from a rainstorm. When meeting with a sudden shower, you try not to get wet and run quickly along the road. But doing such things as passing under the eaves of houses, you still get wet. When you are resolved from the beginning, you will not be perplexed, though you still get the same soaking. This understanding extends to everything.
A great deal of this stoicism was displayed at the weekend, at the Dialogues of Wind and Bamboo event at the Royal Botantic Gardens Edinburgh. The sky was not kind, and we were rained upon from start to finish. However, I had the sense that sheer bloody-mindedness would prevail amongst both performers and performance-goers, and that nothing would be postponed because of the weather.
And so we persisted, but some things are obviously odd when performed in the rain. No sane person would wander out and do Tai Chi in a cold, damp park, and I felt sorry for those giving a demonstration of the art, who did their best to ignore the rain. It must be extra difficult when people with brollys are stomping past. I think this point is true of the dance pieces too - the audience were probably not as relaxed as they could have been. And if you are distracted during a performance, it precludes the possibility of giving yourself over to the dance, incapable of submitting to the pure movement.
However, I think the traditional Chinese music gained something through being played in the storm. The hum of the rain was like a backing track, which bedded very well underneath the stringed notes.
Susie Brown’s installation Natural Progression, persists until 29th June. It consists of a set of painted bamboo sticks set into the ground, forming a fence-like barrier which slithers accross the lawn. Like an organic Fred Sandback installation, it delineates the open space and makes you think twice about crossing the imaginary boundaries it seems to define. It therefore takes a little courage to engage with the piece, which you can do by blowing across the tops of the bamboo to ‘play’ their notes.
Back in the RBGE glasshouse life was much drier, although the towering, anorexic palm trees occasionally drip onto you. FOUND and the Shanghai Jazz Project teamed up to give a performance. The glasshouse, with its collision of nature and human technology, is precisely the sort of odd venue I expect from FOUND. I’ve seen them in Warehouses and Chinese Kitchens, and they’ve played in portacabins before too.
FOUND are known throughout Scotland for their love of sampling stuff, mixing and remixing what they collect into their music. For this performance, we heard them sample an old 1930s Jazz recording, supplied by the Shanghai Jazz Project. We heard the familiar hiss and crackle of the old recording, and I remember thinking that this was not unlike the patter of the rain ouside.
Dialogues of Wind and Bamboo was the brainchild of Kimho Ip. Over at the project’s website, there’s an interesting podcast discussion with Stephen Blackmore, Regius Keeper, about the twin pleasures of nature and music, and their importance in the increasingly frenetic modern world.
Sifting through my late Grandmother’s scrap-books, I found this set of Pharmaceutical envelopes from the Victorian/Edwardian era. They were collected by her uncle (so that’s my Great-great Uncle) Thomas Lewis, who was a Chemist in Pembrokeshire, Edinburgh, and London.
The two things I enjoy about these designs are the innocent and polite text, and the use of typography. One would think that employing several different typefaces would look odd and discordant, but the combination of stencil, gothic, serif and sans-serif faces somehow seems to work. I’m reminded of the illustrator Kevin Cornell’s work, which is unsurprising really - He has an obvious affinity with this era.
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Liberal Democrat MP Evan Harris, with parliamentary colleagues, at an event in support of the Human Fertility and Embryology Bill, which will protect and extend the right of scientists to perform crucial stem-cell research.
I saw this aged notice tatooed onto a wall in Westminster, just off Smith Square. That’s the nice thing about living in old cities - there’s a piece of history on every corner.
I wonder if the vaults are still there, or whether they have been turned into luxury, windowless apartments for rich agraphobics.
Several stations seem to be undergoing some kind of redecoration, which neccessitates the removal of all the adverts. The lack of colour gives the caverns an odd feel. I like to think it harks back to an earlier, more innocent and auster time.
Well well - Just as I take a step back from the running of Fifty Nine Productions, they find their way into one of those top 100 lists. We are now officially only 6 degrees less hot than JK Rowling:
59. Fifty Nine Productions
Fast-tracking their way to international success as audio-visual designers, Mark Grimmer and Leo Warner have worked with Suspect Culture, Grid Iron and, for the National Theatre Of Scotland, Black Watch. Following extensive work at the National Theatre, the Royal Ballet and New York’s Metropolitan Opera House, future projects include a new play at The Traverse and Salome at the Royal Opera House.
No mention of Robert Sharp, goddammit, which probably reflects my distinctly hands-off approach in recent months. One can only hope that the second-hand prestige shows up in some healthy dividend payments, one of these days.
I spotted this gentleman at Trafalgar Square, reading the Evening Standard, while he waited for a set of traffic lights to turn green. I wonder if he reads the paper at every junction, or whether he knows which lights have a long enough delay to allow him to get through the leaders without interuption?