Here’s Bolt breaking the World Record last night in Berlin:
Amazing. But watch the track-side photographers at about 1min 17secs into the clip chase after Bolt, catch him up, and take his photograph! I thought that was funny.
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There’s a great little project happening in Regents Park at the moment. The Treehouse Gallery is an ever growing collective of artists, designers, musicians and educators, who have constructed their own public space in which to hold exhibitions and events.
I’ve been following the development of the events schedule for a few weeks now, which is steadily filling up with workshops and other events, but I don’t see much in the way of debates programmed. Surely some LibCon readers and writers could get together to argue about something? Localism is a live debate at the moment, and would seem a perfect topic to discuss in a community-made space. CSJ? Fabians? Demos? SMF?
Many landlubbers love the shipping forecast on the radio. The cryptic figures for wind speed and precipitation are soothing and mantra-like, and provide a comforting and consistent start to the day for thousands of listeners who have no idea what they mean.
Online, I find the tweets of my friend Shawn Micallef fulfil a similar function. Amid the constant bombardment of political messages, there is Shawn, always Shawn, with his relentless observations of Toronto psychogeography:
https://twitter.com/shawnmicallef/status/2847244251
https://twitter.com/shawnmicallef/status/2850036900
I know what the individual words mean, but the place he is describing is an utter unknown. I have never visited Toronto, and without that context, the place names are a mystery. I conjure up quite literal interpretations of what each street might look like, or what the acronyms might stand for. And whenever he mentions Spadina, I think of spandex.
How strange, then, to discover that Shawn is in the UK, and tweeting about London. It is also a city of ridiculous and inappropriate names (Hackney Wick, Angel, India Quays, New Cross Gate, Forest Hill, High Holborn), only now Shawn’s nibble-sized thoughts are suddenly contextualised, and I can visualise exactly where he is walking, almost trace his steps.
And that thought, “I can almost trace his steps”, is what occurred to me on Friday evening. Alone and listless in South East London, I decided to do something weird. I decided to use twitter to re-trace Shawn’s steps. I decided to… Stalk Shawn. His regular twitter updates would act as electronic breadcrumbs. Could they lead me, in the dark, through a city of seven-and-a-half million people and 660 square miles, to a specific, bespectacled Canadian flâneur? My own twitter updates are below: scroll through to relive the chase.
View Stalking Shawn in a larger map
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From Carole Ann Duffy’s Last Post:
You lean against a wall,
your several million lives still possible
and crammed with love, work, children, talent, English beer, good food.
The life cut short would always have been good. A life actually lived rarely compares.
Thoughts on war as a ‘game’. Thoughts on the “old lie” and my own long-dead uncles:
That word, that “yet”, challenges us. Sassoon knows that we will forget, eventually, and the men who died at The Somme and elsewhere will eventually be known to us only as nameless fodder, much like the thousands who died at Waterloo. Too far back in history to be properly human. But no Seigfried, not yet, not while three men who fought in that war still roll down Whitehall in their chairs.
Well, Harry Patch and Henry Alligham are gone, and our own memories will start to fade. Its not the job of poets to rewrite history. Its enough for them to keep the memory strong.
Here’s a short interview with the animator Joseph Peirce about the forthcoming A Family Portrait, produced by Fifty Nine. Its about a family portrait session going bad. I’m glad he mentions AwkwardFamilyPhotos.com, which is hilarious and fascinating in equal measure.