prince valiant

A flaming figure of a cyclist enters the Olympic Stadium. Photograph: Dennis Grombkowski/Getty Images

seeing without eyes

The TopFoto caption: EU001059.jpg Chariots of Fire legend, Harold Abrahams, sprints blindfolded against a totally blind man at St Dunstan's. Abrahams lost the race, 20 June 1920. c. TopFoto

This is the banner photo that TopFoto is using during the Paralympics.  Clearly Harold Abrahams has lost himself spatially.  Without his eyes, he can't focus his mind and body in a straight line, despite the interesting guide flag thing.  
This is what was so interesting about the Paralympics – it is so much about the mind, and the intellect, driving everything forward.  Even the body, perfect and imperfect.

paralympic beauty

Supposedly the big bang, but so often whatever was going on looked like drawings, in this case a smudged Boullée. London 2012 Paralympic Games Opening. AP PhotographThe opening for the 2012 Paralympics, staged by Jenny Sealy, the artistic director of Graeae, was astounding.  Unlike the paean to seemingly eternal but tired British pop culture that dominated the regular Olympics' opening and closing, the Paralympic opening was narrated, alternatively, by Stephen Hawking and Ian McKellan as Prospero: books flew, people flew, apples fell: one realised that paralympians live in the world of science and technology in a way that non-paralympians do not.  Meanwhile, atoms collided, dark matter surged, Handel was sung, and it was beautiful.  

Not least, perhaps most, beautiful was David Toole, who dances like water down a river to his very fingertips.

Enrico Scaramellini: Wardrobe in the Landscape

Enrico Scaramellini, Wardrobe in the Landscape. Northern Italian Alps, 2012. photo by Marcello Mariana.

Scaramellini says, 'Great is the land, the landscape: small is the place, the space.'
Plans and beautiful photos of this house set between two barns are on dezeen: it appears to borrow a room on the second floor from the adjacent barn, and the house flares slightly to the back, but the idea of a house as a door and a window is completely magical – a child's view of the world.

a change is gonna come

Sam Cooke - A change is gonna come by hopto

One of the proposals for On Site 28: sound is about recording studios and their particular qualities of surface and such.  Sam Cooke was mentioned.

We were in English in grade 9 and Judy Butler who sat behind me told me Sam Cooke had died.  This 1963 song, A Change is Gonna Come, sat, and still sits, at the heart of the Civil Rights movement.   

1963 was an important year: Martin Luther King wrote 'Letter from Birmingham Jail', the 16th Street Baptist Church was bombed in Birmingham and four little girls were killed, King's 'I Have a Dream' speech was made in Washington, Medgar Evers was murdered.  Not until the formation of the Black Panthers in 1967 did black power begin to overtake black faith that a change was going to come.

And, still thinking of things Olympic, it was at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City that the 200m gold and bronze medalists, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, shared a pair of black gloves and made their stand for human rights.  Last night on the Radio Australia's Asia Pacific Report, there was a piece about the silver medalist, Australian Peter Norman, who also wore a human rights badge in solidarity and was subsequently reprimanded by the AOC and not sent to any further Olympic games. His 1968 200m record of 20.06 seconds still stands in Australia.  Evidently there is a debate in the Australian Parliament about apologising to him, although he died in 2006. 

Why do people wait until someone dies, before their time in this case - he was only 64, before admitting they treated them badly? 

Peter Norman, Tommie Smith and John Carlos on the podium as the US anthem was playing, at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City. They all wore the badge of the Olympic Committee for Human Rights, OCHR.

Schütze+Hopkins

And thank goodness we live in 2012.

Water Blade Retina, from Fille en Aiguilles.  Schütze+Hopkins. Twilight Science Editions, 2012

Paul Schütze – lots of interesting stuff on his website, such as this:

Paul Schütze. Garden of Instruments. 314 Gallery, Bergen, Norway

hotel california, 1977

After the last two weeks besotted with running and jumping, rowing and swimming, ending with the windmilling Pete Townshend, I drove from the coast back home with Waterloo Sunset running on a loop in my brain.  Then this morning for some reason I woke up with the guitars at the end of Hotel California at the end of a dream.  The mind is full of curious channels.  

When this came out I didn't have a tv so missed the video completely, but it was the soundtrack to summer for years.  Everyone I knew used to look like this. 

The Deep of the Modern: Manifesta 9

Coal Sack Ceiling homage to Marcel Duchamp, Manifesta 9. Photograph: Kristof Vrancken/Association Marcel Duchamp, Paris

This year, the biennial Manifesta is centred on the Waterschei mine in Genk, in in the coal-mining region of Belgium.  Adrian Searle has written a fulsome review of it in the Guardian, and there is a slide show of some of the work here.  
Searle talks about the Bechers and their recording of the industrial landscapes and infrastructure of eastern Belgium, Holland and the northern Ruhr, where Manifesta 9 is being held.  The Bechers are in this exhibition as well, but the arresting image of the coal sacks indicates the interventionist nature of some of the work, beyond the recording of landscapes that shock by their mere presence alone.

The catalogue is here.  The first paragraph of the curatorial concept for Manifesta 9 states, 'The Deep of the Modern intends to create a complex dialogue between different layers of art and history. Its point of departure is the geographical location itself—the former coal-mining region of the Campine in north-eastern Belgium as a locus for diverse issues, both imaginary and ecological, aligned to industrial capitalism as a global phenomenon. Manifesta 9 takes its cue from the previously abandoned, recently restored Waterschei mine complex in Genk.'

The Deep of the Modern.  What a title.  The image above is an homage to Duchamp's 16 Miles of String of 1942. This free ranging through the twentieth century of art and industry, production and politics shows how they inflect each other, rather than presenting the isolation of each of these activities into the discrete silos that they have generally pretended to be.  This is an obvious and natural discussion of the world in which art is an integral part, however it signals a big change from late twentieth century art discourse.

On Site 26:DIRT looked at the surface of the earth, issue 27:rural urbanism investigated in many of the articles how the earth, the dirt, agriculture, the mines and resource-extraction industries locate cities.  On Site 28: geology, next spring, will be continue this discussion of geological consequences and how we are both shaped by them and try to intervene in them ourselves. 

Richard Long on Box Hill

the Guardian's caption: Land-mark ... a cyclist passes Richard Long's artwork Box Hill Road River, in Surrey. Photograph: Brian Cleckner/National Trust

Richard Long's centre line on the zig-zag portion going up Box Hill in Surrey, part of the cycling track for the Olympics: evidently it was inspired by the graffiti chalked on the roads during the Tour de France, which, now that I've looked it up, isn't that interesting. 

Here he is talking about laying down the road paint, like a thief in the night.  an authorised thief in the night, with a team of helpers. 

Mohatella Queens and South Africa in 1974

Umculo Kawupheli.  from the description on youtube, 'Original song with self-made video, featuring clips of the Queens back in the 1970s with their backing, Makhona Tsohle Band.'  

1974: just two years to the Soweto Uprising, 14 years since Sharpeville, 10 years since the imprisonment of Nelson Mandela.

Steve Bloom's photographs of this era were in this years London Festival of Photography in June. A BBC news documentary was made of Bloom describing some of the work:

Steve Bloom. Beneath the surface. Guardian Gallery, London, June 2012. All images copyright Steve Bloom/stevebloomphoto.com. Music by KPM Music. Slideshow production by Paul Kerley. Publication date 31 May 2012

cinemas

Khirghizie Bishkek Cine, Russia. correction: Bishek, Kyrgyzstan. see the comments section,

So, things slow down a bit in the summer – not being very assiduous right now.

I love this building.  It is from a wonderful series of movie theatres posted by cinebxl on flickr.

Ayub Ogada: Nairobi April 2012

Not the perfectly recorded version that was in The Constant Gardener (below), but a live version (above) full of noise, heat and four beautiful dancers.

the Bathurst hedge

12 July 1962. Britain's tallest hedge. TopFoto.co.uk

sorry about the proprietal watermark, but the hedge ladder is so interesting.  This is from TopFoto's 50 Years Ago Today: 12 July 1962.  Britain's tallest hedge undergoes its annual trim which takes three gardeners ten days to complete by hand.  Planted in 1720, it is part of the estate owned by the Earl and Countess of Bathurst in Cirencester.

2008: Britain's tallest yew hedge given a trim. The Daily Telegraph, 11 Aug 2008
The quantity-obsessed Daily Mail reported in 2008 that it is now 'the 300 year-old hedge on Lord Allen Apsley's Bathurst Estate', and that it cost £5000 to trim it.  The Telegraph, picking up the same feed, adds that 'Two workers spent two days on a 70ft high cherry-picker cutting back six inches of new growth, which produced nearly a tonne of clippings.  These are then sold to pharmaceutical companies who use yew extract as a key ingredient of Docetaxel, a chemotherapy drug used mainly for breast, ovarian and lung cancer.'

Who'd have known.

Interesting too that they used to be gardeners, part of the cost of running the estate; now they are contract workers and an invoice must be paid.

the Mintlaw bridge, 1911

construction of the Mintlaw Bridge over the Red Deer River, 1911

1911: the construction of a steel trestle across the Red Deer River, 644m long, 33m high.  Like an east-west pipeline, it was resource-related; the Alberta Central Railway was meant to carry coal from the coal fields near Nordegg and Rocky Mountain House to Vancouver. It went bankrupt and the line was leased to the CPR for 999 years.  What a curious concept that is, leasing for a millenium.  

The line was underused (WWI, the depression, WWII and the discovery of oil in Alberta changed the energy landscape somewhat) and eventually abandoned in 1983, but the Mintlaw trestle bridge still stands.  It's a grand picture, the construction of the bridge.  The bridge is its own construction scaffolding. 

Douglas Gordon: The End of Civilisation, 2012

The End of Civilisation is one of the True Spirit projects co-commissioned by Great North Run Culture, Locus+ and funded by Arts Council England for the Cultural Olympiad.  The site overlooks the Scotland-England border, in Cumbria.

David Borden: tribute to Ruth St Denis and Ted Shawn

from the YouTube blurb:  'The Dawns.01 with Ted Shawn and his Male Dancers. This is a live performance by Mother Mallard in Ithaca, New York, September 2007.  Video by Noni Korf Vidal and Franck Vidal.  Shown are David Borden, kbd and Conrad Alexander, MalletKat. Out of camera view are keyboardists Blaise Bryski and David Yearsley. Everyone is playing sounds stored on Apple Laptops and triggered by USB connections.'

dancing

Ruth St Denis on the beach, 1916. NYPL digital gallery Image ID: DEN_0543V

This is Ruth St Denis dancing on the beach in 1916.  Unlike classical ballet where energy flows off the body in smooth waves, St Denis, who changed dance radically with Ted Shawn in the 1920s, flings off energy from her body but then snaps it back with a tweak of her wrists.  

It is similar to what one sees in some of the drawings of Patkau Architects in the 90s: a retaining wall shoots across the plan and then, when normally it would subside with a sigh into the ground where the topography finally meets the level, the Patkaus would crank the end and all the energy of the weight behind that retaining wall would jerk back toward the house.

It is a powerful ploy, no less in dance than in architecture, to embody resistance.  What was Ohm's Law?  resistance = voltage/current?  This is the problem with going with the flow, no voltage, no resistance, no energy.  Things change when energy is interrupted.

camping

A clifftop campsite in Crimdon Park, County Durham, England. 1946

Okay, it is 1946, everyone camping here, the men at least, just spent a lot of time in tents in north Africa, in Burma, on the plains of Lincolnshire, but this is the summer holidays, in England.  The war is over.  Wouldn't one think that anarchy would be a welcome release and tents were higgledy-piggledy?  Clearly not. 

The English once were a sociable people, not for them the extreme privacy of camping in a BC government or National Park campsite, all winding roads through the woods and deep seclusion on one's little clearing with picnic bench and firepit.  Sometimes it would be nice – and feel safe – to be just one more tent in an array such as this one.

and gosh, look at all the army bell tents.  One wonders if the release of army surplus after the war spurred on the development of mass camping and campsites.  As a kid, our tent was a huge Hudson's Bay Company canvas tent with an extension: not army surplus, but so capacious. It smelled like summer.

urban archaeology

9th Avenue, Inglewood, Calgary Alberta 2011This barber shop sign sat on this wall for at least 30 years until it was painted over in the general gentrification of its building.  Following Business Redevelopment Zone colour guidelines which recommend maroon and olive, the wall is now repaired and painted a flat sludge green.  Who would choose such a colour combination, and worse, why would anyone follow it? And why are handmade signs seen as rubbish anyway?

The great affection for Fred Herzog's photos of Vancouver includes nostalgia for an era when signs were hand-written or else made by sign-painters.  It was a time when there was not a lot of money: one could be house-proud, which meant clean, but city pride, city branding, city marketting – why would one bother?  You lived in cities and towns, they looked like how they looked.

Now we endure the militancy of neighbourhood design guidelines and BRZs that insist neighbourhood main streets look harmonious.  Can one legislate cultural harmony? My neighbourhood association has long inveighed against having a Tim Horton's although they let in a Starbucks, and the old hot pink/lime green Korean restaurant is flagged regularly in the newsletter for its 'inappropriate' colour scheme.  The message is clear, we are all going upmarket and somehow must have better taste than we did before.  Curiously, paradoxically, this average Canadian neighbourhood might have taste, but it's lost its flavour.

Wade Hemsworth: the wild goose

The gentle Wade Hemsworth at 76, singing our other national anthem.

And a gentle life, on wikipedia