Main Street

Independencia Avenue, Chihuahua, Mexico. circa 1960

Vintage Everyday this week has a small collection of Mexican postcards from the 1950s and '60s.  Far from looking like a foreign country, these small town street scenes look like anywhere in Canada of the same era.  Prairie towns such as High River, or Olds, still have a scrappy one- and two-storey main street with cars and trucks angle-parked on both sides.  They look like these postcards, and like lots of little towns in the American southwest today.  

This was thirty years before NAFTA integration; cartoon Mexico of the 1950s was Speedy Gonzales.  And yet, US penetration into both Canada and Mexico was so pervasive that small town morphology in each three countries followed the American frontier model.

Of course the Jai Alai arena, the bullring in Nogales, or the churches are specifically Mexican, but the signage — a mix of constructivism and art deco, the neon, the products, the cars — it all looks like Hastings Street in Vancouver in 1958.

The past is a foreign country and it looks like Mexico.

wood matches and plastic lighters

The remains of an albatross © Photo: Chris Jordan - http://www.chrisjordan.com

Went to buy some matches yesterday, looked all over the supermarket, none to be found.  Asked, told that all 'smoking paraphernalia' was over in the gas bar.  Trudged through the slush to the gas bar, asked for a box of matches: what a strange request.  The girl had to find a ladder to get them from a locked top shelf.  I could buy two huge boxes or ten little boxes, no the packages can't be divided.  
I said, this is winter, we light candles and kindling; matches aren't smoking paraphernalia, they light fires.  Here is the answer: people use disposable lighters or, for candles, those long butane filled wands.  

Which is better for this world, a match made of wood or cardboard, or a lighter made of plastic, metal and lighter fluid?

Midway Atoll is located in the North Pacific Gyre, one of five floating continents of plastic litter and chemical and organic waste.  Midway is an albatross colony: pieces of plastic, about the size of disposable lighters evidently look similar to squid, the main component of an albatross diet.  This plastic is eaten and then regurgitated to feed albatross young.  Who die.  The corpse decays and as it was stuffed with plastic, a tidy collection of matter incapable of decay is left on the beach.  

Plastic never goes away, it just gets smaller and smaller and thus is ingested by smaller and smaller animals.  Who die.  And while we seem to be able to sample the debris in each of the oceanic gyres, there is so far no solution for its collection.

The photo above is by Chris Jordan, who has made a film about Midway.  I heard about it on Radio Netherlands' Earth Beat a few weeks ago. 

Louis Helbig: aestheticising the unconscionable

Louis Helbig. Bitumen Slick N 57.19.28 W 111.25.44 Syncrude Aurora North

Helbig writes of the image above: Booms confining bitumen floating near the edge of Syncrude's Aurora North tar pond.  This is where industry suffered its most serious massive public relations setback in the spring of 2008 when someone alerted the public and the authorities to flocks of ducks landing on its surface.  In this particular incident about 1,600 ducks were killed.  Syncrude was convicted in 2010 of breaching both federal and provincial environmental reglations.

He has a series of aerial photographs of the oil sands region, and although his view is activist, as one can see from the captions, the images are beautiful.  How is it that our visual acuity has been trained to find abstraction so sublime.  Context is removed and we gaze at such images with the appreciation other eras gave to flowers or girls with pearl earrings.  This is precisely what is so dangerous about the removal of context, scale, consequences and facts.  They are removed.  

We need people such as Louis Helbig to keep explaining not just his photographs, but the abstract nature of the oil sands enterprise itself.  Whatever it does there is a diagram on the map with pipelines dotted in to Texas, maybe to Prince Rupert and on to China.  It is a series of mirrored glass office towers in Calgary and Houston. It is every plastic bag we throw hopefully into the recycling bin, it is the cloud of exhaust everytime we start our cars. 

Melchior's hands

Jan Stephan van Calcar. Portrait of Melchior von Brauweiler, 1540. Louvre, Paris

When lassitude and indolence were virtues.  One must never care too much.

Stalingrad

Vitaly Arutyunov The Mamayev Hill series, First prize, World Press Photo 1987.©RIA Novosti / TopFoto

The caption to this image reads (with a bit of editing): 'the 52m-tall monument The Motherland Calls was the tallest statue in the world when erected in 1967.  Mamayev Kurgan overlooks the city of Volograd, formerly Stalingrad, in southern Russia. The name in Russian means tumulus of Mamai. Today, Mamayev Kurgan features a memorial complex commemorating the Battle of Stalingrad.'

TopFoto is such an interesting place: each day an image from exactly 50 years ago.  It is hardly ancient history, but not only is the past a different country, but the past seems a curiously innocent and optimistic country.  1961: people had survived the war, life was getting prosperous, tragedies were passionately commemorated, as above, on the eve of the Cold War. 

Fernando Brízio at the Antigo Convento da Trindade

From EXD'11 in Lisbon.  Click on the image to go to David Pereira's beautiful sequence of photographs of this exhibition.

David Pereira, photographer. Don't Look Back | Fernando Brízio | Desenho Habitado | Antigo Convento da Trindade

rockfall net

Rockfall netting, Trans-Canada Highway, Kicking Horse Pass near Golden BCThis is a prosaic image of the steel mesh curtains in the Kicking Horse Pass just east of Golden, on a dangerous, narrow, steep, winding part of the Trans-Canada where there is only half a shoulder and no where to stop.  I usually pass these curtains in the winter and have seen them covered in hoarfrost, or wet and shimmering in the sun, or packed with snow.  They are very beautiful, but it is suicidal to try to take a photo of them while driving.  And one cannot stop.  

This is Burgess Shale territory and both the highway and the railway tracks sit on narrow ledges hacked out of the cliffs cut by the Kicking Horse River.  These cliffs, limestone and slate, shatter with the freeze/thaw cycle and crumble away landing on the road surface, thus the curtains which hang in front to catch falling rock.

A little farther east, the rubble beside the road is pale green, a particular formation that is compressed calcium carbonate, they say.  All this rock is fragile, it weathers easily and continuously.  The road is in a permanent state of repair and reconstruction and is often closed.  There is no radio signal, cell phones do not work: one is in the middle of a large stretch of unalloyed geology.  There are gabions, there are straw erosion bales, there are curtains, there are tiny cars and trucks hurtling their way through it all, there are accidents and a primitive understanding that this is still a dangerous landscape.

gabions 2

Gabions at Studland Beach, Dorset

Gabions counter erosion on beaches, usually under soft cliffs such as limestone and sandstone, or they protect roads and paths next to the beach. Lots of them in soft calcareous and slatey southern England: above, Studland Beach in Dorset, tidy genteel gabions made by a masonry culture – they look like dry stone walls.  Below, rough gabions in rough, granitey Scotland.

Duncan Astley. Gabions at Loch Hourn, Corran, ScotlandGabions are transparent to water, but obstruct larger things: sand and rock. A near-perfect solution, water is not thwarted, it comes and goes, but in a diminished way, its force absorbed by the gabion.  The fill would be formless and weak if not held in place by the wire cage which, with the lightest of touch, forms a fighting unit of rubble.

gabions

Breach in the north wall of Fort Sumter filled with gabions, 1865. Federal Navy, seaborne expeditions against the Atlantic Coast of the Confederacy, 1863-1865.

Two more weak systems: wicker baskets and piles of rocks that together can fortify a rampart.  This particular kind of gabion can also be found in Viollet-le-Duc's Issu du Dictionnaire raisonné de L'architecture française du XIe au XVIe siècle.  Viollet-le-Duc. Gabions, 1856.

The same system is in military use today: Hesco Bastions are flat wire-reinforced canvas bags that spring open to make a drum which is then filled with material at hand. 

Donovan Wylie. Mountain Position. Mas Sum Ghar. Kandahar Province, Afghanistan, 2011This is a Canadian Forces FOB.  Hesco Bastions form a palisade. It all seems so fragile, scaffolds and gabions, yet they are capable of great protective strength. 

a luxury of bamboo sticks

bamboo scaffolding, Cambodia

Haven't much information on this photo, but it is from Vulgare, a most interesting landscape blog from France. 

Clearly this scaffold has something to do with cliff stabilisation: two weak systems pressed against each other to hold everything in place.  The tires at the bottom of the unscaffolded part are another such solution: gabions holding back the base.  And the shade arbour in the foreground, another fragile structure that in certain circumstances could be life-saving.  This is an unpeopled photograph of a scene dense with human need and activity.

scaffolded domes

Taj Mahal, 1942To protect the dome of the Taj Mahal during the Second World War, it was buried in a thicket of scaffolding.  India was full of RAF bases that serviced the Burma Campaign, nearby cities were often targetted by the Japanese: for example Dum Dum airfield was near Calcutta which was bombed several times. 

The construction of the Taj Mahal in 1633 used a brick scaffold, rather than the more usual bamboo scaffolding.  The dome is brick, sheathed in marble.  The brick scaffold was as large as the building itself, built to carry the marble slabs.  It is an interesting relationship between the kind of scaffolding used and the weight of materials: hand sized bricks, laid incrementally, although monumental when finished are small units.  The marble was of a different order completely, lifted and placed by ropes and pulleys attached to the scaffold. 

The other great wartime dome survival story is St Paul's Cathedral in London, which survived. This dome is a lightweight skin over a sturdy brick cone that supports it. The scaffold is internal structure. 

Section through the dome of St Paul's Cathedral

scaffold skins

Todd Architects and Civic Arts/Eric R Kuhne. Titanic Belfast section, 2010

Found the steel plate in a section of Titanic Belfast.  Ships, the sea, icebergs: lots to work with here.  In the 1970s going by ship was still the cheapest way to cross the Atlantic.  The last crossings were made by the Baltic Steamship Company, with the MS Alexandr Pushkin in 1980 and Polish Ocean Lines' MS Stefan Batory in 1988.  They were wonderful boats, very soviet, classless but strict social divisions between crew and passengers.  The ships clanked, food and wine was plentiful, one showered in salt water.  

Below is part of Titanic Belfast in construction.  The scaffolding sits lightly, almost a shimmer on the surface, a different system from the building envelope, but that hovers just inches away from that envelope.  There is a romance in this too: scaffolding is the sign of the hand, as it is there for construction workers who are literally hand-making the building.  Scaffold shows; the finished building is smooth and silent when the scaffolding comes down, finished.  Scaffolding is evidence of the process of building – an exciting thing.

Titanic Belfast in construction. Architects' Journal, 9 August 2011

hubris titanicus

Adding the cladding. Todd Architects and Civic Arts/Eric R Kuhne, Titanic Belfast, 2011

Wreaking triumph out of disaster.  From Todd Architects' description of the Titanic museum:

Titanic Belfast, the iconic centrepiece of the Titanic Quarter regeneration – 75 acres of waterfront to the south side of the River Lagan and adjacent to Belfast city centre. Designed with leading international practice Civic Arts/ Eric R Kuhne & Associates it is a multi–functional world–class tourism and leisure attraction, housed within a dramatic sculptural form, overlooking the birthplace of the world famous ship ‘Titanic’. With financial backing from government and Belfast City Council completion is targeted for the first quarter of 2012, to coincide with the centenary of the launch.

Oh, why not.  Valourise the iceberg that knocked the Titanic to pieces. 

What sort of narrative is going on here with the architecture?  Of course an iceberg offers a more contemporary museum-buildings-as-dramatic-sculpture look than piles of rusty steel plate, but isn't the whole Titanic brand a bit tainted?  a bit emblematic of a doomed over-confidence?  The 'world famous ship Titanic' was only world famous because it sank.  Its sister ship, Olympic, ploughed the seas in dazzle paint throughout WWI, and continued as a working ocean liner until 1935, but didn't sink and isn't famous.

It has its fans though:

political scaffolds

Harland and Wolff Shipyard, Belfast. Building the Titanic, ca 1910.

This is the Titanic under construction at the Harland and Wolff Shipyards in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 1910.  In this three-dimensional thicket of scaffolding, gantries and cranes sits the two halves of the hull.  Steel plate is stacked in the foreground.  

Harland and Wolff still exists, today building wind farms and other renewable energy infrastructural components.   In the 1960s with the demise of passenger liners, the shipyard made tankers, drilling ships and oil platforms, subsequently it made bridges, aircraft carriers and cruisers and in the 2000s diversified into wind and tidal turbines.

At its peak in the late 19th century it employed 35,000 workers and was one of the largest shipyards in the world, with migration of workers from throughout England, Scotland and Ireland.  Partition of the six north counties from the rest of Ireland and Home Rule, proposed in 1914 and adopted in 1920, meant that the deep embedded energy in the shipyard and in its workforce remained in British control.  Reasons for partition have always been given as sectarian, but it could also be that Britain did not want to lose this very important resource.  

By 1989 the shipyard was reduced to just 3,000 workers and was taken over by the Olsen Line of Norway.  Harland and Wolff had been in decline since the 1960s, the consequent unemployment contributing to the Troubles of the 1970s and 80s.  

This started with a photo of some quite interesting scaffolding and the Titanic, a story everyone knows but does not associate with Belfast, although the City of Belfast is working hard to overcome that with its renewed Titanic Quarter.  The scaffolding is also the complex political structure that was erected around the shipyard that kept it going, providing employment, when so many other yards in England and Scotland closed.  It wasn't altruism, it was part of the negotiations.

Britain plans to build 7,5000 wind turbines in the next ten years, and because of the public dislike of wind farms, tidal turbines are increasing.  There is lots of work here for Belfast.

scaffolds

17 December 1985: scaffolding removed from Liberty's hand

Scaffolding allows us proximity to some very large myths.

T. Earle. Captain H E White, ca 1930, from a time when people still painted portraits.. WWI officers seemed to keep their ranks as a kind of honorific, although they were no longer in the army.

The Great War 1914-1918  67,000 enlisted Canadians killed, 173,000 wounded.
The Second World War 1939-1945  44,093 enlisted Canadians killed.  

The elision of these two wars, the poppies, the cenotaphs, the minute of silence, with contemporary veterans of ISAF in Afghanistan overlooks the fact that in the two world wars, everyone was a volunteer, rather than a professional soldier.  Today, the Canadian Forces Reserve of 27,000 members, volunteer part-time while they maintain their separate careers in the public sector.  CF: 68,000 total.  This is equal to the number of Canadians killed in WWI.  We were in Afghanistan for 10 years and lost 158 soldiers, we were in WWI for four years and lost 68,000, and in WWII for five years and lost 44,000.  The numbers are shocking.  

Below are the Attestation papers for H E White who in 1914 was 39, had four children and was happy as a clam surveying new railway routes in the Clearwater, the Rockies west of Red Deer.  His survey team consisted of him, his brother and an aboriginal crew, from whom he learned all sorts of interesting medical survival treatments using leaves and twigs.  A trapper came across their camp and told them that England was at war; they packed up, walked out and enlisted.  Harry took the whole family to England and spent the war in the Orkneys in a huge camp at Scapa Flow, the gateway to the North Sea.  He lived.  Charlie, his younger brother, was killed in the trenches almost immediately.  

The point is that they volunteered to enlist.  They weren't drafted, they weren't forced to go, they weren't soldiers.  
Of the 44,000 killed in WWII, they had ambitions of ordinary lives as teachers, librarians, artists, salesmen, farmers.  They didn't necessarily have a great desire to be a career soldier driving them to enlist.  They just did and damn it, they were killed.

 

Donovan Wylie 2: the architecture of war

Donovan Wylie's Kandahar outposts

copyright Donovan Wylie, Magnum. Observation Post. Exact location unknown. Kandahar Province. Afghanistan, 2011

Although Canada was part of ISAF and in Kandahar Province until just this summer, we rarely saw where they were.  Rick Mercer went to the base at Kandahar, stood in front of Tim Hortons, we saw ramp ceremonies, CF members sent messages back to their families at Christmas on CBC, but it was all in the bright lights of tv cameras and the cleanliness of the main base.  Even news reports of the poppy fields being destroyed were as beautiful as poppies are.

Donovan Wylie, a Belfast photographer, was embedded with the Canadian ISAF contingent and funded through the Bradford Fellowship 2010/11 from Bradford College, the University of Bradford and the National Media Museum, located in Bradford.  His series of photographs of FOBs is on display at the National Media Museum until mid-February 2012, and will be published in an accompanying book. 

Forward Operating Bases are just that: the forward part of the line, observation posts usually made of hesco bastions, and very, very vulnerable.  This is the Afghanistan in which our forces did their tours, and in which 158 died: dusty, brown, lunar, lonely.  We, in Canada, were never shown this environment.  Our various ministers of defence never walked into these outposts on IED mined tracks.  They never lived there.  

One of the characteristics of WWI and the horror of its trench warfare was the eternally cheerful letters from the front sent to families back home. And when those who survived finally did make it home, they never talked about it.  After seeing Wylie's photographs, I feel that we in Canada were let down by our national media, who also sent cheerful reports from the front.  Why is PTSD as epidemic as it is?  Perhaps it is because hardly anyone is talking about what happened. 

signs of remembrance

Moina Michael, secretary to the YMCA in New York, started the wearing of the poppy in remembrance of Armistice Day, November 11, 1918. Through the American and the French YMCA, poppies were sold to raise money for war widows and their families.  She started by buying silk poppies at a trimmings store: the poppies actually looked like poppies.  Today, the poppy-wearing nations, generally the Commonwealth, have distinctive poppy shapes, abstracted from the original.

In Grade 2 in the annex to Craigflower School that we had, and in love with things miniature, I remember inspecting my poppy: it had the red bit, and in the centre a black piece of felt with a serrated edge and in the centre of that a tiny bright green felt dot that the pin went through.  The petals were flocked cardboard, on the back it said the poppy had been made by veterans of Canada.  The Canadian poppy was first worn in 1922, made by disabled vets in workshops in Toronto and Montreal, sponsored by the Department of Soldiers Civil Re-establishment (later Veterans Affairs).  It provided them a small income.

The Legion eventually took over production, and poppy production is now outsourced to a private company.  Today our poppies are stamped out of flocked plastic, so light and slippery that it is impossible to keep them on your coat unless you bend the straight pin with pliers into a sharp hook. However, ours look good on TV as they are so graphic: circular, black centre. 

The British poppy has only two petals, a plastic stem and a leaf. It is made by the British Legion in their factory in London.  As late as 2008 their poppy appeared to have four petals, circular, with leaf, but somehow two petals have been lost, or there are alternative poppy producers in Britain.

A Flanders poppy, Great Britain between the wars. Modern British poppy

The ANZAC poppy in New Zealand is similar, but without the leaf, felt not paper, and has a flag attached for the Returned Servicemen League. ANZAC Day is April 25th; Remembrance Day is a more minor memorial event. ANZAC poppies were made in New Zealand from 1931 until 2010 when the contract was moved to Australia where poppies are now assembled using parts made in China.

ANZAC poppy, New ZealandThe Australian poppy (seemingly different from the ANZAC poppy, it is a bit confusing here) is a lovely thing, it actually looks like a poppy.  First sold in 1921, the poppies were imported from France where they had been made in orphanages.  The proceeds went to the RSL for its veterans' welfare work and to the orphanages.   It seems still to be made by the Returned Services League but can't find details.

Malcolm Cowe, November 12 2010, Perth, Western Australia

In Scotland, poppies have been made in Lady Haig's Poppy Factory in Edinburgh since 1926.  It still employs 40 disabled ex-servicemen who hand-make 5 million poppies, crosses and wreaths a year.  They make a range of poppies, including these long stemmed silk poppies out of silk.  

Lady Haig's Poppy Factory poppies. Sir Alastair Irwin, Edinburgh.The poppy has never become a general symbol that slips between war and peace, battle and non-violence.  It is absolutely lodged in that one event, the Armistice at the end of The Great War, the war to end all wars, but the terms of which led to the Second World War and on to the Cold War.   It is, in McCrae's poem whence it all springs, a reminder of what are now called 'boots on the ground' – the actual people who fight our wars.

V

Winston Churchill demonstrating a British V for victory against Nazi Germany.

V for victory is how it was used by Churchill in WWII.  We know now how very close Britain was to defeat; it was important for Churchill to show indomitable surety that victory was nigh.  
It is a combination of the hand of solidarity and the letter V.  It is also the two-fingered Cub salute: the two fingers are the ears of Akela, the wolf cub.  You remembered that didn't you?

Victory and peace.  We also know now that victory does not automatically mean peace.  Nixon used to hold both hands up in a fractal of two-fingered Vs at the end of a two-armed V – this where the V for victory in Vietnam was at odds with the V meaning Peace, man.  Throughout the late 1960s and early 70s peace meant withdrawal, not victory, an absence of victory as the battle was given up rather than waiting for defeat.  

The V hand sign has emerged again in the Arab Spring, where valour, valediction, validity and victory has been signed by every child, every woman, every student and rebel in each country as entrenched power structures were dismantled.  Tunisia and Egypt's demonstrations were non-violent resistance movements; this didn't work in Libya and isn't working in Syria.  Here V stands for a victory not of the individual who as he is rushed off on a stretcher manages to lift a hand and weakly flash two fingers, no, here the victory is for a people who will never go back, no matter what it takes, even if it takes generations.  

A young Libyan girl flashes the "V sign" with her two fingers painted with the old national flag's colours, during a demonstration against Libyan leader Moamer Kadhafi outside the court house of Benghazi.Shockingly, in looking for the images here, I found recent pictures of Ahmedinijad in Iran and Saif al Qadhafi both complacently saluting their audiences with a V: here they are indicating their roots in revolutionary movements from a long, long time ago.  The green flag of Qadhafi's revolutionary movement, the target in the Libyan uprising, represented the Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya: green is the traditional colour of Islam.  Green was the colour of protest in Iran in 2009, one sees on the news Palestinian coffins draped in green.  The V and Green seem to be very specific in their applications depending on which people are using them, where and at what stage are their revolutions.

There is something about all these symbols and signs that coalesce around peace, non-violence and solidarity, and revolution, war and victory.  These conditions seem to be all very closely linked and the symbols oscillate between them.