plastic bag with styrofoam box in a tree

plastic 

bag 

with 

styrofoam 

box 

in 

a 

tree

heavy industry

heavy industry

what happens 
when a phone
is switched
on
in my pocket 
on a sunny day
or
complete uncertainty.

Two abandoned beige vinyl chairs

Two abandoned beige vinyl chairs were dumped near our house. Probably from a van, probably because the tip was closed, and the owners didn't give a toss. Some, all or none of that is true apart from the fact of the two ugly chairs sitting entangled in the back lane on a cloudy cold spring day. Though it was in fact June.

They sat there for a few days, a week. Then they were gone, between one day and the next. A minor irritation and now just a memory of the pale flesh vinyl, the thick flat arms and the stunted heaviness which was in contrast to the stacked arrangement, an almost apology for being there. 

I'm going back over thing that have occurred in the past 100 days, stuff that is completely off everyone's radar including my own. And I'm writing about photographs and possibly even Photography. 

That is attempting to dance about architecture? Maybe, but not necessarily. Something has happened. The divide of purpose and intention, amusement and political statement, the location of the right response and the raw stumps of the wrong is now much clearer. Black Lives Matter, Forensic Architecture. Martin Parr, Nan Goldin, and the almost totality of Instagram. 

The pandemic has piled up - the chairs? - so many 'issues', a code word for facts with bruises. And I'm forced to the sidelines to watch through a restricted slot as things fall apart. The pandemic spreads the facts of everyday life very thinly. To engage requires picking up threads and getting drawn into explaining, 'symbolising' the content and the location as some kind of statement about it.

Even the repetitions of hack / pro photographers, or streets in Stavanger or the shouted farewell as someone leaves Instagram, as I leave Flickr. Photography might be at a point of change, as it usually is.

A partially collapsed BBQ

A partially collapsed BBQ

Today, 30/6/20, is the the however manyeth of Covid19. Neither celebration nor mourning, it has like the Fear against which Frank Herbert wrote the Litany, in "Dune", passed. Unlike the Fear, it remains as well. I know people who have had it and those that think they've had it. Neighbours, friends, my brother-in-law. Jill and I have shielded, as the parlance has it. Restrictions over and above the 'normal'; no shops, no people closer than the gate, online shopping, a box for quarantined deliveries. The significance of 72 hours as a mark of safety, and the complete absence of dreams. For obvious reasons, no one will willing let their unconscious loose on the current situation : a pandemic being managed by half wits who constantly worry about how their incompetence is being greeted by quarter wits. 

And this leads to the partially collapsed BBQ, which I saw on Sunday 28/6 moored on paving slabs in the local park. The previous evening the air was blue with BBQ smoke and talk/laugh. The BBQ seems to be "symbolic", a 3D rendering of some kind of sociability modulated into the key of outdoor, holiday and drinking. A prop in a staged version of normal as an aspiration. And it falls down, knees knackered and headless, disguised as a suitcase, shut down and partially open. A miniature dinosaur.

After trump and the UK Referendum, the FN in France and Wilders and the Alternatif fur Deutschland and on and on. And then South Korea?!

trump is clearly the pus finally coming out of a broken and amoral politics and neoliberal economics. But they are not the same. American political practice - constitution, electoral college and the shell parties which mean nothing and then try to mean something. And the most polled political system couldn't see it coming until the moment of impact.

The ethics of maintaining a broken system because anything else might....

The complete vacuum of political action - a rectangle of people at a road junction in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, the almost "moral rearmament" tone [...we have to change], the completely empty faces of the apparatchiks behind trump as he explained why he had settled the fraud case against his "university", the third division fuckwits he has disinterred to be Attorney General and head of the CIA. 

Bankrupt and failing, listening to Twitter feeds and believing nutjob talk radio and farcebook and Hillary only lost by 0.00001% and now Amerika is in trouble [aka "waiting for a message of some kind"].

The political system has collapse and been replaced by performance. 

A mass movement to oppose trump?
In a heavily armed political structure?
Where diversity and process can stop the force of gravity?
And no one remembers ........very much.

And the pronoun problem : WE or YOU.

Empty Saturday

Empty as in devoid.
Neighbours are heading for Florida in August, barely anyone visible. A Sunday pretending to be otherwise. 

By 1PM, stunned people try to drive cars, but little has changed. 

More distant neighbours are getting work visas for the US and will disappear.

I'm sure the light changes at this time - August and a long way north - there's a catch in the light, an angle, a temperature, a shadow. 

Just a sense of time passing further away.

Bookface

I've avoided BookFace for a while, about a month. It's now peppered with "suggested pages", ads and nonsense. The nonsense is mainly human created, trivia dug from the trivia mines and "shared". Selfies, the red hot news that America is a shit hole run by racists and at risk of electing one as president. A thin spray of helpless references to conflicts we can only experience in nightmares or in 12 second bursts on BookFace.

And endless yakking and holiday snaps and phone videos.

And then I find that a real human being who I actually know [not virtually] is leaving and going to Ethiopia and has invited me and many others for a farewell drink, tonight! As in TODAY! Lauren Elliott, maybe 24, going back to Ethiopia for the 3rd time. 

Young people! I wish I was 40 years younger, I honour and respect them for actually doing and not just wishing.

Paradox.