BAGDContext CSM

How to travel in style…

I’m often a bit disappointed by the lettering and typographic design on vans, lorries and trains….so, I’m delighted by this. I love it. Click on the picture to see it bigger.

The democratic and republican origins of the US has tended towards a mythologising of ordinary people and the intrinsic dignity and heroism of blue-collar America. Nowadays, this is still evident in the RnB of Bruce Springsteen…and in the long tradition of US street photography.

Lewis Hine played an important role in developing the visual representation of ordinary life. He’s most famous for his iamges of steepljacks building NYC skyscrapers…and them having picnic lunches atop the scaffold…

Here are some of his railway pictures

Hine was a socioligist who used hos photographs as evidence for social reform. He played an important role in the the reform of child labour laws…

Upton Sinclair is anothe rfigure who s important in establishing an agenda for social reform. Sinclair famously wrote about the brutal working conditions in the livestock markets, yards and abattoirs of the Chicago railhead…the book is called, The Jungle (1906).

Sinclair also wrote about the adventures of Sergei Eisenstein in Hollywood and Mexico.

More recently, the British film director, Peter Greenaway, has made a film about Eisenstein in Mexico.

The government are considering ending the distinction between forst and second class on trains in the south-east…good idea, but why not all first class? Let’s elevate everyone; not drive them down…

The BBC website has a story about Geoff and Vicky, who are visiting every railway station in Britain.

There’s a little film, here

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/in-pictures-40341771

The BBC website is showing a slideshow of john Sanderson’s photographs of empty rail tracks…strangely unsettling.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/in-pictures-40341771

Here are three lovely enamelled loco badges…

Here is a screengrab from the trailer for the new Doctor Who adventure…it has a steam loco, on a bridge, heading for a pyramid…

We love Doctor Who…the present Doctor, a slightly manic Peter Capaldi as Univeristy professor, is terrific and an obvious role-model. Yesterday’s adventure got even better when a mysterious pyramid suddenly appeared….of course pyramids can’t just appear… it’s an alien spaceship! Who would have guessed that?

Also, the Doctor is President of the World…I wish

Of course, all the world’s armies are camping near by, and are ready to destroy the thing…but, it turns out the aliens have a special tech-ray…and anyway, they just want to be loved…but not in good way.

The pyramid is also an implicit reference to George Clinton’s P-Funk afrofuturism of the early 1970s…brilliant, and with shades of Chariots of the Gods too. Brilliant!

Here is an extract from the wiki page…

Clinton has pointed to the show Outer Limits as an influence in his elaborate narrative, but more importantly, he and Bootsy Collins encountered a UFO together while driving to Detroit… Clinton recalls light bouncing from one side of the street to the other, and remarking to Collins, The Mothership was angry with us for giving up the funk without permission.

The P-Funk mythology was just one tool in the conglomerate’s arsenal. By the mid-70s, Clinton was rebranding funk as many things at once, “an aesthetic, a marketing ploy, a black cultural nationalist battle-plan and a way of being if not a spiritual discipline.” He was drawing on everything from “hipster lingo of the beboppers, early black radio deejays and the apocalyptic anti-slavemassa edicts of the Nation of Islam,” as well as the Yippies and the Black Panthers. Clinton was positioning P-Funk as a “radical response to the American police state” and “the antithesis of everything that was sterile, one-dimensional, monochromatic, arhythmic and otherwise against freedom of bodily expression in the known universe.” In its simplest iteration, Clinton posited that “funk” was equivalent with the “truth.”

George Clinton played with about thirty people on stage…and his sets went on in a jazzy way…it was all a bit anarchic and exploratory for the main stream, and that was just the music. The association with an emancipatory african-based belief system was too much for US music business and for the US political establishment…the appeal to fun was just too dangerous!

If you want a more mainstream version of the same, try Earth Wind and Fire’s brilliant boogie wonderland, marvellous

And thank you, Doctor.

I have just discovered the wonderful world of old railway photographs…and the people in them.

These guys look just like the characters in the Andrew Martin books I’ve posted about just recently.