Starting Over

Well that was quite a month, everything happening at the same time, but I can't have 'Death' up as the last post for 'Waking Up Is Hard To Do'. It just wouldn't be right to leave it hanging there like that.
However I do associate WUIHTD with the last years of my time in London, and the gradual, or perhaps not so gradual, realisation that things just weren't working for me there anymore.
So what do you do? You make plans, and you hope, that if you keep going at it, if you are persistent enough, those plans will come off. I tell you it is not easy, that process of extrication, not easy at all, and it's not cheap either, the world is so complex that getting out of any situation means you have to pay.
But if you look at it in the longer term, you give yourself a chance, and that chance, in my case and in Julie's, was worth taking. Here we are in Pontypridd, high up looking over the valley, in our back yard (almost) enjoying the big sky and the rich autumn tones, rediscovering how to walk, how to ride, how to see, perhaps even how to feel.
So I'm going to close this project for now, since, perhaps, I have actually woken up. Other nightmares are bound to follow, and I'm starting other projects, projects that will document our new world, and the rather different challenges we face. It's time to make the best of it, we've moved on, what a relief.

Death

I am surrounded by death. My father in-law died on Wednesday, my own father went in to hospital the same day and I'm not convinced he will leave it. All this puts your life in purgatory, largely punctuated by sad moments in pubs.
Meanwhile both Julie and I left our jobs and are moving to Wales. Thankfully we know, solidly, and forever, we exit London town on the 1st October. The sense of discombobulation is extreme, and then there is every body else to worry about.
Amidst hospital visits and every night in strange beds, my brother took us to a record shop in Market Deeping, above a sweet shop. I recommend this bloke. He had some great gear. He even had Aerosmith's Rocks.
But my brother and I both bought the same record, which was a bit weird, both because amidst the collection there were two copies, and that we both selected Dire Straits Communique to take 'home' with us independently. We didn't remark on it at the time but since I haven't stopped playing the record since, I believe there may be some strange significance.
Communique was the first Dire Straits album I bought and there are lovely things within, and in our worry, my brother and I text our appreciation of this record, he says he loves the clarity of the guitar playing, I just love the misery in 'News' and 'Where do ya Think your Going', as well as the clarity of the guitar playing.
I bought the record a long time ago and lost it along the way. So sometime in 1979 I bought it and it meant something. Now it seems to mean more. I'm glad, amidst all this loss, I find something.

Last Day

Picasso 1932

It was Julie's birthday yesterday. It's hot, the bus ride to the Millennium bridge was hardly pleasant. But the giant shop that is Tate Modern was at least air conditioned, even if the circulation, for an architect, remains infuriating. So hot and infuriated, we chose Picasso first, and Shape of Light second. I recommend you see both in the same morning; they offer a good contrast.
We bought just three postcards from the Picasso show. There they are, above, obscuring the rather dull birthday cards you tend to receive when you are over fifty. Considering these paintings were done in the space of a few days in 1932, they come astonishingly fresh.
They hang together in exactly that order, the two on the right larger than the one on the left. The two on the right feature the same aspidistra. I don't care if it's an aspidistra or not, it's just the same plant. And it's the same Marie Terese too; all over the show. You can't help thinking that throughout 1932, she must have spent a whole lot of time sitting around half naked in that particular arm chair. You also can't help thinking how pissed off Olga must have been looking at this endless succession of amazing paintings of Picasso's new love. To be a great artist, it's clear, you really don't give a damn, and that is the biggest lesson of this show.
There is not doubt that the two on the right are masterpieces, they are the two paintings in a big show that draw your breath. Overall, the show demonstrates just how much art a great modern painter could make in a year, and that takes your breath away too, but those two paintings in particular, are just magnificent.
But to be Picasso must have been a bit of a strain. In becoming Picasso, he's also damaged goods. That's the second lesson from this show; there's just too much him.
Moving in to Shape of Light, across the opposite side of the third floor galleries, you'd be pressed to find any personality at all. Thats the thing about photography, it's a thankfully more introverted pursuit, sitting in that dark room, carefully working print after print, looking for perfection. Where Picasso is large and immediate, photography is small and time consuming; literally often enough; small enough for you to notice the mounting and the framing. Julie said that's why there are more girls; stashed away in those dark rooms; avoiding display. I couldn't help thinking 'the oldies are the goldies'; the photograms from the Bauhaus era whisk you away. Whisk you where? To a space of optimism and faith in the future. What's telling is that as you move through that exhibition, you slowly lose it; you trudge forward to fuck all; to screens. So you might think photography over in a 'click' but it isn't. The thing about Shape of Light is the realisation that it is precisely not about the moment or the personality, but of that time secluded in the dark room. Instagram it is not, craft it is, or was.

Chucking it In

I was tempted to title this blog 'At Last I am Free' but the Robert Wyatt reference is perhaps a little over considered. 'Chucking it In' could be a Dr Feelgood album title, and feels slightly earthier; more Canvey, more me. Yes, so I've finally chucked it in, after twenty seven years at the university enough suddenly became enough, the camels back bent one bit too far, the end of tether was reached, and, thank goodness, they let me go.

I may not have the severance package exactly in my pocket yet, but the dopamine levels certainly shift upward. I smile in the street. People use the word 'elated'; like you must be 'elated'. They use the word freedom a lot too. I'm not sure exactly what I feel personally, all I've noticed is that propensity to smile in the street and a sudden recognition of records that suddenly seem highly appropriate in a way they never did before; Ramble On, Freebird, Further on up the Road; all these have acquired new significance as if made exactly for me, and when they suddenly crop up in one pub or another, it's as if the gods are smiling on me personally.

Why did I do it? is it time of life or time of man? Both. We have to build our house in Wales or we will never do it. Meanwhile, education is being decimated by both technology and endless stupidity. This, of course, a consequence of capitalism/consumerism/call it what you like; but over all it has become impossible to render the spade as a spade, or accept the shovel, the chance to shine becoming the endless pursuit of so called innovation, with the product the equivalent of extravagant Christmas decorations; useless and trivial. 

I supposed for a long time I've functioned as some kind of hand brake on my own institution's fantasies, but brake pads eventually fade. Now I look at that long list of posts floating in on Facebook; lovely stuff from students complimentary on this or that. That makes me smile too, but I know now, it's time to fly away, yes, Fly Like an Eagle, that's it, just like that.

Aldington at Bledlow

That's not Peter Aldington, the creative force within Aldington Craig and Collinge, but me standing in-front of the trike and Adlington's award winning housing at Lyde End in Bledlow of 1977. It could have been Peter, in some parallel dimension, for he also sports quite a beard, and certainly in terms of empathy, there is so much for me to admire here. I wish I had but a small percentage of his talent. As it was, when I met him long ago, he admired my sketchbooks, but it's in the marshalling of physical building material that Aldington should be admired; in the detail certainly, and in the care of conception. This is a masterful arrangement of wall, roof, and infill panel, reminding me of the rigorous work of Ted Cullinan when in California (Marvin House,1960, below), but knitted more agriculturally in to the Chiltern village setting. It even manages, in it's quality, to doff it's cap to lord, master and enlightened patron Lord Charrington across the road, who undoubtedly recognised quality when he saw it (he died this week) reminding us of some old school values sadly disappearing.

It is tempting to say Aldington created a repertoire of building details from first principles (and I learnt a few of these when working for Donald Wilson as he set about fashioning doors and windows for some cottages in Dorset in 1980) but they are unusual. To set plate glass directly in to a brick wall with the aid of not much more than craftsmanship and mastic is unconventional, so is letting glass slip down to eliminate the cill (a Wilson trick) and you might expect a high risk of failure. However, returning to Lyde End after forty years the place looks as fresh as a daisy; all that bespoke stuff worked!

In a world now obsessed by smooth, floating singularity, transfixed by the malleable in all senses, this is a refreshing return to the world of articulation part from part. Each element is not expected to do everything, but to play it's part and find expression in doing so. A concrete beam slips six inches further out than where it might stop, a window detail within clapboarding is different to that within masonry. Each material either goes around a corner or finds itself butted and secured against something else. Further, nobody has forgotten the garden and the husbandry that mirrors that of the building art, they compliment each other; after all, a rose is not a tulip.

Cardiff via the Lighthouse Road

Cardiff city centre is one of the most pleasant of any large city, largely down to it's urban grain of streets and arcades. The arcades accommodate the smaller businesses that keep the place lively, as opposed to the deadening effect of yet another John Lewis. That's not to say that Cardiff doesn't accommodate those behemoths too, but if the department store dies as a type, the multiple arcades could sustain all sorts of activity. 

Conventionally, you'd drive into Cardiff on this dual carriageway or that, but we dropped off the A48 at Newport to take the coast road (B4239) via St Brides and Peterstone; the Lighthouse Road. It's not much more than a track crossing the salt marsh and must be the strangest way to enter a city imaginable. These are the badlands, not literally perhaps, but certainly an area yet to be caught up with; an area of rubbish and wildlife and tethered horses, catteries and kennels and shacks. For somebody from Essex, it has charm. Approaching from the east brings you in to the docklands and Rumney; roundabouts, trucks, potholes and anonymous warehouses; lots of them, and ahead, the acrid air of demolition. The road skirts the remains of the big piece of industry (above) in a fog of dirt and suddenly your in a line of filthy traffic moving like some kind of ragged military convoy; signposted to Cardiff Bay.

This I suppose, is regeneration, but you can't be happy about it. The buildings of our 'new' industries are hardly less depressing than those of the old; stock built wrap arounds sporting various attempts at pattern making; as two dimensional as the means of their production; that occasional wonky angle nursing a sterile meeting room; or an atrium of bad chairs. This kind of architecture has now began it's march on the city centre itself, and it's a terribly sad thing. Such buildings are essentially good for nothing. They are as thin as the bank notes and contracts they represent.