Observations from a Hill

©Elsewhere   He who meanly admires mean things is a Snob - William Makepeace Thackeray, 1848     Baudelaire, writing in an essay on the Paris Salon of 1859 (Selected Writings on Art & Artists) rounds on photography with a venom born of the arrogance of certainty of place in the world:     '...it is simple common sense that, when industry erupts into the sphere of art, it becomes the latter's mortal enemy...Photography must, therefore, return to its true duty, which is that of handmaid of the arts and sciences, but their very humble handmaid, like printing and shorthand, which have neither created nor supplemented literature...But if once it be allowed to impinge on the sphere of the intangible and the imaginary, on anything that has value solely because man adds something to it from his soul, then woe betide us.'     Thus, in a few paragraphs, he consigns the nascent art of photography to the 'lower ranks' of the means of ...

CP-1 Under Construction - Layer 10     December 2nd 1942. The Atomic Era was ushered in by the first self-sustaining man-made nuclear reaction in Chicago Pile-1, assembled under the west stands of Stagg Field football stadium at the University of Chicago. The experiment was devised by Italian physicist Enrico Fermi and represented the first step towards the development of atomic power generation and of course, the Atomic Bomb. Enrico Fermi     The push for the Bomb to be realised was made all the more urgent five days later when Japan bombed Pearl Harbour and drew the United States into the Second World War.     The outcome of the work that followed led to the dropping of the thus far only two nuclear weapons deployed in anger, killing thousands of Japanese civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.      In the years following, the Cold War between the West and the Soviet Union escalating, new and far more powerful t...

Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz (August 31, 1821 – September 8, 1894)     Hermann von Helmholtz was a physician and physicist who, like most scientists of his era studied, researched and invented across a broad range of subjects, from the physiology of sight and colour vision, to the perception of sound, acoustics and electromagnetism.     What is not widely reported is his influence on the sound of reggae.     In the field of acoustics there is one stand-out invention that in some form or another has moved many a person - on the dancefloor, at parties, or just at home - to dance. The Helmholtz Resonator, or at least it's distant cousin, the bass reflex loudspeaker. Although larger and outdoor venues demand a different approach to bass sound reproduction, the bass reflex was, in its day, the sound of reggae; characterised by deep, powerful, loping basslines that hit you in the solar plexus like a punch from a heavyweight fight...

    Just listening to Simone Dinnerstein's take on Bach's Goldberg Variations, made famous by Glenn Gould's recordings in the 1950's. She has an altogether different approach to them, a softer, perhaps more lyrical rendering - Gould, in some of his recordings (all impeccable and definitive virtuoso performances) had a slightly harder, more academic edge (which I also like); Dinnerstein's performance somehow suits the afternoon here at the moment - it's hot in Fairview Heights (around 28°C in the garden) and the breeze light. This brings me back to thinking of my late parents again. Dad, as I've said, could play the piano by ear: he could listen to a tune and have it down in a couple of minutes. Always and only in the key of F♯ - mostly the black notes - melody on the right hand and a two-chord-vamp on the left. He could play for hours without repeating himself, and consequently found favour at parties and in bars & hotels as the occasion presented it...

Our New Zealand Flax     I've been trying to unearth our New Zealand Flax from the undergrowth that's been threatening to engulf it recently (well, not so recently, to be honest.) It's been in the bottom garden about ten years, so is about half-way mature. It currently stands at about two-and-a-half metres tall and will get to about four metres by the time it reaches twenty years old. It's already a pretty impressive beast, especially when the pannicles (those long branched things that are obviously not its leaves) come into flower. It's botanical name is Phormium Tenax. To give it it's full classification: Kingdom: Plantae Clade: Tracheophytes Clade: Angiosperms Clade: Monocots Order: Asparagales Family: Asphodelaceae Subfamily: Hemerocallidoedeae Genus: Phormium ; J.R. Forst & G. Forst Type Species: Phormium Tenax     This is its full Linnaean classification, as formulated by Carolus Linnaeus in the 18th Century - a way of pinning ...

Lamb Curry (Madras Style) Tamil Nadu - Camellia Panjabi from 50 Great Curries of India     I was going to put together a little homage to Veeraswamy's Madras - I think my great friend Johnny G was probably solely responsible for awakening my nascent love of spice and Indian food in the Seventies. His mom - Maur - used to use Veeraswamy canned curries - Madras, of course! She grew up in India, and the Veeraswamy sauces were redolent of the food she remembered from youth. I remember John bringing a can to Winson Street for a random lunch (bearing in mind that neither of us could cook,)  and we ate - sauce! Magic - Damascene - loved it and have loved Indian food ever since. The picture above is, as the caption says, from a book by Camellia Panjabi - look out for it - the recipe is a corker! I normally don't bother with recipes: I like to wing it and find out if it works or not, but there are one or two that I swear by. This is one of them; it's a bit involved, but t...

Logo by Max Ponty 1947         As this is the second time I've used smoking-related imagery at the head of a post, it might be reasonable to assume that I am missing the habit. Physiologically, probably not, but there's still a certain something to the act of smoking as it used to be before packages looked like postmortem photographs aimed at trainee pathologists.     As cynical as the tobacco industry certainly is, there was degree of complicity with it on behalf of the smoking public. It was a symbiosis founded on addiction and reinforced by image - we saw ourselves reflected in the mirror of our relationship with the heroes & heroines of our youth in the literature, cinema & music that formed our assumed style and fixed our tastes for life.     Thankfully, the tastes that remain no longer include that of tobacco for most of us. Sure miss the image, though.

Partial Eclipse, Llanberis ©2015 Kel Harvey     I've never experienced a total eclipse of the sun, but have seen several partials, and they are still remarkable events. This photograph was taken as that strange calm chill was settling over Llanberis, bringing its unnatural twilight to the afternoon.

Achilleion , Gastouri, Corfu ©2017 Kel Harvey     Jane & I have visited the Achilleion a couple of times over the years. A photogenic but curious place which points to one particular period in Corfiote history, but also serves, along with other curiosities, to illustrate the complexity of that history and Corfu's place in Europe's. The island has variously been governed by most of the major European powers over the centuries: Roman, Venetian, British, French, German - and their collective architectural and cultural influences have left a distinctive mark on this most singular of Greek islands. None is more marked in this respect than the Liston - a French collonade of bars and bistros that could happily sit in Paris or Lyon - on the edge of Spianada Square at the very green middle of which is a cricket square, the obvious influence of British rule in the 19th century. These days, the former conquerors are merely tourists peering back at histories they know littl...

Another Day... There's something perversely beautiful about our current situation...

Enoch & Eli 1957 Ah've 'ad this book a-sixty-three-year, an' ah still get a loff owt'n it! Bostin!

Disconnection ©MMXX Kel Harvey Disconnection           an estrangement           from           a           moment,                      its           existence           itself           a           memory,           un-        sure           un-        fixed           un-     ...

Tracks     Being 'on track', 'going somewhere', 'heading for the top'. Curious phrases. Meaningless to most; survival, procreation and mitigating the agonies of life are the reality for much of the human race; this is the language of the elite. These tritenesses masquerade as opportunity, while obscuring the entrenched inequality that keeps the elite in possession of the means of production and in control of the supply of money they feel duly entitled to. For most people, tracks are a way out of where they are to a better life, somewhere else. At the moment, destinations are extremely thin on the ground - the pandemic has made sure of that.

Holding Time #6 - Anchor-making in Cradley Heath Circa 1978 - ©MMXX Kel Harvey     This image captures the interval between removing the yellow-hot billet from the muffle and swinging it between the working faces of the drop hammer. Two men are required for the process - one to manipulate the hot billet between hammer-strikes, using the dogs and handle clamped to the back of it, and one to operate the treadle regulating the steam to the hammer. In this particular forge, there was only sufficient head of steam for about ten seconds of hammer-work at a time - by then,  the air was so thick with oily vapour that hammer and workpiece couldn't be seen at all.     This particular piece of steel was destined to become the shank of an anchor - at one time this particular manufacture made them for vessels from small river-boats to the largest ocean-going liners. Cradley Heath was at the centre of chain & anchor manufacture in the Black Country right u...

Untitled James Harvey ...on a Wave of Phase...208, Medium Wave: somewhere, a faint trace of the 1960's & the musical conduit of our youth is still rattling out tunes - ah! conservation of energy!  - to species unknown in far-flung celestial neighbourhoods where Radio 1 has still to arrive: Tony Blackburn and The Move yet to wake up; blankets in a heap, to Flowers in the Rain...You've gotta love Physics.

Holding Time #1 ©MMXX Kel Harvey       I thought, hang the C-Word & Boris' travelling Circus for one night - we've ranted enough for the day, so I just made an image and a poem for the evening... Past Tense   a tiny square  of time, fragile and thought lost held thin in silver - a life later Kel Harvey

Image [and hand] ©MMXX Kel Harvey     Heard Community     Have you              Herd             The Worth           of          A Life           of               Immunity?              Or the Price            of               Sanctimony? What Cost-            Benefit gain         Obtains         when        ...

Litanies - ©2019 Kel Harvey     My stepping-back-from-political-comment-in-this-blog is not going so well. Given where we are in history I suppose...what the heck. Here's a poem written well over fifty years ago that I think speaks as true today as then. M. 66                  The politicians,       (who are buying huge cars with hobnailed          wheels the size of merry-go-rounds)              have a new plan.              They are going to               put cobbles               in our eyesockets           ...

    Decisive Moment - a deceptive, slippery phrase that despite its agreed meaning is hard to define. Routinely misused by politicians in showing apparent control over any situation taxing their political survival, it is usually accompanied by other vaguenesses such as 'tipping-point', 'game-changer', 'once-in-a-generation':  the clichés abound, proliferate and obfuscate; repeated & repeated & repeated - blind-prayer-flags snapping against the wind of overwhelming fact .     Historicism in real-time: Twitter/Instagram/WhatEverPlatforms echo the shouts of thousands - millions - of avatars in a space where there is no comeback save ritual humiliation through - text! Anonymously . Thereby hangs the truth - and the lie - of it.     A Decisive Moment by any definition, should decide something, probably irrevocably, changing forever someone or something - a Moment lost in time that cannot be changed or un-done. We are living ...

Canon F1 & a roll of [very] expired Agfa film...     Upcoming experiment. I found this roll of Agfa Ortho 25 film in a camera case that I hadn't opened for some considerable time. It expired in 1994, so I guess it was bought originally around 30 or so years ago. The camera is a rescue item from EBay. I used to own an F1 back in the late Seventies & early Eighties - beautiful piece of kit and in my opinion superior to the more ubiquitous Nikon F-series (having owned & used both [Nikon F & the admittedly brilliant F2], both personally and professionally, I think I'm OK in passing comment).     Anyway, I was just going to write a little about my intention to put this roll of the unknown through the Canon and how I'm going to resurrect an old enlarger and build a darkroom, etc. and that I would post the results if there were any of note.     But, as I opened a bottle of Tuborg I had a vivid flashback to Copenhagen Airport,...

Steve McQueen - 'Le Mans'       Just watching 'The Great Escape' for the umpteenth time - I'm actually old enough to have seen it at the cinema: The Grove Picture House, to be precise. Starring of course, the coolest man in cinema history - Steve McQueen - above on the set of the movie Le Mans & sporting the legendary Heuer watch made famous by the man himself. Aside from the horological connection, the memory of watching films at the old fleapit throughout my youth reminded me that my Dad was for a while, the second-projectionist at the Grove. Fast-forward a number of decades to the early Nineties and your humble narrator spent many an hour grappling with 35mm film at The Electric Mountain in Llanberis, installing and maintaining the best AV show they ever had there with my partners-in-crime Joe Stoner & Joe Watt.    As to the watch - an original with pedigree will be unaffordable to all but the very wealthy - even the re-issue in the pic b...

Guinness - circa 1973 - still unopened        Over the years, I've either lost, given away or had stolen many things. Considering I've moved house no fewer than twelve times in my life, I suppose that's to be expected.     One particular and valued thing we managed to lose permanently; twice. A friend of mine from art college, Jim Fenwick, painted a picture for our wedding in 1979, which unfortunately got lost in our move to North Wales the following year. We told Jim, who duly painted us an exact replica of the original painting 'With a View to a Room I Am' which then, twenty years later, got lost in our move from Brynbella Cottage up to our first place in Rachub. Having lost touch with Jim and not wishing anyway to tempt fate a third time, we chalked it up to experience and let it be.     One thing that I have managed to keep with me over the years, surprisingly, is an unopened half-pint bottle of Guinness which I bought in Bru...

Melin Llynnon - Llantrisant, Ynys Môn - ©2020 Kel Harvey     I guess we're all fed up of tilting at windmills at present. Living for four years in a surreal parallel reality, signing petitions, firing off emails and shouting at the TV and radio day in and day out - now hemmed in by something we can't even see, let alone shout at; protest seems like an empty option sometimes.     But protest is happening - the returning of kids to school is provoking a response from teachers, assistants, heads and families that says 'Not until it's safe...' A boycott here would be natural and unassailable - you can't sanction or imprison all concerned, nor would there be any moral high ground on which the Government could stand. Just a thought. I said I would keep politics to a minimum, but it's getting very difficult to avoid it.     However, on another note, Jane & I have given up tilting at the particular windmill that is cordless phones. Never ...

    Having received news today that London will have eradicated The Virus in a fortnight: Hurray!  [Source - MRC Biostatistics Unit COVID-19 Working Group, Public Health England; via The Daily Telegraph], it looks like a large chunk of England's populace will be looking forward to some kind of return to some kind of normal.     Here in the unsophisticated 'regions', we take a more cautious view however, and cleave to the 'let's not jump the gun' side of the fence, to use a hideously strangled mixed metaphor. Let's be sanguine about our situation and admit that at the moment the chances of 'normal' are a little remote and that it might be prudent to take things a day at a time.     In a time of reflection for many of us, I'd just like to offer a poem by Brian Patten, which kind of sums a lot of stuff up in a very few words.     In a New Kind of Dawn - Brian Patten In a new kind of dawn readjusting your conscience you wak...

My Olympus OM2SP bought in 1986 & Pentax SP500, a recent-ish eBay buy.     You can take the Internet in so many ways. Too most people it amounts to little more than Social Media, games, shopping and watching stuff/listening to music - a bit like a superset of traditional media.     For very early adopters such as myself - pre-web-browser days - it was an enigmatic offshoot of military and then academic enterprise. The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was a US Dept of defense project. Along with the development of packet-switched data and the TCP/IP protocol ((Google 'em ;-) - irony intended - note programmers' balanced brackets here...) the aim was for a nuclear-hardened data comms network based on multiple redundancy. Essentially, if one node of the network is knocked out, the thing as a whole doesn't fall over.     Then came the academic use of the network (I'm précis-ing like mad here, because I want to get to...

Faber Poetry Edition - The War Poems - Siegfried Sassoon This was published in 1918. It resonates in so many ways at the moment.              Great Men The great ones of the earth Approve, with smiles and bland salutes, the rage And monstrous tyranny they have brought to birth. The great ones of the earth Are much concerned about the wars they wage, And quite aware of what those wars are worth. You Marshals, gilt and red, You Ministers and Princes, and Great Men, Why can't you keep your mouthings for the dead? Go round the simple cemeteries; and then Talk of our noble sacrifice and losses To the wooden crosses.              Siegfried Sassoon

Players Number Six - Youthful Folly in a Packet     OK - this is where it started for me. Summer 1966 - pre-Lordswood School. Me, Philip Ranson & Steven Botfield are doing the usual evening wander, as eleven-year-old boys did in the Sixties - around Moilliet, Dugdale and Halberton Streets, messing about. On one, I can't remember which at the moment, but I think it was Moilliet Street, I saw a ten-packet of Number Six in the gutter which looked fresh. Inside were six cigarettes. Philip asked what I was going to do with them and I said, having never smoked in my life at that point,     " I think we ought to smoke 'em... "     Rider - I have now been clean of the tobacco habit for over fifteen years, but the sight of those packets still brings to mind that first, deeply seductive hit of nicotine. Six Number Six - almost the Number of The Beast. And  Number Six: The Prisoner - synergies abound.

Moon & Clouds, Rachub     I've spent a lot of these posts reflecting on the past and I suppose from the viewpoint of a sixty-five-year-old it would seem apposite: and true, I relish the re-awakening of dormant memories, quite often brought into focus in unexpected and unprompted moments. My Dad spoke of this re-emergence of his past as he got older - a simple fact of ageing I think we would do well to mark and take advantage of.     This little blog was a quite deliberate attempt to mark another point of transition from one life into another and also to attempt a discipline my Dad was denied and that I denied myself until now: to write some of this stuff down.     Having been fortunate enough to have had several, quite distinct lives over the last fifty years, I've always internalised each episode as such and when one reaches the end of its natural course, I move on. I suppose, a bit Zen. There is a thread which connects each to the nex...

Summerfield Park Bandstand Concert 1909     Just a little verse - a reflection again of childhood and transition. Summerfield Park was my growing-up space as a child: the closest thing to Herefordshire I had in the City. A green space to hide and play in as a small child, to roll giant snowballs in when school was called off in the long and very hard Winter of 1963, when our teachers gave up teaching in class because the classrooms were as cold as outside and reasoned that we might as well play in the snow for the rest of the day.     All Summer we'd play football, cricket, fly model planes, fight battles, waste time - the commodity which we had in such abundance - watch the Brewery train puff it's way down from Mitchells & Butlers to The Green in the deep cutting at the back of the park, the scent of the ever-present privet blossom in our nostrils.     November - the largest bonfires we'd ever seen - Guy Fawkes night was the event...

Birmingham Workhouse Entrance: The Arch of Tears       On the subject of The Green, I suppose I ought to mention our most infamous contributions as a district to Birmingham City. Winson Green is of course famous for what is now called HMP Birmingham - to us and previous generations: Winson Green Gaol. The Green was also home to a lunatic asylum, a fever hospital and of course the Birmingham Workhouse.     The entrance to the place is in the photograph, and it's nickname 'The Arch of Tears' condenses the indignity, pain and eventual fate of the poor and under-priveleged of the parish into four bitter words.     My Great-Great-Grandfather Godfrey Rudge who was born in Ruabon, Denbighshire died there, a widower, in poverty in 1906.

         The Green. It's what unites us. Ethnicity and history aside, if you're from the Green, that's your tribe. I used to say when asked what my nationality was - "Brummie" but I don't really believe that's true. There is no one 'Brummie' - even in the truest sense, let alone now, when Birmingham appears to include most of the Black Country, Coventry & just about anywhere north of Watford Gap in the public imagination. So I put it to one and all that the true definition (outside of Gwil bach's & my Welsh connections) of Nationhood is that we are all from the great and glorious...Winson Green. Birthplace of Champions. And some blokes who went to Lordswood...

My Great-Uncle Arthur Rudge - progenitor of the Australian branch of the family.     I've been trying to make some sense of a couple of very convoluted family trees, compiled variously by my Dad, his latterly found cousin in Australia and a Judith Stark, who I think was based in Singapore, although I'm hazy on the detail. The family tree in question is the Rudge (Dad's mother's) side. The three trees were assembled in isolation over some twenty years and coalescence only happened after Dad decided to follow up the fate of an uncle of his - Arthur Rudge.     Dad had a memory from childhood that a member of the family had very suddenly upped sticks and gone to Australia. He didn't have any detail, apart from a christian name - Arthur. So, in his early internet-using days, he started trawling around for connections. Eventually, after a lot of back-and-to, he made contact with Gladys. He started an online conversation which led to the realisation that t...

Little Richard 1932-2020     The King & Queen are dead, long live their Majesties. I should  write a piece about this extraordinary man, but plenty of others are doing a better job than I can. So, I thought I'd put a little something down about one of his main influences: Sister Rosetta Tharpe, whom we should have seen at Birmingham Town Hall in 1970 as part of the revue that was 'The American Folk, Blues and Gospel Festival'. Unfortunately, she was too ill to travel at the time, having suffered a stroke and the  subsequent amputation of a leg due to diabetes. She died less than three years later in 1973, aged only 58, after a second stroke.     This YouTube video of 'This Train' showcases what a performer she was and illustrates the influence she had on the stage presence of Little Richard. A great singer and a bloody good guitar player, so she was. I'm still disappointed to this day I didn't have the opportunity to see her live, and sw...

Fairview Heights Late Afternoon     Have been avoiding everything Anniversary-related - not deliberately, but in a getting-on-with-stuff sort of way - today. More garden and building maintenance stuff. I have absolutely nothing against Remembrance of the heinous conflicts that inform our present; to forget is folly of the grandest and most dangerous order. But, to quote from the Max Hastings piece in today's Times:     'On May 8, 1945, a young British officer named Christopher Cross wrote home to his parents from Germany:                 "I suppose I should feel elated, but I feel tired and disgusted. What now, I wonder?"'     The what now? Where do we go from here? Questions that need, and will be asked after our current lockdown situation is over. But it looks like we could be letting ourselves in for more of the same truth-twisting and history-rewriting blame ...

    I first went to to Florence nearly twenty years ago, when I was freelancing for a small company in Bangor, working on European projects involving E-Learning, as it was so quaintly called then. I had no real clue as to the brief, but I was instructed to travel far and wide within the EU, and did so on a number of occasions over the ten months or so I worked for them. I was handsomely rewarded and got to travel, so question did I not. One meeting was scheduled off-season in Firenze, seat of the Medici and home to much art and many artists of the Renaissance. But as any denizen of the Art Room knows, the crowning glory of this glorious city - and it is glorious! - is the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore - the Duomo. Filippo Brunelleschi's topping out of the Cathedral's long, long-standing open roof problem. The Dome. A creation like none before - the largest, self-supporting dome on a building in the world. FB's achievements fill books, so I leave you, dear reader, to...

Ralph & Florian - Kraftwerk - I still have my original vinyl copy        I'm officially bereft. Florian Schneider has died of cancer at the age of 73. Those that remember parties at Winson Street in the Seventies will also recall I always managed to get Tanzmusik from the above album onto every party tape. How this was generally received I never knew nor really cared - it did it for me and that was all that mattered at the time. One of the pioneers of what would much later become EDM, Florian Schneider I salute you.

Anne Briggs     One of my very favourite songs is this one. Many, many people have recorded versions of it and there's a prodigiously fine one by Van Morrison; but this one by Anne Briggs is at the top of the pile. Carry on listening after and you'll get her and Bert Jansch doing Blackwaterside - top stuff... and if She Moved... doesn't bring a tear to your eye, well you're a hard man to reach and no mistake. She Moved Through the Fair - Loreena McKennitt My love said to me My Mother won't mind And me Father won't slight you For your lack of kind Then she stepped away from me And this she did say It will not be long love 'Til our wedding day. She stepped away from me And she moved through the Fair And fondly I watched her Move here and move there And she went her way homeward With one star awake As the swans in the evening Move over the lake The people were saying No two e'er were wed But one has a ...