the quiet

A scene of distant Union flags blocked by barriers. Maybe Regents Street is offering a metaphor for revised arrangements after a Brexit?

More likely it's just London digging up its roads again. Toward Oxford Street there's early notice that the area will be will be closed at the weekends during the summer.

Back at Downing Street, it's the quiet before everything kicks off later this week.

Yes, London is preparing for the global TV event accompanying the referendum as an improvised media village assembles opposite the Palace of Westminster.

Parliament Square

"Far more in common with each other than things that divide us."
Jo Cox - Maiden speech

quick Tate Modern impressions, including those bricks

Once inside the Tate Modern, the first decision was where to start. Most people seemed to be heading for the tenth floor, which is really a public viewing platform. Instead, I took the other set of less crowded lifts to the fourth floor, which is the highest level of the new galleries.

I was soon inside my first room, which was a series of works by Louise Borgeoise. A whole room showcasing an artist gives time to form an opinion in a way that sometimes seeing single works juxtaposed won't provide.

My picture shows one of her spider pieces, another much larger one (Maman) was used as a central piece when the Queen opened the Tate Modern back in 2000. Bourgeois kept working as an artist until her death at the age of 98.

Her later work developed themes around pain and loss of control sometimes through works enclosed in cages - like the Cell (Eyes and Mirrors) seen behind the spider in the above image. Here's my look inside Cell XIV, courtesy of my iPhone.

And in a way the exhibit illustrates the difficulty in trying to describe the innards of the Tate. There's so much yp explore and much of it makes one think.

It could be an old and originally controversial piece like Carl Andre's 'Bricks' (properly called Equivalent VIII). I remember seeing it many years ago for the first time and then smiling this time as I entered one of the new rooms to see it arranged across the floor.

Yes, it's a rectangular composition of bricks. Andre described it as a sensation like wading in bricks and the art establishment first in the 1970s and then again in the early 2000s became embroiled in debate about whether the piece was a con or pivotal in art sculpture.

Then there's this innocent looking table from an art piece by Marina Abramovic. Part of her own living work which explored collective responsibility. Controversial in its original context, causing its first exhibition to be stopped after six hours, through viewer intervention. The instructions below give a further clue.

These happen to be a few of the first items I stumbled across, examples of modern art greatest hits.

There's oodles of other material to explore with the Tate Modern frequently juxtaposing well known works and newer artists.

One could say that there are plenty of ideas and much to reflect upon.

tilted

Sous mes pieds le ciel revient.

Je fais semblant d'avoir tout compris.

Thursday Thirteen : Tate Modern extension (Part 1 - outside)

1. I popped along to the new Tate Modern extension for a preview of what is on offer.

2. The official opening is on 17 June, but with my special pass I was one of the a long line of people taking an early look inside.

3. The Tate Modern is in an old electricity generation building and there's areas call The Tanks, The Boiler Room and the newest part is called the Switch House. Spot the oil storage tanks location in the picture below.
4. The original Tate collection was started by Henry Tate, who was the inventor of the sugar cube.

5. Noticeably, the new brickwork of the extension reminds me of stacked sugar cubes.
   
   The architects may refer to the brickwork as 'knitwear' but I'm wondering whether, like Newcastle's Baltic, it will become attractive seasonal lodgings for a type of sea-bird? (kittiwake cam here)

6. I used to pass the building during its construction. It was a much whiter looking colour before the external brickwork was added to the concrete skeleton.
   
   Now it's like one of those posh coats with a contrasting lining.

7. It seems hard to believe that the Tate Modern only opened in 2000.
8. It now receives some 5 million visitors a year and is now well-established as a key London tourist venue.

9. I know I'm not talking about the artwork in this post. There's some great well-known (and controversial) pieces on display, but they warrant separate descriptions.

10. Despite the long queue of people waiting to enter the building, the interior was surprisingly uncrowded. I'm told there is around 60% more exhibit space now.

11. There's various links to the pre-existing part of the building, although I think they had special restrictions until the whole building is formally re-opened.

12. The Bankside area has been completely transformed over the last few years. New buildings, an urban park, pedestrian areas, a superb walk along the Thames. It should be on everyones' list of places to visit when in town.

fire at the circus maximus

Last few days of the campaign and, sure enough, more scare stories are popping. I suppose they'll save some for the weekend, although the effect so far is driving the various dials south.

Let's take a look - there's the value of GBP (down).

The stock market (down).

Shares in Britain's biggest industry - finance services (down).

We can see a consistent downward trend. Supposedly the markets are pricing in the uncertainties. Now we're hearing about emergency budgets and new taxation as well. I illustrate the post with Alphonse Mucha's Nero watching Rome burning.

Maybe Osborne is a modern version of Nero? Certainly Osborne and toast in the same sentence seems likely in the near future.

Of course, by talking about the economy here, I'm playing into the hands of the Remain camp, who are steadfastly avoiding talk about migration, which is the main plank of the Leave camp argument. Cameron is superb at giving his speeches to non-press questioners and swerving out of shot when he gets buttonholed. To balance it up, here's the ONS stats for migration.

Total UK migration is about 50:50 between EU and Rest of World.

The Rest of World has China top incoming, then India and then USA.

And there's a couple of countries that particularly skew the EU incoming (the so called EU2, comprising Bulgaria and Romania, who account for 27%).

There's more about all of this here, in the ONS May 2016 report.

And this morning, I could look up and see a couple of helicopters hovering over Parliament. I'm guessing it was linked to the two mini flotillas splashing around outside the Palace of Westminster, so that the two groups could shout through megaphones at one another.

I'm not making a point about In or Out here, it's more that our government is probably supposed to promote stability but seems to be doing everything possible to inject uncertainty.

For Osborne and Cameron, the very fact of a referendum make a brilliant political excuse for all manner of things that don't get done.

Weirdly, without an election to follow the Referendum, we're in a very strange situation.

If we Remain, we've the scare stories of Ozza and Cazza to deal with, but if we Leave we swing further right with Bozza, Nige and Mikka tugging the island further from the thamentopoein-carrying death moths of Europe.

Crazy in the coconut.

Wordless Wednesday

Walking to Capel Mounth

TfL prepares for emojification

TfL have just announced the change to the London Underground typeface font, so that they can include hashtags and @, moving from Edward Johnston's 100 year old typeface to a new and very similar digital typeface Johnston100 designed by Monotype.

Truth be told, there was an intermediate version back in the 1970s, when the old overlapping W was replaced as part of a move to typesetting.

Johnston didn't see the need to design certain characters like @ and #, although if he had, we'd probably have stylised ones, like his groovy £ (now de-flourished), quote marks and the care with the differential spacing of the filled loops on B, P and R, which all also help legibility. Then there's the caret topped i and j and the ornate and serifed lower case g.

Sure enough, they've tweaked the g and also removed the flourish from the £ symbol. Those dots on the i and j get morphed to 11, the full-stop is invited to become precariously balanced and the new @ symbol looks as if it comes from a different univers*.

Even the Apple mac keyboard had to kind-of cram the hashtag in, next to the GBP £ symbol as an alt-character on the number 3. Such multiple key pressing for a character isn't new, and even in the days of low speed digital communications, there were various notional shorthands to speed up the messaging.

So no great surprise that Apple have just said that iPhones can convert real words back into digital-world emojis, and that the new emojis can be displayed three times the size of the old ones. Squeee.

The TfL and the emoji moves are maybe further signs of the digital future and I suppose resultant emoji translations become internationally understandable?

In case you're not fully up to speed, for some revision, here's Zoe Mendelson's rendering of the Breaking Bad finale in emoji, below.

It would be fun to convert a few TfL station names to emojis, but that will have to wait.

* = bad typeface joke

two hands to hold

As a gun-free Brit, I notice that the US gun lobby have been quick to aggressively comment all over any sites suggesting U.S. gun laws are inadequate in the wake of the latest atrocity.

A few months ago someone made a map showing gun stores and Starbucks, illustrating there's about five times as many gun stores as Starbucks in the USA. This statistic has already been heavily contested, but there's still a gun store within an hour drive for most people, including many Walmarts and similar outlets which carry firearms.

One of the challenges to the frappuccino statistics was that some of the so-called gun-stores might be Federal Firearms Licensed (FFL) individuals operating from their kitchen tables and assisting cross state line arms sales. That's all right then.

I decided to look at Washington D.C., whose 68 square miles appears to only have one licensed gun-store.

When I extended the search to the rest of the neighbourhood (Maryland, Virginia etc.), I was soon up around 100 stores. I picked one at random, and took a look at some of the stock.

As well as BB guns and other items aimed at a younger market, there were also bigger guns available. In America it isn't legal to own a machine gun without a special licence, but an assault rifle is like a one-shot-at-a time variant. They seem to be pretty commonplace.

As I glanced through the stock list of this Virginia-based store, I noticed this one: A Sig Sauer MPX, which looks like something out of an old Bruce Willis movie.

I noticed that the Sig is available as both a semi-automatic, which is generally legal, and as a Class 3 fully automatic weapon, where holding the trigger will fire bullets continuously. Now this is, as the blurb describes, a full weapons system, so by the time all the bibs and bobs have been added its probably a $2000+ purchase.

Something less expensive maybe? That's when I noticed this smaller advertisement, for a youth rifle.

A 10/22 rifle with a 25 round magazine clip and a bucket containing 1400 rounds of ammo for $395! And it's a stainless steel collapsible rifle for ease of transport. "Teach your son to shoot special".

Somewhere in between? Walmart was the biggest seller of firearms in the US but it withdrew most of its high powered rifles late in 2015.

Amongst the high powered items, the AR-15 is still readily available and popular because of its adaptability. Here's a less expensive Colt Expanse M4 ($699) and a mainstream Colt AR15 ($999), from a further nearby store in Virginia.

I didn't check all the legal points, but I did notice in Florida these two guns don't require any form of licence (an $8 background check is all that is needed) and it is actually illegal in Florida to keep a list of firearm owners. The simple version is that if it requires two hands to hold then its available across the counter.

That lower gun is the one dubbed "America's gun" and has frequently featured in the 1001 US mass shootings since Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012 right through to the weekend's Orlando nightclub tragedy.

At 164 days into 2016, excluding gang-related, the US has had 133 mass shootings, including 15 in Florida.

Canary Wharf time check

Sometimes you just have to. If you know what I mean.
#onlyplaceinworldwhereicandothis

#iphonepictureismoredifficultthanitlooks

On top of London #upattheO2

To the Dome, for a bit of a climb. We'd assembled from across various part of London, to climb over the Dome. I worked close to the Dome for a while and often used to see people setting out on the expedition, but this is a first for me.

At Base Camp, we were given clipboards and a massive form to fill in. Waivers, emergency numbers and even shoe sizes. All logical, of course, because we'd be given gilets, harnesses and boots for the climb.

A briefing, a few moments to climb into the harnesses, put all of our belongings into blue boxes for safe keeping and eventually emerge at the start of the actual climb.

A few more safety checks as we were clipped onto a runner line that went all the way to the summit. Our special gripper locking safety wheels needed to be at the right angle to pass through certain loops and then onto the climb itself.

The first few steps were curious, the walkway was boingy and we needed to manipulate the safety system without trapping our hands inside the mechanism. We soon found our rhythm and were climbing properly. The way up started steep but became progressively easier as we approached the top. Logical really with the flattish shape of the Dome.

Plenty of time for pictures and a wander around at the top. A cameraphone-only zone because we'd all been asked to leave any bigger items back at base camp.

After the range of triumphant pictures against all manner of scenic backdrop - Canary Wharf, the ex-Olympic Village, West India Dock, Victoria Dock, The Thames Barrier - it was time to clip on again and start the descent.

Amusingly, there were a few angled sections to the descent, which progressively looked more and more sheer. I'm told it was 30 degrees, but it felt like 60.

Back at ground, we did the group hugs and handshakes and then triumphantly handed back our gear.

Great fun. We'd been on top of London.