David Barrie

An accidental Christo situation

This is an abandoned Victorian workman's hut - wrapped for preservation - on a vacant development site that I am currently working on in Wales.

It's a brilliant piece of accidental art that's taken on totemic qualities over the past week.

Either by design or accident, I'm trying to let a fabulous existential thing kick in before reading grim financial news and am reading J.G. Ballard's Atrocity Exhibition on the London underground on the way to work.

And it's to be recommended:

Beach Fatigue

After climbing the concrete incline, he reached the top of the embankment. The flat, endless terrain stretched away on all sides, a few oil derricks in the distance marking the horizon. Among the spilled sand and burst cement bags lay old tyres and beer bottles. Guam in 1947. He wandered away, straddling roadworks and irrigation ditches, towards a rusting quonset near the incline of the disused overpass. Here, in this terminal hut, he began to piece together some sort of existence. Inside the hut he found a set of psychological tests. Although he had no means of checking them, his answers seemed to establish an identity. He went off to forage, and came back to the hut with a collection of mud-stained documents and a Coke bottle.

Though next week I think that I'm going to turn to steamy Sidney Sheldon.

Should I stay or should I go?

Procrastination is evil.

It works in a Surrealist painting but sucks in real life.

The annoying bit is that just when you start to believe in the mantra of those who tell you to jump first - and in theory watch everyone else follow - Nelson Mandela tips up in Time magazine telling you to lead from behind.

The danger is that you end up in an exquisite universe of Mick Jones and The Clash:

Darling you gotta let me know
Should I stay or should I go?
If you say that you are mine
Ill be here til the end of time
So you got to let know
Should I stay or should I go?

Over at Doors of Perception, design writer John Thackara comes clean with a fetish for digital dashboards.

So I guess I should come clean and confess to a thing for flow charts.

Here's a brilliant one that's all about Procrastination:

And for those can be bothered to commit, here are nine tips on fighting procrastination that I've had stuck on the inside of my diary since the dawn of time from a back-issue of the London Financial Times:

• Select a balance of thinkers and doers for the project team
• Expect/demand regular and tangible updates of progress
• Provide sufficient budget for project to be feasible
• Agree a deadline for preliminary discussions to convert into positive action
• Satisfy the WIIFM (what's in it for me?) factor
• Encourage 'ownership' of project by a team or individual
• Prioritise desired outcomes
• Create a sense of urgency
• Allow the team the space to fail

Great, smashing, super....but I'm not quite sure where to start.

Procrastination flow chart courtesy of Ehdom 07.

Straight roads

Ever since Pruned posted on the US Army Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, I've been waiting for overviews of the surface of the planet that show the marks and dents we leave behind.

Two weeks ago I flew over the Western Kalahari in Namibia and got close: 

The straightest roads imaginable.

A case of blurred vision

This is quite often how I see the world, especially in shopping malls.

Things just get blurred. And I don't take in the detail.

Until this week, I thought that I was crazy.

Then came a blinding light.

Social scientist Monica Degen and geographers Caitlin DeSilvey and Gillian Rose have studied people's experience of a shopping mall in Milton Keynes, England.  (God help them!)

In a recent paper, they wrote up their research and drew attention to what they call manoeuvring:

a broad surveying gaze which is used to move around objects, which acknowledges objects but does not engage in any depth with them.

In other words, focus-pulling on the move:

In this 'thin' or unfocused look, objects exist as part of a scene to be passed through, blurred together into indistinct background with little sense of form and detail. When one has a specific destination in mind, it is very easy to blank out the intervening content. A 'thicker', more engaged look appears when we approach the final destination of our walk and our eyes zoom in: a person we expect to meet, a specific shop, a desired object, a possible purchase perhaps - pull out from the stream of material stimuli.

All of this may be obvious to you.

But to me, it's near Biblical.

In effect, the potential qualities of a specific space are animated by how we engage with it.

This is another reason why places should be designed in ways that allow for accidental looks.

Why environmental phenomena like desire lines are so revealing:

And why, when you move through a landscape, it sometimes feels like you create your own space.

In other words, to steal a technique from long-distance swimming, you create your own water.

Image of Berling courtesy of dreasan.  Desire path by Fin Fahey.

Dolly mixture

So a girl will be out in a dress and it will seem quite simple. And another girl will say, 'That's nice, but what's that?' pointing to a wooden carving on her shoulder. And then the girl will say, 'It's a wooden owl, actually, it's hand-carved'. And her friend will say. 'Lovely.'

Stylist Cathy Edwards sums up the look of her friend Emma Cook and her clothes designs in an article in the London Independent.

Absolutely nothing to do with the publicity picture of Alison Goldfrapp and an over-sized owl for her latest album  - but kind of connects - and is a great account of friendship any way...

Thanks to Style Bubble for the link to Emma Cook...

Happy 2008!

Keep your head in the clouds

I've spent so much time in the run-in to the holidays attending carol services and listening to super-serious religious music, there can only be one message for the holidays: keep your head in the clouds.

And if you can't afford the plane ticket, buy a red wig, preferably an afro.

Human parachutes

'The Falling Man' of 9/11 captured the horror of enforced suicide.

In their brilliant biography of Chairman Mao, Jung Chang and Jon Halliday present another, earlier and perhaps more shocking form of death decision.

In the early 1950s, according to Jung and Halliday, between two and three hundred thousand Chinese committed suicide during two totalitarian, anti-corruption purges,  known as the 'Three Antis' and the 'Five Antis'.

In Shanghai so many people jumped from buildings that they acquired the nickname 'parachutes'.

One eyewitness wondered why people jumped in to the street rather than into the river. The reason, he discovered, was that they wanted to safeguard their families:

If you jumped into the Huangpu River and were swept away so the Communists didn't have a corpse, they would accuse you of having escaped to Hong Kong and your family would suffer. So the best way was to leap down the street.

Until I had read this, I'd always thought that suicide and social conscience were mutually exclusive.

Happy new year!

FOUND by Allyson, while cleaning underneath the bench seat of her dad's new Volkswagen Vanagon.