David Barrie

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.