Tag: art

Banksy’s new statue

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

The figure of “honour”, atop the rather mournful Guards Crimean War Memorial in the background, seems to be looking at the marching flag man and shrugging. “What can you do?”

On the edge of the Nakba Day Rally, walking away from it in the direction of the Tommy Robinson march, Banksy’s latest statue seen from the rear, and situated just outside the Atheneum on Lower Regent Street and Pall Mall, looked like it might have been an unlikely tribute to one of the mass trade union, Irish or Socialist leaders of the 1880s, whose demonstrations against unemployment and the Irish Coercion Acts in 1887 were met by volleys of empty champagne bottles flung from the upper windows of the Pall Mall “Gentlemen’s” clubs and a police assault in Trafalgar Square that led to 1 death and 400 injuries; with the army standing by with fixed bayonets. John Burn perhaps. The sort of statue you might see in a country in which the ruling class owns a revolutionary tradition. That of Danton on the Boulevard Saint Germain comes to mind.

However, even from the rear, there was something about the suit that was from a later period. And something about the mechanical toy style of marching that suggested the Right, not the Left.

Looking at it from the front makes all that clear. The huge flag, waving boldly and pointing ever onwards and upwards is blowing back across the marcher’s face, so that he can’t see where he is going. Blinded by belief. And he is stepping confidently forwards, off the edge of the plinth, at the foot of which all the kings horses and all the kings men would have a lot of trouble putting him back together again. The flag has no motif, so it can stand for any set of beliefs that blinds someone to facts and the reality of their situation. However, in the context of the dominant set of statues in London, almost all of which celebrate military figures from the days of Imperial pomp, and in the aftermath of the “put out the flags” movement, its obvious who his target is.

His own video of the erection of the statue underlines this.

As with all progressive statues in London, there will now be a struggle as reactionary forces in local government, like the Conservative Restoration in Westminster, seek to have it removed lest it lead people to think.

Bending it… but not quite like Beckham.

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

An extraordinarily well camouflaged butterfly in a rewilding garden somewhere in Essex. Look closely and you can see its eyes and antennae.

The slogan of the Essex and Suffold water company is “living water”. In current circumstances they might want to chnage that.

One of the people I argue with on the Next Door site goes under the moniker “Brick Oboe”. I find it hard to believe that that is his actual name. It sounds like the most obscure of the seventies rock bands who named themselves after the slang for an erect dick: Led Zeppelin, Steely Dan, Brick Oboe.

In the distance in the playing field opposite my parents house a strange figure dressed in a pink and white hazmat suit and medical mask looks as though he is prospecting for metal, or perhaps mines; sweeping his device from one side to the other, slowly, cautiously, systematically. As he gets closer, it turns out he is mowing the grass. The PPE seems a bit extreme for that. Perhaps he has a serious grass allergy.

A week later, the whole field gets done by a tractor; which makes you wonder what the point of the bloke in the Hazmat suit was. Perahps he was just doing the irradiated grass…I take a deep sniff as I walk past for that fresh cut grass smell. A job with aromatherapy built in.

The ambulance worker in the non emergency hospital transport taking my Dad to Basildon goes to get a hospital wheelchair when we get there. This is a clunky, heavy device that looks like it was designed to carry industrial goods by a Soviet tank designer. An altogether more robust vehicle than the onboard wheelchair, which has a comfortable seat and at least the impression of suspension. He explains that the industrial design, and weight, of the hospital wheelchair is deliberate; to stop people stealing them. The long poles at the back of some of them are “to stop people getting them into cars. You’d be amazed.”

His colleague on the way back is so annoyed by the bossy recorded posh voice from the in vehicle safety monitor telling him to drive safely and do his seatbelt up that he does it up behind him and sits on it.

Listening to one of the carers chatting to my Dad about his life this morning, it struck me that carers – taken together- have a massive store of oral history about the area they work in.

Chatting to one of them, she said that she felt she had to get the job to stave off permanent boredom after moving to Purfleet from Central London. “Its so QUIET in Purfleet”.

As the stair lift is Dutch, perhaps the music to accompany an ascent should be the Flying Dutchman Overture. The chair goes slowly enough to get quite a way into it.

On the way back from the pharmacy back in NW9, a battered looking yellow football bounces down the path from the estate on Stagg Lane heading swiftly towards the road. I swing my gammy leg towards it and, in a miracle of luck, my dyspraxic slice at the ball conjures up a magnificent banana shot that takes it safely back into the estate and behind the hedge.