Future Past (4328) May 2010

It's Wednesday morning and School of Everything Unplugged at the Royal Festival Hall. A time and space for reflecting on the week past and the week to come. Dougald mentions a book, 'The Way We Live Now', writen in the early nineties by Richard Hoggart. Later I cycle past the Oxfam Bookshop in Marylebone High Street, I turn back and walk in. On the shelf marked Social Sciences between 'Soft City' by Jonathan Raban and 'McLuhan' by Jonathan Miller, I come across The Way We Live Now. I read some words from page 53,
'In a sense .. adult education is quietist, time out - a time, a space, for reflection, the better to find our way, to arrive at things by our own paths, in our own time.'

(4328) Wednesday, School of Everything Unplugged, Royal Festival Hall, reflection, metaphors,

Flickr Comments

twig® says:
If I squint you look like a Shadow. Taj Mahal minaret ...
...and the carpet pattern "paths" lead seamlessly into your shadow!
Interesting reflectional shot!

tonyhall says:
Twig, I'm listening to and reading about en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taj_Mahal
And checking out the 'Net & Ball rug'
shop.southbankcentre.co.uk/net-ball-rug
'an abstract version of the square wave seen with the aid of a oscilloscope - the visual representation of sound.' and 'inspired by an apple' !!

swigadelica says:
I love the single desk and 2 chairs. There are 140,375 posts tagged with "Wednesday"

clifsnap says:
I thought your head was a tree on first looking. A sign of a good picture when on close inspection you find more than you expect.
I still think your head's a tree though !

stewpic says:
Great image and like Clif I first thought your head was a shrub the reflections are awesome. So you found the book you was looking for in Marylebone high street oxfam shop a good stroke of luck.

Paul v2.0 says:
..multi-layered reflection shot with total appeal..

^Tom says:
The photo is archetypical Tony – an inside outside piece of self-contextualization, or to put it more kindly self-reflection turned into an art form. The title I like too. The future is in the past, and the past is in the future, we live in the moment, we live in the historical present. Of course we see things from a different angle, but I hope you picked Jonathan Raban’s ‘Soft City’ off the shelf and had a browse. The blurb on the back of my copy (which hasn’t gone to Oxfam) reads: ‘The city as we imagine it is as real, or maybe more real, than the hard city we can locate in maps and statistics. The soft city of the mind is a private place; everyone lives in his or her own soft city’.

Black Dust a.k.a. odonbd says:
There was a romantic innocence about the 20th century's view of the future. Now, that future was in the past, and our present is an alternative future from that point of view. It's a difficult task to gather all that sort of concepts in a single shot. Reflections, diagrams, words echoing throught the time, writings making noise in our present, notes and words distorted, messages in a bottle updating new notepads. I can imagine such objects like a theme, as I'm trying to define a semantic field to group it all.

tonyhall says:
Swig, the desk and chairs representing the possible start of a conversation at the School of Everything Unplugged - 4 posts tagged!

tonyhall says:
Clif, haha, and it often feels like a tree, your observation is growing on me.

tonyhall says:
Thanks Stewart, I didn't expect to find the book, but had meant to pop in this second-hand bookshop at sometime, so it was a pleasant coincidence when I came across this book.

tonyhall says:
Paul, some places offer more to reflect upon than others.

tonyhall says:
Tom, I did have a look through Jonathan Raban's Soft City, and it did encourage me to reflect upon how I construct my own image (memory) of 'my' city ... and think about 'their' cities; Le Corbusier's 'Laws', isolated residents of heartless Millbrook, the communities of strangers. Henry Mayhew's classifications of Settlers, Wanderers and Nomads .. the Mythologies of Roland Barthes .. the Magic of the City ... the book ends where my memories of living in the city begin, wandering the streets around Old Compton Street in Soho

tonyhall says:
Odon, I'm drawn towards the semantic field, defining boundaries, finding meanings in what is included, feeling settled with that gathering, but gradually becoming aware of what is excluded. Over there, on fertile ground, I see the semantic network forming, conceptual relations and new ways of representing and constructing knowledge.

Somewhere in there hypertext branches connect word nodes, blossoming in the magic of the world wide web. Closer to our dreams.

A mind map begins to manifest itself, a memory, a word for an image, a concept. The map begins to represent a small world network - strangers being linked by mutual acquaintances.

... I have to shake myself out of this wandering state and head towards the very-small-world of our kitchen to find some ingredients and construct an evening meal. Do a bit of real food cooking.