The Sevilla Foto festival is all over most of the Alameda and a good bite of the rest of the city. I’m particularly enjoying the Foto Rutas collective exhibition. There’s something oddly pleasing in seeing familiar shop windows embellished with some excellent photos.
“The wigs of lawyers could hardly acquire their modern significance until other people stopped wearing wigs”
Eric Hobsbawm. The Invention of Tradition.
I’m not sure what to make of the Rocio pilgrimage (link with a great old photo). It’s a revealingly Andaluz spectacle, with casual stapling of scraps of what people really want to do (travel and camp with friends, drink, get dressed up) to a religious manilla folder of devotion and faith-based healthcare.
More on this when I’m able, but for now it brings one of those clifftop gulps to think how we got to here, where an ox in the city streets is a miracle and a news helicopter is unregarded background.
broken geometry so
This is an old one, which no one else likes. It´s from the Alcazar, a couple of years back – the first time I came to Seville.
One of my favourite scientific writers for making myself feel simultaneously very clever and very dim is Douglas Hofstadter, and one of my very favourite bits of Douglas Hofstadter musing is on understanding analogies, from this geeky collection.
Formal analogies are a fundamental mode of thought, often useful, more often useless but entertaining. The basis of an analogy is the suggestion of a relationship which can be strongly mapped on to a new situation, so X is to Y as A is to B. Or is it? The act of forming an analogy relies on selecting which characteristics to compare. And difference being difference, mappings are always partial and imperfect.
Hofstadter devotes some time to how we choose, from among the infinite possible analogies in a [link]domain, something which seems to work. For example, to slightly twist the earlier example,
B is to C as Y is to?
The ‘correct’ answer here will depend on what, somewhat arbitrarily, we decide is the most important characteristic of the relation. The first two possibilities relate to position in the alphabet. The first (as Y is to Z) considers translation of relative position most important; the second (as Y is to X) considers reflection of relative position most important. Even ignoring outlandish analogies, and sticking to answers involving one letter, there are many other valid possibilities, for instance in the domains of sound, relative frequency (e.g. B is ranked eight positions below C in an English letter frequency chart, Y is ranked eight positions below D), letter forms (e.g. A and B have a central horizontal line. Y has a central vertical line, so perhaps T would be appropriate), and so forth. Some of these seem more valid than others, and that tells us something about the relative strength of characteristics and relationships, and what we consider intelligent in this area.
When we start to go beyond formal realms, into natural language applied to a world made of more than words, things get more complicated – for example, remember those dark times when Dennis Thatcher was the First Lady of Britain. The mapping is imperfect, though this is, of course, what gives the statement its kick. A perfect mapping is either not worthy of mention, or so drab as to lose any entertainment value. For something more stimulating, the best we can hope for is that something feels right somehow.
What does will depend on what those sharing the analogy consider essential in the domain selected, and how far we are prepared stretch the mapping. Analogies (and their kissing cousin, metaphors) start to deform destructively taken beyond their elastic limit.
This ungainly preamble is edging towards a rash statement, essayed in the park after a bottle and some of cheap rosado, whereby I claimed, as several times before, that, in some ways, Seville is the Glasgow of Spain. It’s not, but why might the analogy seem to work? What context would make it seem valid?
Here, the conversation was about food, and specifically fried food. As in the home of the Glasgow salad, fried potatoes (here what speakers of British English call crisps, and of North American English chips) often accompany something equally beneficial to cardiac function. Oh, and there’s also accent. The Seville accent is thick and earthy, and the language diced into short sentences often spiked with the Spanish equivalent of four-letter words.
On these terms, perhaps Cádiz of Andaluz cities maps better onto Glasgow, with an equal or greater commitment to batter and banter, and an even more impenetrable accent. Which might leave Liverpool, Newcastle or Bristol as a better mirror-image of Seville. Somehow it seemed important to pick a port (Seville was for a time the major port to the Americas and the second city of the Spanish empire), somewhere renowned as lively or spirited (in no way is Seville the Hull of Spain) and somewhere with a unique take on the language (though not a different language – Seville isn’t the Swansea of Spain; Bilbao or A Coruña might be, in this domain). Though, of course, it’s not important at all.
[And by way of relief after 700 words of that, here's a photo]
Summer seems to be here again. The jacarandas think so, anyway.
[More old stuff]
Seville is a city that lives its public theatre in three dimensions. The actors who wander the cobbled stage below are observed, appraised and roundly criticised from up in the rickety front-row of the circle – the balconies and terraces that are so much a part of living here.
In my first year in the city, I was forever straining to see what was happening up there where unseen deities dispensed contemptuous judgement and scattered pipa manna. Seven flights above our flat was a locked glass door through which, when breath and vision had returned on an oven of a day, a bare concrete expanse could just be discerned, eternally out of reach. Friends were luckier, with smart modern balconies or, in bigger blocks, the rippling deck of a communal space, rigged with washing lines and bedsheets and commanded by a grizzled captain. Luckier still were those who had somehow wangled a ticket marked ‘terrace’ in the rental lottery.
But luck can change; next turn of the tombola and I have my own terrace, and can now swing my gaze slightly hesitantly around the rooftops. So, how do the gods live?
Lazily, mostly. On furniture of ancient melamine or wooden wrecks banished from rooms open to the bombona man. Or hammocks, strung from rust. Some of the smarter houses down the way hide pools, beer fridges and matching furniture behind the striped canopies but, at an early dusk, I look out mostly at aerials groping the sky for tarot readings and gameshows, at crumbling brickwork behind façades of whitewashed plaster, and at gutters grown shaggy over summer. It’s a jerry-built paradise, unplanned, with bolt-on rooms, railings, and spilling vegetation, neglected cacti, architectural porcelain, and ledges – some colonised by pigeons, some patrolled by cats nimble on ceramic and disdainful of deeds and tenancies.
Up here, residents stare at one another in the blank curiosity of a strangely public space. Within days of arrival, I was staring back, curtain twitching without curtains, but with a feeling of frank entitlement in taking whatever entertainment is on offer: the comings and goings of the family across the way; the fug and dubby rhythm of the house with the rainbow flag; the progress of the mismatched lovers among the laundry across the ravine; and, on one or two occasions, a neighbourly argument, at customary volume.
There’s a shared life on the rooftops, and sometimes an odd disconnection from the geography below. In the muddle of houses stacked like shoeboxes after a warehouse flood, it’s hard to trace down to street-level the old man who winches his canopy backwards and forwards, three rooftops over; but I’m glad he winches, marking the tempo of day and night, from sunrise over the church to the moment the sun sets behind next door’s gable.
As winter comes, the gods head inside, leaving their Olympian residue. I count six Betis flags to one tattered Sevilla, a dozen litronas, three broken chairs, a couple of shipwrecked washing racks and a watermarked canopy. And, here and there, amongst the cigarette butts and spilled drinks, cockroaches, creeping in from the dereliction over the wall.
[I don't have a terrace anymore. So it goes]
Photographing strangers is a bad habit that I don’t want to kick. It’s taken a while to overcome most of my guilt for sticking a lens in the face of someone I’ll never talk to, or brushing past them with a surreptitious shot on the fly, to avoid breaking whatever the moment has. Mostly I’m interested in photographs that capture something about the subject’s relationship with whatever’s in the frame – the social, built or natural environment, whether they’re interacting or refusing to interact, whether they’re considered or oblivious, whether they’re in harmony or dissonance (I can only hear that in Brian Sewell).
Even though my intention is never to belittle, photographing people without permission is ridding them of their context – constructing a narrative around them that they have no say in. I’m hoping it’s excusable.
[More of this...]
In Britain, I can usually identify where a particular graffital bloom has rooted in the political ecosystem (a typically Green bit of co-opting of natural science). Here, despite cramming, a familiarity with the two pages of the free papers which aren’t devoted to futbol, celebs or ‘Light rain causes chaos on roads’, and some careful decoding of abbreviations and acronyms, I find myself sometimes fumbling fairy cakes in boxing gloves. The connotation of political gestures goes deep down into the humus, where musty words tangle in meaning.
[photo]
Sometimes, political graffiti relies on its context for effect. Sometimes the timing is all: witness the “Same shit, different century“, in place by late morning of January 1st, 2000, in Burley, Leeds. And sometimes, pathos is what sticks in the mind: the “Don’t Vote, Organis…” which dribbled off into what I prefer to think of as a failure to organise enough paint. Sadly, photographic evidence for these remains in stubbornly analogue storage in a Norfolk garage. This one, however, just along from a couple of expensive-looking conversions, I have:
Having been briefly guilty in my past of swallowing the cotton-wool idea that graffiti (any graffiti, even the most grubbily uninventive tagging of newly chromed public works) should be channelled into something productive – tamed into a simpering mural, or a grimly well-meaning youth project – I now see the contradictions there. The two have such different intents: one reinforcing propriety, the other tickling legitimacy. While suspicious of the desire of the soft-handed urbanite for some carefully managed vibrancy, and equally suspicious of the idea that spraycans (and photocopiers, and the Internet in some sketchily explained way) can nudge us into considering what’s missing when most basic needs are met most of the time in most of the rich world, places without public disputation frighten me. Tidiness frightens me. The walls suggest that here, someone cares enough to seek to persuade, unpaid.
Sunny today. Makes it all easier, astonishingly.
