(Monday) Moan 68

 

IN A DIFFERENT WORLD

I was watching a programme about building houses the other day – The House That £100k Built  – in which presenter Kieran Long and his ally, architect Piers Taylor, are on hand to help/advise/guide those poor ordinary individuals who have decided, for one reason or another, to spend their hard-earned money on building their own houses.

 

Nothing wrong with the concept at all.  I haven’t seen the other programmes in the series and may well do so now that my appetite has been whetted.  But what struck me most about the episode that I saw was how, once again, it was clear that those ‘in the know’ about a subject had what can only be described as a narrow, missionary-like zeal for their view of the world and what constitutes the ‘right’ way to do things.  Long and Taylor were appalled at the plans of Ruth and Tony, two Shropshire farmers who were building their own house.  They wanted a break from the ramshackle nature of the farm buildings in which they had lived and worked throughout their lives.   Long and Taylor, on the other hand, wanted them to embrace that very ramshackle and rural look so that their house ‘fitted in’.  They couldn’t understand why the farmers did not want to use rusty, ‘wriggly tin’, such as can be seen on any farm in the country.  In what I though was a compelling and unanswerable response, Ruth said that rusty, wriggly tin was fine if she wanted to live in a barn, but she wanted to live in a house. 

 

Long (journalist of architecture, critic and teacher) wanted Ruth to understand what he meant by architecture that fitted into its surroundings, so he took her to Dungeness, where he waxed lyrical about the “amazing landscape” and the way that a weathered grey wood box fitted in.

 

Oh really?  ‘Amazing’ – well yes, I suppose so, but I’d find it hard to get as excited about it as Long managed to do.  And whether or not ‘fitting in’ with such a landscape was as good an idea as trying to improve it is something that wasn’t considered.

 

Sometimes it seems to me that there are multiple parallel worlds in which ‘experts’ live alongside the rest of us, where what makes sense in their worlds makes no sense in ours.  Which of them is the ‘real’ world is, of course, a matter for debate. 

 

 

THE EMPEROR’S NEW CLOTHES

In New York at the weekend a street graffiti artist tried to sell his work for $60 a time to the unsuspecting public.  The public’s response was muted, to say the least.  Eight paintings sold, four of them to someone who just wanted to cover the wall of his new flat, and some of them at half price.

 

Ha ha!  The reporters delighted in letting New Yorkers know that they had been too dim to realise that they were being offered works by the most famous of all graffiti artists – Banksy no less.  If only they had realised then they could have bought these nondescript spray-art pictures and made a fortune by selling them to collectors and experts who valued them at $20,000 each.

 

Or looking at it another way, the public gave its verdict on the intrinsic value of such vandal-like street paintings and the experts who would rush to snap up anything by Banksy were made to look like fools just waiting to be parted from their money.  Could it be that there really is no real merit in these works and it is all just hype, or can you really see the Emperor’s new clothes?

 

 

GET ME A PICTURE!

It seems that no TV news item can now be presented unless it includes some illustrative video footage.  Apparently, the viewing public will lose interest or not be able to follow what is going on if it is just someone speaking to them - although isn’t that how radio does it?

 

Anyway, the BBC decided that it would include a short item on the publication last week of the new Immigration Bill.  Now it seems to me that for any video footage to be useful it ought to be possible for someone watching it with the sound muted to be able to make a good guess as to the subject being covered.  In this case it looked as though the show’s producers had given up on this and decided to use 30 seconds of people walking the streets, only in order not to cause any kind of offence we were shown only the lower halves of the people doing the walking. 

 

How ridiculous.

 

 

NOT ALL TECHNOLOGY IMPROVES YOUR EXPERIENCE

I’m all for using new technology when there is a point to it – where it improves your experience of whatever it is you are doing.  However, there are cases where using new technology does not necessarily do this, or where the way it is used needs to be considered very carefully.

 

For my first example of what I mean I give you the humble act of using a public toilet.  Most of us will have experienced the frustration of waving our hands around wildly trying to get the water to flow from a sensor activated tap or the air from a sensor activated hand-dryer.  What fun it is to see someone else struggling with these contraptions, especially if the one you are using has worked as it should.

 

And I can see the merit of a sensor activated flush mechanism for a toilet.  However, the placement of such sensors should be such that they do not operate if the user simply shifts slightly on the seat.

 

The anxiety of that inadvertent flush is not something I’d wish to repeat!