Pig Sty Avenue

There were people tonight, in orange jackets, going around the wee road in front of the flat, shining torches backwards and forwards across the ground.  What else were they looking for but frogs?  There are plenty around just now, with ponds nearby.  And are they, like, municipal workers, collecting the frogs to put them helpfully by a pond?  Or are they operating for a firm that supplies to a restaurant in the French Concession?  I really need to learn Chinese, so I can ask about this stuff. 

I'm putting David Harvey's blog on the blogroll.  I've just finished the book, The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism . It's an analysis of the current crisis which owes a lot to, but is not uncritical of, classic Marxism.  Made a lot of sense, though I want to chase up some of what's said.  The model he puts forward of "different but interrelated 'activity spheres'" is interesting.  They are:  techs and organizational forms "social relations" admin and institutional arrangements labour/production processes relations with the Earth. "reproductions of daily life and the species" "mental conceptions of the world"  The central thesis is that we can't understand capitalistic processes, including the ones that led us to this current crisis, without understanding its operations across the activity spheres.  It follows that any revolutionary movement intent upon expropriating capital must wor...

That's from the last roll of b&w I'm going to be using in a while.  I quite like the way it looks, though - it has a 1950s feel, which is appropriate to the anachronism of Marx and Engels standing there so proudly in rampantly capitalist Shanghai, 2011. I used to love b&w, and I still do in old photos.  But for the times we live in, I've just gotten bored with it.  Bruce Gilden said, (in the youtube linked here)  that he thinks in black and white.  I don't.  I even dream in colour - and I certainly do think in colour.  And cross processing approximates to the way I do that - true colours just don't correlate with what I think we see in our imagination and in our dreams. Nevertheless, I won't be using Fujichrome Velvia anymore.  I've tried overexposing somewhat, but I'm still getting too much red: I like the way it's got the green of her bag, but the rest is just far too red.  I bought five rolls of 100iso Provia in London....

Idiots like Louise Mensch (and her increasingly rabid and stupid looking boss) really just don't get it, do they?   If there's really no problem shutting down social network sites to stop rumours circulating, then why not close down the mobile phone system, switch off domestic broadband, even impose a general curfew?  People elected to represent us really should think before blethering. 

Well, Muifa may have passed by with little effect in Shanghai, but here I am now in London and it feels like a war zone.  A taxi driver told me 30 cabs were torched last night, and a driver was dragged out and robbed.  He didn't sound like a gobshite.  Banks shut in the City.  A pub I went to in Holborn, the barman was lamenting their lack of shutters, and weilding a big old docker's crowbar in jocular fashion.  The hotel bar has stowed it's picnic tables from outside.  There are rather naive looking coppers on the streets.  Plenty of hurry up wagons chasing around with sirens going.  But it feels like, if a large enough number of people decide to go late night shopping with manhole covers, who's to stop them? The police, as the kids know, are lying, cowardly bullies, who appear to maintain law and order by means of an age old confidence trick. Perhaps the bluff is being called. 

Here's the BBC. The wind's picking up now, late Saturday.  The white clouds, orange in the streetlights, are racing across the sky, in a southerly direction. Work has stopped on the apartment block over the way, but the workers are still in their tin accommodation.  We've cleared the balcony of everything except the big planter which once had mint, but now has a solitary borage plant: it can handle a typhoon.  Car alarms keep going off.

There's an unusually strong breeze, and, even more unusual, it's cool.  When it drops, the temperature feels only a little lower than normal.  There's a strong charge of electricity in the air.  Some emergency cropping is being done on a tree in the carpark.  But Jing'an's a place with a lot of trees, all heavily in leaf.  It might be my imagination, but there was more eye contact and cheeriness when we went out for lunch and then shopping just now.  We've got plenty of stuff in, especially water, porridge, eggs, noodles.