This guy above has been protesting about animal cruelty with the same banner around his neck for at least a decade. I have several shots of him over the years. The one below is from the MYLDN book (still available in all good bookshops & from me plug plug) which also has a passage on these lone long term protestors who dedicate their life to championing a cause with a seemingly low impact. And yet, who knows how many people this guy has swayed over the years? Hundreds of thousands, maybe even a million people must have seen him over the years. He is there pretty much every Saturday outside Notting Hill Gate station dead centre of the exit as people pour out of the station and head towards Portobello market so you cannot miss him. On a normal (B.C) weekend several thousand would seem him in a single day.
Maybe he is more of an influencer than his modern social media counterparts? And then again maybe he has been relentlessly ignored throughout his time there. Regardless, he is there no matter what. He hasn’t got little orange hearts to keep him going. Just his own sheer determination. And now even in the middle of a pandemic he is out there, same position, just now equipped with a mask. People might look on him as just ‘one of those weirdos’ but he is a true inspiration because he soldiers on regardless. A notion we all need to adopt right now.
And this is the final gallery of photographs in this series which all fall under the banner of random moments in time drenched in a neon noir hue. I hope you have enjoyed looking at these glimpses into the nocturnal worlds I have witnessed. It has been a surreal experience working on this project over last few months as it revolved around nitelife activities at a time when there was none. They are now from a world before this one and hopefully it will also be the world after this one..
And even though, with vaccines on the way, it feels possible again, it’s still going to be a long time before these sort of experiences return. Before we can all be together again, bouncing to the same beat, basking in the same glow, breathing in the same air without having to be kept apart, afraid of what might happen if we don’t.
Divided and isolated is clearly not good for anyone and so we must hang on until we can congregate once more. It has been tough, tougher than even you could have imagined because being together is how we are meant to be. We are mammals. Emotionally connected warm blooded highly social beings who thrive on unity and contact. And so we must do everything we can to be that way again because this version of existence clearly doesn’t work. Not for anyone. It’s just a sadly necessary step on the way back to where we came from which is both our past and our future.
And If you still want to get a print please get in touch via email info@babycakesromero.com – and for the final time…these limited edition signed prints are £100 each, £30 of which will go to the Felix project which will feed 183 people who need it. This offer will end December 15th so please get your orders before then. And just wanted to thank everyone who have ordered prints so far. Looking forward to being on your walls soon!
Scrawls on walls this week, some clear, some not, some finished, some not..with reference to this shot above it would appear they are anti-mask..no prizes for guessing that one. There are people out there who don’t want to wear one for reasons revolving mostly around selfishness, paranoia and/or stupidity but why would you have issue with someone else wearing one? What concern is that of yours? What harm could be done by wearing one other than to make CCTV cameras pretty fucking useless?
So many things these days are processed emotionally rather than rationally it is preventing an intelligent response or discourse on anything. With regard to the mask ting it’s just a bit of cloth covering your gob to help stop you spraying/swallowing spit globules. Latest research (here) reveals that there is way less risk from touching surfaces than they thought and if you are out in the open you aren’t in much danger either but close quarter indoor interaction is greatest chance of getting it which is why masks are so important if you aren’t chatting at a distance….and that’s it. That’s why they want you to wear them.
You wanna make more of it? You wanna get all riled up over face fabric? That’s on you. It’s literally all they are asking you to do. Most of us will only need to wear it for a fraction of our waking day. And you’re telling me you can’t even do that?
I don’t really have any interest to wade in on the mask debate because I can’t really believe its even still a debate. Its fuck all to do with your freedom. It’s disease prevention control. That’s it. There is no more.
They don’t want to curb our freedoms because we already gave them up on a plate. That horse has already bolted I’m afraid…
They don’t want to chip us because they already have. If you walk around with a phone every step you take is being tracked & monitored. Bill Gates isn’t putting nanobots in a vaccine to do that because it’s already happened and we consented.
And they don’t want to control us because they already do. And we let them in return for lil tit bits that facilitate our lives. We live in a comfy prison. We always have. It’s got fuck all to do with masks or Covid. Does it suck to wear them? Sure. Are there worst things out there than us all walking around looking like surgical gangsters? Fuck yes…like this thing dragging on forever cos we can’t reign in our behaviour. Don’t we all want things to go back to normal? I sure as shit do.
We live in an era of protest. An age defined by dissent. The world is filled with frustrated angry people rallying against their establishments for a multitude of outrages that bear little in common other than they are serious enough to get people to take to the streets. It appeared that Corona would kill off protests but in the end it just became another thing to protest about. There are currently so many groups fighting for so many different causes it is difficult to keep up and yet the one thing all these disparate cries of injustice are all united in, is that they are mostly defined by what they are against not what they are for.
Having a common enemy has bonded together many different groups of people at a time when there is mostly ever-increasing fragmentation and division. The internet has united people all over the world in a single cause but it has also ensured that we will never be able to get the majority to agree on anything ever again as the says of singular & factual source information are well and truly behind us.
Last week saw the return of the Extinction Rebellion and it is sadly apparent that their momentum has waned, their support diminished and the world has kinda moved on. And yet as it clearly slides from the forefront of people’s consciousness climate change is accelerating rapidly and its effects are ravaging the planet, hurtling us towards a future where life will not be sustainable for humans.
And just because we have stopped thinking about it doesn’t mean it has stopped happening. It is all there to see, we are just choosing to look in the other direction. And am not in any way undermining the validity or necessity of any of the protest movements in action around the globe at this moment in time but it has occurred to me that all these other protests around the world are maybe an intended distraction because we can’t face the reality of the environmental collapse we are facing.
The U.K government has now branded the XR as a criminal organisation who are threatening our way of life whilst the media and much of the population view them as troublemakers, privileged middle class or crusty hippies. These labels have been designed to deliberately undermine the movement and reduce their support but it still does not change the fact that their message is true and correct. It is happening and nothing is being done about it.
And the consequences of our inaction will have catastrophic results for all living creatures on this planet. Today I read that animal populations have decreased by 68% since 1970. At what point do we try to stop this mass extinction which we are responsible for and we will ultimately be a part of? at 80%? 90%? 100%? Oops too late.
Another aspect of ‘normal’ life which has returned with a vengeance is public protesting. 2019 was a year that was heavily defined by protests across the globe for a variety of different issues so the question must have been raised by fearful establishments everywhere… how do the fook do we stop this? If only we could create a situation where it is forbidden for them to be on the streets and then they won’t be able to join forces and oppose our actions…cue Corona creation conspiracy theory number 46. Yet with almost the entire population of Earth ordered indoors it was clear that the potential for civil unrest had dropped significantly.
I don’t actually believe that they fabricated the existence of Covid-19 to reduce street protesting but it certainly looked like it. And when the BLM movement erupted across the entire planet in the middle of a worldwide lockdown, it not only quashed that theory but also showed that “no force on Earth can stop an idea who’s time has come”. Not even a global pandemic.
The dam has burst. And the tide of change is swept across every continent at once. And yet these protesters converged in the midst of us trying to reduce the devastating impact of the virus when it was at a crucial stage. I watched stunned as thousands congregated regardless and felt that it would jeopardise everything that we had just gone through. And so I stayed away and did what most were doing, I watched it unfold on the internet.
But, watching events transpire online is a very distorting and relatively unhealthy experience as the algorithms in place ensure that you pinball from negative story to negative story, feeding outrage, fuelling anger, creating a narrative where you feel that everything is utterly fucked and hopeless and everyone is against everyone and the world has gone to hell in a hand cart.
The initial explosion of violence in America dominated the news but if you looked deeper than the headlines, the real story was how peaceful protests across the globe, comprised of people from all demographics and all cultures, had united to stand up and declare their unequivocal support for the black community and to state it is a societal problem that will no longer be tolerated. This was a tale of ‘coming together’ not ‘tearing apart’.
As the media were busy portraying the protestors as violent troublemakers I eventually decided I had to see it with my own eyes. And still hopefully be able to keep my distance in the process. These shots were taken at a BLM rally in trafalgar square last Friday. I arrived early and found a very quiet, peaceful gathering. When I looked around at those present I could see that, for the most part, they were just young kids. They were the reps of Generation Z who mix better than any previous generation to date. They show beautifully that race is simply not an issue for them in the way it was for previous generations, and they are living proof that there has been massive progress.
These youths were not looking for a fight at all. They were extremely placid and good natured. Their presence was simply a message to older generations that they have to make way for a new society where systemic inequality is a thing of the past and racial persecution at the hands of the police is, not only, no longer sanctioned, but eradicated for good. To use an enforcement term, a zero tolerance policy is now required.
And so I stood there in Trafalgar square looking at these docile youngsters in face masks with their little cardboard banners and there was even a little stand with fruit and water for any of the protestors and it felt more like a village fete than a protest movement. And then more and more police vans started to show up and coppers piled out of the doors and onto the square. It was very surreal as their presence just seemed so out of place with the scene I was witnessing. Like sending the riot squad to break up a kid’s party. It was the very definition of heavy handed policing, the very thing they were protesting about. And suddenly there was a tension in the air. I then heard from one of the organisers that thousands of people were on their way from Hyde Park and the thought of it being boxed in with all those people made me feel very uneasy so decided not to stick around to be kettled.
The younger generation are there to guide the way. We need to listen to them. The institutions and ideals of the 20th century are no longer compatible with the modern world so we must change them in order to move forwards. The old world establishment is holding back the new era, clinging on to a broken system that needs to come down and it’s resistance and fear of change is making the transition a pitched battle. It doesn’t need to be this way.
Racism in America is a huge problem and way more prevalent and divisive than in the U.K but we still have a major racism problem within our police force here. I was always proud to be from London as, compared to most other places, it was a very progressive, tolerant and racially inclusive city. And especially in the area of West London where I live. I do know of anywhere else where there is a better mix between racial groups than in this neighbourhood and that is one of the main reasons I love living here. Yet, like all other areas in London, you see racial profiling in ‘stop and searches’ all the time and when I put my mind to it I can’t think of a single occasion in all the years I lived here when I saw them stop someone white. So even though the multi-cultural residents do not, for the most part, have any issue with each other, we are not having the same experience at the hands of law and order and that is simply unjust and must stop.
West London saw a massive influx of Caribbeans after the 2nd world war. The Windrush generation, as they are now known, were invited here by our government to help rebuild Britain after the devastating destruction of the blitz. They thought they were coming to the Mother country, the centre of the Commonwealth of which they were part. And yet when they arrived, they were treated horrendously, because there was no declaration from above explaining to the citizens of the U.K that they were here on our request because we needed them and they should be treated with respect.
The population of this little island should have been told to welcome our new residents with open arms and give gratitude to them for coming to our rescue. This declaration of intent was regretfully never sent to the population of Britain. It was immigration without information which sadly has been a consistent policy ever since and consequently, fear led to hostility and the new members of Britain suffered untold amounts of abuse as a result. But its still not too late to deliver that message. It would bring us all together and diminish the division between us. We must end the populist xenophobic politics, eliminate unlawful persecution of any race or minority and create genuine integration and unity for everyone. That might sound idealistic but it’s not actually hard to implement at all. The truth is, genuine equality for all is really easy, you just treat everyone the same.
The 3 year anniversary of the Grenfell tragedy has just passed. In memory green ribbons, both real and painted have appeared all over the area and they look like butterflies floating around the neighbourhood. Beautiful and heartbreaking. The tower itself seems to get smaller everytime you look at it. They have been incrementally been dismantling it for over a year or so and it feels that the more it disappears in the real world the more it disappears in people’s memories. And yet West London will never forget those who lost their lives because they will always be part of the community and also because justice has still not been served.
In the modern era we seem to now lurch from tragedy to tragedy and as soon as the next one arrives everyone forgets about the one that just dominated and focus instead on the latest calamity or injustice to take over the news. There is rarely any resolution. Whether its plastic pollution, Australian wildfires, the refugee crisis, homelessness, the school girls in kidnapped in Nigeria..at the time they all unleashed outrage and initiated mass online activity but were then dropped as quickly and as fervently as they were picked up.
These terrible events consume every headline and dominate your social media feed for the 2 weeks they are topical and then and they evaporate into the online ether as if they had never existed. A lethal combination of over-saturation and A.D.D destroys the public’s interest seemingly just in time for us to lose our shit all over again over the next thing. And the next thing. And there is now always a next thing. The conveyor belt of horror seemingly never ends.
People are already clearly over the pandemic and yet we are still in the eye of the storm. Does it matter it hasn’t been solved? Apparently not. People are already over climate change and that hasn’t even really begun yet. Does it matter it hasn’t been solved? Our actions say otherwise. These days there appears to be this notion that once everyone has done their bit of ranting on social media, fired off some hashtags and gone to a protest march or two the problem has been dealt with and we can all go back to shopping for shit we don’t need.
Nothing gets solved anymore, we just get bored and move on. The most recent humungous global event is the BLM movement which has shaken the world to the core in the last two weeks. It has been extraordinary to see the world unite in protest and say ‘enough is enough’. And yet, like the others I have just mentioned above, this is a deep rooted problem that needs, not just immediate action, but sustained activity that will lead to long term systemic solutions in order for genuine progress can be made.
As a species we need to start seeing things through to the end. We need to actually make things better, not just want them to be better and then give up and divest our energy into something else when it reveals itself to be too hard to fix overnight. Major societal shifts and systemic change are very hard to initiate and implement and take time. A ton of time. It takes research and understanding and education and planning and commitment and that cannot be achieved in two weeks. We have to see this through and think long term strategies than will span far into the future or progress will not be achieved.
Our worlds have been shrunk. Miniaturised for our own safety. I have never spent so much time indoors in my life. Consequently home confinement has made what’s happening on our doorsteps infinitely more interesting than usual because it doesn’t really have any competition. There is only so much screen based visual content you can watch before you brain turns to guacamole. And why bother when you have a soap opera right outside your front door? The lockdown has made me a full blown curtain twitcher which I had previously thought was purely for nosey bizzy body old women with sour puss faces…turns out we’re all curtain twitchers now.
in Hitchcock’s “Rear Window” James Stewart’s wheelchair bound existence means he starts to heavily focus on the only vista he can see and it becomes his entire world. I haven’t quite witnessed a murder (although not far off) but have seen enough high drama to be worthy of a netflix series just by peering out my window.
The internet connects us to everything that is happening all around the world which makes us forget sometimes the actual world we inhabit, the world right in front of us. But I am desperate for the real world to return in full because have come to the conclusion that the internet is categorically not a healthy place to live.
In reality you don’t need clickbait horrors to keep you engaged. Even just a person walking past can illicit a huge amount of stimuli for the brain. You can gage so much about someone in a very short space of time. The way they walk will tell you how confident they feel about themselves. The clothes they wear will indicate everything they want to project about their identity. If they walk in the road and not on the pavement it shows they are maybe fearful of getting too close to others because of the pandemic. It’s like directing your very own film with an array of characters provided and you make up the plot.
Your brain makes a million assumptions based on whatever information it can muster and then jumbles them all up with a truckload of projected opinions and creates a scenario it will then believe. We are more storytellers than objective observers and way more than we would care to acknowledge. Yet we mustn’t forget this. In an extreme situation like this lockdown the brain goes into overdrive as it has a lot less to play with. As our realities shrink our internal machinations magnify, including our worries about the outside world that we’ve not been able to engage with.
Our world’s are starting to open up again and even though we want this to happen Corona has made us more fearful of returning. But we can’t stay indoors forever so some point we’re all going to have re-engage with it. The virus doesn’t look like its ever going to truly go away so we are just gonna have to learn to live with it. This essentially means each and every individual deciding how they want to play it. You might decide you are never going to leave the house again or you may decide to say ‘fuck it’ and take whatever risks are required to get on with your life. There are a multitude of things that are harmful in everyday life and that could even potentially kill you. And you accept these risks and work around them. Otherwise you are not living at all. And living your life, rather than being scared of the threats to it, is the only way to truly live.
We can no longer rely on governmental advice because it bears no correlation to the situation so it is now up to us and our own common sense. Boris and co. are not listening to their scientific advisors whatsoever so we no longer need to listen to them. Their decisions are not based on data, if they ever really were, they are simply deciding it’s time to go back. All health experts are stating that it is way too early to lift the lockdown and it will do nothing but increase the chances of a second wave.
We all want our lives to return to normal as soon as possible but what is the point if it just makes the last two months an utter waste of time? We would have gone through all of that for nothing. The U.K government has repeatedly shown it is not putting our safety first so we must use our common sense and take the necessary precautions. If it means masking up and maintaining social distance and washing the fuck out of your hands so be it. It’s every man for himself.
Act how you see fit. Don’t be swayed but what is happening around you. Just because everybody else is acting like its all over you don’t have to. If you wish someone to keep their distance, tell them, Make it their problem, not yours. Stupidity and selfishness are spreading in this island at an even faster rate than Covid but you can protect yourself against that as well by following your own set of rules. Live by example. Be your own role model. And stay away from slogans ;)
People shot from the back this week. Not like murdered obvs, just photographed. Why? Because we can’t go back. And nor do we want to. The path behind us, the one we were on, the path of continuous growth in a finite space with no reduction in consumption or emissions, the path that has been brought to an abrupt stop by the pandemic, was always a dead end for our species…not today but in the ‘almost, not quite here yet but so close you can feel it and it’s definitely coming if we do fuck all to alter our course’ future.
The ‘other’ path which we can now see because we are now actually on it is a path where mass aviation travel is a thing of the past, where our dependence on oil has been massively reduced, where fast fashion and relentless consumerism has lost its grip, where air pollution has dropped enough so that it is no longer harmful…this is the path we must stay on which means not going back to life as it was before Corona.
We must be strong. We must pressurise our governments to be strong. To take us forwards in the 21st century which means abandoning all the drives of the 20th century simply because they are a threat to our continued existence. We must appeal to our MPs not to agree to bail out the aviation industry and to stop funding the fossil fuels. Let them fail if they can’t survive and let us instead invest in renewables because they will save both the economy and the environment. Oil is no longer even a good investment so there is now fuck all reason for govs & financial companies to put their money in it. #defundclimatechange is a current online movement to convince shareholders in the likes of blackrock & jp morgan to divest their money away from the fossil fuel companies that are continuing to destroy any hope of a liveable future.
Recently I was been given a list of every single email for every MP in parliament around 600 or so) so if you would like me to send to you this doc please get in touch via the ‘CONTACT’ button on my website and I will send to you. I have just written a letter along the lines of this blog post. If we all demand they abandon this one way ticket to hell for the kids of today and if we all do it they will have to listen. This is our last chance to change their minds and implore them to do the right thing. Everything hangs in the balance.
and just to confirm, that stuffed toy is attached to the top of his helmet. Bold look.
Maybe you think life in the lockdown sucks but whatever has been taken away from us there is still life. So if we can just accept that everything has changed and all the shit we used to do we now can’t do in the way that we did it…we can forwards. We need to embrace it not fight against it and if we do, we can usher in a new era for humanity as oppose to consigning us to the evolutionary scrap heap. Corona will pass, environmental breakdown won’t.
I have watched dumbfounded and fairly appalled at the negligence of the youth to maintain social distance out on the street…this is based on what I have seen with my own eyes so could be specific to my area but here it really feels like they are making zero effort to abide by the rules and don’t seem to give a flying fuck…and then it dawned on me..why should they when our society has clearly proven it doesn’t give a fuck about them?
We have not reigned in our climate fucking ways in any significant capacity despite knowing we are consigning the next generation to a pretty fucked future. So why should they care about protecting the older generations when we have shown through our unwillingness to alter our behaviour that we do not care about them. Our government’s way too late aim to reduce emissions to zero by 2050 is a shunt like no other and is effectively declaring generational warfare so can we be surprised they are ‘fighting back’?
The fate we will give them will be infinitely worse than what Covid has done to the people of this planet and if we allow our society to continue to be driven by fossil fuels, relentless consumption and meat production on the current scale this current global catastrophe will seem like a jaunty jaunt in a very jaunty place.
And so endeth MYLSBN – which ,for the record, has nothing to do with lesbians contrary to what some might think (yes Tennyson crew, I am talking about you!). The shots over the last few weeks were designed to give you a virtual trip to Lisbon during this lockdown. A way to travel without moving. This pandemic has given our species a golden opportunity to show how we can live differently to how we lived before.
And now that we have been brought to a standstill we can hopefully see we are at a junction in the road. The path we were on was a dead end and we knew it but we couldn’t envisage an alternative. But now we have been given a glimpse of what life would be like if all unnecessary travel and excessive consumerism and relentless pollution stopped. And as restrictive as it it is, life carries on.
We can now see a different path because we are effectively on it. Already emissions have dropped all over the globe and it has been proven we can completely change the way we live almost overnight. Those that opposed change convinced us it wasn’t possible but the response to Corona across the globe has proven otherwise. Let’s use this devastating and destructive virus to save mankind by halting the rise in global temperatures and preserving the goldilocks zone on this planet that allows us and most other species to live upon it.
I know it maybe seemed strange that I was showing you photographs of a former visit to Lisbon as the world went into meltdown but it was designed to serve as a form of escapism from the relentless feed of horror. I realised very early on that it was crucial for us to have breaks from this thing to preserve our sanity. I enjoyed being elsewhere whilst I worked on the pictures and yet, inevitably, they always brought me back to the current situation and all my articles have revolved around the virus rather than the trip they came from.
The bulk of the pictures from my documentation of Lisbon came from a single procession on the last day I was there and pretty much every shot was taken within a single hour. Sometimes a slice will encapsulate the whole and felt that this event which pretty much the whole town turned out for, gave me an insight into the city and showed what was most important to the good folk of Lisbon, namely community & tradition. The procession was of a religious nature but for me, it was more to do with the people coming together as it was to celebrate their beliefs. It also felt like going back in time to an era where there was more solidarity amongst citizens and from a time when you could be in large crowds en masse together (remember those days?) and maybe that was why I was so keen to stay in this little virtual travel time capsule bubble.
Hope you enjoyed too. I will back on the streets of London as of next week, well as much as the lockdown will allow me. Stay safe people!
More shots this week from Lisbon. As life is on hold it feels somehow appropriate that my photographs are trapped in a moment in time. It’s as if the world has been frozen like that moment in the Matrix when they pause the program. Maybe we are in a computer simulation after all and this is just a glitch in the system so everything has to stop while they fix it. Maybe it’s a software update and once its done we’ll all be shit hot at kung fu.
For the record, I don’t think we are actually in pods hooked up to a giant mainframe being used as human batteries but we are all now technically living in a digital world as the real one is effectively a no-go area. And we were heading that way anyway. The battle for our lives between reality and our digi-existence has been going on for a while but it looks like it’s now over. And the real world lost.
The photographs this week all feature elderly people, from a time when they could be out on the streets and not be terrified to be within close proximity of people. Most people are feeling vulnerable and afraid so my heart goes out to this older generation who must be feeling it infinitely more so. And at a time in their lives when they would naturally be feeling more fragile.
And this experience has made us all feel more fragile in a world where we were already feeling less safe and more apprehensive. And yet fear is the enemy and we must fight it, just as we are fighting this virus. We must accept that life comes with threats. It always has and always will. They just need to be managed, they don’t have to define us.
Fear is a built in survival mechanism but you cannot live in the ‘fight or flight ‘mode 24/7. It is incredibly harmful in the long term. It generates the stress chemical cortisol which attacks the immune system which in a twisted irony could actually make you more susceptible to getting infected so you must try and protect yourself from worry as much as you do from Corona. And you can do that by not being permanently plugged in to the feed. We don’t need to hear about every single update the moment it happens. We can disconnect. We aren’t in those pods remember?
The shots this week were all taken of people waiting for a procession in Lisbon. Already seeing pictures of people congregating is starting to look really strange. It is insane how quickly what was once usual becomes utterly unusual. And how the abnormal becomes normal. Our worlds have shrunk considerably but we adapt.
I have never been indoors this much in my entire life but I accept this is how it must be. Having been sick with the virus (still untested but not possible its anything else) for last 10 days has actually helped me not climb the walls as have been wiped out and my worry is actually when I start to feel better and have normal energy levels. My other medical condition is I have ‘ants in my pants’ so having to deal with continued confinement might exacerbate this insect ridden underwear syndrome but I will endure as we all must. Like everybody, am already adjusting to this highly bizarre and surreal existence and memories of my former life are already fading.
Hope you are all coping okay. Even though we are all going through the same thing it doesn’t always feel like it as we are all in isolation and living it separately. It wasn’t untill last night when so many of us on our street came out to applaud the NHS did I physically see my neighbours who are all going through the same thing. To hear the cheers and the applause was so uplifting and connected us all. We are all in this together and we mustn’t ever forget it. It is our sense of togetherness that will help us get through it.
As you may or may not have guessed, I am not actually out on the streets of Lisbon currently. I am stuck at home like most others. Me & Mrs B have been self-isolating all week as sick with poss/poss not Covid-19. ( mebbe 17 or 18 ;) If we do have it, luckily it is mild version & similar symptoms to Tom Hanks, no joke but the joke is that’s about all we can go on as can’t get tested. So these shots were taken on a trip last year and haven’t had a chance to go through them till now. I am also posting these in the midst of all this madness because its a way of travelling without moving.
With the current global lockdown and everyone isolated indoors it feels like virtual travel is definitely the order of the day. It feels like this is what the internet was designed for. To keep us connected when we can’t do so in the real world. And to keep us distracted. We need diversions during this indefinite period. You cannot pay attention to this shit storm all the time. It will drive you bat shit crazy. So maybe ease up on the constant drip feed of round the clock bulletins and let your mind wander elsewhere from time to time.
For what its worth I am doing daytime corona, nighttime escapism. I saw on Netflix that all the movies that were trending were virus related which to me seems crazy. That’s like watching airplane disaster movies on a plane. You need to stay informed and keep abreast of the latest developments but you also need to stay sane so make sure you give your brain a rest.
Wall to wall worry is not going to help get you through this. You need time outs so am providing shots of elsewhere in the hope that helps. Obvs if you live in Lisbon (hello Paddy, dermot, fernanda!) this might be less of an escape but at least it might let you mentally meander to a time when Corona was just a beer.
Some of my aforementioned mates were part of the Brexodus that moved to Lisbon after the referendum (remember those happy times when we just spoke about the EU) and after visiting them last year I realised it pretty much ticks every box of what I want a city to be. The vibe, the people, the architecture, the way of life, the food, the nightlife..its all top draw. And from a photographic point of view, it is superb. So many incredible faces, you can barely turn without seeing a magnificently character on ever corner. The light is stunning, noticeably so, I don’t know why, but its truly breathtaking as it makes all the colours of all the buildings and the crystal blue sky pop like HDTV. (yes, fraid these shots are in bnw as still on my colour strike as I was depressed about the world before the film Contagion became a reality show!)
I have a feeling CoronaWorld ain’t going anywhere anytime soon so we might have to get used to not going anywhere for a while which is why digi-travel is the solution. This virus has brought the globe to a standstill and maybe that is not such a terrible thing. We go round and round and we never stop for long enough to work out what the fuck we are doing or where we are going. Both as individuals and as a species.
I feel life is relentless and I always wished that it would be possible for everything to just stop. To freeze everything. Just to get a time out. Just to have a breather. Just long enough to stop chasing your tail. They say be careful what you wish for…
I hope this enforced time out will give us time to reflect and realise that what we need to as a species is put the brakes on everything we were doing anyway. I hope we will learn from this and not just go back to normal after this has blown over and not learn from the experience and just return to the round and round…maybe the positive is that Corona will show us how we can live without relentless consumption & travel and put us on a regenerative path towards sustainable living. We must not let this opportunity go to waste.
I will be posting more shots of Lisbon up next week as I want to continue to ride the magic carpet of virtual travel…because I am housebound but also because once again I dream of Europe where they are doing whatever is necessary to put the safety of their people first which involves a total lockdown. Why aren’t we? No-one fucking knows. We are currently run by an arrogant, uncaring imbecile – a terrible combo at the best of times.
Stay safe out there people…and stay strong. Stubborn optimism is the order of the day. Don’t let this shit get you down. It shall pass. And meantime…all aboard the pixel plane!
Carnaby St. (where all shots this week were taken) recently erected a giant whale & other sea life made out of recycled parts to show they’re really concerned with the environmental impact of the fashion industry, These assorted creatures hovered directly above the outlets of the companies that are directly responsible for the problem in first place. And not at any point did anyone who worked on this project think that maybe this was a conflicting message to the consumers below: Be aware of the destruction caused by fast fashion, but still continue to buy it from our shops.
By tomorrow I would have completed one year without buying any new clothes. I signed up to the ‘no new for 52’ XR boycott fashion pledge and have stuck to it. Not looking for pat on back as it really wasn’t that hard as mostly buy previously owned anyway and rarely have spondoolies to spare so did not find it too much of a hardship. Did my consumerist abstinence make a shit of a difference to anything? Of course not but I wanted to see first hand if it was possible to live a life without unnecessary consumerism.
My conclusion is, not only is it possible, it is actually more enjoyable. The longer it went on the easier it got. And then I extended it to everything else that I didn’t really need and in the last 12 months have only bought consumables, work related items or replaced something that was broke. And that’s about it.
I now think I can maybe get to death without buying any new clothes (bar mebbe some undies n socks) so now I just mooch about looking at things and not buying them. This is, in fact, quite joyful and better than actual shopping as you no longer have to suffer the dilemma of whether you should purchase something or not. You also then don’t feel flat and unsatisfied when that very fleeting sensation of pleasure from retail therapy subsides and you are left with a hole that still hasn’t been filled.
I have also saved a ton fuck of money as you can imagine. So it’s a proper win win and that’s before you even take into account that if, as a unified species, not just as isolated individuals, we drastically reduced our consumption and production of crap we don’t actually need we might just be able to get ourselves out of this dire situation we have created.
I recommend trying it as you will soon see there is a life to be had that doesn’t involve just buying stuff, despite what they tell us. Just don’t think of it as denying yourself, think of it as liberation.
Ok, just wanted to say that, now I’m going back under my rock. Goodbye…
SPOILER ALERT: Harsh facts and grim forecast only ahead…
Tough talk from the streets this week…feels like they’re trying to rile us up. As if we weren’t riled up enough..we maybe need a bit less rile in our lives or maybe we need more? These are a call to action. To shake us out of our apathy. It feels we are sleepwalking along the path to doom, incapable or unwilling to deal with anything that the future might hold. We are really on just getting on in the hope that it will all go away. It won’t, and with this total lack of urgency or action…not a chance in hell, which is kinda where we’re heading if we maintain this ‘can’t deal with it’ attitude…
In London this week The “Extinction Rebellion’ , a new eco movement group are mounting a series of protests trying to pressurise the energy dept of this country to start seriously implementing the policies that are essential to stop us from heading into climate meltdown. Will they listen? 500 or so protestors are willing to get arrested for their actions. Will they pay attention? Unlikely. But what if it was 5,000? 50,000? 50 million? What if the entire country went down there? Would they do anything then?
Even with mounting public pressure it seems unlikely because they are already fully aware of the facts, they’re not stupid but they are corrupt. This accounts for the lack of any credible initiatives as they are essentially in the pockets of the oil industry and energy firms who, by the way, will never get out of the way whilst they have power and money; two things they have spent the last few decades stockpiling in abundance.
Last week, over in America, a bill designed to initiate the first big wave of environmental policy and bring in serious carbon taxes for all polluters was destroyed by the Fossil Fuel Fucks who pumped millions into lobbying and advertising to sway the minds of those that continue to be bought. We need to find a way to eliminate their stronghold on societies and governments all over the world and The Extinction Rebellion is maybe just what we need right now to shake things up a bit although honestly am not very hopeful.
I don’t wish to sound defeatist to the efficacy of action as apathy is what has got us to this point in the first place but what we would need to do as a species is a gi-normous gargantuan and immediate unified effort. Every country across the entire globe would have to agree to radically change everything almost overnight and be 100% together in their commitment to removing all the activities that cause emissions. We would need total human harmony across the board. Which is clearly in abundance everywhere. Unfortunately as there doesn’t seem to be a country on the planet whose population can agree on anything right now, especially this one, and what actual chance is there of that? Answer: slim to none.
The only way would be to fire everyone in government and replace them with politicians strong enough to turn down their cash which would mean finding/ growing (accelerated cloning) morally impregnable human beings devoid of self-motive & greed. Once in place they could then ditch fossil fuels entirely. This is obviously utterly in the realms of fantasy and sci-fi and pretty pre-tay unlikely. The saddest thing is renewable energy sources could sustain us, all the know how is there and it would work. We might just have to go back to simpler living for a while, but that might not be such a terrible thing. But those who stand to lose from their implementation will not get out of the way. They would rather everyone lost everything. They would rather render this planet uninhabitable for humans than suffer a profit drop. That’s how fucked up it is.
It was never about saving the planet, it was about saving ourselves and we are doing a really shit job of that currently. I saw this doc on vimeo recently called “earth rise” which was about the photo taken of Earth from the Apollo 8 mission in ’68. They were told to photograph anything of interest on their journey but didn’t realise that the most mind-blowing shot would be of the planet they had just left.
As they looked back they saw it in all its beauty. Watching this film (link) made me realise as I’m sure it did those astronauts that Earth is actually paradise. This is it, its not elsewhere, not after this, paradise is here and now. This floating spinning blue marble is an oasis in a massive sea of nothingness. There is nothing else around for light years and there might not be any other life out there. The fact that life exists here is a miracle. In the film, Gravity, the opening tagline is “In space, life is impossible”. We cannot make life impossible here. It doesn’t matter if we don’t survive as a species as long as life is able to continue after us. Desertification is increasing at the rate of 130,000 sq kilometres a year which means at this rate we are going to turn this functioning eco system into another Mars. Maybe Mars was once like Earth and something similar happened. We cannot let that happen here.
So what’s left? Keep your head down and your eyes on the screens in your hand and wait for the storm to hit? Umm, yep. That’s about the size of it. One of the main reasons that we are big on talk but lack the ability to engage in action is that we have been spoonfed our existence. We don’t know how to fight for anything anymore. Everything is given to us on a plate so maybe when the shit hits the fan we will return to survival and maybe that is exactly what we need. We currently live in a world ‘beyond survival’ and it has clearly made us all crazy trying to fill the void of not having to fend for our lives. What we have filled it with is really utter nonsense and so spending our days trying to hunt and not get eaten in the process could actually be the best solution for the human race.
I personally won’t be engaging in such activity. I ain’t killing anyone or anything for my dinner. I’m a peace baby. And an 85% indoor vegan. What the fuck do I know about fighting for food? And we’re definitely going to have to breed a generation tougher than the snowflakers…they’re hurt by words so fuck knows what sticks n stones are going to do to them..
So what do we do in the meantime? We could all join the Extinction Rebellion, more productive than watching netflix and at least we’d feel we were doing something…otherwise you have to choose between total denial and abject fear and neither are great options lets be honest…
Apologies (ish) for the negative take on current situation but realism and pessimism seem now sadly to be the same thing. Soz. I have been saying for a while that there was no point wasting a perfectly good present on a perfectly hideous future but the future has come to find us…and by our actions, or inaction. we will get to choose what it looks like.
Some surreal shots for you this week…when reality is too much to deal with staring at it straight in the face, take a sideways glance and get a whole other perspective. The news is not reality, its just one part of it. It is not the whole story. Not even close. We feel dominated and influenced by global events but most of them don’t have a bearing on our daily lives in any way at all and yet still they affect us more than things that actually are in our lives.
The human brain can’t really differentiate between what is real and what isn’t. The same areas in our response centres light up regardless of whether we are witnessing something or experiencing it first hand. So if you are watching horror shows, whether fact or fiction, you will feel as if it is happening to you. Its not so much a case of you are what you eat, but you are what you watch.
But its so hard to ignore what’s going on in the world when its being hurled at us every which way we turn and we feel if we don’t pay attention we are ignoring what is going on and that feels wrong. Just to give another perspective, another thing we are ignoring is that we are microbes clinging on to a planet spinning through space around a gi-normous exploding ball of energy and we are neither up nor down and we are travelling at 67,000 miles per hour. That is, in reality, is our reality. Its not news, you can’t see it or feel it but it is happening. Just saying…
