27 May 2012

Week 22: 'A large, comfortable dwelling'

Wonder spawned in: 1922
Wondered into being by: Roger Flaherty, Allakariallak, Nuvalinga and others
Wonderspan: 8 min
To experience this wonder at its best: Click on 'full screen' and this time turn off the sound.

If for the past few searing days you have craved ice cubes - in the middle of your back, for example - then today's Monday wonder might be just what you need.

One day I came home from little school and mum asked what I'd learnt.  'How to build an igloo,' was the truth of it.  Our Picture Box treat that day had been a 1949 Canadian Film Board short called exactly that.  It's a magical film but I've since found an even more wonderful one on the same theme: an excerpt from the 1922 Roger Flaherty film, Nanook of the North

Nanook was the first ever full anthropological documentary film based on a year or so its maker spent with an Inuit group in the Hudson Bay area of Canada.  It is a sentimental take on the 'noble savage' - the idea that older ways of life and ordering society are better than the apparently civilised ones we have now.  Historically, we have fallen in love with the noble savage when modern society has hit crisis times, and it's not surprising that shortly before Flaherty made his film, the apparently civilised world had been at war with itself for four years.

The film has been criticised for staging scenes and fabricating an unrealistically rustic picture of life in the Arctic.  In the 1920s the Inuit were already mostly hunting with guns, for example, but Flaherty asked Nanook to use the traditional methods.  Nanook is not the protagonist's real name either; it's the much more wonderful Allakariallak.  All the same, the film was made by the standards of a different era almost a century ago.  It remains an astonishing portrait of people living in the harshest environment on Earth possessing next to nothing and being pretty happy with it -- there may be something true in the noble savage after all.  Rousseau said:
'Nothing is so gentle as man in his primitive state, when placed by nature at an equal distance between the stupidity of brutes and the fatal enlightenment of civil man.'*
It's rather a romantic thing to say (ever had a tooth pulled out with pliers?) but perhaps not entirely wrong either.

If you have an hour spare, the full Nanook film is an amazing watch.  Nanook and his family use ancient Inuit hunting methods to catch seal, walrus and snow fox.  He also tends the huskies, builds a kayak from seal skin and trades with the white man.

Today we're just going to watch Allakariallak use nothing other than a snow knife of walrus ivory to build a home on the ice for his family, complete with its incredible ice window.  The snow walls of the igloo, which just means 'a home', would have kept the temperature around freezing or just above, while outside it could get to -45 degrees.  The clip is better with the sound turned off, I reckon:
Extra...

Here's the Picture Box film, which provides you with instructions for making your own 'large, comfortable dwelling':
And here are all 80 minutes of the full Nanook film in complete silence:
* Rousseau quote from On the Origin of Inequality. 
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20 May 2012

Week 21: 'We are each of us a multitude'

Wonder spawned in: 2010
Wondered into being by: Symphony of Science, with Jane Goodall, David Attenborough, Carl Sagan, Richard Feynmann and others
Wonderspan: 4 min
To experience this wonder at its best: Click on 'full screen' and make sure you can hear the sound

Today we're wondering at 'some of the things that molecules do', wuzzy lines that get 'wuzzier all the time' and 'an unbroken thread that stretches from those first cells to us'.  The universe is a song, it seems, and 'within us is a little universe':
It'll be going round your head for the rest of the day.

Extra...

I think that's the best Symphony of Science film but these are also pretty good:

13 May 2012

Week 20: 'It's just what I like doing.'

Wonder spawned in: 2012
Wondered into being by: Michael Copson and Peter Mugridge
Wonderspan: 10 min
To experience this wonder at its best: Click on the full-screen icon and make sure you can hear the sound.

Well, I really struggled to hunt out today’s wonder but it’s one of my favourites for the whole year.  The theme is trainspotting.  No, I’m not joking.

I’ve been fascinated with trainspotters for a long time.  What they do has seemed completely pointless and dull but as impossible to ignore as an unscratchable itch.

Trainspotters get laughed at alot - their own websites say so - and it's not hard to see why.  They're just not rock-n-roll.  They really do wear anoraks; they shuffle about and seem socially awkward; they don’t know what team they support and they don’t care what car they drive.  The hipster trainspotter has yet to be found and if he were (can we say 'he'?) he would be still be a rule-proving exception.  For other folks who want to feel a bit better about themselves, maybe laughing at a trainspotter seems to help. And yet, is someone wearing an anorak really that funny?  If we’re looking for a laugh there ought to be better ways of finding one.

It's the very same oddbod quality of trainspotters that makes them interesting.  By ‘odd’ I mean unusual rather than wrong.  And by 'interesting' I’m not referring to the detached curiosity of, say, an antique collector who’s found a quirky artefact.  I mean that I could happily sit with a trainspotter in the Pumpkin Cafe on Crewe Station, say ‘Tell me something about trains,’ and vicariously enjoy the leftfield passion as something worth the listening.

Not convinced?  Well, let’s consider the anoraked trainspotter of our imagination, fascinated as he is with trains, the machinations of systems, and being in amongst the infrastructure.  He spends, let's say, a couple of hours on a Saturday afternoon watching nothing very much pass along the tracks at Willesden Junction.  His is a watching activity.  Now, millions of people who think of themselves as normal and well-adjusted frequently find themselves watching any of the following --
  • daytime television
  • Prime Minister's Questions and the accompanying cattle-mooing of MPs
  • the shop windows of Oxford Street or the Bull Ring
  • the man or woman who's just about to reduce the thing you want at the supermarket
  • your Facebook feed, itself quite like a virtual train but without any numbers to write down
Could you really make a case that watching any of these is a more interesting thing to do than spot trains in Willesden, with a thermos flask and a Bounty bar in your bag?

I’m not a trainspotter – I really don’t find the diesel commuter train from West Drayton to Paddington anything but pretty ugly and boringly designed and I don’t want to be wondering about what number it has today.  But a trainspotter has a passion for something which harms no-one (and I’ll bet that anything in the bullet-point list above does more damage, in various ways, to people and society than trainspotting will ever do).  And had I to choose between a conversation with Joe Bloggs about what happened on some reality TV show last night, and a chat with a trainspotter at Crewe telling me why he misses the old slamdoor stock, I’d take the latter.

One of the intriguing things about trainspotting is that it remains largely unexplained, including by rail enthusiasts (their preferred term) themselves.  I remember hearing a radio interview with a young enthusiast at Birmingham New Street.  It went like this:
Interviewer: So what train is that, then?
Enthusiast: It’s a [numbersandlettersandstuff]
I: Have you seen one of those before?
E: Oh yeah.
I: So why do you want to see it again?
E: Err...
Here the interview ended - he just couldn't say why he want to see the next train coming in.  But why should there be a ‘why’?  The slightly mysterious character of their pastime makes trainspotters quite unlike a group of aficionados who won’t take you seriously if you don’t ‘get’ their passion – say, for football.  As rail enthusiast Peter Mugridge says in the film we're about to see:
 'Some people like fast cars, I like trains.  Some people like watching football, I like watching trains.'
You can't say fairer than that.  Trainspotters just like trains and that may be bit odd but it's also a way of loving.  And just imagine Doncaster or Crewe station without trainspotters – the world would be slightly less interesting than it is now, wouldn't it?  Go on, admit it!

Anyway, it has been really difficult to find something wonderful that represents rail enthusiasts in a way that isn’t a cheap laugh, but eventually I hit upon Michael Copson’s straightforward film.  My favourite bit is the family scene -- no need for Peter to join the crowds of the supposedly 'well-adjusted'.  Here he is:

My special extra trainspotting research just for you...

I invite you to be curious for a few minutes more about this kooky pastime.  Let's start with some of the lingo:
  • Track-bashing: travelling on as much of a particular railway line as possible, and ticking that one off
  • Gricing: attempting to travel the entire railway network.
  • Foamer: derogative term for a trainspotter, used in the US by rail workers and based on the imagined tendency of trainspotters to foam at the mouth when a train approaches.
  • Basher: a trainspotter’s term for a trainspotter.
  • Stick: a signal
  • Railwayana: stuff collected from the railways, such as finial orbs (the decorative pieces on top of old-fashioned signals).
  • Cattle: commuters
  • A normal: a non-enthusiast
  • Special train: a train that’s not usual, like a steam train
  • Motorcading: chasing a special train in a car
  • Worst: a First Great Western train (allegedly they’re not very good, don’t know why)
  • SPAD: Signal Passed At Danger (i.e. someone jumped a red light)
You could impress a few people with a bit of bash-talk like this, ‘A Worst full of cattle spadded stick 205UP yesterday while I was motorcading a special.  The normals had no idea.’  I don’t know whether that’s authentic bash-talk; I’m just giving it a go.

One of the more curious things I found is 'Sensible Train Spotting', the world’s first and probably last trainspotting simulator computer game.  You have limited time to tick off a list of train identification numbers in your virtual notebook as you watch trains pass through the station.  Start missing them and it’s Game Over.  The program is still available but as it was made for the obsolete Commodore Amiga computer you’ll need an emulator to run it.

If that’s just too much waiting around (and it obviously is) then you can try this online trainspotting experience, whose array of interactive options include blinking, turning around and going home.  Although this is poking a bit of fun at rail enthusiasts I hope they won’t mind it too much: www.ratbike.org/tspotsim/sim.html

Another way to live vicariously is via www.railroadradio.net where you can listen in real-time to the radio feed reaching driver’s cabs all over the US.  I sometimes put this on while working from home – there’s often a lot of hiss and then suddenly you’re listening in on a conversation on the other side of the world, wondering what it all means.  Try http://www.railroadradio.net/content/playlist/nj.asx for some busy conversations in the New Jersey area.  While I was listening in I got ‘You guys ready to move, over? Proceed east to no. 2 track in the out-of-service zone.’ And ‘Have you seen a UP5942 east, over?  Is that you, UP5942 over?  Hey guys, what’s your location, over?’ and ‘You wouldn’t be hanging out in the East End, would you?  It’s just I need to get an Amtrack around you.’  If you like a quieter life, try the Castle Rock railroad radio in the US ‘Mountain Zone’ for a gentle static hiss only occasionally interrupted by a laid-back train driver wanting company: http://www.railroadradio.net/content/playlist/castlerock.asx  Listening to this one I got ‘I’m going to have to flag you there, give me a call when you get to 5002.’

Extra…

Here’s a trainspotter's sense of humour:
And here’s what a trainspotter’s film actually looks like once he's taken it home and edited it together:
Committed rail enthusiasts could until recently visit www.railenthusiast.co.uk, which ‘caters for the ongoing needs of the committed enthusiast’ by providing access to details of 11,158 trains, 4,153 photos of same and 31,495 ‘history events’.  Sadly it's now offline.

6 May 2012

Week 19: 'We just wanna have a good time.'

Wonder spawned in: 2011
Wondered into being by: Friends of the Earth Scotland
Wonderspan: 9 min
To experience this wonder at its best: Click on 'full screen' and make sure you can hear the sound

Hello and thank you for following waysofloving.com so far.  I've made a map of all the locations of all the Monday wonders - have a look here: www.tinyurl.com/mondaywonders.  As for the rest of the year, I have lots of wonders eager to be released into the wild but I'm still looking for a few more so please make your own suggestions by sending me an email at justplaindavid@waysofloving.com.

Today's way of loving has pushed its way to the top of the pile just because I absolutely love it and I can't keep it in the dark any longer.  Today we're loving the joy of protest movements.  What is protest?  By itself it's quite a boring word.  But what if its goal was not just to be right or make a point, but rather to inspire a different way of being, or perhaps a new feeling for what life is really about?  In that case, effective protest will try to speak to the whole of us - our passions, dreams, longings, a feeling for belonging - and not only to the bit of us which wants to know what's right and what's wrong, or what works and what doesn't, important though that is.

These two films reflect this kind of passion for being alive.  In doing this they inspire (in me, anyway) a feeling for a more abundant kind of life and society.  The first playfully exposes corporate 'greenwash' at the Royal Bank of Scotland.  RBS flaunts itself as a green company - by sponsoring last year's Climate Week, for example - while investing billions in hugely damaging tar-sands extraction (a method three times as carbon-intensive as that of conventional oil extraction and which ruins vast areas of wilderness).  What I find really compelling is that the women in this film seem so much more joyful and playful than the money-driven world they parody.  As a viewer, I want a bit of their freedom and joy and, for precisely the same reason, I want to listen to what they have to say.

The second film feels like it's from a different era but it's in much the same spirit.  The Nottingham Clarion Choir sing the South African national anthem, Nkosi Sikeleli, having sung it for many years in solidarity throughout the long struggle against apartheid.  I trawled the internet for the gutsiest version of the this anthem and Nottingham, believe it or not, is where I found what might be the most belted-out rendition of all: ‘We sang it … we sang it … and we continue to sing it…' (in five languages... in Nottingham!)  Meanwhile, may God Save Us From Our Own National Anthem.

Extra...

And here's more joyful protest:

Europe's largest arms fair is held in London's East End every other year (next in 2013).  A Quaker peace worker, Izzy Hallet, worked with a school right next door to make this brilliant 10-minute video - 'Where is the love?' (thanks to Jaci S for suggesting this one):
Here's Charles Eisenstein saying that while social change is a political enterprise, it's also about so much more (and thanks to Sunniva T for proposing this one):
If you want to know how South Africans sing their own national anthem, try...
Want more from Nottingham? Of course we do! Don't worry, there's more coming on waysofloving.com soon...