Jacques Tati

I was watching a Jacques Tati film last night, filmed in 1949 it was about a travelling show coming to a small French village.

Although there were a few cars and motorbikes featured, it was clear that in those days the roads belonged to far slower means of transportation. A cart could be held up by some ducks, or an old woman with a goat. The natural king of the road was the bicycle, speedy yet adaptable, with the cyclist able to chat and interact with those around him. The amount of livestock on the roads was surprising to a modern eye, as was the amount of property that was simply accessible or on the street.

One of my theories when I was studying prehistory was that once you got portable wealth, then you got more wars. Basically if all your neighbours had was a load of berries or was too heavy to carry, then there was not much point in trying to steal it. However once people started to herd animals, then the practicalities of stealing become much more straightforward.

So in the 1949 world without ready access to vehicles, there was little opportunity to get far enough from wherever you stole something for it to be practical.

Similarly because whenever you moved around you were still in the community, still able to speak to people or other travellers, people interacted more often and in a richer fashion.

Planners now talk about public space, but in the 1949 village most space was public in a way that relatively little space is now.

Public space only really makes sense when people are pedestrians.

However the irony is that although the bulk of our towns and cities are still laid out to the street-plan that was designed for when travel was predominantly not much quicker than walking pace, the transport routes have been taken over by vehicles that actually travel much faster and which do not allow any interaction with passers by. So modern vehicles have taken over roads that are just not set out for them.

Thinking about cars, what does a car want to do when it gets to a city, it wants to park. But roads go straight into cities, they don't respond to what motorists want to do.

If cities are designed for cars then they look like some American cities, huge spread out blocks that are too large to walk round, and sparse in detail in interest. Or like industrial estates with no pavements and nothing to see.

We have a model of urban design that is based on conflicting aims that we are not acknowledging. We need to step away from the motorist based view of planning to one that offers a richer array of options and ways of living.

on Wenders

Lately I have been watching a lot of Wim Wenders films. Well lately I have been buying a lot of Wim Wenders films, I have actually only watched a small proportion of them so far, but I am doing my best to make a bit of personal time each weekend to settle down and watch an arty DVD on my laptop. So far I have been most drawn to the documentaries, which provide some insight into his working methods. For his initial films the personal and the portrayed merged into each other, casting people he had relationships with, and using thinly disguised versions of himself as protaginists. The films were scripted pretty much on the hoof as locations were sourced. In some cases this works well, Kings of the Road is a wonderful piece. Other times it is disasterous, as with Lightning Over Water about Nicholas Ray which makes for extremely uncomfortable viewing.

However finding about more about how he operates it becomes clear that the director is really a person who seeks to make the impossible happen, magicking up money and resources out of nothing, refusing to recognise that anything is impossible, stubbornly shooting film inspite of any impediments. With time the director also becomes something of a brand, denoting something that viewers might want to buy into. Behind the brand there is a vast support network of artistic and technical collaborators who contribute as much, if not more, than the director.

The director is like the old Erich von Stroheim caricature, possessed by a messianic determination to create his vision on celluloid. It is almost a cliche that the director is determined beyond what any reasonable man would be. Although Wenders generally seems an affable sort, his determination to make films burns through relationships and friends, leaving only the celluloid.

I am not sure that many of us has the determination and confidence to pursue our vision with that degree of single minded-ness, I am not sure whether it is even truly an admirable quality.

In the end it is for each of us to find the right answer about what it is that is important in our lives.

still seeing

Looking back at my last blog it is actually far more gloomy than is justified. After a few weeks of my new glasses, things do actually seem to be settling down now. They are not nipping my ears and nose the way they used to, and beyond the usual tired eyes by evening and less than bionic vision in poor light, things are fine enough.

As ever I do tend to over-react to things, probably fine in an emergency, but a bit tiring in real life. The main problems, apart from scaring myself by googling things, was probably that I was insisting on staring at everything, all the time, expecting it to be in crisp blu-ray focus all the time, from whatever angle I was looking at it. No wonder my poor eyes were tired out. Some maniac staring through them all day like a man possessed would make anyone's eyes tired.

on seeing

I recently got my eyes tested, and unsurprisingly required new glasses. I don't drive, and with my old glasses the wider world had generally retreated into a fuzzy lack of focus. Something that by and large I did not find too vexing, unless I was specifically requiring to see something like which railway platform I had to go to.

By now my glasses are unfashionably thick varifocals, and apparently by being poor for distance they made it easier to read close too. I am very very short sighted!

My new glasses provided me with distance vision that seemed bionic in comparison to what I was used to. Unfortunately close too proved much more problematic. I need to move my head constantly when reading to keep things in crisp focus. I spend most of my time reading. The opticians also handed me a leaflet about the dangers of retinal detachment, which served to put the fear of god in me.

I've now had the new glasses tweaked and adjusted and had my prescription double checked. I suppose that my current eyesight with the new glasses is just what it is. I can read, but it is tiring and my eyes grow fuzzy by the end of the day. Generally my field of vision is a mosaic, some of it in focus, much of it not. I'm going back to being relatively contented to see little patches in relatively clarity with fuzzy margins elsewhere.

There can be few things more worrying than the thought of your eyesight diminishing. The world persists, it continues to exist out there, but unobserved by you. Even walking up to something is no guarantee that it will become clear.

Time does pass, and your time passes. You observe the world less clearly and you have to rely more on memories than observation or recent experience.

It is a time to think about what you take pleasure in, and what is valuable to you.

holidays

Some friends of mine are just back from a Nile cruise, they had been sailing down past the pyramids when they were alarmed to see a herd of cows, and one of them seemed to be dressed in green soldier fatigues with a rifle slung over it,

but it was okay, it was just a military coo,